Nonsense from Thomas Sowell

What Cliff May calls, in this week's otherwise valuable FDD News & Notes, a "brief, incisive op-ed" is actually a half-baked cavalcade of nonsense and historical falsehoods in the service of passing off an irrelevant ideological hobbyhorse -- in this case smears against diversity.

The Thomas Sowell column in question appears at the WSJ's Opinion Journal. Let's parse:

Iraq is not the first war with ugly surprises and bloody setbacks. Even World War II, idealized in retrospect as it never was at the time--the war of "the greatest generation"--had a long series of disasters for Americans before victory was finally achieved.

The war began for Americans with the disaster at Pearl Harbor, followed by the tragic horror of the Bataan death march, the debacle at the Kasserine Pass and, even on the eve of victory, being caught completely by surprise by a devastating German counterattack that almost succeeded at the Battle of the Bulge.

Other wars--our own and other nations'--have likewise been full of nasty surprises and mistakes that led to bloodbaths. Nevertheless, the Iraq war has some special lessons for our time, lessons that both the left and the right need to acknowledge, whether or not they will.

This is not incisive. The word Cliff must have been looking for is "vacuous." Let me get this straight: Conservatives shrivel from the Vietnam analogy, but we are all supposed to nod our heads in agreement that the war in Iraq is akin to World War II? I'll let reasonable people decide which analogy is more apt, even though neither is in any meaningful way. (Hint: Reasonable people who are not complete retards will know that World War II is not the right answer. But you have to give him credit: if you're going to make a leap into the realm of the absurd, by all means, make it a big leap.)

What is it that has made Iraq so hard to pacify, even after a swift and decisive military victory? In one word: diversity.

Here we go. The difficulties in Iraq aren't the result of complexity. There aren't multiple causal factors involved. Sowell can reduce them to one word. And wouldn't you know it -- it is a word that happens to correspond to one of Sowell's favorite axes to grind. Isn't that convenient? Ain't reductionism grand?

That word has become a sacred mantra, endlessly repeated for years on end, without a speck of evidence being asked for or given to verify the wonderful benefits it is assumed to produce.

Note the pervasive use of the passive voice. There is a simple reason for this (and not simply the fact that journalists apparently are unaware of the fact that the passive voice makes for bad writing): It allows him to create false subjects and to do battle with strawmen. A sacred mantra to whom? Repeated endlessly by whom? We don't know, and the answer is that Sowell could not come up with someone who pictures diversity as a "sacred mantra" and repeats its virtues endlessly. So it is apparently better for him to create a fictive enemy than to engage with real people who, inconveniently enough, have provided vast amounts of evidence about some of diversity's benefits. Is diversity a debatable topic? Of course. But why engage in a debate with real people and acknowledge complexities when you can simply create a false argument?

Worse yet, Iraq is only the latest in a long series of catastrophes growing out of diversity. These include "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda and the Sudan, the million lives destroyed in intercommunal violence when India became independent in 1947 and the even larger number of Armenians slaughtered by Turks during World War I.

This is where this argument descends from the merely shoddily written and ethically dubious to the factually nonsensical. The genocide in Rwanda and the Sudan were about "diversity"? In what way? This makes no sense. The genocide in Rwanda had its roots in the colonial legacy in which first the Germans and then the Belgians privileged one group (Tutsi) over a sizable majority (Hutu). This privilege not surprisingly created resentment among the minority group which, when independence came, translated its numerical majority into political power. Over the decades, tensions rose, violence occurred. In the early 1990s, under external pressure, General Juvenal Habyarimana, Rwanda's Hutu leader, reluctantly began the process of power sharing, a process he never embraced prior to his death in a plane crash that served as the tipping point for fueling the genocide that followed in which Hutu militias (most prominent among them the interahamwe) slaughtered between 800,000 and 1.1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutu. How, in any meaningful way, is this about "diversity"? One could engage in the same discussion of all of the examples he cites. Unless Sowell honestly believes that rudimentary rights -- such as the right to be free from genocide, say, or the right to a role in the political process -- honestly have something to do with the culture wars over diversity that he caricatured earlier, there are only two conclusions one can draw from this: Sowell is manifestly dishonest or he truly has no understanding of events such as the genocide in Rwanda or the grim proceedings in the Sudan. Either way, from here how can anyone take Sowell seriously?

Despite much gushing about how we should "celebrate diversity," America's great achievement has not been in having diversity but in taming its dangers that have run amok in many other countries. Americans have by no means escaped diversity's oppressions and violence, but we have reined them in.

Never mind that we still have not identified these folks who are gushing. And we'll ignore the paragraph-ending preposition as well. "Diversity's oppressions and violence"? What does this mean? Is Sowell seriously going to deny, for example, that the Civil Rights Movement was fundamentally a struggle for diversity? And is taming these supposed dangers of diversity really America's "great achievement"? So have we now established that in addition to not understanding the rest of the world, Sowell also is clueless when it comes to American history? Because he is if this is what he places as America's greatest achievement.

We can skip ahead for awhile. Sowell makes various assertions about nation-building that we can all debate, but that are not especially objectionable, or at least that are not demonstrably false.

Political spin may say that Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror, but the terrorists themselves quite obviously believe otherwise, as they converge on that country with lethal and suicidal resolve.

Once again Sowell shows his lack of intellectual integrity. Iraq's role in the war on terrorism is a subject that fair people can debate fairly. Instead, for Sowell, those who assert that Iraq is not part of the war on terror (note the subject of his sentence -- I'm taking this guy seriously?) are engaged in political spin. Note also that Sowell has difficulties with the sort of rudimentary concept of tenses: The question is not whether Iraq is part of the war on terror, but rather whether it was when we invaded. This distinction is not a splitting of hairs -- there is the distinct possibility that we either created or lured terrorists to Iraq. And this too would be a debate worth having if Sowell was actually interested in any kind of quest for truth.

What makes Sowell's dishonest and ahistorical article so stunning is that in more capable hands, his conclusion would be spot-on:

Whether we want to or not, we cannot unilaterally end the war with international terrorists. Giving the terrorists an epoch-making victory in Iraq would only shift the location where we must face them or succumb to them.

Abandoning Iraqi allies to their fate would ensure that other nations would think twice before becoming or remaining our allies. With a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon, we are going to need all the allies we can get.

I agree with this entirely. But it has nothing to do with everything that preceded it. This flatulent op-ed piece is the exact opposite of incisive, and inasmuch as its brevity fuels its inanity, that brevity can hardly be considered a selling point. Sowell's obfuscations will not help us to win the conflicts we now face. People who lie and misrepresent those who disagree with them and abuse history are not allies we want in the war against Islamic terrorists. Allying with them for short-term gain does not make us any safer, though it might just make us dumber.