The Peaceful Way

In some ways, it’s difficult to criticize the motivations of the anti-war movement in the West. After all, most of us want a peaceful existence, and war is a horrific way to resolve differences.

And yet, the anti-War movement offers smug “solutions” that reek of an overriding moral superiority but at the same time offer no rational approach for dealing with death cult ideologies that want to destroy Western democratic thought. In fact, their "solution" is to claim that Islamofascist ideologies don’t want to destroy us (even though Islamist leaders state it explicitly, over and over again) and that negotiation, incentives and appeasement will somehow alter their barbaric, anti-Western behavior (even though there is no evidence that this is even remotely possible).

The anti-war movement demands an immediate withdrawal from Iraq without discussing the consequences of such a withdrawal (for Iraqis, the broader ME, and the World at large). They use 20-20 hindsight to demonize those who initiated the war, allying themselves with a left-leaning MSM to convince the larger populace that we are already defeated.

Joshua Muravchik contends that “Iran [and its surrogates] is making a mistake that may lead the Middle East into a broader conflict." He suggests that a broader more deadly war is coming and that our mistake is that we haven’t confronted tyranny, allowing it to believe that it's stronger than it really is:

A large portion of modern wars erupted because aggressive tyrannies believed that their democratic opponents were soft and weak. Often democracies have fed such beliefs by their own flaccid behavior. Hitler's contempt for America, stoked by the policy of appeasement, is a familiar story. But there are many others. North Korea invaded South Korea after Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared that Korea lay beyond our "defense perimeter." Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait after our ambassador assured him that America does not intervene in quarrels among Arabs. Imperial Germany launched World War I, encouraged by Great Britain's open reluctance to get involved. Nasser brought on the 1967 Six Day War, thinking that he could extort some concessions from Israel by rattling his sword.

Democracies, it is now well established, do not go to war with each other. But they often get into wars with non-democracies. Overwhelmingly the non-democracy starts the war; nonetheless, in the vast majority of cases, it is the democratic side that wins. In other words, dictators consistently underestimate the strength of democracies, and democracies provoke war through their love of peace, which the dictators mistake for weakness.

Those of us who are against appeasement and negotiation with genocidal fascists are deemed Neanderthals by the anti-War left. Yet, when should we act? How long should we wait? How many will die because we delayed any effort to crush the fascists while there is still time?

Muravchik continues:

Today, this same dynamic is creating a moment of great danger. The radicals are becoming reckless, asserting themselves for little reason beyond the conviction that they can. They are very likely to overreach. It is not hard to imagine scenarios in which a single match--say a terrible terror attack from Gaza--could ignite a chain reaction. Israel could handle Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria, albeit with painful losses all around, but if Iran intervened rather than see its regional assets eliminated, could the U.S. stay out?

With the Bush administration's policies having failed to pacify Iraq, it is natural that the public has lost patience and that the opposition party is hurling brickbats. But the demands of congressional Democrats that we throw in the towel in Iraq, their attempts to constrain the president's freedom to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program, the proposal of the Baker-Hamilton commission that we appeal to Iran to help extricate us from Iraq--all of these may be read by the radicals as signs of our imminent collapse. In the name of peace, they are hastening the advent of the next war.

Those readers who lean-Left are convinced to an absolute certainty that Muravchik is wrong. That the peaceful way is the only way. That morality and peaceful intent will be perceived by Islamists as strength, not weakness.

That’s exactly what Neville Chamberlain believed in the late 1930s.