What's Right

National Review, March 24, 2003 by David Frum

Low, Dishonest . . .

Radicals who came of age in the 1990s were truly rebels without a cause. Socialism was gone and so was the nuclear arms race; and the causes that remained lacked -- well -- a certain oomph. Who could get excited about the campaign to deny Third World farmers cheap and productive genetically modified seeds? Things got so bad that my fellow Torontonian Naomi Klein was acclaimed as the "Pasionara" of the Newest Left on the strength of a book that argued that consumers should avoid products that displayed their makers' labels -- a remarkable fusion of the principles of international socialism and those of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves.

But the long years of dearth have now ended. The war on terror has provided the hard Left with its biggest cause yet -- and some exciting new allies. On February 15, hundreds of thousands of people around the world rallied in opposition to American plans to topple Saddam Hussein. The Washington Post reported on March 3 on the origins and composition of this new antiwar movement. "The organizers say the February rallies were first agreed upon at a small strategy session in Florence in November. But their roots go back to the days just after Sept. 11, 2001, when activists say they began meeting to map out opposition to what they anticipated would be the U.S. military response to the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

"In Britain, according to organizer John Rees, several hundred activists first got together the weekend after Sept. 11. Most were from the hard core of the British Left -- the Socialist Workers Party, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the anti-capitalist organization Globalized Resistance, along with Labor Party legislators Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway. Within weeks, they had combined with representatives from two more important elements -- Britain's growing Muslim community and its militant trade unions. By October they had a name: the Stop the War Coalition."

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com has dubbed this coalition the Communist- Islamicist alliance, and like the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 it is at once shocking and yet oddly logical. Now comes the next logical step: An alliance that began with marches and demonstrations is now planning a campaign of civil disobedience.

"Campaigns to disrupt U.S. forces have also been launched," the Post reports. "Besides the dozens of activists who have traveled to Baghdad to volunteer as 'human shields' against a U.S. attack, nine Dutch antiwar activists were arrested Tuesday for chaining themselves to the gates of a U.S. military center outside Rotterdam. In Italy, hundreds of protesters occupied train stations and railway tracks for nearly a week to delay trains carrying U.S. military equipment from northern Italy to the Camp Darby military base near Pisa. Irish protesters broke through the perimeter fence at Shannon airport in January and damaged a U.S. Navy plane, causing other planes to divert their flights and refuel elsewhere. Trade union movements in Italy and France are pledging work disruptions and considering general strikes if war breaks out." In a column on February 27 for Toronto's Globe and Mail, Naomi Klein herself tells us that similar activities are being contemplated inside the United States.

"The most ambitious plan has come from San Francisco, where a coalition of antiwar groups is calling for an emergency non-violent 'counterstrike' the day after the war starts: 'Don't go to work or school. Call in sick, walk out: We will impose real economic, social and political costs and stop business as usual until the war stops.'"

Give the Italians and Irish this: Their antiwar protesters are grimly serious. They block trains to protest war. On this side of the Atlantic, the protesters are contemplating only skipping school. But then, maybe the North American protesters are exercising reasonable prudence. If hostilities do begin in Iraq, the United States -- unlike Italy or Ireland -- will be a belligerent power. And there's a term for blocking trains during a state of belligerence. That term is sabotage -- and sabotage is a crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison.

At the very beginning of the War on Terror, journalist Andrew Sullivan provoked an intense media controversy for warning, "The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead -- and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column." This set off the anti-McCarthyite klaxons of the keepers of liberal orthodoxy, and Sullivan later offered an explanation and semi-apology: "I have no reason to believe that even those sharp critics of this war would actually aid and abet the enemy in any more tangible ways" than through intellectual dissent.

It now appears that Sullivan modulated his words too soon. In the calls for interference with war activity inside the United States and on the territory of America's allies, we see something more than mere dissent -- something more even than the naive protection and justification that some on the left have extended to alleged and indicted terror-masters on American soil. We are seeing the emergence of social forces that are prepared to violate the laws of this country and its allies in order to aid America's enemies in time of war -- and not just any old enemy, but enemies whose sole aim is the deliberate mass murder of the innocent.