Stardate 20030421.1639

(On Screen): Before the war, certain people's extremely public opposition to the war inspired speculation that they either were being blackmailed by Saddam, or being paid off by him, or perhaps both.

And we all knew that once the war was over, a lot would come to light. British Newspaper The Telegraph has already been revealing some of that kind of stuff, and now they've got documentation that indicates that British Labour MP George Galloway, easily the most emphatic opponent of the war in the UK, who traveled to Baghdad and met with Saddam, was actually being paid by Iraq. It makes you wonder who else was on the payroll, doesn't it?

In a more general sense, the conduct and outcome of the war and the revelations which are coming out of Iraq now about what life was really like there are already changing the political climate in the western world and inside the US. There are a couple of articles from the Weekly Standard (which is considered a major voice of the neo-con movement) which talk about this.

I think it was apparent all along that a lot of those who nominally opposed the war did so because of a larger agenda. In fact, they didn't actually care about Iraq at all, or the plight of the people there. Most of us who favored war did care about that but it wasn't the primary motivation for fighting. Nonetheless, in the aftermath of the war it's becoming evident not only who was right (correct about the facts) but also who was right (had the moral high ground).

We have to give the benefit of the doubt to at least some of those who protested against the war. Whether they were deluded or not, many of them did think that the consequences of war for Iraq would be much more terrible for the people there than the status quo. To reach this conclusion, they had to significantly underestimate the kind and quantity of vicious brutality of Saddam's regime, and to massively overestimate the results of combat. Still, given those mistakes their conclusion would look correct. Such people must now be feeling rather queasy, perhaps even feel betrayed by the anti-war movement's leaders, and will be much less likely to rally to the leftist flag in future.

Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel write about The Redistribution of Honor. They talk about how this may change the balance of power in academia, where much of the anti-war activism originated.

The funhouse of the postmodern academics was built around the two closely related themes of postmodernism and multiculturalism. Together they displaced the idea of truth and its cousin, empirical evidence, with the notion of "narrativity." All the world was simply words. There was no reality, just a series of competing stories all of which were mere social constructs and none of which was more correct than any other. In political terms, the campus postmodernists identified with the pre-modern rebels against modernity in the Arab world. But with the war in Iraq, those on campuses who, like Al Jazeera, believed "Baghdad Bob's" account of events discovered that lo and behold there is such a thing as an empirically grounded reality.

Will this discredit the neo-Marxist agenda espoused by the vocal post-modernist academics who have been using the French model to seize control over university politics in the last couple of decades? The French model is "be loud, claim to speak for the majority, and shut up all who oppose you by attacking them viciously."

While postmodernism clearly dominates many parts of academia, especially in areas like literature and "women's studies", it's not at all clear it's infected all parts of it. Notably absent from this whole business has been professors in fields like science and engineering and business, who for the most part seem to be keeping their heads down and getting on with the primary business of teaching students and doing research.

David Brooks writes an even stronger article talking about the way that certain groups were basing their decisions on delusion. And in the second half of the article he engages in a long speculation about how this will alter the way that young people see the world. He does this by creating a person he called Joey Tabula-Rasa and then talks about how Joey sees current events unfolding.

Brooks speculates that recent events will make it seem to Joey that will reject leftist positions because those who hold those positions were so consistently and stridently wrong, and were either lying or living in a dream world.

But Brooks is an old fart like me, and I'm not sure he's really any more able than I am to judge the zeitgeist for people just coming of age. (And it may be premature to do so, in any case.) Is he just projecting his own wishes on Joey Tabula-