While I love Goldberg’s book “Liberal Fascism,” I disagree with his assessment of U.S. military intervention in Iraq. But at least he has admitted it was a mistake. Well, sort of.

I agree that many “anti-war” people on the Left think that we should intervene militarily in another country so long as there is a humanitarian reason (for example, the civil war in Darfur). So that does not make them truly anti-war, does it? And Goldberg deftly points this out.

However, I think first and foremost we should have had a true declaration of war from Congress, as is stipulated in Article 1, Section 8 in the U.S. Constitution. So the Iraq War is therefore illegal. A true declaration of war would have allowed the American People to participate in the decision. Congress could have weighed the evidence and decided if Iraq was truly a threat to national security.

Goldberg has a good idea that we should have the Iraqi people decide by voting (it’s ironic that Goldberg should call his option a “third way,” however). But I think that we must go back to the Constitution again. Remember, you can moralize all you want about the horrors of letting the terrorists gain control yada yada yada, but the highest law of the land must be followed, without exception. I think the Iraq war is being used in a Progressive sense, as a moral motivator, so the Bush admin can declare “We planned in war!”

George Orwell, in his book 1984, understood that a fascist society needed to be in constant war. Always the righteous army of the State is advancing against the enemy of our way of life. Sound familiar? Neo-conservatives always point out that the enemy of our way of life will flourish if we leave Iraq, which I believe to be unfounded. Like Ron Paul says, let’s take our marching orders from the Constitution and get out, and not make the same mistake again!

And I’m totally going to call B.S. on this whole terrorist scare. Okay, so 19 thugs can fly planes into the WTC in NY and kill thousands of people. We’ve had terrorist attacks on our soil before, and tragic though it is (I don’t want to denigrate the lost lives in the attack), it’s nothing compared to the Cold War, which I lived through and remember well. In those days, we were talking about universal Armageddon, where with one “push of a button” the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. could destroy the entire world ten times over! Now that was a threat!

How did we deal with that threat? With diplomacy. Kennedy avoided armed confrontation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Regan countered the Soviets with Mutually Assured Destruction.

How can be best deal with the “terrorist threat?” With diplomacy, which Bush is not willing to do. His whole philosophy is based in preemptive warfare, which is frankly Un-American. In America, we believe in innocence until proof of guilt. And our foreign policy should reflect that. I think that we need to wait until a country has actually committed an act of aggression before condemning it to invasion. And even then, that act must be weighed carefully in the halls of Congress to determine if a foreign country’s act of aggression against another is something that truly threatens our national security.

Bush’s solution to preventing another 9/11? Yet more government bureaucracy in the form of the fascist-sounding “Department of Homeland Security.” Why can’t we just use old-fashioned, tried and true, constitutional means of crime fighting to get the bad guys? Why the sudden rush to dump our individual liberties?

Simple. And it’s in Goldberg’s book. I’m afraid that fascism is on both sides of the isle.

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