At certain moment, you realize with stunning clarity how empty and absurd our political clichés really are. “Democracies don’t start wars,” Condoleezza Rice repeated the other day.  What can that possibly mean in the real world?

Taken literally, this simple formula implies that any time a democracy is at war with a nondemocracy, the nondemocracy must have been the aggressor.  Since the United States is a democracy, it is unthinkable that it may be even partly to blame.  Thus the Iraq war must have been Iraq’s fault.

As you see, the logic tends to be rather, well, Soviet.  You may recall that the Soviet Union was never the aggressive party in any conflict.  It was always defending itself against capitalists, reactionaries, and fascists, just as the United States is now defending itself (and world freedom, democracy, et cetera) against Islamofascists.  Whenever the Soviets invaded a country, they said they were “liberating” it, the very verb the United States now uses to describe its military mischief abroad.

By the same taken, the state of Israel, another democracy, is always the victim in any conflict.  Apologists like Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz, and Charles Krauthammer have made this point so often that you may wonder if the laws of probability have been suspended.  One could believe that Israel is in the right more often than not, considering some of its enemies.  But is it possible that the Israelis are never, ever even partially at fault, just a wee little bit? ~Joe Sobran

Not only does Condi “I’m a student of history” Rice not distinguish herself well here (the list of wars between democratic states, while not huge, is surprisingly long) and not only does she reveal the administration’s penchant to run its strategy according to the speechwriter’s soundbite, but she also conveys very much the sense of someone uttering a bit of Newspeak that you find it hard to believe that she, an allegedly well-educated person, can possibly believe.  Whenever someone says, “Democracies don’t start wars,” he might as well be saying, “I like democracy, and I don’t like war, therefore any wars that happen were not started by democracies, least of all by my own.”  It is what some might call denial, and others would call ideological blindness.  Secretary Rice and her boss have both in spades.