Liberal Hawks Still Ignoring the Beam In Their Own Eyes

This is more than a month old, but I recommend Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias' takedown in The American Prospect of the liberal hawks and the "Incompetence Dodge"—wherein the liberal hawks blame the Bush Administration's bungling for their own buyer's remorse about not getting the war they wanted. (Apparently they wanted a war where nobody dies.) The desertion of the liberal hawks is a topic after my own heart, but Yglesias and Rosenfeld have a decidedly different take on it:

This position may have its own internal logical coherence, but in the real world, it's wrong. Though defending the competence of the Bush administration is a fool's endeavor, administrative bungling is simply not the root source of America's failure in Iraq. The alternative scenarios liberal hawks retrospectively envision for a successful administration of the war reflect blithe assumptions—about the capabilities of the U.S. military and the prospects for nation building in polities wracked by civil conflict—that would be shattered by a few minutes of Googling.

The incompetence critique is, in short, a dodge—a way for liberal hawks to acknowledge the obviously grim reality of the war without rethinking any of the premises that led them to support it in the first place. In part, the dodge helps protect its exponents from personal embarrassment. But it also serves a more important, and dangerous, function: Liberal hawks see themselves as defenders of the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention—such as the Clinton-era military campaigns in Haiti and the Balkans—and as advocates for the role of idealism and values in foreign policy…

It sounds alluring. But it's backward: An honest reckoning with this war's failure does not threaten the future of liberal interventionism. Instead, it is liberal interventionism's only hope…

Reckoning with fact, by contrast, might have led to some acknowledgement of the tragic worldview that is, however much our better angels may not prefer it, a necessary component of foreign policy making in a world characterized by far more "less bad" options than genuinely good ones. It is perhaps a seduction peculiar to liberalism, which wants to believe the best about human nature, to ignore the tragic character of much of the world—and to reflexively interpret the failures of an ambitious social-engineering endeavor as evidence of bad technocratic management rather than mistaken premises. Recognizing the flaws of the incompetence argument when it comes to Iraq would necessarily lead liberal hawks to acknowledge that not all interventions are created equal.

It's a pretty thorough piece that dismantles a variety of liberal hawk excuses. I've never been sure what the liberal hawks were expecting to get out of this war. They've got Saddam on trial, various elections, and an assortment of Kodak moments, at a cost of 2,000 American lives. Isn't this better than any reasonable person had a right to expect?

But to keep the liberal hawk phenomenon straight, you have to keep a few things in mind:

1. It's not new. Am I the only one who remembers the Prospect when it was giving Sidney Blumenthal a forum to kick Dole for his "isolationism" against Democrat wars? The rise of the neoconservatives is the main reason war is now defined as a conservative issue—and the neocons are by definition (and for the most part by biography) people rooted in the left. Even the liberal New Republic has rarely met a war it didn't like. After looking at a stack of 1964-'65 issues, I found that TNR did in fact oppose the Vietnam War pretty much from the beginning, but with that exception (admittedly a pretty big exception), I can't think of a war the magazine didn't cheer for. Take this to the bank: When the United States is weighing its next military adventure, TNR will, after ostentatious deliberation, regretfully conclude that yes, war is our country's only option.

2. The excogitating class' pattern of enthusiasm followed by regret follows a very dependable historic pattern. Randolph Bourne's essay "The War and the Intellectuals" is a study in the way intellectuals of the World War I period imagined themselves as major world leaders. Intellectuals are always desperate to feel like they're important historical actors. Woodrow Wilson threw some ideological dog biscuits their way, and they decided all the gassy talk about democracy and a league of nations meant that the intellectuals themselves were driving the war effort rather than just shilling for it. Compare that with the inflated sense of self-importance evident in the way the liberal hawks used to gas about holding Bush to his democratic promises and jumping into the justification-vacuum created by the WMD fiasco. The intellectuals always end up disappointed, but they don't learn.

3. Ultimately, Rosenfeld and Yglesias are trying to rescue liberal interventionism from people they believe abused it. This piece is a good reminder of why I have no truck with people who consider Bill Clinton's Kosovo adventure—which was illegal under both the U.S. Constitution and whatever passes for international law and has produced a judicial circus with an audience even smaller than the Hoxie Bros. Circus—a success. Liberal interventionism doesn't deserve to be rescued. It deserves to have a stake driven through its heart and to be buried in a garlic-filled coffin.