Dean Screams for Drones

In the January issue of Reason, in the L.A. Times last month, in our book, and out on the promotional hustings, Nick Gillespie and I have been talking about how the Howard Dean anti-war left dissipated as a direct result of being subsumed within the Democratic Party behind standard-bearer Barack Obama. So what is Howard Dean's take on Libya, then? The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf checks in:

On Wednesday morning, for example, he went on MSNBC, where he praised President Obama for the war in Libya. "It's very smart. You don't put boots on the ground. You don't commit trillions of dollars to a war in Iraq," he said. "You do it with the other tools that we have that frankly work much better over the long term because you don't get a lot of public resistance—drones, special operations forces, use of intelligence agencies. That's exactly what he did."

From the Reason archives: Eight years ago this Sunday, I wrote a piece titled "Intervention Logic," that discussed in part how Howard Dean advocated "boosting troop levels in Afghanistan by 500 percent, and making a nation-building commitment to Baghdad that far outstrips what the Bush Administration currently contemplates."