Past and Future Hawks

Wonder of wonders, Victor Davis Hanson has made a coherent argument:

The next time a Democratic administration makes a case for using America's overwhelming military force to preempt a Milosevic or a mass murderer in Darfur — and history suggests that one will — the Democrats' own present disingenuous antiwar rhetoric may come back to haunt them, ensuring that such future humanitarian calls will probably fall on ears as deaf as they are partisan.

This is true in several minor ways, and false in one major way: nothing will happen as a result of their being "haunted" by past statements. We're shoulder-deep in a war of nation-building right now that was launched by a Republican president who vocally opposed nation-building and approved by Republicans who opposed humanitarian interventions in the 1990s. Would someone like to argue that their past statements "haunted" them in the run-up to war? No? All right, then.

For all of Hillary Clinton's pathetic contorting on her Iraq vote, she's at least honest. Clinton II, like all of the Democratic candidates, will turn into a nation-building Wilsonian the second her skin touches the Washington Bible.