I don’t know what you were doing in 2003, but I was arguing fiercely against the Iraq War. I hate to say it, but on that one the liberals were right. The libertarians were right. Heck, even the French were right. Neocon warmongers and dopey jingoists ran around renaming food “Freedom Fries” to punish that country for warning us accurately against blundering into a stupid and useless war which, as I warned at the time, produced absolutely nothing but mass death, chaos, and a genocide of Iraqi Christians.

I knew all that when Colin Powell got up in front of the United Nations to make the case for war as the last desperate measure to stop Saddam Hussein from obtaining “weapons of mass destruction,” lest the “smoking gun” turn into a “mushroom cloud,” as Condoleezza Rice warned us we might see over Manhattan. I knew that Hussein had no active programs to make those weapons, and no links to al Qaeda or 9/11.

I knew that not from reading hysterical leftists at Code Pink, but from reading Pat Buchanan and the patriotic peaceniks at Antiwar.com. I trashed my budding career as a conservative writer by coming out against that war, but I’ve never had any regrets about that. I hoped that I was wrong, that some WMDs might in fact be found. They never were.

I was part of the small, despised minority of conservatives who came out against that war, and got labeled “unpatriotic” by National Review magazine. (Read my scathing response here.) So it was with some morbid joy that I sat down to watch Official Secrets, a Keira Knightley/Ralph Feinnes film made by liberals about liberals who rightly opposed that aggressive war — and who pointed out that the intel on which it was justified was politicized and phony. (As George W. Bush basically admitted when he did a tasteless sketch to entertain journalists, playing “Where’s Waldo?” and pretending to hunt for WMDs.)

A Movie You Need to See

So I was primed to enjoy Official Secrets, and I wasn’t disappointed. Powerfully acted and compellingly told, it’s the true story of a low-level British spy Katharine Gun (Knightley) who learns that the U.S. was using espionage and blackmail to arm-twist U.N. diplomats into voting for a U.N. resolution authorizing the war. Outraged that her own government was using illegal tactics to render a dubious war legal, Gun leaks the information to antiwar journalists.

In so doing, Gun violated the U.K.’s Official Secrets Act, and to keep her colleagues from taking the blame, she owns up and confesses. The full machinery of the British state then turns on her. Her foreign-born husband comes within a whisker of getting deported. She’s charged with crimes and faces a long prison sentence if convicted. A high-minded and honest civil liberties lawyer (Feinnes) risks his reputation to take her case. Meanwhile, the war is unwinding, the chaos spreading, and the WMDs receding ever further into the realm of unicorns and Smurfs. 

I do recommend the movie, and don’t want to spoil the ending. I’ll just say that the proceedings and the outcome speak well for the fundamental goodness of free, Western democracies — even when they’re led by cynical deceivers like Tony Blair, George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney.

So why talk about this now? Why rehash old stories where leftists were the good guys, and Republicans the villains?

In part because those old GOP villains still are with us, and still employ gaslighting, lies, and hypocrisy in service of their fake “conservative” values. Dick Cheney, the Iraq War’s architect, was a loudmouth NeverTrumper. He also created the monstrous framework that Anthony Fauci has fully enfleshed, and greenlighted the program that created the COVID virus. Did you know that? The Blaze has reported on it, and on the honest liberals who back in the early 2000s were trying to stop Cheney. More recently, Liz Cheney led the Stalinist witch hunt of the January 6 committee — which hunted down honest citizens for protesting government-generated falsehoods. (In this case election fraud, not phony warmongering intel.) George W. Bush sneered that the January 6 protestors were “children of the same foul spirit” as the 9/11 hijackers.  

The Same Villains Now Rule the Uniparty

The neocons were villains then, and they’re still villains now. The difference is that we no longer have many well-meaning, honest liberals like the British whistleblower in the movie. Apart from a few outliers like Glenn Greenwald and Naomi Wolf, today’s Left is perfectly fine with silencing free speech, the Deep State controlling the media, and subjecting dissidents to vile jails, rigged trials, and bloated sentences. Amnesty International and the ACLU aren’t championing peaceful pro-lifers facing years in prison for praying; they have become the same kind of monsters they once bragged about slaying.

And now the Left wants to elect as president a cynical, opportunistic former prosecutor, Kamala Harris. In her earlier career, she was perfectly happy to cover up sex crimes by priests as a favor to far-left wealthy Catholic donors. She also used her office to try to imprison David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt for exposing Planned Parenthood’s sale of baby’s organs for profit. She helped raise millions to bail out violent George Floyd rioters and looters.

And Harris will gladly use the Deep State to silence conservative Christians.

The worst of the radical Left has now allied with the corporate warmongering Right. And only the imperfect person of Donald Trump now stands against them. Let’s pray that he dodges the next bullet meant for him.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.