clueless on the left

In response to drivel from Richard Cohen, Atrios whines 

One thing which has long puzzled me is why Afghanistan wasn’t enough for all the “liberal hawks” and people like Richard Cohen who wanted “therapeutic violence” (Spank them! Spank them!). The Beinarts of the world wanted a war and a grand humanitarian mission. They had one. It was Afghanistan. It was justifiable. We went and kicked some ass. And then we abandoned the grand humanitarian mission and went chasing after a shiny new war.

Why wasn’t Afghanistan enough? Why were people who tried to point out that maybe we should stick around and try to fix that country before we went and busted up another one considered to be unserious dirty fucking hippies?

What Cohen actually said in his column was:

If anything, I was encouraged in my belief [that we had to get rid of the monstrous Saddam] by the offensive opposition to the war — silly arguments about oil or empire or, at bottom, the ineradicable and perpetual rottenness of America.

On the contrary, I thought. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. The United States had the power to change things for the better, and those who would do the changing — the fighting — were, after all, volunteers.

Cohen said nothing about hippies, of course. He was criticizing the mindless anti-war brigade. Surely he must have meant the conscience-stricken perversely self-involved toxically narcissistic Not in Our Name crowd, who wrote in mid-2002.

Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression.

The signers of this statement call on the people of the U.S. to resist the policies and overall political direction that have emerged since September 11, 2001, and which pose grave dangers to the people of the world.

So back to Atrios’s question. Why were we hawks not “satisfied” with Afghanistan?

Because this was not tit-for-tat retaliation to squash a few Al Qaeda-flavored bedbugs and cockroaches. 9/11 called for destroying the vermins’ nests and killing the eggs. Which were not in Afghanistan.

The idea was that when we, as a nation, went back to our pleasures and pastimes after exterminating the worst pests, it would be with the knowledge that we have done all we could do to secure “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  

It’s that simple. And that complicated.

Deal with it.