The naysayers: today's variety sound wearyingly familiar

FOR nearly three years we have witnessed a steady stream of invective that American policy in the Middle East is amoral, impractical, or doomed to failure. The recent democratic aftershocks in Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, which followed from the elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories, have sent formerly critical pundits and diplomats scrambling for cover. As interesting as the about-faces of the New York Times et al. are, we should not forget that the domestic criticism of American efforts has long roots in our past, but little to do with the historic developments on the ground in Iraq.

Take, for example, the blame-America-first line. Some on the hard left sought to blame September 11 on our support for Israel or general "American imperialism" in the Middle East. Past American efforts to save Muslims in Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Kuwait, and Afghanistan counted for little. Even less thanks were earned by billions of dollars given to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. The Islamofascist vision of a Dark Age world run by unelected imams, in which women were secluded, homosexuals killed, Jews terrorized, non-Muslims routed, and freedoms squelched, registered little--even though this vision was at war with all that Western liberalism stands for.

This flawed idea that autocrats hate democracy more for what it does than what it represents is not new. On the eve of World War II, isolationists on the right insisted that America had treated Germany unfairly after World War I and had wrongly sided with British imperialism in its efforts to rub in the Germans' past defeat. "International Jewry" was blamed for poisoning the good will between the two otherwise friendly countries by demanding punitive measures from a victimized and impoverished German people. Likewise, poor Japan was supposedly unfairly cut off from American ore and petroleum, and hemmed in by provocative Anglo-American imperialists.

By the late 1940s things on the ground had changed somewhat, and the blame-America-first ideology adjusted accordingly. Now it was the turn of the old Left, which castigated "fascists" for ruining the hallowed American-Soviet wartime alliance by "isolating" and "surrounding" the Russians with hostile bases and allies. The same was supposedly true of Red China: We were told ad nauseam by idealists and "China hands" that Mao really wanted to cultivate American friendship but was spurned by our right-wing ideologues--as if there were nothing of the absolutism and innate thuggery in him that would soon account for 50 million or more of his own people murdered and starved.

Ditto the reactions to the animosity from such dictators as Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro. The Left assured us that both were actually neo-Jeffersonians, whose olive branches were crushed by unimaginative Cold Warriors and who only then went on to plan their gulags. Few seemed to think it natural that a free and powerful America would be hated by fascists and Communists--much less that it should be praised rather than castigated for earning such hatred.

SUPERSTITION AFTER SUPERSTITION

A second line of criticism maintains, again wrongly, that Americans are essentially weak. Before we went into Afghanistan, the Bush administration was hectored that the country's fierce people, colonial history, rugged terrain, hostile neighbors, foreign religion, and shattered infrastructure made an American military victory unlikely. We also forget now how the Left warned us of terrible casualties and millions of refugees before the Iraq war, and then went dormant until the insurgents emerged. Then the opposition resurfaced to assure us that Iraq was lost, only to grow quiet again after the Iraqi election and its regional aftershocks--a cycle that followed about the same 20-month timetable of military victory to voting in Afghanistan. Only America, it seems, can be an overweening bully and a pitiful helpless giant at nearly the same time.

Now a new geopolitical litany of gloom has arisen: The reserves are "shattered"; North Korea, Syria, and Iran are untouchable while we are "bogged down" in Iraq; we took our "eye off bin Laden"; a schedule for withdrawal from Iraq needs to be spelled out; there is no real American-trained Iraqi army; the entire Arab world hates us; and so on.

Such pessimism is also nothing new. In 1917, "a million men over there" was considered preposterous for a shadow of a military force. Yet by late 1918, seasoned doughboys were chasing Prussians out of Belgium. On the eve of World War II Charles Lindbergh returned from an obsequious visitation with Goering's generals to warn us that the ultra-modern Luftwaffe was unstoppable. Four years later it was in shambles, as four-engine American bombers reduced the Third Reich to ashes.

Japanese Zeros, supposed proof of comparative American backwardness in 1941-2, were the easy targets of "turkey shoots" by 1944, as American Hellcats and Corsairs blew them out of the skies. Later, Sputnik "proved" how far we were behind the socialist workhorse in Russia--even as we easily went to the moon first a little over a decade later. In short, the American military and economy has been habitually underestimated in the 20th century, even as the United States defeated Prussian imperialism, German Nazism, Italian fascism, Japanese militarism, and Stalinist Communism.