Posted 6:58 PM by Angie Schultz

Enemies on the Right, Non-Enemies on the Left

Tim Blair praises this Julie Burchill column in the Guardian. Warbloggers will love it; she mocks the ostentatious selflessness of Susan Sarandon and Co. She really hands them their heads on a silver platter with their own exquisite pity as a garnish.

But she's full of shit:

Those who demonstrated against US aggression in Vietnam and Cuba did so because they believed that those people should have more freedom, not less.

Hmmm...Vietnam...Cuba...Cuba...Vietnam. What do those places have in common? Besides "American aggression". Oh, yeah! Communism! American "aggression" in both those places was meant to stop Communism, to save people from exactly the sort of misery that has Julie Burchill so indignant when experienced by Iraqis.

Funny how both Burchill and her enemies, the Americans, had the same goals for the Vietnamese and the Cubans.

In the next paragraph she takes on the Beautiful Peace People:

I've just heard a snippet of the most disgustingly me-me-me anti-war advert by Susan Sarandon, in which she intones, "Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags, and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know - what did Iraq do to us?" Well, if you mean what did Saddam do to America The Beautiful, not an awful lot - but to millions of his own people, torture and murder for a start. Don't they count?

Not for all of me they don't.

Let me make myself clear: I don't care about the Iraqis. I don't want their civilians slaughtered, and if they are liberated in the end, I will rejoice. But this war is about what Saddam could do to America the Beautiful, if he is not stopped. As so many of the Peace People have pointed out, many, many people around the world live in exactly the same sort of misery---many of them in much worse circumstances. Why pick on Iraq?

I agree. If it weren't that I perceive Saddam to be a threat to us, I wouldn't want our blood and treasure spent on the liberation of Iraq. It's simply not worth it, and it's not worth it precisely because of people like Julie Burchill.

When we did that sort of thing in the past, Burchill and her friends cried that we were evil imperialists, out to rule the whole world for ourselves and massacre anyone who got in our way. Should we try to "liberate" Cuba today, or North Korea, they'd probably say the same thing. If you research "why do they hate us?", at least as far as Europe is concerned, you find the trail leads right back to the Julie Burchills of the world.

And this is exactly what informs the views of Sarandon and the other Peace People. They've listened hard to those who told them that the US was nothing but an imperialist aggressor. Now they reflexively believe that it's impossible for the US to have any altruistic motives---even secondary ones. Now they don't even want us to fight to defend ourselves. You've taught them well, Julie.

But now, apparently, Burchill has approved our aggression. It's to liberate the little brown people from terrible suffering! Now, British soldiers are the idealists!

Your big mistake, Saddam old man, was not calling yourself a Communist. You could have had exactly the same power, exactly the same control, gassed exactly as many Kurds, and the Julie Burchills of the world would've defended your regime to the end. All you had to do was fly a few red flags and put up a few posters of Lenin. Maybe salted your rhetoric with a little "glorious workers' revolution". Would that have been too high a price to pay?