almostinfamous | April 26, 2006 at 10:38 PM
I do see a difference between Wolfowitz and Cheney, and therefore similarly between Berman/Geras and some of the assclown warbloggers who changed the logic of their argument for Iraq every five seconds.
In many ways, it's one of those differences that makes no difference, and it's not as if most of the "reasonable, decent" prowar people have all meaningfully rethought their support–as long as they continue to say, "Well, I had a moral point, and it was just the Bush Administration screwing it up", they still really don't get even a half-credit for reasonableness. Because the screwing-it-up part was in fact one of the things that many reasonable critics were observing was wrong about the war, that to go to war under the wrong circumstances at the wrong time with the wrong leadership in the wrong way with a wrong plan IS MORALLY WRONG. You can't say, "Well, I have a moral principle about this war which trumps the innumerable bad premises" any more than you can be only partially pregnant. You go to war in the wrong way, you've got a wrong war.
But I wouldn't want that point to obscure substantively different intellectual and institutional histories that informed different parts of the support for the war. The landscape that George Packer picks through carefully, for example, matters at various points both for understanding the war and for understanding its aftermath or consequences. Even for understanding how to oppose it politically. But it doesn't cancel out that people who were wrong, were fucking wrong, and that most of them, especially the reasonable, decent sorts, still lack the decency to cop to the totality of their wrongness. Which makes their claim of decency sort of silly on its face.
::Tullycast:: 