Sunday, August 22, 2004

Touchy

So, following a few trackbacks I see I've offended some tender sensibilities. It all begins with this post where I highlighted Tim Noah's comment:

What this man was saying was that it was better to have been wrong about Iraq than to have been right. That's the prevailing (though not always conscious) consensus in Washington, and it's completely insane.

and added:

And, basically, this is because a bunch of liberal-to-moderate hawks considered support for the Iraq war to be a testosterone test - whether or not you had the cojones to kill a few people and send someone else's kids off to war for the good old USA.


To which ogged responds:


Ok, fuck Atrios already. He's been relentless in hounding liberals who supported the war, and some gloating is fine, but enough's enough.

This has nothing to do with "gloating." This is about a phenomenon that existed during the run-up to the war and, as Tim Noah points out, insanely still exists today. Anti-war voices were entirely marginalized by the mainstream media, the Bush War Marketing Team, and, yes, liberal hawks - at least the ones who had any kind of platform. The attitude of many prominent liberal hawks was that anti-war people were just knee-jerk pacifists whose opinions should be discounted, and many of those people, as Tim Noah points out, still feel that way today. Was that the attitude of all people who supported the war? Of course not, and I never made that claim. But Noah's point, was that amazingly the people (again, not ogged, but the liberalforeignpolicyestablishmentinWashingtonandthemedia), who were those liberal hawks who supported the war still find support for the war, however wrong it was, as one's entrance key to the debating room.

Likewise, Jack O'Toole responds:

Does Dr. Black really believe for a moment that people like me -- people who've spent our lives fighting for the same progressive ideals that he holds dear -- could possibly think that way? Or is he just so damned angry about the whole situation that he's completely lost his sense of perspective? I honestly don't know. But I do know this: When demagogues like Andrew Sullivan challenge the motives (i.e., the patriotism) of the liberal wing of the Democratic party, I stand shoulder to shoulder with my friends. And I'm not about to stop just because one those friends appears to have (temporarily, one hopes) lost his way.


Again, I was responding to a specific article by Tim Noah about the fact that the very people who excluded and marginalized anti-war people from the beginning are continuing to do so, and that the consensus in Washington is "it was better to have been wrong about Iraq than to have been right," and I offered my assessment of why that is. If ogged and O'Toole lump themselves in the category of people who believe that even if the Iraq war was wrong, that somehow their support for it demonstrates that their judgment is more sound than those who opposed it, then, yes, I suspect there's something to my suggested reason.

As for being angry? Well, yes, I'm angry. No matter what war one imagined was going to be fought, whether it was "Ogged's war" or "Tom's war" or "Jack's war," this was the Bush administration's war. They cynically used it it as a political ploy for election 2002. They went after everyone who opposed it. They still sell "Freedom Fries" in the House cafeteria. Their lies for justifying the war were dissolving in realtime, even as they came up with more. Yes, I am angry that otherwise intelligent people climbed aboard this twisted and nakedly cynical endeavor which was clearly a fraud from start to finish. But, no, I don't question the motives of all who did - just the ones who believe that by being wrong they were proven right.