“And All the Time We’re Bombing Them from 30,000 Feet”
Is there anything in the world so infuriating as a liberal hawk? Every inch of the globe becomes a monument to his prating shows of “compassion,” which always seems to mean kicking the shit out of someone or other. You can’t get away from them!
God these people make me sick. Let’s cleanse the palate with Sam Rosenfeld:
Liberal hawks joined neoconservatives in taking advantage of the public’s post–September 11 engagement with the world to unveil a comically promiscuous military agenda. The New Republic first argued that the Bush administration should have deployed more troops to Afghanistan, then proceeded to argue in favor of the war in Iraq, then criticized the administration for failing to send more of America’s already overstretched forces to interventions in Liberia and Haiti, then urged action to halt genocide in Sudan, and now takes the view that the problem with Iraq is that hundreds of thousands of additional troops should have been sent there from the beginning. Though arguably imbued with loftier motives than its neoconservative variant (The Weekly Standard has variously argued for attacking Iran, Syria, and North Korea), TNR’s stance is still knee-jerk hawkishness that is oblivious to the realities of the situation. It deserves to be tuned out in debates every bit as much as blanket pacifism does. Just as serious opponents of war must be prepared to countenance some wars under some circumstances, serious advocates of using force for humanitarian purposes must be willing to acknowledge some limits to what can and should be done.
Rosenfeld via Logan.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
October 26, 2005 @ 8:29 am
Why is it that every war-policy tendency seems to have a name except the one actually favored by a majority or large plurality of the U.S.? There’s ”isolationism”, ”pacifism”,”neoconservatism”,”realism”, even ”liberal hawks” (as a group name rather than an ism, but still), but no name that I know of for the mindset that would approve of the decision to go to war in Afghanistan (since they would not turn over the people in their country who attacked ours) and perhaps the Balkans (since it was clear from the combination of worldwide support including provision of peacekeepers and overwhelming power that it was possible to intervene there successfully). ”Liberal realism?”
Comment by Nell —
October 26, 2005 @ 10:17 am
What’s the source and context of the quotation in the post title?
Comment by Jim Henley —
October 26, 2005 @ 10:26 am
Proxmire, I think. (Maybe Fulbright.) Responding to an accusation in the media by LBJ that he just ”didn’t care about the Vietnamese” because they were brown people.
Comment by Anodyne —
October 26, 2005 @ 10:40 am
”… but no name that I know of for the mindset that would approve of the decision to go to war in Afghanistan … and perhaps the Balkans…”
Kabul-lyism
Yugo a-go-goism
Comment by washerdreyer —
October 26, 2005 @ 10:46 am
Liberal humanitarian interventionism?
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
October 26, 2005 @ 12:20 pm
In a saner world, I think ”common sense” would fit the bill nicely.
Comment by David Rossie —
October 26, 2005 @ 2:18 pm
Rich, I think you’re searching for a phantom policy tendency. Many people support wars because of patriotism and the perceived duty to support the troops and the president in all military endeavors. I don’t think much thought goes into foreign policy intricacies for a large segment of the population, at least not until after the fact -for example, support for the war in Iraq goes down after 2 years of bad news.
Comment by Diana —
October 26, 2005 @ 3:08 pm
The whole Cohen article is nauseating but this: ”Republicans, particularly neocons, who talk the language of moralism in foreign policy and who, weapons of mass destruction aside, wanted to take out Saddam Hussein because he was a beast.” really scrapes the bottom of the cesspool.
What a dope.
Comment by Barry —
October 26, 2005 @ 3:19 pm
Jim, consider this an official protest. Cohen ain’t a liberal. He might have been one, once, I’ll concede, but Hitchens and Kaus probably were as well. By now Cohen is a happy Republican, with a double-supersized serving of ’Kewl Kidz’ elitism. He’s been sh*tting on Dems, liberals, and real libertarians for quite a while now. And Diana’s quote from his column only helps my case - does anybody believe that Cheney & Co started a war due to actual concerns with human rights and freedoms?
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
October 26, 2005 @ 8:29 pm
”Liberal humanitarian interventionism” doesn’t really do it, since that’s what the liberal hawks already claim, and since I think that most people really are willing to go to war in situations like Afghanistan, which was a response to an attack rather than a desire to ”spread democracy”. I really don’t think that it’s a phantom tendency. Many people still have internalized some notion of the casus belli and of the desire to intervene when intervention appears to be both rationally likely to succeed and universally approved.
Comment by Diana —
October 27, 2005 @ 2:14 pm
Don’t you find the citation of TNR as ”liberal” grimly amusing? They are liberal about very little. On the subject of the Middle East, they are Likud Central.
Comment by Barry —
October 27, 2005 @ 2:35 pm
There was supposedly a joke in the 1980’s, as they started drifting rightward, to call TNR ’Even The Liberal New Republic’, because they kept endorsing Republican actions.
And that was before Marty ’Palestinians Delendi Sunt’ Peretz bought it, and before Michael Kelly, Fred Barnes, and Andrew Sullivan were editors.