One of the latent premises of our modern age is the fact that our collective attention span and historical ignorance conspire to raise stupidity to a virtue.  Although both parties are susceptible to this phenomenon, the Democrats seems to have raised it a perverse kind of art form.  America's foreign policy is an illustrative case in point, and we can begin the review with the following quote:

Let our position be absolutely clear:  An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

A reflexive response is that this was either Bush I or Bush II, but both would be incorrect.  Was it President Reagan?  No, it was President Carter in his 1980 State of the Union Address, and it was a response to the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.  Although Mr. Carter won't be recognized as anything other than a mediocre president, this statement, written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, his National Security Adviser, merely reflects America's reasonable right to defend its interests. 

Yet, when something similar is uttered by President Bush, we hear cries of 'cowboy diplomacy,' and 'unilateralism,' which ring particularly hollow in light of the unprecedented success of the 6-party talks with North Korea.  Speaking of which, we're not testing the elasticity of the truth by suggesting that most Americans probably couldn't tell you how many coalition partners the U.S. had when it entered the Korean War--it was nine--about twenty fewer than Bush I had in the Gulf War and nearly the same when Bush II invaded Iraq in 2003.

For a second exhibit, we turn to a French foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, who asserted that his nation "cannot accept a politically unipolar world, nor a culturally uniform world, nor the unilateralism of a single hyper power."  Readers hermetically locked into the Bush hating European paradigm would think it was 'W' he was referring to, when, in fact, it was President Clinton, in the seventh year of his presidency.

The 20th century saw the development of institutions whose goal was to dilute the allegedly pernicious influence of nationalism.  Although that was a natural by-product of World War II, there's no evidence that those bodies--the United Nations, NATO, the International Criminal Court, and the EU itself--have played a measurable role in inhibiting belligerents on the international stage.  Yet it's America's nationalism, whether under Carter, Clinton, or the Bushes, that seems to invoke the ire of European nations, although it's clear it reached its zenith under 'W.'  But in light of America's role in liberating Europe and Japan, not to mention dozens of other interventions in the name of freedom, is it justified?

Returning to our theme that human history seems to be a long series of re-runs, cyclical lessons that are learned in the crucible of war and then resurface later only to be relearned anew, this generation seems intent upon reprising the roles of good and evil.  Indeed, one of the unfortunate causalities of post-modernism is the thoroughly obtuse notion that we've conquered evil, that we've achieved a kind of universal understanding that liberal democracy is the political equivalent of gravity--it's the way the world is.  It's corollary is that noxious notion of the moral equivalence of all nations, a uniquely vicious product of academia and its tireless elites.

That conventional thinking has a long half-life is evidenced by Democrats generally and liberals in particular, who seem impervious to the past thirty years of radical Islam and the dozens of attacks on Western nations.  That this savagery culminated in the attack of 9/11 seems also to have receded over the horizon of their thinking, although they are loathe to concede it had anything to do with President Bush's counter-terrorism efforts.

Although Senator McCain may win in November, with the expected Congressional losses to Democrats, it's probable that our current trajectory vis a vis Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon will remain unperturbed.  If that's the case, and if the Carter Doctrine quoted above is deemed unacceptable when uttered by a McCain, we may well be on track to relearning last century's lessons, but on a magnitude far more devastating.