Victor Davis Hanson has a great piece in today’s NRO, in which he identifies the three principles that drive the liberal anti-war crowd. As usual, he states it as clearly and succinctly as anybody. He identifies them as:
1) moral equivalence. For the hard Left there is no absolute right and wrong since amorality is defined arbitrarily and only by those in power.
2) utopian pacifism — ‘war never solved anything’ and ‘violence only begets violence.’ Thus it makes no sense to resort to violence, since reason and conflict resolution can convince even a bin Laden to come to the table. That most evil has ended tragically and most good has resumed through armed struggle — whether in Germany, Japan, and Italy or Panama, Belgrade, and Kabul — is irrelevant. Apparently on some past day, sophisticated Westerners, in their infinite wisdom and morality, transcended age-old human nature, and as a reward were given a pass from the smelly, dirty old world of the past six millennia.
3) multiculturalism, or the idea that all social practices are of equal merit. Who are we to generalize that the regimes and fundamentalist sects of the Middle East result in economic backwardness, intolerance of religious and ethnic minorities, gender apartheid, racism, homophobia, and patriarchy? Being different from the West is never being worse.‘
Good stuff.