alone again, naturally

Wah! Even Mickey Kaus thinks Hillary is making a mistake by not apologizing. I don’t, as I’ve written elsewhere. [I've unbolded Kaus's emphases and bolded my own]:

P.S.: It’s not too early to say that Hillary’s performance in the opening weeks has been impressively unimpressive. It’s pretty clear in retrospect, that the war with Iraq, however it comes out, was a bad gamble. A mistake, in other words. But now that we’ve made the mistaken gamble, it also seems clear–to Mohammed at least–that the surge might do some good. The correct position, by these lights, was War No, Surge Yes.

Those lights are wrong. Hillary is being asked to say that her vote was a mistake at the time (not in retrospect). She believes her vote wasn’t a mistake at the time. Thus, she won’t apologize.

She may, however, find a workaround. Her opponents count her out at their own peril. For one thing, they forget that in the general election, candidates who are now so free and easy to say their Iraq vote was a mistake will be accused of trashing the troops, of being unfit for office because they were falling all over themselves to be the first to say that 3,000 Americans died in Iraq for a “mistake.”

Kaus continues:

It would be selfishly callous, in a stereotypically American way, for us to invade Iraq, make a mess, and then not be willing to pay any extra price to help fix the mess we’ve made. (Murtha’s demand that the troops be given “a year at home”–and the heck with what happens to Iraqis like Mohammed–only emphasizes this self-interested perspective.)

Kaus makes my point for me, if only he would take into consideration the entire ‘08 picture: that the ardent anti-war Dems are “selfishly callous.” Well, they’re beyond selfishly callous and “self-interested.” They’re the proud Not in Our Name party.

Last April, I wrote the post below. In the meantime, Bush has prosecuted a catastrophically inept war, which has morphed into something no one counted on against a global jihad movement that no one on the planet knows how to fight effectively. Yet. 

My feelings about the anti-war “case” and its most sanctimonious opponents haven’t changed one bit, however:

anti-war narcissists and their enablers

Published April 11th, 2006 in political culture

The other day, Andrew Sullivan posted a letter from a passionately anti-war correspondent, a steaming load of self-serving horseshit, that I have tried to put it behind me, to forget that I ever read, to ignore.  

But I can’t. Because it reeks. When a self-loving, self-idealizing, self-righteous, moralizing cretin like this gets a pass from someone as smart as Sullivan, it’s more than irritating.

First, Sullivan’s correspondent claims that he knew from the get-go that the war was a mistake:

I opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. It smelled. It smelled to high heaven. This was no action in response to 9/11. This was something else. Some grand design for restructuring the Middle East, for “draining the swamp”. A war of revenge against Unfinished business. Oil.

Oil. Revenge. Imperialism. Check. But it gets better:

I could have supported intervention in Iraq. Saddam was a monster. But not Bush’s intervention. If his Dad, and Powell, had put together a true global coalition, with a real commitment to pay the high price in money, manpower and years necessary to free Iraq, secure the peace and rebuild the country, yes, I could have supported it. But I knew GWB and his team would never accomplish those ends, because those ends were not his ends. His ends, and his means, speak for themselves. [emphasis mine]

George Packer has rightly referred to such anti-war critics as pacifists–they never met a war they could endorse, unless it was a hypothetical war.

The thing that sticks in my craw, however, is the degree of self-love inherent in statements like this from Sullivan’s correspondent:

had we prosecuted the action in Afganistan competently, and to the end, by securing the peace and rebuilding the country, we might have come out of the war on terror with our heads held high and with the world’s respect and even admiration….

The war in Iraq has been our tragedy…

We are still in the midst of the horror, unable to look away from the mirror….

Like the “Not in Our Name” crowd, this letter writer weeps for himself and for his country and about his shame. You see, the war is all about him.

Here’s a clue: the war in Iraq is not about how it reflects on us. It’s about defeating jihadism away from our shores. In that respect, the worse it reflects on us, the better it may be for our national security.

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I’m sure I’ll hear all about it if I’m proved wrong and David Geffen is proved right—today, Maureen Dowd quotes him as follows:

“Whoever is the nominee is going to win, so the stakes are very high,” says Mr. Geffen …,

 

I’m pretty sure I’m right, though. One of my starkest memories is going back to my office here in New York City on September 13, 2001, to find an e-mail from a Hollywood guy I was working with at the time. After receiving a polite inquiry to see how I was doing and if everyone was all right (I was grateful to be able to answer in the affirmative), I asked about him.

“I’m fine,” he wrote. “Yeah that was brutal. But you know, shit happens.”

Right. I forgot. Shit like 9/11 … happens.

Now: someone tell me that David Geffen knows what he’s talking about, or that anyone should listen to him. (I’m not saying don’t take his money—take him for all he’s worth!. Just don’t listen to him.)