The “liberal hawks” who plumped for war with Iraq are now deserting the president in droves. Andrew Sullivan, Paul Bermam, et al. have endorsed Kerry rather than the man who acted on their vision. Is this just fair-weather hawkery or something worse? Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh says:
These days, none of those luminaries can summon a kind word for the president who acted in accord with their own arguments. Ignatieff dismisses the humanitarian intervention as a “fantasy.” Sullivan has in recent days seized on the nebulous circumstances surrounding the disappearance of explosives at Al Qaqaa as evidence that Bush failed to keep order in postwar Iraq. Jarvis tells Reason, “though I think the execution of the war itself was good—Rumsfeld is really smart—the aftermath has been really f[*]cked up.” Friedman declares, “Iraq is a terrible mess because of the criminal incompetence of the Bush national security team, and we are more alone in the world than ever.” Zakaria calls the president “strangely out of touch,” unaware that his “attitude” is responsible for the problems of postwar Iraq. Pollack condemns “the reckless, and often foolish, manner in which this administration has waged the war and the reconstruction.” For Kaplan, the only question is whether the Bush administration is “reckless or clueless.” Berman is now relieved to recall that even while championing the invasion he was cautioning against the president’s “rhetoric, ignorance, and Hobbesian brutishness,” and declaring himself “‘terrified’ at the dangers [Bush] was courting.” Even Hitchens, while standing by Bush’s side (temporarily, as it turned out), criticized the administration’s “near-impeachable irresponsibility in the matter of postwar planning in Iraq.”
This is a neat arrangement of responsibility by the liberal hawks: All the blame falls on the president, none on themselves. Bush’s former supporters channel what is now the overwhelming conventional wisdom that the administration (in the person of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld) failed to provide a large enough force to run the country adequately. Leave aside the question about just how large a force would be adequate, given that even under the current deployment the armed services are strained to meet their commitments and relying on callups of the Individual Ready Reserve to fill manpower gaps. Ignore for a moment how 300,000, or 500,000, or a million, non-Arabic-speaking troops would prevent, for example, an insider from helping massacre 50 Iraqi police recruits. Under any conditions, the liberal hawks’ brand of armchair generalship is stunningly glib.
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A Thinking Reed 
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