Oh it holds lessons for them too, it's just that they're learning the lessons they want to learn, not the lessons supported by the facts. Lessons about not being bad-ass enough, allowing too much domestic dissent, too much access by the press, etc... It's called cognitive dissonance.

"I was willing to gamble, too -- partly, I suppose, because, in the era of the all-volunteer military, I wasn't gambling with my own life."

Which is why the chickenhawk charge is valid.

We need to reexamine the labels we use: neoconservatives are 'neos' because conservatism repeatedly disgraces itself in this culture, and has to come back new-and-improved, ever more ready to shove itself down the throat of the American people. Not to mention those of brown people in other lands.

What are they conserving, one needs to keep pondering.

he's looking at the disaster in Iraq with clear eyes and thinking seriously about how it should change his worldview. That's something that an awful lot of war supporters continue to refuse to do.

Change our worldview??

Why should we? We're still right just like we always were, you surrender monkey, you.

"We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war."

Well, no, not quite. The problem isn't merely a lack of virtue or wisdom, in fact the problem isn't with Americans, it's with war itself. War simply isn't the way to build rights-respecting democracries.

But he's trying.

We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war.

Truer words were never spoken. It all boils down to this.

Sounds like Beinart finally grasped "The Myth of the Bush Doctrine."

i suppose I am supposed to be all forgiving and tell him it's all okay now that he has seen the light, but I am not a Kumbaya-singin' Liberal.

Chickenhawk apologies are too little, too late. And this gutless wonder comes right out and cops to the charge.

I was willing to gamble, too -- partly, I suppose, because, in the era of the all-volunteer military, I wasn't gambling with my own life. And partly because I didn't think I was gambling many of my countrymen's. I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought.

Wow. That is genuinely impressive. I'm still mad at him, but I can respect him some now.

Now all we need is for people like Beinart to stop trying to exclude the people who were right in the first place from having any political influence.

I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought.

He was "influenced" by the Panama invasion?
And Afghanistan? Which Afghanistan war? Since I don´t believe he "came of age" in 2001 he must mean the Soviet invasion? Where the USA didn´t deploy any troops.

Did he notice the differences between Panama and Iraq? Like size of the country, differences in culture and religion?
Or did he really think that if the USA could defeat Panama easily then surely it could defeat any other country easily too?
Was he drunk in 2002 or using dope?

Actually, I think Beinart is partly wrong in a sense. I think we have most of the wisdom and the virtue required, I just don't think war is the way to accomplish the goal that was set forth, nor do I think we could do much at all in a positive sense to accomplish such a goal. The transformation of the middle east that the Bush administration was aiming for required a culture and history that Iraq did not have. If there are to be liberal democracies in the middle east, it will have to come from within those cultures, they cannot be imposed from without.

So, our wisdom did fail us (no one is all-wise) in that some, like Beinart, thought it was possible to have success through this course of action. Hopefully, Bush has proven to everyone else the folly of such errands, but I doubt it.

josh marshall recently:

"I know there's this often doctrinaire debate about whether the occupation was destined to come to this bleak point or not. But things wouldn't have been nearly as bad if the White House and the Secretary of Defense hadn't insisted on the shiftless, lackadaisical and incompetent approach we've followed, ignoring the reality of the situation until domestic politics in the US forced their hand..."

unprovoked aggression is never a good idea and always ultimately fails. all this talk about things not being "nearly as bad if" essentially legitimizes the entire notion of preemptive attacks which is a war crime.

just stop...

More utter crap from one of the chief crapsters. Why can't that guy just admit he's a dumb ass that was unable to recognize that which millions of informed people realized before the launch of the criminal Iraqi adventure, not to mention all of the related criminal acts encouraged by him and his neo-fascist fellow travelers.

Beinart and his fellow neo-Wilsonians have failed to recognize that which Wilson himself learned in the wake of his 1914 Mexican adventure to free Mexicans from the hater dictator Huerta. That is that when a country is invaded, regardless of the existing political divisions, the population will, more or less, unite to expel the invader.

I am amazed that any publication still provides Beinhart with a forum for his sophomoric renderings.

Liberals must not be anti-utopian and unmessianic? Allow me to strongly disagree. We CAN hold an ideal of a perfect world, we SHOULD spread our gospel of freedom and democracy. These are the qualities that have and will continue to define America. Neither Mr. Beinart nor anyone else can change that. The one change we do need to make is we must not do it by force!

Let us do as the best teachers have always done: teach by example. That means actually being who we say we are: the melting pot who takes the oppressed from around the globe and gives them the platform and freedom to change the world.

We should be leading instead of resisting progressive change in the environment, worker’s rights, healthcare. What a force for good our zillions and our energy could be if we didn’t use most of it for filling our bank accounts.

Here’s some ideas that would prove we are the good people we tell the world we are:

Convert most of our armed forces into peace forces. Let them be first on the scene with aid at tsunamis and earthquakes and erupting volcanoes.

Convert our selfish medical establishment into a national health SERVICE which requires that doctors must spend a portion of their internship administering to the poor overseas.

Use our fabulous buying power to win rights, better pay and better treatment for the environment in the countries that make our consumer goods.

Then, the one additional quality we need, which is most un-American, I’m afraid, is patience. If the world chooses not to love us from day one, if every dictator doesn’t quit by day two, we should have the will to see it through. Don’t push, don’t force, just be.

Yes, this is all utopian and messianic. We can’t let George Bush destroy the best in us!

Kevin,
You are very forgiving. Beinart was one of the most exasperating cheerleaders for the war, particularly because of his position of some influence. Still, I think forgiveness is appropriate. Beinart does seem to be grappling honestly with the reality of Iraq, free of any false self pity nor the brittle defensiveness of those who still can't quite bring themselves to admit they were wrong. It's a start.
Ralph

Dang! Correction to the above first paragraph.

Liberals must be anti-utopian and unmessianic? Allow me to strongly disagree. We CAN hold an ideal of a perfect world, we SHOULD spread our gospel of freedom and democracy. These are the qualities that have and will continue to define America. Neither Mr. Beinart nor anyone else can change that. The one change we do need to make is we must not do it by force!

Nothing like changing the entire thrust a piece by adding one word!

what gets me is is that wonks like beinart on the left and on the right supported the war without a thought to the consequences for the people who have to fight it and for the nation as a whole. to them, war is just another abstract policy option, the army a tool to use (hey, they volunteered afterall). at least beinhart now admits it.

Hear, hear, James of DC however the power elite won't have that. You see they believe that the Earth and everything on it and in it belongs to them. Their property exclusively to do with what they want.

And what they want is money and whatever money can buy.

Everything else is just an obstacle to be destroyed.

It'll be time to forgive him only when he attacks the war-with-Iran-Now-Crowd in the same sneering terms he dismissed Scott Ritter a few years ago.

When Beinart calls Kristol, Goldberg, Kagan, Perle, Rice, Cheney, Lieberman etc. child molesters with no credibility on any matter of military or foreign policy, then he'll deserve forgiveness. Not Before.

I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan,
and couldn't be bothered to study f*cking history.

But having gotten that off my chest, I suppose it's better for his worldview to be change than not. Learning, if only too late.

Kevin quotes Beinart: "We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war [...] the United States cannot be a benign power and a messianic one at the same time."

Beinart is still buying into the Cheney Cartel's big lie that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a "preventive war", and the fake, phony "neoconservative" bunk that it was a "messianic" war to "remake the world" (ie. "spread democracy") that failed due to a lack of "wisdom and virtue".

The invasion and occupation of Iraq was a long-planned war of unprovoked aggression, based on lies, for the corrupt purpose of seizing control of Iraq's vast oil reserves for Dick Cheney's ultra-rich cronies in the US-based multinational oil companies -- as the ample evidence from the PNAC public documents, Cheney's secretive Energy Task Force meetings, the testimony of multiple former Bush administration officials about the pre-9/11 Bush administration focus on invading Iraq, and an examination of the US-written Iraq Oil Law demonstrates.

Beinart appears to be still unwilling to face the truth about this war, and unwilling to face the fact that he and other "sensible liberals" allowed themselves to be deceived by the deliberate, elaborate and repeated lies of Cheney and his gang of career corporate criminals who misled this country into war, and misused the US military, for purposes of private financial gain. He continues to comfort himself with the unsupportable and absurd storyline that the "neoconservatives" had "benign" intentions to "remake the world" that unfortunately failed due to their "messianic" overreach and failure of "wisdom and virtue".

There was nothing either "benign" or "messianic" about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, nor did "wisdom and virtue" have anything to do with it. It was a war of unprovoked aggression driven by greed, period.

And lots of people knew this in 2002-2003, and said so at the time -- while "sensible liberals" like Beinart attacked, ridiculed and marginalized them.

I agree with david mizner, to a degree -- it isn't that we completely lack wisdom and virtue, but that the project that the neocons have set us on requires (and assumed that we have) *superhuman* wisdom and virtue. When your plan is predicated on something impossible, it's not going to work.

The US would benefit if we didn't believe our own press so much -- we aren't always the best, or the smartest, the first on the scene with the right idea. Let's try to limit our mistakes to the unavoidable, and eliminate the stupid.

We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war.

I'm sorry, but the quote above still indicates that Beinart is deluding himself. The Iraq War was never a "preventive" war, whatever that's supposed to mean -- it was naked old-fashioned aggressive war, one country attacking another just because it could.

I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought.

Beinart's around my age, and yet in that same surreal period I still managed to pick up books and read about our past aggressive adventurism in the Mexican-American, Indian, and Spanish-American and Vietnamese wars, among others. But I suppose if "I'm too lazy and ill-informed to educate myself about my supposed area of expertise" is the excuse he wants to go with....

All too many war supporters cling to American Hegemony; the PNAC is RIGHT it's Bush incompetence that's messing it up.

FWIW - We still don't know the real reason we are waging a war in Iraq - was it for...

Neocon doctrine (wolfowitz, rumsfeld, perle, feith)
Cheney (halliburton and oil company corp welfare)
Bush (the oedepal drive to get to bagdhad and topple hussein)

I still don't know - do you?

"I was willing to gamble, too -- partly, I suppose, because, in the era of the all-volunteer military, I wasn't gambling with my own life."

The American public generally regards the military as rent-a-cop temporary workers or illegal immigrant domestic help. Attitudes and attention spans are markedly different when personal or familial danger is present.

"... the United States cannot be a benign power and a messianic one at the same time..."

Minding our own business and making our society attractive to others will better motivate other countries to emulate our model. Nobody likes being beat over the head and told what to do especially when your country is being occupied by people who don't practice what they preach.

bcinaz,
Maybe all three reasons.
Think of it as a perfect storm of hubris, greed, and mental illness.

It's as if Iraq holds no lessons for them at all.

And we have to ask why.

I think it's because they're working on an altogether separate agenda. Thanks to a thread at Cannonfire asking what is a working definition of fascism, I've been thinking about Ernst Fraenkel's The Dual State,

For Fraenkel it was a "normative state" (Normenstaat) which secured the continuation of capitalist society for those Germans not threatened by Nazism coexisted alongside a "prerogative state" (Maßnahmenstaat) that used legal sanctions as well as brutal violence against people considered to be enemies of Nazism and Nazi Germany. Dual State."
(wikipedia)

Written in 1941 it's about how dictatorships come to exist in a country where the government has an otherwise non-dictatorial format using the immediate example of Germany.

What he says is that the dictatorial party is able to section off for itself some area of responsibility in the interest of protecting the state in which they have absolute and unquestioned authority because the threat is said to be so dire. Anyone or anything falling within their prerogative has no rights whatsoever and because it exists simultaneously with normal life it in theory is said not to affect the average person at all.

Sound so like the Republican world-view I think this Ernst Fraenkel book should have a revival.

The elderly John McCain simply can't get it straight anymore.

Seems he criticizes someone, then runs to that very someone and apologizes.

The old fellow critizes Vice President Cheney on Iraq:

"The president listened too much to the vice president . . . Of course, the president bears the ultimate responsibility, but he was very badly served by both the vice president and, most of all, the secretary of defense," McCain was quoted as telling The Politico, a Capitol Hill newspaper and Web site."

And then the old guy runs and apologizes:

"A few days later, Cheney said, McCain approached him on the Senate floor, said he had been quoted out of context and offered an apology.

"'I was happy to accept,'" Cheney said."

A few weeks ago, Sidney Blumenthal revealed the same sort of shenanigans by the toddering McCain:

"McCain's political colleagues, however, know another side of the action hero - a volatile man with a hair-trigger temper, who shouted at Senator Ted Kennedy on the Senate floor to "shut up", and called fellow Republican senators "shithead ... fucking jerk ... asshole". A few months ago, McCain suddenly rushed up to a friend of mine, a prominent Washington lawyer, at a social event, and threatened to beat him up because he represented a client McCain happened to dislike. Then, just as suddenly, profusely and tearfully, he apologized."

So, folks, what's going on with McCain? Has he lost it? Is the old guy in the first throes of dementia? If the latter, shouldn't we demand that he be checked out? And I don't mean checked out by a campaign doctor, but by a top bunch of neurologists such as those at Methodist Hospital in Houston.

We can't have a sobbing, pitiable old man in the first stages of dementia running for the presidency.

Wake up you idiot liberals!!!

It's not about intellectualism. Or "coming of age". Or "intoxication" with political theories.

Face it. We are an infantilized, fearful and pathetic citizenry. Why? Because we cannot grapple with the plain truth that we live is a quasi-police state in which wealth and resources are distributed irrationally, inefficiently, and hedonistically for the benefit of the relative few.

We engage in global hegemony not out of idealistic motives but primarily for the profit of our corporate owners. Idealizing the invasion of Iraq, as Beinart does, as if it were for reasons other that oil and worldwide class warfare is a disservice to humanity.

Questions:

Why does the wealth of the nation increase over time as the general quality of life deteriorates?

Why do we imprison more of our fellow citizens that any other country?

Why don't you do anything about it?

Joe Buck on February 23, 2007 at 1:10 PM:

Now all we need is for people like Beinart to stop trying to exclude the people who were right in the first place from having any political influence.

I'd like to believe that Beinart is being honest, but the cynic in me looks at his mea culpa as a means for him to restore his (and TNR's) political legitimacy.

Something along the lines of "Yes, Iraq is a quagmire, and yes, I was wrong...Now that I'm right about how wrong I was, Let me tell you why I'm right about my support for Bush's new plan to..."

If TNR was wrong about 'remaking the world through preventative war', what else are they wrong about?

Actually, I think Beinart is partly wrong in a sense. I think we have most of the wisdom and the virtue required, I just don't think war is the way to accomplish the goal that was set forth, nor do I think we could do much at all in a positive sense to accomplish such a goal. The transformation of the middle east that the Bush administration was aiming for required a culture and history that Iraq did not have. If there are to be liberal democracies in the middle east, it will have to come from within those cultures, they cannot be imposed from without.

Well, here's a first. I seem to be fully agreeing with an entire paragraph that Yancey has written.

I think Yancey gets at the core mistake in the selection from Beinart (I don't have access to the rest, because I'm not a subscriber).

The inability of the US to impose its will on Iraq, and transform it into a democracy, has at base nothing to do with either its wisdom or its virtue. It has to do with the simple intractability of the problem. I just don't see how anyone can make a convincing argument that there was a means whereby any country, in the full exercise of its best wisdom, and with the most virtuous of intentions, could have transformed Iraq into a democracy.

If there's any sense in which Beinart's analysis might be true, it would be that any country that possessed true wisdom would, in fact, recognize that the goal was unachievable by outside forces.

We are not omnipotent. That is the very first component of wisdom for any country.

.But it does mean that, when our fellow democracies largely oppose a war -- as they did in Vietnam and Iraq -- because they think we're deluding ourselves about either our capacities or our motives, they're probably right. Being a liberal, as opposed to a neoconservative, means recognizing that the United States has no monopoly on insight or righteousness.

"probably right", huh? Was Iraq a case where they were "probably right" but "actually wrong"? And how many democracies do we need in our support? Can we intervene unilaterally in a case like E. Timore or Darfur where a UN force with no democratic participation gets overwhelmed?

How does this apply to a case like Afghanistan where the US went in alone and a few democracies followed?

Anyhow, this will be a good essay to remember when someone proposes, as they will propose, that somebody do something about a tragedy like Ruanda or Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and nobody but the U.S. has the tranaport capacity or striking power to do anything.

Stefan wrote: "The Iraq War was never a "preventive" war, whatever that's supposed to mean -- it was naked old-fashioned aggressive war, one country attacking another just because it could."

It was (and is) even worse than that.

The Iraq War was (and is) the result of a gang of career petro-fascist war-profiteer corporate criminals, masquerading as "neoconservative" politicians in order to dupe the gullible (on both the left and the right), who deliberately, repeatedly, and elaborately lied to the American people, the United States Congress, the United Nations Security Council, and the entire world, in order to mislead this country into a long-planned war of unprovoked aggression for the purpose of seizing control of the world's second largest oil reserves for their own personal profit.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq was and is a criminal enterprise -- not only in the sense of being a "crime against humanity" because it was a war of unprovoked aggression which has killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, but in the sense of being a plain old crime of armed robbery, albeit on a gigantic scale.

cld,
It has had a revival. Fraenkel, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt are big these days, particularly in Europe, as well as our contemporary Giorgio Agamben and his work on the state of exception. Agamben has been working for some time on the thesis of sovereign power and was shocked when the Bush administration came on the scene. His early work on dictatorial prerogative reads as if he were observing the Bush administration in action.

Anyhow, this will be a good essay to remember when someone proposes, as they will propose, that somebody do something about a tragedy like Ruanda or Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and nobody but the U.S. has the tranaport capacity or striking power to do anything.
Posted by: MatthewRMarler

rwanda was nothing like saddam's iraq. equating an ongoing genocide with a disarmed dictator wallowing in a sanction-deprived nation is disingenuous.

this sort of dishonesty should be pointed out when wingnuts attempt this equivalence, as they will.

It's shocking he would have actually believed most of that before, much less would be willing to admit it.

I agree with grape crush that this has more to do with Beinart keeping his job than anything else. His given reasons for supporting the war (I was young, it sounded cool, I had no stake in it, we'd done it before, right?) are laughable. His epiphany has come awfully late and he still doesn't get it.

I'll give him props for publishing this, which subjects him to ridicule from the left and the right, but he still just doesn't get it.

"I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily"

He thinks the skrimishes during that period were wars? He's obviously a goofball who should not be taken seriiously.

The most important thing I've heard recently is that in DC everything old is new. (Saying's been around a long time--I just hadn't heard it.) Why does everyone waste so much time on people who are determined to repeat the mistakes of the past. Give Beinart & his ilk airlines tickets to somewhere else so they get out of our faces.

Kevin wrote: "Whatever else one might think of Beinart, he's looking at the disaster in Iraq with clear eyes and thinking seriously about how it should change his worldview."

As I indicated in my previous comment, that is flatly untrue. Beinart is not "looking at the disaster in Iraq with clear eyes". He is looking at it through eyes blinded by the complete fiction that it had anything at all to do with "benign" or "messianic" intentions to "remake the world".

If he were looking at the war in Iraq with "clear eyes" he would be writing about the US-written Iraq Oil Law, which -- believe it or not -- proposes to give the western oil companies seats on a council which will control how, and to whom, and on what terms, contracts for exploiting Iraq's oil will be issued; and he would be writing about how the Cheney Cartel deliberately deceived him and the rest of the country with their lies about "weapons of mass destruction" and their cynical bullshit about "spreading democracy".

As it is, he is still carrying water for Dick Cheney.

He was "influenced" by the Panama invasion? And Afghanistan? Which Afghanistan war? Since I don´t believe he "came of age" in 2001 he must mean the Soviet invasion? Where the USA didn´t deploy any troops.

Uhm, its pretty clear, to me; he says he came of age in the "period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought." Clearly, he means in the time period after George H. W. Bush's 1990 invasion of Panama but before George W. Bush's 2001 invasion of Afghanistan (the description of US wars in that period as benefiting the people on whose soil they were fought requires a bit of artistic license to take seriously. For instance, the 1991 Gulf War was fought on the territory of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait, and while the Saudis and Kuwaitis can easily be seen as beneficiaries, as can the Iraqi Kurds, Iraqi Arabs, Shi'ite and Sunni alike can hardly be argued to have been beneficiaries of the war.)

I get the feeling though that Beinart still doesn't fully grasp what was wrong with his initial approach; he seems to understand a bit, now, the practical limitations on power which he had previously ignored, but he doesn't seem to get why he missed them.

He seems to think that when he came of age is an adequate explanation and excuse for his error; comparing himself to people who made the exact same mistake for the exact same reason 30 and again 60 years before.

But does he get that, as a policy pundit, he cannot afford to recklessly ignore history as he did; if he hadn't done so, the time in which he came of age wouldn't have prevented him from benefitting from the lessons learned by the same errors of which he is now, far too late, aware.

He may have learned the lesson now on this one particular idea, but has he learned the lesson that as a pundit he must be aware of and consider relevant history beyond his personal adult experience? I fear that he hasn't, and that he is far from alone in the punditocracy there.

Lots of other people saw the history, lots of other people recognized that the fantasies being sold by the neocons were fantasies and why. But far too many pundits, even on the left, were willing to go along, the way Beinart did.

And if they don't recognize the fundamental mistake (not merely the narrow area where they have had their face rubbed in error), then they are going to keep doing the same thing on other issues.

I'm sorry, but the quote above still indicates that Beinart is deluding himself. The Iraq War was never a "preventive" war, whatever that's supposed to mean -- it was naked old-fashioned aggressive war, one country attacking another just because it could.

But, you too seem to miss something: "preventive" war—which is, after all, war justified on the possibility that at some unspecified future time another name may develope a dangerous confluence of capacity and intent to commit aggression is fundamentally a kind of naked, aggressive war.

It is, by definition, war "justified" by a provocation that has not occurred, and might, in the absence of war, never occur.

So to say that a war was a "preventive" war is to say it is an act of aggression. There is no way a war can be the former but not the latter.

I believe it was St. Augustine who maintained that if a sinner were thrown from his horse there was still time for him to repent, even between the saddle and the ground.

And so Mr. Beinart....

How does this apply to a case like Afghanistan where the US went in alone and a few democracies followed?

Since our invasion of Aghanistan was in response to an attack on our shores and was therefore in legitimate self-defense, it doesn't apply at all.

I see he implies he is an intellectual. There's one problem.

We had a slew of self-annointed or mutually congratulatory "intellectuals" who have clearly shown they are not. In fact, by defininition you do not have the right to call yourself an intellectual.

This guy was too young to have the experience, too ill-educated to know his history, and not intelligent enough to visualize the consequences of the policies he espoused.

Why does he think he has the right to "gamble" with anybody's life if we are not under threat. That's a little presumptive. Blood on your hands, you idiot.

Let's see if anything changes in what his periodical publishes. His apology has to run a lot deeper than this.

I think this gets at the heart of why people are so critical of some Democratic candidates. It's not so much that we want "apologies," it's that we want some sign, any sign, that they truly have learned the appropriate lessons of the past few years, thereby decreasing the chance that we will have to go through this again in my lifetime. Sadly, few have shown such signs.

How does this apply to a case like Afghanistan where the US went in alone and a few democracies followed?

The US had broad support from the rest of the West (and indeed the world) when it came to the war in Afghanistan; it went in mostly alone because it chose to do so, not because it the vast majority of the civilized world opposed the action.

Liberals anti-utopian? Surely you jest. Marx and his followers in the now-extinct USSR (thanks to Ronald Reagan) and its satellites were bent on creating a utopian state where everyone was equal and perfect social justice had been achieved.

Yes, so? Marxists are generally not, and Leninists clearly are not (indeed, were rather violently opposed to) liberals. You need to get your head out of Right Wing Propagandaland where "liberals" are identical to "Communists".

mhr: What do US Democrats want more than anything?- to achieve equality and social justice here, too.

My god, those bastards! Can't somebody stop their fiendish plans?!?

If Mr. Beinart's children or parents were killed by US white phosphorus bombs, his eyes would not be so clear.

Most Americans who justify starting unnecessary wars would never say the deaths of their loved ones was worth the cost. Iraqis and all other cultures feel the same way. I think Mr. Beinart must be a bigot.

I have not seen Mr. Beinart call for the impeachment and indictment of President W. Bush for his "deluding ourselves about either our capacities or our motives," or ending military aid to Israel. He has no credibility.

mhr --

neo-conservatives anti-utopian?

Their primary goal Bent on establishing an authotitarian regime where businesses run unregulated, the only restrainf being the "market" as neo-con-defined, for the benefit of an plutocracy, and where the welfare of the society and health of the environment within which they operate attracts no consideration at all. Who, on the international stage, consider other nations to be a provider of necessary materials -- voluntarily is OK, by force if necessary -- to achieve the primary goal and, again, whose health and welfare again features not at all.

Who consider any treaty breachable and any unilateral action justifiable.

Yes, an ideology of greed and self-interest.

Smoke that at your next "christian" prayer breakfast.

You know, the American right is deeply scared by the New Deal, the Cold War and the counter-culturism of the 1960s. As someone who barely remembers a world with the Soviet Union I find all this liberals=socialists=communists=people-who-want-to-oppress-the-world-with-Stalinism a trippy time warp.

Mass murder may be beyond the pale for some of them but taking from some and givinig to others is well within Democrats' capability.

You gotta love the framing here. According to mhr, mass murder may be beyond the pale for "some" Democrats -- the implication being that other Democrats would as soon mass murder you before breakfast as look at you.

Of course this has never happened nor will it -- but it makes for good right-wing hysteria, don't it? Sounds like somebody needs their own AM radio talk show. Muskogee Oklahoma waits with bated breath!

mhr wrote: "... the now-extinct USSR (thanks to Ronald Reagan) ..."

You are a weak-minded, ignorant dumbass who is incapable of doing anything but regurgitating the stupidest, most idiotic right-wing drivel ever invented. You must spend all your time watching the Fox News For Dummies channel, where they dumb-down their right-wing extremist propaganda so that even the stupidest of dittoheads can manage to memorize and recite it.

"In the 1990s, I grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the United States." - Beinart

Mogadishu was intoxicating. What a bunch of warmed over liberal crap.

Thanks, bellumregio,

Agamben is new to me.

from Wikipedia,

Giorgio Agamben is particularly critical of the United States' response to September 11, 2001, and its instrumentalization as a permanent condition that legitimizes a "state of exception" as the dominant paradigm for governing in contemporary politics. He warns against a "generalization of the state of exception" through laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, which means a permanent installment of martial law and emergency powers. In January 2004, he refused to give a lecture in the United States because under the US-VISIT he would have been required to give up his biometric information, which he believed stripped him to a state of "bare life" (zoe) and was akin to the tattooing that the Nazis did during World War II.[2][3]

However, Agamben's criticisms target a broader scope than the US "war on terror". As he points out in State of Exception (2005), rule by decree has become common since World War I in all modern states, and has been since then generalized and abused. Agamben points out a general tendency of modernity, recalling for example that when Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon invented "judicial photography" for "anthropometric identification", the procedure was reserved to criminals; to the contrary, today's society is tending toward a generalization of this procedure to all citizens, placing the population under permanent suspicion and surveillance: "The political body thus has became a criminal body".

One need look no further than his comment that, "I grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the United States" to know Beinart is a fucking tool. To see him anointed as some sort of foreign policy guru is almost as nauseating as hearing Friedman referred to as the "eminence grise" of U.S. foreign policy. Neither has a fucking clue and both seem to suffer from near total historical ignorance. The deep thoughts of both are easily dismissed.

Mogadishu was intoxicating. What a bunch of warmed over liberal crap.

Cite please. Where are these "liberals" that think Mogadishu was an inspiration? I've never met one, although my husbands best friend at school was a Marine in Somalia, and knows precisely where the blame for that fucking fiasco lies (Bush 41).

By the way, I haven't seen anyone here too damned eager to apply a soothing balm to Beinert's wounded soul. Screw him. Too little, too late, he can take his new-found politically-expedient contrition and shove it up his ass.

"In the 1990s, I grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the United States." - Beinart

Jay, I think he was referring to sitting at the feet of Wolfewitz, Perle and Kristol and lapping up their drool.

(completely ignoring the Red Herring from mhr,)
Seconds on all the reasonable things said thus far. It would seem that anything short of a call for impeachment for starting a preventive war falls short of a reconciliation. Will you renounce torture and extraordinary rendition? And you please acknowledge that this was a war to control Iraq's oil.

We'll be waiting on our Missouri for a full surrender, unless you need us to drop some more bombs your way (via congressional inquiries, etc.)

I'll second Greggy.

Let's see, Bush invaded after he lost the election. Common knowledge. But thanks for playing.

I think this gets at the heart of why people are so critical of some Democratic candidates. It's not so much that we want "apologies," it's that we want some sign, any sign, that they truly have learned the appropriate lessons of the past few years, thereby decreasing the chance that we will have to go through this again in my lifetime.

Whenever I hear a Democrat say something like this, I do wonder if they are seeing everything through Bush colored glasses.

Look, it's one thing to talk about whether Democrats might in one fashion or another enable Bush to engage in his recklessly aggressive foreign policy. It's quite another to imagine that that Democrat might, as President, pursue a hyper-aggressive foreign policy that will damage us.

Really, can you come up with a single example of a Democratic PRESIDENT pushing aggression against other nations well beyond acceptable limits?

If not, then why the concern that one of our current Democratic candidates will decide to become another global bully -- indeed, especially after the Iraq war experience?

As I said, it seems that many Democrats imagine that somehow the powers of the Bush administration to conduct foreign policy will extend beyond the grave of his Presidency. They can't seem to grasp that when Bush's term ends, the possibility of his enablement ends, and we are in an entirely new world.

SecularAnimist nails it at 1:41 and again at 2:13.

Anyone who read through to the back pages of the Washington Post knew that the evidence was bunk: that the aluminum tubes were unsuitable for nuclear enrichment, that the yellow-cake story was phony, that the mobile weapons labs were pure guess, and that the inspectors were working hard and not finding any signs of on-going programs until they left rather than be bombed in Shock and Awe.

I suspect that everyone who supported this war, or even the Resolution to send Bush to the UN or however they're spinning that vote, was either still scared shitless of 9/11 more than a year later, or was scared shitless of being painted as weak on terrorists when they had to face an electorate who was still scared shitless by 9/11. So maybe Beinert comes in the first category and Hillary in the second.

But to say they were mislead means they just weren't looking at the evidence at the time.

LBJ and Viet Nam comes to mind.

Brojo,

LBJ and Vietnam were a LONG time ago, in terms of current Democratic thinking on foreign policy: LBJ made his mistakes 40 years ago by now.

I personally can hardly conceive that a Democratic President, in the immediate wake of a disastrous adventure in hyperaggression, would simply turn right around and engage in the same sort of reckless behavior.

My own take on this is that people who want to act as if this is a genuine concern are really playing a political game of trying to disparage a certain candidate, and don't seriously believe their own expressed anxieties.

Guys like Beinart should be sent to re-education camps.

'when our fellow democracies largely oppose a war -- as they did in Vietnam and Iraq -- because they think we're deluding ourselves about either our capacities or our motives, they're probably right.'

Didn't read all the comments so I don't know if this has been mentioned yet but Robert MacNamara said the same thing, nearly verbatum, in the documentary Fog Of War. His words were something like 'if your allies, other like-minded countries don't see the wisdom of your endeavor maybe you should rethink it'. He was basically saying that was a lesson he learned from the Vietnam war that should've been applied toward Iraq.

What a crock of shit! Beinart was just following orders from the people who put him in his position at the New Republic. His job is to lie to the stupid masses and shape opinion. Now that all he predicted and all he supported has turned out to be totally wrong, he's trying to save face. He speaks of a "liberal international order", but he and his magazine wrote editorials highly critical of the United Nations for being ineffective and useless. The bottom line: Beinart is a light-weight!

After Viet Nam I could hardly conceive that any American president or the American people would simply engage in the same sort of reckless behavior. But W. Bush was reelected in 2004.

I know, Nicaragua and Panama happened during Republican administrations. I think Somalia was actually Bush I's, too. But the Democrats in Congress did not put up much of a fight to stop those mistakes, nor did they put up much of a fight to stop the invasion of Iraq. I do not have much confidence in Democrats to stop subsidizing Israel's war machine or to stop demonizing Iran or Hezbollah, either. Sen. Leiberman is not running for the Democratic nomination, but he has much in common with many who are.

I am skeptical of Democratic politicians who voted to give W. Bush war powers and who do not seek his impeachment. As a matter of fact, because they say they represent my views about the war now but have done what they have done and will not do what I think needs to be done, that I will not support them just because they are not card carrying Republicans. From my point of view they have all been co-opted into the capitalist complex. The differences are of minute degrees and I am unwilling to split hairs so that I can vote for a Democratic nominee who will not forthrightly say withdrawal from Iraq will be immediate, assure Iran the US will not attack, and admit the US support of the militancy of Israel must be stopped. Sorry.

What a crock of shit! Beinart was just following orders from the people who put him in his position at the New Republic.

Cal Gal wrote: "But to say they were mislead means they just weren't looking at the evidence at the time."

Indeed, here is what Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich wrote in the fall of 2002, when folks like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton were falling over themselves to give Bush a blank check to invade Iraq:

Unilateral military action by the United States against Iraq is unjustified, unwarranted, and illegal. The Administration has failed to make the case that Iraq poses an imminent threat to the United States. There is no credible evidence linking Iraq to 9/11. There is no credible evidence linking Iraq to Al Qaeda. Nor is there any credible evidence that Iraq possesses deliverable weapons of mass destruction, or that it intends to deliver them against the United States.

-- Dennis Kucinich, November 2002

How is it that Dennis Kucinich knew this in the fall of 2002, but somehow John Kerry and Hillary Clinton (and Peter Beinart) did not?

so let's make the comparison: jetBlue, which bet that it could slip its operations through a storm because it believed the storm would not be long lasting, and Beinart, who made his bet. Or should the jetBlue comparison be to the administration, which bet that all things Iraqi would be simple to resolve

"How is it that Dennis Kucinich knew this in the fall of 2002,........." - secular

I agree, nominate Kucinich for President in '08. Pleeeeaaaasssseee!

Brojo,

One point I will agree with you on is that Israel is a true wild card in this analysis.

Democratic politicians, one and all, are so completely in the pocket of AIPAC that I can imagine them enabling virtually any kind of evil behavior Israel might engage in.

I don't how to solve that problem. I don't see much difference between any of the candidates on that score.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, of course it's great he's rethinking his position and learning from his mistakes. On the other hand, how many times do we as a nation have to learn from our mistakes? It seems like it should be a simple principle; never start a war except in response to a direct threat. It seems like we should have learned this long ago, at least after Vietnam. Does this have to keep happening over and over again, each new generation forgetting what the previous generation learned through bitter experience, and what should be a pretty straightforward principle?

--Rick Taylor

If some international Jewish conspiracy is pulling the strings how is it that Condi can shut off talks with Syria with just a contemptuous snort?

'It seems like it should be a simple principle; never start a war except in response to a direct threat. It seems like we should have learned this long ago, at least after Vietnam.'

Problem is that instead of learning that lesson we instead 'learned' that wars we should have won can be lost by the media making up bad news from the front lines.

If some international Jewish conspiracy is pulling the strings how is it that Condi can shut off talks with Syria with just a contemptuous snort?

I was wondering that my own self.

....But it does mean that, when our fellow democracies largely oppose a war -- as they did in Vietnam and Iraq -- because they think we're deluding ourselves about either our capacities or our motives, they're probably right.

How meaningful is that? "Probably right"? You mean like 55% chance, 75% chance, 95% chance they are right? What about a case like Ethiopia (in League of Nations days) or Iraq where one or more democracies that disapprove action obviously has its own less-than-adorable commercial interests?

"Fellow democracies"? The US has support from more "fellow democracies" in Iraq than in Afghanistan, though in both cases most of the other combat is performed by just two of them, Britain and Australia. A majority of EU and NATO democracies support the US in both cases.

he's looking at the disaster in Iraq with clear eyes and thinking seriously about how it should change his worldview

On the evidence presented here, he hasn't come to grips with the fundamental fact that in almost every situation the US is likely to encounter in the future, the US will have to decide on its own whether to act militarily, and hope for enough help from other democracies. In any particular case, some of the other democracies will remain passive or in opposition, and most of the others will provide just a little bit of help. I see neither clear eyes nor serious thought.

Do his comments apply only to "preventive" war, and not to other wars "of choice" or of "necessity"?

In the 1990s, I grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the United States.

Well, maybe that explains it. Avoid advice and support from people who are "intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the United States." Perhaps Bush and the neocons were so intoxicated. It never seemed that way to me.

We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war. Of the options available for dealing with Iraq, I thought that the invasion had a better chance of improving Iraq than either of (a) continuing the sanctions (which were crumbling), complete with piteous pictures of suffering Iraqi kids on al Jazeera tv every night, and people like bin Laden hating the US for causing that suffering; or (b) ending the sanctions, as demanded by most of the Muslim world, and the EU and American left.

Is it the sense of people here that the various UN interventions are demonstrably less bad? How about the instances of US non-intervention, like Ruanda, Darfur and Tibet? Do we have the wisdom and virtue to remake the world through non-intervention in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, or Haiti?

It's as if Iraq holds no lessons for them at all.

People are learning too many lessons from Iraq, holding them too confidently, and ignoring the conflicts among the lessons learned. The "lesson" that the US went in with too small a force conflicts with the "lesson" that the US made too many mistakes in the first year of occupation, and those in turn coflict with the "lesson" that we intrinsically lack the wisdom and virtue to remake the world through preventive war.

frankly0, if it were not for the war I could split hairs regarding healthcare, gun control and mundane issues like them and possibly support most of the Democratic candidates. I say possibly because I have only voted for a mainstream party candidate once, Kerry, and that did not provide me with any satisfaction.

I happened to go to the Pajamas web page yesterday, I am not sure why - it is only the second time I have gone there, but they have a web poll for both parties' candidates. I was going to vote for either Kucinich or Gravel, but neither was listed. I think that is an indication of who the establishment wants and does not want as a candidate for president. I do not want to support an establishment candidate.

If some international Jewish conspiracy is pulling the strings how is it that Condi can shut off talks with Syria with just a contemptuous snort?

Removing the usual smear that criticizing Israel and AIPAC is effectively anti-Semitism, I'd like to see some real evidence that Israel has decided by consensus that important national interests require them to engage in these talks with Syria, and yet they chose to cave to Rice's demands.

Let's just say that for Israel to cave to Bush's demands on issues Israel deems truly critical, rather than have Bush cave on those issues to Israel, would be without precedent in Bush's Presidency.

That is that when a country is invaded, regardless of the existing political divisions, the population will, more or less, unite to expel the invader.

Well, that certainly isn't happening in Iraq. There, disunited people are mostly hunkering down while a few (maybe 1% of population) partisans are trying to kill off the members of competing factions.

When it counted Beinart failed us and supported this damn miserable invasion.

So, to hell with him and Friedman and the rest of the neoliberal gang...

Time to realize the USA is not a force for good in the world, but a force for its own interests...

And forget the Adam Smith hooey that self interest leads to the common good. It don't--it leads to your bank account

Alas, folks, and this is unmentionable in polite company, but we're in the middle east to control the oil..

That's why the Dems are making believe that they want to get out of Iraq/q.
They don't, not as long as cars run on gasoline.

James of DC: The one change we do need to make is we must not do it by force!

A consequence of the Iraq war will be that the next few presidents will be more passive, almost isolationist, in their foreign policies. What Clinton called "assertive multilateralism" won't be done. That will be OK with me. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the American declaration of war just barely passed, and almost all Democrats opposed it. Should such a situation arise in the near future, such a declaration would be defeated outright.

Removing the usual smear that Israel and AIPAC are identical on what occasion did Bush cave to anything in regard to Israel?

That they almost had these talks going and would have pushed forward with them if not for US intervention is evidence by itself this is a direction they are interested in.

spider wrote: Of the options available for dealing with Iraq, I thought that the invasion had a better chance of improving Iraq than either of (a) continuing the sanctions (which were crumbling) [...] or (b) ending the sanctions, as demanded by most of the Muslim world, and the EU and American left.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq was not sold to the American people, the United States Congress, the United Nations Security Council, or the world on the basis of having a "chance of improving Iraq."

The invasion and occupation of Iraq was sold to the American people, the United States Congress, the United Nations Security Council, and the entire world on the basis of deliberate, elaborate, repeated and sickening lies by Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, and other principals of the Bush adminstration about what they knew at the time to be a nonexistent "threat" from nonexistent "Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" (including repeated, specific and knowingly false statements by Dick Cheney, George W. Bush et al that Saddam Hussein's government was actively developing nuclear weapons, was only months away from having a nuclear weapon, and that failure to invade and occupy Iraq immediately would result in "mushroom clouds" over American cities), and nonexistent "links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda".

The invasion and occupation of Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with "improving Iraq". It had nothing to do with "preemption" or "prevention" of anything, since there was no threat to "preempt" or "prevent" (which the UN inspections had made very clear well before the 2003 invasion).

It was a long-planned war of unprovoked aggression, to seize control of Iraq's vast oil reserves for the US-based multinational oil companies and establish a permanent massive US military presence from which to launch further wars of aggression to maintain or seize control of the oil reserves of other Middle Eastern countries, that was sold to the American people with lies.

"and those in turn coflict with the "lesson" that we intrinsically lack the wisdom and virtue to remake the world through preventive war."

No, they are evidence that we lack the wisdom and virture.

Why is it surprising that the war supporters refuse to learn?

The conservative philosophy is unequivocal at this point: America can do any evil it wants, never has to apologize or compensate for it, never has to accept concessions for its bad behavior, never has to acknowledge the negative consequences of the evil that it does but rather is privileged to rationalize it away, and is authorized by God to insist that even the most superficial evils of any other country requires absolute surrender of that country's sovereignty to American conservative will.

It's the twin evils of arrogance and conceit on steroids and conservatives are suffused with these evils.

And liberal war hawks simply operate under the delusion that their own good intentions can somehow overcome the bad intentions and character of their conservative allies or, alternatively, that conservatives will somehow wake up from their intellectual and moral stupor and be reborn as liberal war hawks, as well as believing that the lesser of two evils is always apparent and predictable.

“One thing Sheikh Sattar keeps saying is he wants al-Anbar to be like Germany and Japan and South Korea were after their respective wars, with a long-term American presence helping ... put them back together,” MacFarland said. “The negative example he cites is Vietnam. He says, yeah, so, Vietnam beat the Americans, and what did it get them? You know, 30 years later, they’re still living in poverty.”(emphasis added)

By Matt Millham, Stars and Stripes
European edition, Thursday, February 22, 2007

Doesn't the Sheikh realize that Democrats have already declared defeat. I mean Murtha can't be wrong, right?

"It was a long-planned war of unprovoked aggression, to seize control of Iraq's vast oil reserves for the US-based multinational oil companies......" - secular

Iraq oil imports to US totaled less than 5% of the aggregate for the year 2006. Just FYI.

How much oil was smuggled to US corps and sold to China?

Iraq oil imports to US totaled less than 5% of the aggregate for the year 2006.

The amount of Iraqi oil imported to the US says nothing about the truth of SecularAnimist's claim about the motivation of the administration being to seize control of Iraqi oil for US-based multinationals, since increased control of oil by such companies does not mean that even a single drop more of that oil is imported into the United States.

One might debate SA's point (I won't, because I agree that it is a large part of the motivation for the war), but your response is a complete non-sequitur.

Iraq oil imports to US totaled less than 5% of the aggregate for the year 2006. Just FYI.

We're not looking forward to last year.

A post hoc mea culpa doesn't cut it. Until Beinart makes amends -- and I mean big amends -- there can be no forgiveness.

I suggest he make the theoretical real and go sign up to fight in Iraq.

Re: my post on Sheikh Sattar, you do realize he is in the minority, right? And don't Democrats support minorities?

Of the options available for dealing with Iraq, I thought that the invasion had a better chance of improving Iraq than either of (a) continuing the sanctions (which were crumbling), complete with piteous pictures of suffering Iraqi kids on al Jazeera tv every night, and people like bin Laden hating the US for causing that suffering; or (b) ending the sanctions, as demanded by most of the Muslim world, and the EU and American left.

Huh. Seems you thought wrong.

A consequence of the Iraq war will be that the next few presidents will be more passive, almost isolationist, in their foreign policies.

You seem to be confusing rejecting militarism with rejecting internationalism. Not only are the two not the same thing, they are in most instances opposed.

While Beinart belated realizes his mistake, the war he and pundits like him enabled continues swimmingly, as the US continues to win friends and influence people in Iraq with the arrest, and detention of Amar Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, son of SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

Jay, you are an ignorant dumbass. That's the only appropriate response to the inane, idiotic drivel that you post here.

this is such a stupid, short sighted argument because the antithetical is equally true: what if there were WMDs, and I don't mean nukes, I mean anything that would have justified the war to the average voter - a stockpile of chemical warheads would have been enough; what if the war had been managed properly and Iraq did turn into a positive progressive example in an Arab world sorely without such? Then all those who opposed the war would be outcasts and all those who supported it would be the only hope for democrats in 2008. Suddenly all you foolish left wing ideologues would be praising Hillary to the rafters and banishing people like Obama - it's a stupid, short sighted argument that entirely misses the point.

In any particular case, some of the other democracies will remain passive or in opposition, and most of the others will provide just a little bit of help. I see neither clear eyes nor serious thought.

Clear eyes, serious thought, can't lose!

Then all those who opposed the war would be outcasts and all those who supported it would be the only hope for democrats in 2008.

So, if everything was different then everything would be different?

Suddenly all you foolish left wing ideologues would be praising Hillary to the rafters and banishing people like Obama

So, if the people who were wrong had been right, and the people who were right had been wrong, then we'd think differently about them?

Um, OK, but I'm not sure what point you think you're really trying to make. Because back here on Planet Earth, we're dealing with the reality of things as they are, not things as they might have been in magical fairy cloud cuck