Special Ops

The op-ed page of the Washington Post is like Forest Gump’s box of chocolates—you never know what you’re gonna get—and the final day of 2008 was no exception.

In ” Darkness in Qassam-Land ,” by Julia Chaitin, a senior lecturer in the Department of Social Work at the Sapir Academic College and program developer at the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development, we are treated to a remarkably sophomoric protest of the Israeli-Hamas war.

Chaitin complains that “it has been almost impossible to speak openly against the war,” about how “difficult to find public forums that welcome a call for a new cease-fire and for alternative solutions to the conflict—ones that do not rely on military strength or a siege of Gaza.” All this in the Washington Post , mind you.

Undeterred by the evident contradiction, she forges ahead to explain just why it is that “When people are in the midst of war, they are not open to voices of peace”:

When people are in the midst of war, they forget that they can harness higher cognitive abilities, their reason and logic. Instead, they are driven by the hot structures of their brains, which lead them to respond with fear and anger in ways that are objective threats to our healthy survival.

With regard to “higher cognitive abilities,” “reason,” and “logic”, I can’t help but wonder if Chaitin has ever heard of, say, Abraham Lincoln and his Gettysburg Address, or Churchill, or FDR or . . . well, you get the point.

But no reason to end the New Year on a down note. Michael Gerson, the new bright star of the Post ‘s editorial page delivers a zinger with ” Support Obama Will Need. ” Gerson notes that despite the fact that Obama ran as a peace candidate, the frightening prospect of a nuclear Iran and his promise to escalate U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, guarantee he will be a war president. Obama seems quite aware of all this and is trying to be a “unifying national figure—in spite of his most insufferable supporters.”

Gerson calls out the infantile fawning of Time magazine’s Joe Klein, who has declared, “as the weeks have passed since the election, I’ve felt—as an urban creature myself—less restricted, less defensive. Empowered, almost. Is it possible that, as a nation, we’re shedding our childlike, rural innocence and becoming more mature, urban, urbane . . . dare I say it, sophisticated?” To which Gerson comments:

Indeed. Is it possible for a pundit to be more like a college freshman who has just discovered the pleasures of wine, co-ed dorms, and Nietzsche—shedding the primitivism of his parents and becoming, dare I say it, an annoying adolescent?

Obama does not need the service of nymphomaniacs on his honeymoon. In 2009, he will require sober supporters—and loyal critics—to get through challenges that will not yield to charm.

Gerson suggests rightly that Klein’s style of juvenile infatuation will likely turn quickly into disillusionment when what Obama, and more importantly, the nation will require is “a broad commitment to difficult national goals involving considerable risk and sacrifice—public patience and fortitude that were not always evident during the longest days of the Iraq conflict.”

Which behooves us to ask: Might Obama’s loyal opposition turn out to be more supportive, at least on critical matters of foreign policy, than many of his most fervent but sophomoric supporters?