Ask not for whom the hawks fly. They fly for Bush.

A brilliant post by Jeanne D’Arc about the staggeringly dishonest bait-and-switch being pulled by hawks who 1)strongly favor intervention in the Sudan, and 2)wish to remain hack Bush apologists. Very difficult to pull off, since Bush hasn’t intervened in Sudan and shows no sign of doing so. Even worse, Kerry–who the Brookses and Reynoldses constantly portray as a dove unable to exercise necessary force–favors the intervention. What’s the solution? As Jeanne says about the definitive Brooks column, the strategy seems to be to posit bizzaro world:

Assuming John Kerry has not taken over the presidency before being elected (and done the opposite of what he has said he believes should be done), I guess we — including Brooks — have to acknowledge that it is none other than Fearless Leader who has wimped out on stopping genocide in Darfur. One might ask why, if this issue is really important to David Brooks, he is so strongly supporting the man who has failed to act. One might also ask if Brooks has noticed that it isn’t really wimpiness, or a sudden, uncharacteristic commitment to multilateralism that has caused Bush’s failure to act, but rather the fact that we have no troops to spare.

But since Brooks seems incapable of even figuring out who the current president is, I wouldn’t expect a coherent answer.

This gets it exactly right, but there’s one more element to Brooks’s con. The blame for not intervening in the Sudan goes not to Bush, but to the UN. Now, granted, ongoing genocides are an area in which vociferous critics of the UN have a point. The UN wasn’t structured to effectively intervene in situations like Rwanda and Sudan, and it hasn’t. But so what? What’s stopping Bush from intervening if the UN won’t? Nothing. We keep hearing from people like Brooks that Kerry will delegate American foreign policy to the U.N. (this seemed to be the part of Zig-zag Zell’s fascist address to the RNC that excited people like Roger Simon the most.) There’s no evidence that Kerry would. But about Bush, there’s no longer any question. He’ll disdain international support to fight a counterproductive war, and then blame the U.N. for not intervening when he should. The worst of all worlds. And Sudan presents us with yet another opportunity to see the difference between people who want an aggressive, liberal foreign policy and people who just like George Bush.