It has often been said that the first casualty of war is truth. That is generally taken to mean that in the course of prosecuting a war, governments will often subordinate truth to propaganda. That is true enough, a lamentable but perfectly understandable response to extremity. But America’s new war against terrorism reminds us that there is another sense in which truth is a casualty of war. We refer to the surreal, truth-denying response of the academic left to the political and moral realities that have prompted the conflict.

In a much noted article that appeared on The Wall Street Journal’s website, the journalist Andrew Sullivan opined that

one of the overlooked aspects of the war we are now fighting is the awakening it has spawned on the left. In one atrocity, Osama bin Laden may have accomplished what a generation of conservative writers have failed to do: convince mainstream liberals of the illogic ...

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 20 November 2001, on page 2
Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com

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