Let's Get Serious

After Baer's article attacking me, and progressives more generally, for being inattentive to and distracted from the threat posed by Iran, I began digging through some of the liberal hawk literature on the issue, and was struck by how cowardly and evasive most of it was. There is a near-allergy to forthrightly offering solutions. After the failure of the Iraq War led to so many hawks being embarrassed by their public statements, the pose of toughness and militarism has become completely unmoored from any statements actually advocating a policy path -- the better to retain the point-scoring upside of Iraq's pre-war conversation, without the humiliation of the post-war reckoning. Over at The American Prospect today, I have an article on this trend, and a challenge to these hawks to say what they think, not merely what they think about what others think. It begins:

"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so," said John Kenneth Galbraith, "almost everyone gets busy on the proof."

Today's liberal hawks are engaged in a slightly subtler game. The Iraq war is an acknowledged catastrophe. The same group-think and bandwagon effects that once pushed them so irresistibly towards embracing the invasion is now similarly forceful in pulling them to abandon it. The question, for many, is how to finesse that flip without losing one's reputation for unparalleled foreign policy seriousness. The answer is Iran.

Read the rest.