Victor Davis Hanson imagines WWII, as reported in the manner of today’s American MSM.

The Present Debacle

May 21, 1945 — After the debacles of February and March at Iwo Jima, and now the ongoing quagmire on Okinawa, we are asked to accept recent losses that are reaching 20,000 dead brave American soldiers and yet another 50,000 wounded in these near criminally incompetent campaigns euphemistically dubbed “island hopping.”

Meanwhile, we are no closer to victory over Japan. Instead, we are hearing of secret plans of invasion of the Japanese mainland slated for 1946 or even 1947 that may well make Okinawa seem like a cake walk and cost us a million casualties and perhaps involve a half-century of occupation. The extent of the current Kamikaze threat, once written off as the work of a “bunch of dead-enders,” was totally unforeseen, even though such suicidal zealots are in the process of inflicting the worst casualties on the U.S. Navy in its entire history.

Worse still, our sources in the intelligence community speak of a billion-dollar boondoggle now underway in the American southwest. This improbable “super-weapon” (with the patently absurd name “Manhattan Project” — in the midst of a desert no less!) promises in one fell swoop to erase our mistakes and give us instant deliverance from our blunders — no concern, of course, for the thousands of innocents who would be vaporized if such a monstrous fantasy bomb were ever actually to work.

We are only now coming off even more terrible losses in Europe, after being surprised by a supposedly defeated enemy in the Ardennes where another 20,000 Americans were killed and another 60,000 wounded or missing — again, due to our continued strategic incompetence and abject intelligence failures. Macabre reports of American bazooka shells bouncing off German Tiger tanks and our Shermans ablaze like Ronson lighters have only now come to light as we plow the Belgium countryside for yet another new American war cemetery. Tragically, this is not the first, but the fourth year of this war, when victory rather than endless bloodshed has been long promised.

A number of issues arise. Why is Henry Stimson (“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail”) still Secretary of War? After the debacles at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines tragedy, the Kasserine Pass disaster, the unforeseen bocage in Normandy, the Falaise Gap escape, the Anzio mess, the fatal detour to Rome, the surprise at the Bulge, the bloodbath at Tarawa, and now the Iwo Jima and Okinawa nightmares, is not five years of his incompetence and arrogance enough? A number of our retired generals seems to agree, who have recently bravely come forward to remind us that Sec. Stimson long ago tried to dismantle key elements of our intelligence services, attempted to curtail the operational command of our Army Air Corps generals in conducting bombings of Europe, and has on more than one occasion intervened to remove targets from Gen. LeMay’s campaign over Japan.

As we see thousands of Americans dying and our enemies still in power after four years of war, it is also legitimate to question the stewardship of Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall. The Sherman tank tragedy, the daylight bombing fiasco, the absence of even minimally suitable anti-tank weapons and torpedoes — all these lapses came on his watch, and the man at the top must take full responsibility for mistakes that have now cost thousands of American lives. Indeed, it is not just that America has worse tanks and guns than our German enemies, but they are inferior even to the rockets and armor of our Soviet allies. The recent publication of “The Sherman Tank Scandal” follows other revelations published in “Asleep at the Philippines,” “The Flight of Gen. MacArthur,” “Gen. Patton and the Atrocities on Sicily,” “Do Americans Execute P.O.Ws?” “Torture on Guadalcanal,” “Incinerating Women and Children?” and “Civilian Massacres in Germany” — publications in their totality that suggest a military out of control as often as it is incompetent…

Recently we have learned that President Roosevelt, the former law school dropout, once again has violated basic freedoms enshrined in our Constitution. Supposed German suspects were subject to military tribunals, tried in secret, and then executed. Tens of thousands of Italians, Germans, and Japanese war-captives are detained in hundreds of American prison compounds, without charges and often in secret. How many were truly captured in uniform, and under what conditions, is never disclosed.

Unfortunately this violation of American values comes not in isolation, but on the heels of the unlawful internment of thousands of American citizens in Western concentration camps, the cover-up of the Cobra disaster in Normandy and the criminally negligent killing of General McNair, and still more rumors that hundreds of American soldiers perished in secret in training exercises on the eve of the Normandy invasion. Yet, the American people to this day have no precise idea how many of their enlisted men and officers have been killed, much less where they perished or how.

Indeed, what little we know comes to light only due to the brave efforts of a few unnamed operatives in the Office of Strategic Services who have in secret provided such information concerning patently illegal activities to the responsible news organizations.

Depkafile, presumed voice of Mossad, reports that new Iran-sponsored Shiite insurgent groups have begun operating in Iraq, and that Iran supplied the surface to air missiles used to shoot down a British helicopter at Basra and an American helicopter over Yussifiya. According to this report, Iran has supplied insurgents in Iraq with 1000 such missiles and a large number of newly developed, enhanced lethality roadside bombs.

In the past two weeks, Iran has been pumping into Iraq two types of extra-lethal weapons in very large quantities. They have already taken their toll in the shooting down of two military helicopters – one American and one British — and an estimated 19 deaths of US military personnel.

DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources estimate the delivery to Iraqi insurgents as consisting of around 1,000 SA-7 Strela ground-air missiles made in Iran, and a very large quantity of a newly-developed roadside bomb, loaded with compressed gas instead of ball bearings and cartridges, to magnify their blast and explosive power.

The supplies have been distributed across Iraq – Basra and Amara in the south, Baghdad and its environs, Haditha in the west, and Mosul in the north.

The new bombs, developed jointly by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the Lebanese Hizballah, have already gone into service with the Shiite terrorists on the Lebanese border with Israel. Israeli military sources say it is only a matter of time before the deadly roadside bombs, already used in Iraq, will also reach Palestinian areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

If this Israeli-supplied information is correct, Iran has certainly committed acts of war. Of course, one expects that Israel would very much like the US to invade Iran, and Depkafile has not always been completely accurate, so….

Varifrank has been following news reports and listening to Congressional democrats, and is able to sum up the rules.

Don’t fight before Ramadan as it interrupts the UN sponsored peace process.

Don’t fight during Ramadan because it shows disrespect to an honored people and a great religion.

Don’t fight after Ramadan since so many civilians will simply be caught in the potential crossfire.

And so on.

A lot of people (this blog included) laughed at poor little Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, just because he didn’t know how to work the FN M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) machinegun, and C.J. Chivers at the New York Times thinks we were being unfair. He’s even found some experts he can quote defending Zarqawi.

(You know how it is: Whenever any enemy of the United States is under attack, you can count on the New York Times to come bustling to his defense.)

An effort by the American military to discredit the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi by showing video outtakes of him fumbling with a machine gun — suggesting that he lacks real fighting skill — was questioned yesterday by retired and active American military officers…

But several veterans of wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, as well as active-duty officers, said in telephone interviews yesterday that the clips of Mr. Zarqawi’s supposed martial incompetence were unconvincing.

The weapon in question is complicated to master, and American soldiers and marines undergo many days of training to achieve the most basic competence with it. Moreover, the weapon in Mr. Zarqawi’s hands was an older variant, which makes its malfunctioning unsurprising. The veterans said Mr. Zarqawi, who had spent his years as a terrorist surrounded by simpler weapons of Soviet design, could hardly have been expected to know how to handle it…

An active-duty Special Forces colonel who served in Iraq also said that what the video showed actually had little relationship to Mr. Zarqawi’s level of terrorist skill. “Looking at the video, I enjoy it; I like that he looks kind of goofy,” said the Special Forces officer, who was granted anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on military matters. “But as a military guy, I shrug my shoulders and say: ‘Of course he doesn’t know how to use it. It’s our gun.’ He doesn’t look as stupid as they said he looks.”

Oh, is that so, now?

Well, even Zarqawi’s defenders in the Times admit that he looked awkward handling the M249 SAW, and was unfamiliar with its mechanism.

Experienced shooters undoubtedly also noticed that Zarqawi is holding that machinegun tucked under his arm, Hollywood gangster fashion, and is making no effort actually to use the gun’s sights.

“Many days of training” may be required to teach soldiers how to disassemble and reassemble such a weapon by feel in the dark, how to maintain it, repair it, and to inculcate intimate familiarity with its shooting characteristics and capabilities; but, on the other hand, all semi-automatic and full automatic weapons have in common the same kind of operating lever, used to pull back the bolt and chamber the first round, or to clear a misfed cartridge.

An “older variant” might have a greater tendency to jam, but there is no difference whatsoever in the way you clear the jam between that M248 SAW and the AK-47 or the M16, or even the Remington 1100 semi-auto shotgun you use for pheasant hunting or to shoot trap for that matter. You just do what Zarqawi’s jihadi helper did: you pull back the lever, ejecting the misfed round, and then release it to go forward and chamber another one. That is not a complicated procedure, and it works essentially identically on all semi- and full-auto weapons. Anyone basically familiar with guns could do it without assistance.

Zarqawi looked and behaved exactly like somebody who had never shot a gun in his life.

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And Times’ Reporter Quivers even finds another expert to make yet another point defending Zarqawi’s honor, and to warn us to watch out about whom we speak disrespectfully.

But the retired and active officers said the public presentation of the tape did not address elements that were disturbing, rather than amusing: the weapon was probably captured from American soldiers, indicating a tactical victory for the insurgents. And Mr. Zarqawi looked clean and plump.

“I see a guy who is getting a lot of groceries and local support,” said Nick Pratt, a Marine Corps veteran and professor of terrorism studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Germany. “You cannot say he is a bad operator.” He added, “People should be careful who they poke fun at.”

Captured in combat? Right! Zarqawi won how many engagements against American forces? That SAW was either pre-war Iraqi army stock, looted from some military arsenal, or it just “fell off the truck” in the course of being delivered to Iraqi army or police units.

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UPDATE

Patricia, in a comment at Tim Bair:

Can you imagine the effort it took for reporters to locate and call sympathetic ex-military and solicit quotes about what a he-man Zarqawi is? Stunning, especially for a paper that is supposedly the gold standard of world news.

That sound you hear is their stock price hitting bottom…

Sister Toldjah: Zarqawi looks like a fool on camera, and MSM utilizes its excuse-making machine.

Confederate Yankee asks: Who do you choose to believe?

Jason at COUNTERCOLUMN goes into CNN’s echo of the Times story in detail.

Joe Katzman at Wind of Change reflects on “the self-administered lobotomy” of European culture and links a number of other postings on the same theme. Katzman places his hope for a renewal of Western self-esteem in a revival of a sense of the reality of Good and Evil, which he hopes to see effectuated by the Church of Rome and the current pope:

Can Benedict XVI be the “Miracle Max” of our age? G-d only knows. Yet the lessons of the late 20th century should teach us not to underestimate a determined Pope. Europe has many antibodies to Catholicism, but it also has many societal and cultural channels through which a Pope can exert significant influence. Not least of which may be his ability to grant to Europe the two things it cannot discuss and yet must have: a way to forgive itself, even as he and his church insist on and promulgate the reality and centrality of both morality and evil.

A happy ending? Not for everyone.

An Indecent Left that has sought to silence, or denigrate, or even to cheer on 9/11 may yet have good cause to fear such a man. An Indecent Left which has moved on to World War 2 Holocaust denial in Europe via relativism, and is embarked on the fetishization of Judas by the folks Gerard Van Der Leun refers to as “The Church of the Self” may yet have good cause to fear such a man. An Indecent Left that relies on unresolved shame as its primary source of energy and power, cannot imagine a hostile tyrant it will not shill for, or service, and increasingly finds itself cooperating and borrowing from Islamist and neo-fascists, may yet have good cause to fear such a man.

But he also believes in “the common thread of Western civilization, Enlightenment values, and the sense of human dignity” which he hopes may prove a basis for a wider consensus.

“(A) Lack of Geographical Knowledge and Low Support for War (is) No Coincidence,” concludes relievedebtor at a group blog I haven’t previously seen, titled Architecture and Morality.

If it is true that Iran has been a ticking time bomb for every administration since Carter’s, every president has likely been waiting for the opportunity and the justification to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, if for no other reason, to surround Iran. Forget “blood for oil,” WMDs, or even the truly good reasons to invade both struggling countries. Geography is enough justification as far as I’m concerned, given that Iran is the gravest threat out there, and 9/11 provided all the justification we needed to establish bases around Iran.

So why is support for the War on Terror waning? Well, it seems most American children, and I would imagine even more of their parents (since they haven’t even been to school in 2 decades) don’t understand that Iran is surrounded by Iraq and Afghanistan! If they don’t even know where these countries are, how they understand the very basic strategic advantage of having Iran surrounded?

In the clearest English I can muster, suppose you’re a psychic police captain, and you know at 4:00 today a bank will be robbed by a madman with a gun, who will kill every teller and customer without hesitation. Would you rather have the place surrounded by 3:00, or wait until the alarm sounds from the bank after everyone is already dead to respond? Of course, you (being the savvy police captain that you are) want to have the place surrounded clearly and loudly, so that the madman will never rob the bank to begin with, or if he does, he will be quickly overwhelmed. Iran is the bank robber, America is the police captain, and it doesn’t take a psychic to know that Ahmadinejad is spoiling to kill as many Israelites and Israelite sympathizers he can find. If we had moderate geography skills, this would be as plain to us as killing Jews is to Iran’s president, and support for the War on Terror would undoubtedly be higher.

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Hat tip to Jose Miguel Guardia via PJM.

Big bad Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a tough guy when it comes to cutting off the heads of hog-tied and defenseless prisoners, but Al Qaeda’s leader in Iraq clearly doesn’t do all that much fighting against armed American crusaders personally.

A captured video, released by US Centcom, shows poor Zarqawi fumbling cluelessly with a Model 249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) Light Machine Gun.

Muttering in Arabic, Zarqawi hefts the M 249’s unfamiliar (over 20 lbs. — 9.07 kg.) loaded weight. Zarqawi is trying to blast away at full-auto, but is only able to squeeze off tentative single shots, and promptly jams up the machine gun’s action. We then discover that the brave Islamic warrior doesn’t have a clue as to how to pull back the operating lever, clear the breech, and restore operating ability.

Zarqawi looks helpless, as an obsequious (fully hooded) jihadi materializes from stage-left, to pull the handle for him, and make the gun operable. Zarqawi by now just wants to get it over with, so he simply holds down the trigger, until he’s emptied the entire magazine. Boy, I bet that barrel was hot.

Major General Rick Lynch also had a laugh at Zarqawi’s expense at the press briefing covered by AP:

“It’s supposed to be automatic fire, he’s shooting single shots. Something is wrong with his machine gun, he looks down, can’t figure out, calls his friend to come unblock the stoppage and get the weapon firing again,” Lynch said.

“This piece you all see as he walks away, he’s wearing his black uniform and his New Balance tennis shoes as he moves to this white pickup. And, his close associates around him … do things like grab the hot barrel of the machine gun and burn themselves,” the military spokesman added.

Personally, I think Zarqawi is looking a bit like the late John Belushi.

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UPDATES

Confederate Yankee gives us another choice detail:

Just seconds after Zarqawi fired dozens of rounds through the gun, he puts one of his men at extreme risk as he sweeps the machine gun’s barrel around, momentarily pointing at the terrorist’s chest without apparently activating the weapon’s safety, or even taking his finger off the trigger. Shortly after that display of stupidity, another terrorist is shown grabbing the machine gun by the still-smoking barrel, burning his hand.

Spook86 thinks Zarqawi’s incompetence may explain why the insurgents in Iraq rely so heavily on roadside bombs to attack U.S. forces.

New Yorker staff writer George Packer, author of the Iraq War-bashing book The Assassin’s Gate, nostalgically recalls the scene in March of 1968, when Lyndon Johnson met with the elder statesmen of his party’s foreign policy establishment, a group known (ironically, I think) as “the Wise Men.”

Grimly, they “told Johnson that the war could not be won in the time that American opinion would permit him, and that the United States should begin to disengage from Vietnam. Five days later, Johnson announced a restriction on bombing in North Vietnam and his own withdrawal from the Presidential race.”

“If there are any Wise Men available in the spring of 2006, what should they tell President Bush to do in Iraq? And, if they told him, would he listen?” wonders Packer aloud.

Since the end of the Cold War, the role of the foreign-policy establishment has been killed off by the nasty partisanship that now infects every aspect of Washington politics. In mid-March, Congress announced the formation of an Iraq Study Group to analyze the state of the war and advise the President about the way forward. Perhaps because the very idea of a bipartisan foreign policy no longer exists, the group seems to have been chosen for its political constituencies rather than for its informed and independent judgment. It’s hard to imagine the likes of Rudolph Giuliani, Chuck Robb, Vernon Jordan, and Sandra Day O’Connor marching into the Cabinet Room to tell the President that his Iraq policy has failed and that he needs a new one, along with new people to implement it.

But what if they do? This is not a President who places his faith in the wisdom of men.

Well, when the wisdom of men (or, at least, the wisdom of the liberal establishment and New Yorker pundits) tells the president and us “the war, in which almost twenty-four hundred Americans have died, and whose cumulative cost will reach $320 billion this year, is going badly and shows no prospect of a quick turnaround,” George W. Bush is entirely right to ignore it, and trust in the might of American arms and the justice of our cause.

Mr. Packer cites 2400 American deaths as if that were a figure so costly as to break the country’s will. In 1864, when the population of the United States was 31 million, the Union Army lost 10,000 casualties at the battle of Cold Harbor in twenty minutes, but the North did not abandon the war. Today the US population is in the neighborhood of 300 million.

Mr. Packer seems to have managed to forget to compare the deaths of over 3000 non-combatant civilians in under two hours on September 11, 2001 with the casualty figures he notes accumulated over three years in Iraq. The US lost 2400 (overwhelmingly military casualties) killed at Pearl Harbor, and more than 400,000 American lives were lost in the course of the war resuting from that attack.

Not only are American combat losses in Iraq minor by historical standards, defeatist liberal pundits like Packer carefully overlook the fact that we are winning the war.

Fareed Zakaria observes in Newsweek:

Al Qaeda Central, by which I mean the dwindling band of brothers on the Afghan-Pakistani border, appears to have turned into a communications company. It’s capable of producing the occasional jihadist cassette, but not actual jihad. I know it’s risky to say this, as Qaeda leaders may be quietly planning some brilliant, large-scale attack. But the fact that they have not been able to do one of their trademark blasts for five years is significant in itself….

The danger from global Islamic terrorism is real. But it is the product of small and scattered groups, spewing hate. It has much less support in the Muslim world than people think. There is much to be distressed about in that world-oppressive regimes, reactionary social views, illiberal political parties, mindless and virulent anti-Americanism. But these trends are not the same as support for jihad or for a Taliban-like Islamic state. And it is the latter-terror and theocracy-that are Al Qaeda’s basic goals. The evidence suggests that they are not gaining adherents.

The West, and the United States in particular, has a long history of seeing the enemy as 10 feet tall-think of Soviet Russia and Saddam Hussein. But as we paint Al Qaeda in those lofty terms, let’s please remember last week, when Osama bin Laden appealed on a crackling audiotape for a little money to build a few huts in Waziristan.

On April 26th, the Wall Street Journal observed in an editorial titled Our Rotten IntelligenCIA:

The press is… inventing a preposterous double standard that is supposed to help us all distinguish between bad leaks (the Plame name) and virtuous leaks (whatever Ms. McCarthy might have done). Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie has put himself on record as saying Ms. McCarthy should not “come to harm” for helping citizens hold their government accountable. Of the Plame affair, by contrast, the Post’s editorial page said her exposure may have been an “egregious abuse of the public trust.”

It would appear that the only relevant difference here is whose political ox is being gored, and whether a liberal or conservative journalist was the beneficiary of the leak. That the press sought to hound Robert Novak out of polite society for the Plame disclosure and then rewards Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen with Pulitzers proves the worst that any critic has ever said about media bias.

The deepest damage from these leak frenzies may yet be to the press itself, both in credibility and its ability to do its job. It was the press that unleashed anti-leak search missions aimed at the White House that have seen Judith Miller jailed and may find Ms. Priest and Mr. Risen facing subpoenas. And it was the press that promoted the probe under the rarely used Espionage Act of “neocon” Defense Department employee Lawrence Franklin, only to find that the same law may now be used against its own “whistleblower” sources. Just recently has the press begun to notice that the use of the same Espionage Act to prosecute two pro-Israel lobbyists for repeating classified information isn’t much different from prosecuting someone for what the press does every day — except for a far larger audience.

We’ve been clear all along that we don’t like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job. But then that’s part of the reason we didn’t join Joe Wilson and the New York Times in demanding Karl Rove’s head over the Plame disclosure. As for some of our media colleagues, when they stop being honest chroniclers of events and start getting into bed with bureaucrats looking to take down elected political leaders, they shouldn’t be surprised if those leaders treat them like the partisans they have become.

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Stung by the Journal’s criticism, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller responded in a Letter to the Editor today, denying any partisan bias, by noting that the Times even covers major scandals involving democrats “(Ask Bill Clinton. Ask Congressman Mollohan)” (!):

In the case of the eavesdropping story, President Bush and other figures in his administration were given abundant opportunities to explain why they felt our information should not be published. We considered the evidence presented to us, agonized over it, delayed publication because of it. In the end, their case did not stand up to the evidence our reporters amassed, and we judged that the responsible course was to publish what we knew and let readers assess it themselves. You are welcome to question that judgment, but you have presented no basis for challenging it, let alone for attributing it to bad faith or animus toward the president.

In the final paragraph of your broadside, you include the following disclaimer: “We’ve been clear all along that we don’t like leak prosecutions, especially when they involve harassing reporters who are just trying to do their job.” That’s nice to hear, and squares with what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they set out to protect a vibrant, inquisitive press. It’s just hard to square with the rest of your editorial.

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If the Times editorial policy is so non-partisan, responsible, and generally sans reproche as all that, I’d be curious to know why Mr. Keller found it necessary to stonewall, and refuse to answer, the timid and polite inquiries by his own pet lapdog “ombudsman” Byrom Calame, who noted that remarkable silence at the beginning of this year.

Who does the Times think it’s kidding?

From Walter Duranty’s award-winning concealment of the horrors of Stalinist collectivization, to Herbert Matthews’ press agentry for Fidel Castro, to the studiously overlooked coverage of the Khmer Rouge massacres in Cambodia, the Times has compiled, for nearly a century, a record of leftwing partisan mendacity that rivals Pravda’s.

Shelby Steele wonders why we just don’t win.

There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.

For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along–if admirably–in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one–including, very likely, the insurgents themselves–believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.

Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.

Steele identifies white guilt as the reason for post-WWII America’s inclination to approach wars half-heartedly and our willingness to accept substitutes for victory, right up to, and including, defeat. The ascendancy of ressentiment certainly plays some significant part in all of this. But I think Steele is overlooked the significance of the estrangement of the American haute bourgeois from participation in the military; and the rise, in the era of endlessly expanding prosperity and security which followed the victory in 1945, of a sense of invulnerability, particularly on the part of American elites.

Americans born post-WWII are commonly rather spoiled, never really having experienced hardship, never confronting the necessity of sacrifice. That’s precisely why so many Americans today are completely irresponsible and frivolous with respect to patriotism, why they don’t believe there is any real obligation to support elected governments in time of war.

They think America is so rich, so powerful, so secure, that war is just a game. “We destroy the credibility of the Administration. We undermine domestic support for the war, and compel Bush to withdraw US forces by helicopter from Baghdad. Then we’ll write triumphant editorials in the Times, and elect a democrat in 2008. Everything will be wonderful.”

They don’t believe the US can really lose anything that matters. They don’t believe that a US defeat has any consequences affecting them. “US withdrawal will just put those Red State warmongers in their place, and get us back in the saddle where we belong,” they think. It has not occurred to them that they just might be very wrong. That this time American defeat might have real consequences.

A small group of leftwing British journalists, university lecturers and bloggers who had grown disillusioned with their own side’s sympathy for terrorism, knee jerk anti-Americanism, and generally pathological outlook met in a London pub last year in order to discuss alternatives. That meeting resulted in discussions and debates which have ultimately produced The Euston Manifesto, an attempt at a redefinition of a political agenda for the Left, including a repudiation of some notably objectionable tendencies, and a reaffirmation of democratic and Enlightenment values.

This sort of thing, of course, is precisely what the American democrat would need to do to have any hope of ever winning a national election, but I tend to think the American left is incapable of standing up to its lunatic activist base.