"CLOUDCUCKOOLAND": Victor Davis Hanson looks at the ongoing implosion of anti-Americanism. Hanson writes:

The dream of 1960s radicals was supposedly that someday the United States might use its vast cultural influence and military power to be on the "right side of history." That meant — instead of Pavlovian opposition to idealistic socialists and occasional Communists in preference for odious figures like Pinochet, Somoza, or Franco — we would try to topple just those regimes and implant democracies in their place. Few then lectured that the Nicaraguans should be left to handle their own dictators or that we had no right to tell the Spanish what to do with Franco. Instead, support for revolutionary movements was voiced and action demanded.

Well, with the end of the Cold War, those days of hope have at last arrived. Noriega, Milosevic, and Mullah Omar not only were fascistic and bloodthirsty, but they are also all gone thanks to the United States military. Rather than seeing protestors chanting to ignore Saddam Hussein, I would have expected that the refrain would be "Solidarity with the brave Iraqi people in their brave struggles against a fascist mass murderer."

I can't help but think that simple knee-jerk hatred of the right is driving the left to many of these extreme positions that have no internal "logic" otherwise. It would be a fascinating "what if" scenerio to ponder what their response would have been if Clinton had pursued Islamic terrorism with the same vigor that President Bush has, when presented with several opportunities to do just that.