Okay, I know: sniveling from Richard Cohen, like sunshine in a desert or corruption in the GOP, hardly qualifies as news. But in
his latest column in the Washington Post seeking to justify his support for the failing war in Iraq, Cohen once again displays the intellectual dishonesty, sense of aggrieved self-righteousness, and hatred of progressives that characterize the current writing of the pro-war media.
Let's take a look, shall we?
Cohen begins by lamenting the glacial pace of Saddam Hussein's criminal trial in Baghdad, noting that the lack of courtroom discipline has turned "the entire proceeding into a metaphor for the American occupation of Iraq: chaotic, endless and, worse, meaningless."
Cohen is, of course, incapable of putting together a single coherent chain of thought that does not veer off into an attack on liberals -- in this case, filmmaker Michael Moore:
For many who supported going to war in Iraq, the nature of the regime was important, even paramount. It is disappointing that this no longer gets mentioned. I suppose the handwriting was on the wall when Michael Moore failed to mention Hussein's crimes at all in his movie "Fahrenheit 9/11." Years from now, someone coming across the film could conclude that the United States picked on the Middle Eastern version of Switzerland. Now, all the weight is on one side of the moral scale.
Moore did not "fail to mention" Hussein's crimes; he instead focused on the bankruptcy of the Administration's basis for going to war with Iraq. Cohen may have wanted to go drop bombs on Iraq's cities simply because Saddam was a bad, baaaaaaad man, but that wasn't enough justification for most Americans or for the Administration: in fact, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz admitted in an interview with Vanity Fair's Sam Tannenhaus, the treatment of the Iraqi people was a matter of tertiary concern at best. The "core reason" for going to war, as the Administration pitched it, was Saddam's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Here's a newsflash, Dick: you go to war with the causus belli you have, not the one you wish you had when your original rationale is proven false. Cohen's column on the eve of war, the one in which he declared "only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman" would dispute the Administration's claims about Iraqi WMD, made exactly one passing reference to Iraq's defiance of "international norms concerning human rights." There were no crocodile tears shed for the poor put-upon people whose homes we were going to destroy, whose children we were going to kill: we were compelled to go to war, Cohen wrote, because Saddam had WMD, and therefore "There is no other hand. There is no choice."
Today, Cohen reserves his ire for those who were right about WMD: his column is intended, he says, "only to discomfort, if I can, some of the people who are so certain of their moral righteousness when it comes to the Iraq war." Like all the rest of his ilk, Cohen refuses to examine his own "righteousness," to question his uncritical embrace of the administration's false claims, to reconsider his sneering dismissal of those who thought maybe, just maybe, there was a choice other than war. Worse still, he refuses to acknowledge that, whatever may have been the lot of the Iraqi people under Saddam, their lives are pretty wretched even now, years after the fall of Baghdad.
In Cohen we see the denial of a small man whose pseudo-intellectual harrangues helped lead to tragedy. He can't admit he was wrong without trying to tar those who were right.