Washed His Hands and Sealed Their Fate
By Shorter New Republic editorial board: “OK, we “regret” our support for the Iraq war, but not in ways that lead us to seriously question the underlying theoretical or empirical assumptions that led us to endorse (and stridently attack the critics of) this unmitigated fiasco.”
Longer New Republic comes from Spencer Ackerman:
Among the most annoying of TNR tropes is the flight to meta-analysis as soon as the recognition dawns that the magazine can’t win an argument. And here, it pains and saddens me to say, TNR embraces it like a security blanket. First, TNR concedes that nothing it can possibly desire is likely to occur: “The U.S. presence in Iraq will not last long. Perhaps this new political reality will serve as shock therapy, scaring Iraq’s warring factions into negotiations that can prevent the worst sectarian warfare. But perhaps not.” The “perhaps not” is an intellectual prophylactic: it changes the subject before one can ask what in the world the U.S. could tell the Sunnis and the Shiites that could make them believe that that their interests are better served by peace than by war. If TNR has any idea what it means by this, it has an obligation to say so. But — and, my friends, I can tell you, because I went to those Thursday editorial meetings for years — these people have no idea what they mean.
[…]
Please believe me when I say that this makes me want to cry, since I used to love working for TNR. But the magazine is setting itself up for making the same mistake over and over and over again. This is the emptiest of evasions — a fetishization of “seriousness” without ever actually being serious. In one of my last pieces for them, I wrote that “Faced with a disastrous war, the most important consideration is not ‘Were we wrong?’ but ‘Why were we wrong?’ and ‘How can we avoid being so wrong in the future?'” I begged TNR during my time there to address these last questions. But now it’s dawned on me that my former friends never will.
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