01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, August 14, 2005

A PHOTOGRAPHIC negative shows the same image as the photo, though you might not recognize it at first. The right wing (RW) has a habit of pointing out the double standards of the left, yet it shows itself to be hypocritical in its rhetoric. It is hypocritical not only in its positions, but also in its accusations of hypocrisy. Here are 10 examples.

10. The Republican Congress was elected in 1994 on a platform of fiscal discipline in the face of Clinton deficits. In three years, over three votes, the Balanced Budget Amendment enjoyed nearly unanimous Republican support, despite opponents' arguments on the need to run deficits in war. Now we are running deficits, and the RW won't admit that it may have been wrong. It instead shifts the argument to deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product. "Deficit shmeficit," it says.

9. A favorite scapegoat of the RW since Sept. 11, 2001, has been Bill Clinton. "Asleep at the wheel for eight years" is the oft-heard phrase. Yet the RW led the opposition in 1995 when, after the Oklahoma City bombing, he blocked traffic in front of the White House and proposed laws similar to the U.S.A. Patriot Act. The RW feared, in the wake of the killings in Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, that a federal police state was being grown in the name of security. Even days after Sept. 11, 2001, Rush Limbaugh himself cautioned us not to be too hasty to sacrifice freedom for safety. Then hysteria set in.

8. In Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo, the Clinton administration called our troop involvement morally imperative. RW leaders opposed all three involvements as devoid of "vital national interest." Now we have the embarrassing spectacle of months passing with our troops able to locate every gold bar in Iraq but no weapons that were supposedly bursting from every closet. Now the moral justification is enough.

7. During the earlier conflicts, the RW (e.g., Limbaugh) drew the distinction that while it opposed Clinton's decisions, it supported the troops. Now the RW blurs the distinction, suggesting that foes of this war have shallow patriotism and empty support. The distinction is important because of the Vietnam War, when war foes blamed politicians and soldier equally, and when the latter endured funding cuts and insults. Soldiers now don't suffer such injustice, and war opponents now don't deserve such rudeness.

6. Conservatives strictly interpret the Constitution, recognizing it as a contract in plain English. They lament judicial tyrants who decree laws either by twisting or simply ignoring it. Yet when it's time to approve federal judges, they adopt the same tactics. They invent Senate duties, such as measuring candidates only on professional credentials. They tell us that a political body such as the Senate is constitutionally required to leave out politics. Ironically, they accuse Senate Democrats of constitutional violations for not doing so.

5. If you ask the RW, homosexuals are not an oppressed class, and sodomy is not a right; gays are a special-interest group defending a bad habit. But ask the RW about smokers' rights, and you'd think they were talking about the Cherokee Nation.

4. The First Amendment begins, "Congress shall pass no law prohibiting." The RW has long known that you have a right to speak, not to be heard, and that your right neither extends into private places nor requires federal funds. In the past, the RW banned federal funds for clinics that counsel on abortion, and opposed National Endowment for the Arts funds for displays of vulgarity and blasphemy. The tune changes when the blasphemy is against Islam.

Roger Williams University is a private school that gets federal funds. The December 2002 circular of the Roger Williams University College Republicans had a front-page article in which Chairman Jason Materra indulged in some amateur theology to prove that "True Islam is terrorism" and "the religion of hate." Academic Dean Ed Kavanagh described other editions as ranging "from factual errors to personal attacks."

The next spring, when the university considered ending the paper's funding, charges of censorship flew in from across the nation. The College Republican National Committee named Mr. Mattera Best State Chairperson, asserting that he "fought for free speech."

3. For decades, one rock in the RW shoe has been its opponents' name calling; racist, bigot and homophobe are crutches that liberals use to dismiss RW arguments as emotion-based. This drives the RW people nuts, because they think themselves the logical, sensible end of the spectrum. Yet they themselves keep the charge of anti-Semitism as the first arrow in their quiver against any opposition to Israeli policy. Other opponents are simply Bush haters or America haters.

2. The basis of RW religion is the existence of absolute truth, the constancy of God's will, and of right and wrong. Yet when faced with a very constant religion such as Islam, many RW people quickly become the moral relativists they've long opposed -- speaking of Islam's need to "modernize," as you would a household appliance, and espousing the "evolution" of their own religion.

Similarly, the religious RW hails the Judeo-Christian roots of our laws and our founding, and says that almost every law ever passed in a democracy was the legislation of morality. Yet regarding RW goals for a so-called democratic Mideast, many RW people caution against letting Islam influence the process. There, they want to impose secularism on a religious people and call it freedom.

1. Propaganda, a tool of war, is by nature something besides the truth. For decades, the United States and Israel, particularly our RW groups, have used the word terrorism as propaganda. As with the left's use of racism, the definition of terrorism is kept vague, so that it always applies to your enemy, never to you. Like victims of true racism (or rape or harassment), the victims of true terrorism are badly served by the bastardization and dilution of language.

The larger problem is that we are trying to wage war on terrorism while clinging to its spin value. We can't have it both ways. The success of wars and foreign policies is decided largely by the clarity of goals. Vietnam is a good example, because, as with the war on terrorism, its goals were kept cloudy by those who stood to benefit from its perpetuation. If our foes and goals are to be clear, then our definitions must also be.

Casual observers may say that we already define terrorism as the murder of civilians to terrorize their survivors. The RW hypocrisy toward the word deliberate is best illustrated by Fox television host Sean Hannity, who called Timothy McVeigh "sick" because McVeigh had called children he'd killed "collateral damage." McVeigh denied targeting children. He was a military man who used a military term, and used it correctly except for one vital thing: "collateral damage" was never meant to refer to American kids.

Well, if deliberate is a debatable term, then surely civilian is not. After all, civilians are innocent. A soldier, regardless of why he's serving or whose side he's on, has one job: to kill on command. Yet we always refer to attacks on our military targets as terrorism, including the U.S. Marines in Lebanon, the U.S. troops in the Khobar Towers, in Saudi Arabia, the USS Cole and the Pentagon.

Even in war -- even wars that we start -- if the enemy is Arab and they're shooting, they're terrorists. The basis of Iran's inclusion in the Axis of Evil is Hezbollah, an army Iran created in the 1980s to repel Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Hezbollah always targeted soldiers.

Even after invading and occupying Iraq, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld often referred to any attack on our soldiers as terrorism. His absurd logic was that these enemies were not uniformed and their fighting not conventional. He sounded just like the British in the Revolutionary War. To them, Americans were criminals because a) we were shooting the British and b) we were in bushes and trees, not lining up in rows.

We have never referred to World War II in terms of terrorism -- not the bombings of London, Dresden or Hiroshima, though each of these fits an honest definition. Now you may say, "You're all wet. We were right to bomb Hiroshima, and we were right to invade Iraq." And you might be right. But terrorism is a tactic, not a reason, which means that if Hiroshima was justified, then it was justified terrorism.

Remember also that every party to every conflict in history thought itself justified. If we plan to add qualifiers to our definitions -- if we make this a war against combat that we think unjust, or a war against people who would dare shoot back at us, or a war against Arabs, or guerrillas, or people who are just too poor (or too smart) to fight conventionally -- then we will surely lose the support at home and abroad required to win such a long world war.

To the Bush administration's credit, it has shown signs of addressing this dilemma. It has made efforts in Iraq to avoid collateral damage, and has publicized these efforts.

Saleh R. Shahid, M.D., is a Rhode Island physician.