I Was Wrong - Andrew Sullivan ( PDF)
http://sullydish.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/andrew-sullivan-i-was-wrong.pdf
Nov 14, 2014
Desertion In the Field
Twilight of the liberal hawks
Tim Cavanaugh | November 1, 2004
One of the most dramatic and least surprising developments of Election 2004's final period has been President Bush's abandonment by the "liberal hawks," the collection of left-leaning thinkers, commentators, and pundits who approved of the invasion of Iraq as a progressive operation, offered well reasoned and often enthusiastic support for Bush in the prelude to the war, were granted their wish by the White House, and have now paid the president back with withering criticism and endorsements for John Kerry.
Anybody seeking to prove the Kerryan criticism that George W. Bush doesn't know how to build an alliance need look no further than the pan-ideological coalition he built right here at home. In the heat of battle, when their support was most important, the liberal hawks broke ranks and fled the battlefield. Nor will they acknowledge having betrayed the president who gave them what they claimed to wish for: In the minds of the liberal hawks, it is Bush who has betrayed their grand ideals with his "mismanagement" of the postwar situation...................
http://reason.com/archives/2004/11/01/desertion-in-the-field
Bush’s Useful Idiots
Tony Judt on the Strange Death of Liberal America
Vol. 28 No. 18 · 21 September 2006
Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?
It wasn’t always so. On 26 October 1988, the New York Times carried a full-page advertisement for liberalism. Headed ‘A Reaffirmation of Principle’, it openly rebuked Ronald Reagan for deriding ‘the dreaded L-word’ and treating ‘liberals’ and ‘liberalism’ as terms of opprobrium. Liberal principles, the text affirmed, are ‘timeless. Extremists of the right and of the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out.’........
Iraq Everlasting
We are still stuck in 2003, and it isn’t (only) George W. Bush’s fault.
By Frank Rich
Published Jun 4, 2014
hen Michael Hastings was killed in a single-car crash in Los Angeles at age 33 last June, journalism lost a rare specimen of the breed it needs most: a reporter who doesn’t care whom he pisses off. Hastings was the hothead whose 2010 Rolling Stone article “The Runaway General” led to the dismissal of the Afghanistan commander, General Stanley McChrystal, for the infraction of trash-talking his civilian bosses. Hastings, too, was pilloried after the piece—by his own journalistic peers, in a manner that would prefigure some of the profession’s more recent hostility toward Glenn Greenwald. “Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has,” said Lara Logan of CBS News.
The Atlantic’s James Fallows on Standing Up to Warmongering D.C.
Former New Republic Editor Peter Beinart on His Pro-War Stance
We now know that Hastings served both his country and profession with more honor than Logan, who later maimed her own career and 60 Minutes by perpetrating a Benghazi hoax. And his service isn’t done yet. After Hastings died, a former colleague at Newsweek, where he worked as an intern and war correspondent from 2002 to 2008, sent his widow, Elise Jordan, the draft of a novel he had finished just before his 2010 embed with McChrystal. Titled The Last Magazine, it is being published this month on the anniversary of his passing.
We’ll never know how Hastings might have revised this scrappy debut effort or whether it would have led to a career as a novelist. But as a provocative piece of thinly fictionalized nonfiction, it’s a posthumous mission accomplished. The Last Magazine—set at a fictional newsweekly called The Magazine that might as well go by Newsweek—tells the story of the run-up to the Iraq War from a perspective that many of his colleagues would like to forget or suppress: as an embed deep inside the so-called liberal media, much of which cheered on the war with a self-righteous gravity second only to Dick Cheney’s. Hastings’s book is a message in a bottle that has belatedly washed up on shore to force us to remember how we landed where we are now.................
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/iraq-war-2014-6/
We are still stuck in 2003, and it isn’t (only) George W. Bush’s fault.
hen Michael Hastings was killed in a single-car crash in Los Angeles at age 33 last June, journalism lost a rare specimen of the breed it needs most: a reporter who doesn’t care whom he pisses off. Hastings was the hothead whose 2010 Rolling Stone article “The Runaway General” led to the dismissal of the Afghanistan commander, General Stanley McChrystal, for the infraction of trash-talking his civilian bosses. Hastings, too, was pilloried after the piece—by his own journalistic peers, in a manner that would prefigure some of the profession’s more recent hostility toward Glenn Greenwald. “Michael Hastings has never served his country the way McChrystal has,” said Lara Logan of CBS News.
The Atlantic’s James Fallows on Standing Up to Warmongering D.C.
Former New Republic Editor Peter Beinart on His Pro-War Stance
We now know that Hastings served both his country and profession with more honor than Logan, who later maimed her own career and 60 Minutes by perpetrating a Benghazi hoax. And his service isn’t done yet. After Hastings died, a former colleague at Newsweek, where he worked as an intern and war correspondent from 2002 to 2008, sent his widow, Elise Jordan, the draft of a novel he had finished just before his 2010 embed with McChrystal. Titled The Last Magazine, it is being published this month on the anniversary of his passing.
We’ll never know how Hastings might have revised this scrappy debut effort or whether it would have led to a career as a novelist. But as a provocative piece of thinly fictionalized nonfiction, it’s a posthumous mission accomplished. The Last Magazine—set at a fictional newsweekly called The Magazine that might as well go by Newsweek—tells the story of the run-up to the Iraq War from a perspective that many of his colleagues would like to forget or suppress: as an embed deep inside the so-called liberal media, much of which cheered on the war with a self-righteous gravity second only to Dick Cheney’s. Hastings’s book is a message in a bottle that has belatedly washed up on shore to force us to remember how we landed where we are now.................
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/iraq-war-2014-6/
The great debate
As President Bush all but declared war on Iraq, journalists Christopher Hitchens and Mark Danner thrashed out the big issues that the country should have months ago.
GARY KAMIYA FRIDAY, JAN 31, 2003
Will invading Iraq make America a safer or a more dangerous place? Can inspections and sanctions contain Saddam? Will the Arab and Muslim world respect an invading America for showing resolve, or react with violent rage?
These questions became at once more urgent and perhaps more irrelevant around 6:45 p.m. Tuesday, when President Bush set Feb. 5 as the day when the countdown to an invasion of Iraq will officially begin. It was somehow appropriate, in these peculiarly disconnected and weightless days running up to an unreal-feeling war, that an important public debate over the looming conflict took place just a few minutes after that war apparently became inevitable.
The subject of the debate was “How Should We Use Our Power? Iraq and the War on Terror.” The opponents were New Yorker magazine writer Mark Danner, author of “Massacre at El Mozote” and a professor at the UC-Berkeley journalism school, andChristopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair writer and former Nation columnist, whose latest book is “Why Orwell Matters.” The audience at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall heard out both speakers respectfully, leading one to wonder if any left-wing rowdies who might have been tempted to heckle the pro-war Hitchens were intimidated by his legendarily box-cutter-like wit. (One irrepressible Jacobite did interrupt the expat Brit with a cry of “Bullshit!” leading the moderator, J-School dean Orville Schell, to admonish the audience against such outbursts. To which Hitchens, who probably has an entire case of these verbal stilettos sharpened and ready to hand in his mental cupboard, calmly remarked, “I don’t seek protection from people who make animal noises.”) Judging by the applause, Danner’s dovish position was more popular, but the audience seemed surprisingly receptive to Hitchens’ arguments......................
The Fifty-First State?
Over the past few months I interviewed several dozen people about what could be expected in Iraq after the United States dislodged Saddam Hussein. An assumption behind the question was that sooner or later the United States would go to war—and would go with at best a fraction of the support it enjoyed eleven years ago when fighting Iraq during the Gulf War. Most nations in the region and traditional U.S. allies would be neutral or hostile unless the Bush Administration could present new evidence of imminent danger from Iraq...................
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/11/the-fifty-first-state/302612/
Going to war with Iraq would mean shouldering all the responsibilities of an occupying power the moment victory was achieved. These would include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting Iraq's borders—and doing it all for years, or perhaps decades. Are we ready for this long-term relationship?
Over the past few months I interviewed several dozen people about what could be expected in Iraq after the United States dislodged Saddam Hussein. An assumption behind the question was that sooner or later the United States would go to war—and would go with at best a fraction of the support it enjoyed eleven years ago when fighting Iraq during the Gulf War. Most nations in the region and traditional U.S. allies would be neutral or hostile unless the Bush Administration could present new evidence of imminent danger from Iraq...................
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/11/the-fifty-first-state/302612/
What Bush Isn't Saying About Iraq
So, why exactly is Iraq different from North Korea? Both are founding members of President Bush's "axis of evil," and both deserve that honor. North Korea has now admitted to a nuclear weapons development program on about the same timeline as what we only suspect about Iraq. So, why are we barely complaining in one case and off to war in the other?
President Bush won't discuss two big reasons he wants to invade Iraq
Bush addressed this conundrum the other day. "Saddam Hussein is unique," he explained. "He has thumbed his nose at the world for 11 years … and for 11 years he has said, 'No, I refuse to disarm.' " The North Koreans, by contrast, said, "Yes, we will disarm"—they promised to stop building nukes in exchange for help in developing peaceful nuclear power—and then they didn't do it. I guess that's a difference, but it sounds as if we're punishing Saddam for his honesty.
Bush's public case for going to war against Iraq is full of logical inconsistencies, exaggerations, and outright lies. It reeks of ex-post-facto: First came the desire, and then came the reasons. But this raises a troubling question, especially for opponents of Bush's policy: If his ostensible reasons are unpersuasive even to him, what are his real reasons? There must be some: Nobody starts a war as a lark. It would be easier to dismiss the whole exercise if there were an obvious ulterior motive. Without one, you are left wondering, "Am I missing something?"..............................
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