Back when Ronald Reagan was president, one tendency I found disconcerting was a trend towards what was called "Realpolitik". This is the idea that you support some rather bad people, and do some rather morally questionable things, in order to achieve "stability".

I am, for the record, a sworn enemy of "Realpolitik". I loathe it.

Now, it's always true that in politics you have to support the lesser of two evils. When the world was engulfed in war, we had to choose, in the short term, between Stalin and Hitler. But what I'm talking about are people who believe that such alliances are good and right in the long term.

One thing I personally have gotten enormous amounts of flack for, here on my blog, is the allegation that we once made overtures towards Saddam. Many of these allegations are bereft of historical perspective: they allege -- falsely -- that the US "created" Saddam, or that we "armed" him (we did not to any major extent -- he was a Soviet client). And it's understandable that we might have chosen, based on what we initially knew, to favor Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. (Again, sometimes you have to choose between Stalin and Hitler.)

But the problem I had with that undercurrent was that once we knew well about Saddam's atrocities, and once it became clear he would gas his own people, it became clear we should not be supporting such a man.

Yet Vice President George HW Bush, under Reagan, repeatedly kept trying to steer foreign policy into a position of helping Saddam in every way imaginable. To his great credit, Reagan sequelched that trend, but the tendency emerged again once Bush 41 won the Presidency -- and James Baker was the leading proponent and the man at the helm!

As a recent Washington Times op-ed put it:

In the case of Iraq, one could plausibly argue in favor of U.S. efforts to engage Saddam during the 1980-88 war with Iran, arguably the most dangerous threat to U.S. interests in the region. The problem with Mr. Baker's approach was that such policies continued after the conclusion of the war -- even as it became clear that Saddam was girding for conflict with his Arab neighbors and Israel. In fact, throughout 1989 and 1990, Mr. Baker's State Department spent much of its time fending off efforts by Democratic and Republican lawmakers and officials in other federal agencies to prevent transfers of militarily related technology to Iraq. The same was true for agricultural subsidies and Export-Import Bank credits benefiting Saddam's regime. These policies were pursued by the State Department until shortly before the invasion of Kuwait.

So here is what I find stunning: One moment, America is a demon, I am often told on my blog, because we supported Saddam more than we had to. The next minute, the president's critics are hailing as a "wise man" the very architect of those supposedly-damning polices!

It's unbelievable: Michael Moore goes on and on and on about the Bush Sr.'s strong ties to the house of Saud, and his attempts to be all buddy-buddy with the Iraqi dictator -- and many Democrats ate it up -- even though Bush Jr.'s foreign policy, at the time, bore (thankfully) little resemblance to that of his father. Good heavens: Moore got to sit next to Carter, in the "Presidential Box" at the convention for saying those things.

Then, here comes the architect of his father's foreign policy -- the very basis for the counter-arguments Democrats consumed and cheered in movies like Fahrenheit 911 -- and do they demonize him? No! They start promoting his pronouncements as "wise", sage advice!

Fools! This is the very man whose policies you said you abhorred in article after article and book after book. His ties and policies and goals haven't changed. (And, though I bear him not an ounce of personal ill will, I must say that he is apparently as much a fool now as he was then, when, in the name of "stability" he set in place the very polices which created the Gulf War.)

But Democrats don't hate his policies; they don't hate his close ties and funding by the House of Saud. They don't really hate his Realpolitik, as I do. It's all just play-acting and temporary, and this demonstrates it unmistakably.

What they really hate is Emanuel Goldstein Bush. Bush is the real enemy, not terrorism, and anyone who's against Bush must be on our side. This is the same mindset which produced idiocy like CNN running the sniper propaganda videos: they didn't intend to undermine the war. They intended to undermine Bush. Failing in Iraq is just a means to that end. All for the greater good, of course.

But it produces an unbelievable amount of hypocrisy and death.