Tremendous round-table discussion amongst left-liberal hawks over at Slate today. When all is said and done, it will include essays from superstar regime-change advocates Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Fareed Zakaria, Kenneth Pollack, and more. Fascinating reading, for several reasons:
1) Several of the correspondents seem to be using entirely different sets of facts. Witness the range of opinion on whether or not the Iraqis are happy that we’re there, for example, or if Saddam Hussein was deterrable.
2) They are all able to criticize the failures of the Bush Administration, and indeed explicitly call for him to be punished for them at the polls, without saying the war was a cruel farce waged by a bloodthirsty oil cabal and it was a waste and a mistake and we never should have gone in there and BUSH LIED–PEOPLE DIED! In other words, they demonstrate a moral seriousness and thoughtfulness that’s utterly refreshing and, amongst the administration’s critics, sadly, rather unique.
3) Some of them seem genuinely concerned for the health of “international institutions.” I would say that the fault for the sorry state of (for example) the UN lies with those who’ve allowed it to become a get-out-of-jail-free card for murderous thugs and their sycophantic bagmen, not with the course of action that finally called the institution’s bluff after catastrophic failures ranging everywhere from the Balkans to Rwanda, but that’s just me, I guess.
4) It’s enormously uplifting for a jaded liberal like myself to listen to intelligent, articulate liberals use words like “fascism” and “totalitarianism” to describe the policies of people who aren’t John Ashcroft.
5) While we’re on the liberal-hawk subject, go read Pollack’s reexamination of his own case for war over at The Atlantic, too. Provided you’re not just looking for “I told you so”s to level at the Bushies, you’ll find that the timing involved in Pollack’s conclusion has changed, but the conclusion itself has not.
6) The quote of the day comes from Hitchens’s contribution to the discussion. It regards antiwar forces whose constant predictions of disaster go unremarked upon when, as they nearly always do, they prove false. “How soon they forget,” he says, “but I don’t, and I am keeping score.” And he’s not the only one.