My friend Michael Brendan Dougherty talks some sense to Mathew Yglesias, who dreams of a return to the good ol’ days of the “bipartisan” foreign policy of the Cold War and sees the Iraq fiasco as a lamentable aberration:
What about the Korean War, or Vietnam? I suppose these aren’t “Iraq-scale” being that they are much, much larger and helped to discredit the Truman and Johnson administrations respectively. Along the way these, lets call ‘em, “Vietnam-scaled blunders”, created a small renaissance of non-interventionist thinking on both the left and right. We might also consider the much longer list of recent (smaller than Iraq-scaled) blunders supported by the same establishment. The first Gulf War, the sanctions-regime and the decade long bombing campaign that followed there, Somalia, Haiti, and our intervention against Slobodan Milosevic. Can any of these be judged a success? The Iraq War was relaunched. Somalia saw the humiliation of American forces and taught bin Laden a few lessons. No one can explain what has been accomplished in Port au Prince. And Kosovo is in a state of near anarchy and has been linked to every post-9-11 terrorist attack in Europe. Yet Yglesias has the stones to frame Iraq as an isolated freakout? A one-off after decades of uninterrupted, unimpeachable successes of the establishment.
On neoconservatism, Yglesias knows better and is telling a convenient untruth. Neoconservatism was not some “fringe right-wing position.” The intellectuals that formed that movement were not gathered around totems of extreme conservatism. No, instead they leapt forth from the heads of center-left Democrats Scoop Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Neoconservatism is a variant of the same establishment foreign policy that Yglesias claims to champion.
I suppose when you are a liberal who originally supported the Iraq War, and you have a foreign policy book to sell, a little lying and misrepresentation goes a long way. Or is he willing to say that he too was out in “loony land” when he boosted an unprovoked war on a nation that hadn’t attacked us. Maybe he lacked what Obama-supporters call, “judgment,” in these matters.
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Cold War liberalism ain’t gonna save you now
My friend Michael Brendan Dougherty talks some sense to Mathew Yglesias, who dreams of a return to the good ol’ days of the “bipartisan” foreign policy of the Cold War and … [Read More]
Posted by Richard Spencer on June 17, 2008
The Usual Suspects