I don't know if anyone will care, I don't know if anyone will buy it, but Peter Beinart has a column up at TNR.com right now explaining his support for the Iraq War. It's honest, too, or at least strikes me as so, and doesn't seem particularly interested in making excuses. It sounds like one of the biggest liberal proponents of the Iraq War has learned a few lessons.
More on the flip...
Beinart starts by explaining why he was in favor of the war in the first place; he "fell in love" with the idea of a United States that rights the world's wrongs. He also acknowledges why doing so was so costless for him.
I was willing to gamble, too--partly, I suppose, because, in the era of the allvolunteer military, I wasn't gambling with my own life . And partly because I didn't think I was gambling many of my countrymen's. I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought. It's a truism that American intellectuals have long been seduced by revolution. In the 1930s, some grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, some felt the same way about Cuba. In the 1990s, I grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the United States.
There it is, the epitome of the liberal "chickenhawk", basically admitting to everything that's been said about him for the past 4 years. The faith in the ability to bring freedom by force, the inability to realize that the War would have consequences for so many because it wouldn't have any consequences for him, outside of his reputation. He wanted to remake Iraq, and he succeeded, but in the most disastrous way possible. More than 3,000 Americans have died, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have lost their lives, and Iraq has been made into what the U.S. feared it was in 2001; a haven for terrorists and extremism. So what has Beinart learned?
We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war. That's why a liberal international order, like a liberal domestic one, restrains the use of force--because it assumes that no nation is governed by angels, including our own. And it's why liberals must be anti-utopian, because the United States cannot be a benign power and a messianic one at the same time. That's not to say the United States can never intervene to stop aggression or genocide. It's not even to say that we can't, in favorable circumstances and with enormous effort, help build democracy once we're there. But it does mean that, when our fellow democracies largely oppose a war--as they did in Vietnam and Iraq--because they think we're deluding ourselves about either our capacities or our motives, they're probably right.
He's right, of course. And it's good that he seems to have sincerely learned those lessons, but does it matter? It doesn't change what's going on in Iraq. No matter how good his motives were, not matter how sincere his regret is now, the consequences are what they are, and I don't know how to feel about his article.
Beinart sounds like the only person he could possibly be at this point in time; a man struggling to come to grips with what he helped bring about. I just don't know if that's enough.