President Bush, while being heckled by anti-war protesters in Australia, asked his audience how anyone can believe the world is not a better place with Saddam Hussein out of power.
Good question. He asked it rhetorically, not expecting an answer. But there are answers. Here are a few:
Because they hate the U.S. more than they hate dictatorship.
Because in their minds, the U.S. is itself a dictatorship.
Why? Because the U.S. is a much richer, wealthier and successful place than most of the rest of the world.
The anti-war types speak and act as if this American superiority is causeless.
They speak and act as if the U.S. obtained this “unfair advantage” over other countries through force. They ignore the fact that the U.S. has far more freedom than other places–especially places like Iraq–and that this just might be a big part of the reason the U.S. is better off.
They ignore the fact that the U.S., compared to countries like Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, is much less religious and far more practical, rational, this-worldly–and that this might have something to do with our economic well-being. Economies are not built by mosques and prayers; they are built by hard work, talent and long-range planning.
Because they hate George Bush. It’s personal. Objectively, his policies are not all that much different than Bill Clinton’s, especially domestically (e.g. his proposed expansion of Medicare, the biggest since Lyndon Johnson). They just plain hate him, mainly because, unlike Bill Clinton or Al Gore, he is willing to use the military for purposes other than international bread-dropping missions. Bush speaks and sometimes even acts like he believes the U.S. has a moral right to defend itself. How arrogant of him! He’ll even, at least for a time, go without–gasp!–U.N. approval. In their eyes, this is “imperialism.” The prospect of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden launching biological warfare against us pales next to the idea of going to war without U.N. permission.
Because, deep down, they’re really on the other side. In the war against terrorism, on an unacknowledged but still very powerful level, they side with the terrorists.
They will scream in denial, and they will protest that their patriotism is in question simply because they don’t support the Iraq war. But they offer no alternative to the Iraq war, except the U.S. sitting and doing nothing as it continues to endure attack after attack. This is what happened in the years leading up to 9/11. You see what it got us.
They hate freedom, individualism and capitalism more than they hate terrorism. It’s that simple.
