Attacking the Liberal Hawks

Generals are not the only ones who spend their time fighting the last war. Liberal opponents to the Iraq war refuse to the let the liberal hawks off the hook for supporting the invasion. This article in the American Prospect goes after those hawks who believe that the failure of the war is due to the incompetence of those who have been managing it:

"The incompetence critique is, in short, a dodge -- a way for liberal hawks to acknowledge the obviously grim reality of the war without rethinking any of the premises that led them to support it in the first place. In part, the dodge helps protect its exponents from personal embarrassment. But it also serves a more important, and dangerous, function: Liberal hawks see themselves as defenders of the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention -- such as the Clinton-era military campaigns in Haiti and the Balkans -- and as advocates for the role of idealism and values in foreign policy. The dodgers believe that to reject the idea of the Iraq War is, necessarily, to embrace either isolationism or, even worse in their worldview, realism -- the notion, introduced to America by Hans Morgenthau and epitomized (not for the better) by the statecraft of Henry Kissinger, that U.S. foreign policy should concern itself exclusively with the national interest and exclude consideration of human rights and liberal values."

The authors of the article believe the contrary, that the Iraq war was never going to be a success, because it couldn't be a success. Prior to it's beginning, they say, we never had the resources or the political will necessary to overthrow the old regime and build a democracy in Iraq. Therefore, the liberal hawks could never have been right about the possibility of success in Iraq, no matter who was running the show. Why is it important to point this out?

"An honest reckoning with this war’s failure does not threaten the future of liberal interventionism. Instead, it is liberal interventionism’s only hope. By erecting a false dichotomy between support for the current bad war and a Kissingerian amoralism, the dodgers run the risk of merely driving ever-larger numbers of liberals into the realist camp. Left-of-center opinion neither will nor should follow a group of people who continue to insist that the march to Baghdad was, in principle, the height of moral policy thinking."

Okay, the liberal hawks were wrong. And yes, it's annoying that some of them won't issue the proper mea culpa and simply admit that they were wrong about the WMDs, wrong about the threat of Saddam, wrong about the possibility of an insurgency, and wrong about how quickly a democracy could be created. However, I consider it to be a quite dubious claim, that this "dodging" among the hawks is what will drive people towards isolationism or "realism." I think that for most liberals, it is the utter failure of the war itself, and the lies that predicated the invasion, that will drive liberals into the isolationist/realist camps. Oh and let's not forget that some liberals are already in those camps; some opposed the war regardless even of the humanitarian disaster that was the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, and some supported the war solely for "realist" reasons, that Iraq posed a threat to us.

No, I think mostly what this is about, is forcing the liberal hawks to admit they were wrong. And...that's it. Liberals who opposed the invasion sometimes seem more enraged by liberals who supported it then they do the administration that implemented it. Consequently, they spend time and effort attacking those liberal hawks. And it's not good enough that the liberal hawks were wrong. Their attackers won't give up until the hawks supplicate themselves before their prosecutors, admitting that not only were they wrong about how the war would and the reconstruction would be executed, but that they were wrong about the entire purpose of the war in the first place.

To this I can only say...give it a rest. The hawks were wrong. They know it. We know it. The public knows it, just as the public knows the conservative hawks were wrong. Only the liberal "intelligentsia" are wondering if this will drive liberals and others into varous schools of thought; most of us can differentiate between the missions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the missions in Somalia and Iraq. And most of us know that in fact it is the utter incompetence of the Bush administration that has brought about the disaster in Iraq, and it is not so commonly believed as these liberals would think that the war in Iraq could never be a success. But most importantly...that argument is over, because it need be. We on the left do not have the time or the luxury to be attacking liberal hawks who were wrong about the war, but whose input is valuable and needed. Let them be wrong about this; those who didn't learn the lesson won't be heeded next time, and those who did will have different advice to offer. The debate over whether or not we should have intervened is long over; now the debate is about what to do now.