This is precisely the sort of thing that annoys me: this thing from Max Boot.
Nor is this the first time that the more fevered critics of the war effort have wound up charging that the country was "lied" into war by nefarious conspirators. Today it’s neocons. In the past it was banana companies, "merchants of death," and international bankers. Such assertions have been heard about the Spanish-American War, World War I, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. (In other words, after every conflict that has turned out to be tougher than anticipated.) Even when it came to World War II, some die-hard isolationists accused FDR of somehow forcing Japan to fight us and of deliberately not warning Pearl Harbor in advance of the attack.
Kagan does not deny that folly and miscalculation played a large role in planning the Iraq War. But, as he notes, there is nothing unique about America being overweening or imprudent in the pursuit of its ideals. The only way to avoid such setbacks is to pursue an isolationist or narrowly realpolitik agenda—which would wind up causing us far greater problems in the long run.
It makes me nuts when someone puts theory in front of practice when it comes to interpretations of Pride and Prejudice. Here's Boot doing the same thing when it comes to human life.
Invading Iraq was a bad idea because it was a bad idea. One did not need an -ism to recognize that. One merely needed to be paying attention. Jesus, Buddha, or the Wizard of Oz -- invading Iraq was a bad idea. It sucked ass with a boat. It sucked ass with a goat. It was an easily perceived fuckup. Period.
Boot's post is further evidence of the ghoulish lengths to which a conservative "intellectual" will go to defend a pet idea in defiance of failure, death, and reality. It's always someone else's job to deal with that sort of stuff.
Just amazing.
I've seen some grotesque shit online, but this really takes the solitary, unique, and recherche biscuit. This is worse than that time on Talk Soup when the angry midget jumped into the wedding cake. But just as strange...
