Iraq and the Sin of Good Judgment

by Eric Alterman
The Nation

The Bush/Cheney war in Iraq has proven to be even more catastrophic than those who had the good sense to oppose it could have predicted. It has killed Americans and Iraqis, destroyed a functioning, albeit unfree nation, increased the threat of terrorism, destabilized the region, empowered our enemies--particularly Iran and Syria--inspired hatred of the United States across the globe and will ultimately cost American taxpayers upwards of a trillion dollars. It is, almost certainly, as Al Gore has noted, "the worst strategic mistake in the entire history of the United States."

The problem the war creates for the punditocracy and the rest of the political establishment is twofold. First, the leaders they backed have not only been wildly incompetent but also impervious to reality. Offered a face-saving exit by the Baker Commission, Bush, Cheney & Co. prefer instead to double down on disaster. Second, there is the problem of the pundits' individual reputations. If William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Lawrence Kaplan and David Brooks et al. are so smart, why were they so wrong about something so crucial? And why, given their sorry records, do they and their editors still think anybody ought to keep listening to them? At the very least, those they misled are entitled to an explanation.

Even those who have offered up their mea culpas have often sought refuge in what The American Prospect's Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias have aptly termed "The Incompetence Dodge." Almost all the most prominent prowar neocons featured in Vanity Fair's recent report, for example, blamed the Bush Administration for failing to execute its beautiful war plans more efficiently.

Accompanying this tactic has been a corollary effort to smear the liberals who got it right rather than renounce the calumny that was heaped on their heads during the run-up to the invasion (from "pacifist" and "isolationist" to "anti-American" and even "pro-terrorist"). I first noticed this tendency when, in June 2005, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times's extraordinarily influential foreign affairs columnist whose analysis of the war proved completely misguided, accused liberals of "deep down" wanting America to fail in Iraq "because, with a few exceptions...they thought the war was wrong." He presented no supporting evidence and named no names. More recently, Time's McCarthyite columnist Joe Klein explained that in "listening to leftists...it's easy to assume that they are rooting for an American failure." Andrew Sullivan has opined that antiwar liberals were "objectively pro-Saddam." Slate editor Jacob Weisberg dismissed those whose analysis proved correct as "the isolationist left," as if idiotic wars were the only means this great country has to engage the rest of the world.

The purest embodiment of this tendency, perhaps, is a recent screed by Roger Cohen, formerly the foreign editor of the Times, now the editor at large of the International Herald Tribune, author of the "Globalist" column and international writer at large for the Times. According to Cohen, writing in the IHT and on the Times website, the people who tried to save America and the world from the horrific catastrophe we must now endure are nothing but "hyperventilating left-liberals [whose] hatred of Bush is so intense that rational argument usually goes out the window." We are "so convinced that the Iraq invasion was no more than an American grab for oil and military bases...[we] have forgotten the myriad crimes of Saddam Hussein." We are "America-hating, over-the-top rant[ers] of the left--the kind that equates Guantánamo with the Gulag and holds that the real threat to human rights comes from the White House rather than Al Qaeda." And for good measure, we also "equate the conservative leadership of a great democracy with dictatorship."

(The rest is here.)