Got a Right to Be Wrong
Posted on | October 8, 2007
After years of contorting themselves into ever-more-ridiculous positions, liberal hawks who supported the invasion of Iraq may be ready to admit that they were wrong. However, notes Tony Judt in his op-ed, they say that wrong is actually right.
Yes, they concede, President Bush messed up his (our) war. But even if the war was a mistake, it was a brave and good mistake and we were right to make it, just as we were right to advocate intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. (“The difference between Kosovo and Iraq isn’t between a country that wanted peace and one that didn’t,” the Slate editor and onetime war cheerleader Jacob Weisberg, now tells us. “It was a matter of better management and better luck.”) We were right to be wrong — and that’s why you should listen to us now.
In addition, they say, we have the guts to call a spade a spade — to designate Muslim suicide-bombers “Islamic Fascists” (Paul Berman) and “Islamofascists” (Christopher Hitchens) — and to denounce Iranian demagogues as would-be Hitlers. We are the heirs, according to the former New Republic editor Peter Beinart, of the anti-totalitarian struggles of World War II and the cold war, and our battle against terrorism is the defining cause of the age.
We are going to hear much more in this vein in the coming months. And there is a new twist. For all its shortcomings, the Iraq war, we are now reminded, was “justified” (Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator) by its impeccable moral credentials. It was supported — and is still — by leading European intellectuals, notably former dissidents like Adam Michnik and Vaclav Havel. They understand evil and the need for America to take a stand. So do we. Our domestic critics simply don’t “get it.” They are appeasers and defeatists.
Up is down, black is white, etc.
