posted 12-30-2003 11:39 AM            

Mr. York the white house correspondent for National Review, comes across with the usual Wall Street Journal accusations of "left wing", "nut case" blah blah jargon one would would expect to find in WSJ editorials. He calls Soros a "dangerous man". But he does a pretty good job summing up what so many Americans have concluded and are continuing to conclude.

Mr. York doesn't seem to get it though (or perhaps acknowledge it) that Bush's insatiable lust for power and expansion of the Exectutive Branch is not just a concern of "the left" but more and more of the middle and even many true "conservatives".

posted 12-30-2003 06:58 PM            

quote:

---

Mr. Soros is most distressed by the president's war on terrorism. He feels that, in general, the U.S. should deal with the terrorist threat by giving out more foreign aid, enacting more equitable trade laws and being a more constructive, cooperative member of the world community. Mr. Soros argues that the U.S. should have treated the Sept. 11 attacks as a criminal matter, not an act of war. "Crime requires police work, not military action," he writes.

In fact, Mr. Soros, while conceding that the Sept. 11 attack was a bad thing, wonders why Americans got quite so upset about it. "How could a single event, even if it involved three thousand civilian casualties, have such a far-reaching effect?" he asks, apparently sincerely. The answer seems to lie "not so much in the event itself but in the way the United States, under the leadership of President George W. Bush, responded to it."

It's an argument familiar to anyone who spends time surfing left-wing Web sites or listening to the Democrats running for president: Mr. Bush, instead of choosing the path of careful police work and international cooperation, recklessly took the nation to war. By doing so, the U.S. became, in Mr. Soros's words, "the victim turned perpetrator."

Why did President Bush do such a thing? Because he came under the spell of a small group of--by now, the reader can see this coming a mile away--"neoconservatives" and their ideology of American supremacy. In particular, Mr. Soros believes, the president and some top officials in his administration were influenced by the Project for a New American Century, the Washington think tank that the anti-Bush left sees as the nerve center of the neoconservative conspiracy. Mr. Soros seems positively obsessed with the Project; in this short book, he reprints its entire mission statement, along with a description of each founder.

According to Mr. Soros's theory, the ideologues at the Project had a longstanding war plan to impose American supremacy on the world. But they faced two obstacles: George W. Bush, their chosen president, did not have a mandate to take such drastic action, and America had no clearly defined enemy. Then, almost as if by magic, Sept. 11 "removed both obstacles in one stroke," Mr. Soros writes.

The newly empowered president declared war on terrorism, and the nation went along. "The administration deliberately fostered the fear that has gripped the country," Mr. Soros continues. "It then used the war on terrorism to pursue its dream of American supremacy." And a sensible course of foreign aid and trade policy was abandoned in favor of war.

By making this theory the centerpiece of his book, Mr. Soros veers close to what has become the left's equivalent of black-helicopter paranoia. But the most irksome thing about his argument, besides its conspiratorial leanings, is Mr. Soros's failure to acknowledge that the path he advocates--treating terrorism as a criminal issue and stressing cooperation with other nations--was tried for a dozen years through the first Bush and both Clinton administrations. President Clinton talked and talked about bringing terrorists to justice. And yet by and large he did not, and he certainly did not diminish the threat al Qaeda posed to the U.S.
Still, Mr. Soros thinks the U.S. would do well to take up "a doctrine of preventive action of a constructive nature," like "fostering the development of open societies." He calls this bold plan the "Soros doctrine." Yes, Mr. President: Throw out your own ideas about fighting terrorism and its sponsors and take up the Soros doctrine instead! And while you're at it, apologize, too--Mr. Soros is particularly unhappy that Mr. Bush was "unrepentant" at his speech to the United Nations in September.

Mr. Soros says he is so concerned about the "excesses" of the Bush administration because they bring to mind what went on in Nazi Germany. A Jew who grew up in Hungary under both Nazi and communist domination, Mr. Soros writes: "When I hear President Bush say that 'either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,' I hear alarm bells." Speaking to the Washington Post in November, he was a bit more explicit, claiming that Mr. Bush "reminds me of the Germans."

At any given time, there is some small sliver of the American population that believes the president--any president--is a Nazi. Those people are usually thought of as nut cases. Now they can count among their number one of the world's richest and most influential men.

Of course, the majority of Americans approve of Mr. Bush's prosecution of the war on terror. And that worries Mr. Soros. "I am distressed," he writes, "that the public is not as alarmed as I am." So he is determined to spend whatever it takes to alarm them. Powered by his money and the massive egomania that infuses this book, he can do a lot.

---