Sean Hannity, Historian

Thane Peterson, reviewing Sean Hannity's new bestseller, Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism, in MSNBC (April 13, 2004):

Deliver Us from Evil is full of name-calling trumped up as intellectual debate, one-sided history lessons designed to deceive the ill-informed, and good old-fashioned war-mongering. Why do so many people read this stuff? My guess is that it's mainly to confirm themselves in their prejudices.

In Hannity's view, things really started to go bad in the world about the time Jimmy Carter was elected President in 1976. The author repeats two basic themes over and over again in the book's 300-plus pages. First, liberals and other "moral relativists" are Neville Chamberlain-style "appeasers" who refuse to acknowledge the existence of "evil" in the world. Second, Presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are courageous leaders unafraid to look evil dictators in the eye and face them down.

By contrast, Democrats like Carter and Bill Clinton "are like weak-willed prosecutors, happy to bargain every capital offense down to a misdemeanor."

Sustaining these themes requires some fancy footwork. Let's be honest here: Democrats and Republicans alike have done their fair share of appeasing tyrants over the last 30 years. For instance, how does Hannity explain away the fact that both Reagan and President George H. Bush for years supported Saddam, supplying him with money and arms throughout the 1980s? Hard-nosed realpolitik to counter the Soviet Union's incursions in Afghanistan? Nope. Jimmy Carter's appeasing of the Soviet Union during his four years in office locked the U.S. into an unpalatable policy it couldn't shake for a decade, Hannity argues.

He chides Carter for pressuring the Shah of Iran before he was toppled in the 1970s to free political prisoners and observe human-rights conventions. "Carter," Hannity gripes, "also strongly urged the Shah to permit 'free assembly' -- though under circumstances that meant open season for potential insurgents to meet and plot insurrection." Hmm. Now how does that differ from what President Bush has been doing in Iraq?

Oh, by the way, just disregard that damning old photo of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld [then Reagan's special envoy] shaking hands with Saddam back in 1983 in Baghdad. That wasn't appeasement.

PRAISE FOR REAGAN. On to the first Gulf War: Inconveniently, it was the first President Bush, a Republican, who led the nation into its initial war against Saddam -- and then, inexplicably, let him stay in power. Why didn't Bush get rid of Saddam back in 1991, when he had the dictator on the run? And why did Bush call on Iraqi Kurds to revolt -- and then abandon them to be gassed by the tyrant?

No explanations from Mr. Hannity. He's right when he says Clinton should have done more to destroy al Qaeda in the 1990s, but he ignores the complication that neither congressional Republicans nor the electorate likely would have supported sustained military action.

Hannity similarly ignores the qualitative differences between his two heroes, Reagan and George W. Bush. One of the few points on which I agree with Hannity is that Reagan deserves considerable credit for wearing down the Soviet Union in the 1980s. The difference is that Reagan used peaceful means -- a huge military buildup and the bluff of threatening to build a "Star Wars" type defense system, which would have made the Soviets' offensive missiles obsolete.

OOPS, NEVER MIND. Reagan's few actual military strikes were against the likes of tiny Grenada and toothless Libya, and I suspect he would have been shrewd enough to avoid the potential quagmire of invading Iraq. Arguably, George W.'s campaign in Afghanistan [which I supported] has been Reaganesque, while his invasion of Iraq is pure Lyndon Johnson....