THE CLEAR CONSCIENCES OF LIBERAL HAWKS


Slate is currently running a roundtable discussion by a group of eminent liberal hawks on reassessing their support for the Iraq war, with the benefit of the experience of the past year. In particular, we now know that: 1) all of the evidence found so far indicates that Iraq's WMD program was signficantly less developed then thought; 2) that the Bush administration was deliberately misleading in its selling of the war, 3) our relations with Europe and other allies remain strained; and 4) the rosiet post-war scenarios have not come to pass.


So far, its been interesting to note the gap between the Wilsonian idealists (Friedman, Berman, and Hitchens) who supported the war primarily as a strategic response to the challenges of Islamic terror (and linked moral response to the tyranny of Hussein) and those of more Hamiltonian/globalist bent (Pollack, Packer, and Fred Kaplan) for whom the more concrete, direct threats posed by Hussein's regime took precedence.


For the first group, whom I happen to belong to, there are no regrets. None of the errors made by the Bushies in their pre-war diplomacy or blinkered post-war planning, nor the dishonesty evidenced in their selling of the war, changes the fundamental correctness of the decision to liberate Iraq. For the second group, it is a more difficult question. Some like Kaplan (and Joshua Micah Marshall who is not included in this dicussion) dropped their support for the war when it became clear how the Bushies were going to conduct it. For others, like Packer and Pollard, it is a harder assessment, given that the immediate threat of WMD was not the only justification for the war.


The issues raised in this discussion are important ones. For the Wilsonians that believe that Bush's macro-policy on the war on terror is right, can the manipulative selling of the war to the American public be dismissed? For the liberal Hamiltonians that saw Iraq primarily as an issue of rogue states and WMD, what is was and is their alternative plan to pop as Friedman calls it, the "terror" bubble? Certaintly they have something more in mind than a manhunt in the mountains of the Pakistani-Afghani border.


Unfortunately, you won't be hearing these issues discussed any time soon in the most important of liberal circles, the Democratic primaries. Instead you'll hear and endless stream of arguments from Dean and Clark on why the voters should replace an administration that gets the big picture right and mismanages the details with one that promises to get the details right but hasn't got a clue about the big picture.