Hitch on Weasels - Christopher

Hitch on Weasels - Christopher Hitchens attacks and debunks the "Cowboy" trope. That's the myth so beloved of the far left and the Axis of Weasels - that Bush and the adminstration are a rogue posse of vigilantes.

A cowboy surely would have wanted to do something dramatic and impulsive (such as to blow up at least an aspirin-factory in Sudan) in order to beat the chest and show he wasn't to be messed with. But it turns out that refined Parisians are keener on such "unilateral" gestures—putting a bomb onboard the Rainbow Warrior, invading Rwanda on the side of the killers, dispatching French troops to the Ivory Coast without a by-your-leave, building a reactor for Saddam Hussein, and all the rest of it.

True.

Here's the summary:

In the present case of Iraq, a cowboy would have overruled the numerous wimps and faint hearts who he somehow appointed to his administration and would have evinced loud scorn for the assemblage of sissies and toadies who compose the majority of the United Nations. Instead, Bush has rejoined UNESCO, paid most of the U.S. dues to the U.N., and returned repeatedly to the podium of the organization in order to recall it to its responsibility for existing resolutions. While every amateur expert knows that weather conditions for an intervention in the Gulf will start to turn adverse by the end of next month, he has extended deadline after deadline. He has not commented on the eagerness of the media to print every injunction of caution and misgiving from State Department sources. The Saudis don't want the United States to use the base it built for the protection of "the Kingdom"? Very well, build another one in a state that welcomes the idea. Do the Turks and Jordanians want to have their palms greased before discovering what principles may be at stake? Greased they will be. In a way, this can be described as "a drive to war." But only in a way. It would be as well described as a decided insistence that confrontation with Saddam Hussein is inevitable—a proposition that is relatively hard to dispute from any standpoint

Read the whole thing, of course.

I've said it over and over - in this blog, on the air the other night, and in countless conversations on the subject: the US, and the President, have played this by the numbers. For all the caterwauling about "unilateralism" and "going it alone", we have played the consensus game. Bush had played the game masterfully.

And the left, outraged at being outmaneuvered, doesn't like it one bit.

(Via Instapundit)

Posted by Mitch at January 28, 2003 08:51 AM