Hullabaloo on the Partisan War

TNR, only available by subscription, had a very interesting article by Peter Beinert. Now Peter as an editor of the New Republic converted a liberal political magazine into a mouth organ of the neoconservative movement - that the United States had a mission to rule the world for the good of the world and to spread democracy. He also even opposed listening to the military generals in the Pentagon as "over and over during the '90s, the generals with firsthand battlefield experience guessed wrong--and the civilians without it guessed right--about what would happen when the United States went to war."

Well, now Peter admits he was wrong, but only wrong to trust Republicans. Hullabaloo blogs him writing: This was a partisan war. By partisan, I don't mean that it was led by Republicans. It was partisan in the sense that the people who formulated it prized group loyalty above all else. They divided the world, the country, and even their own administration into people who could be trusted and people who could not. And, unfortunately, the people who could be trusted knew much less about how to build democracy in Iraq than the people who could not. ... For conservatives, the right lesson of Iraq is that, if you apply a loyalty test to this country's best sources of knowledge--the academy, the press, and the government itself--you'll lose the war on terrorism through sheer ignorance. For liberals, the lesson is to see conservatives as they are, not as you'd like them to be. I'll try to remember it next time.

Digby of Hullabaloo adds his own thoughts: The modern GOP lives in a little world of its own, made even more parochial by the advent of its own media infrastructure. The people who are in charge are second rate thinkers who rose to the top because the pool was so small to begin with.

In America today, there is no such thing as bipartisanship. It didn't have to be this way, but it is. The Democrats compromised with the other side until they came this close to selling their souls and got nothing but the boot on the neck in return. They can go no further.

el - I would prefer all the neoconservatives were in the GOP camp instead of polluting the Democratic Party. The Pax Americana doctrine was fundamentally, morally, strategically, and historically wrong.