So,
Lawrence Kaplan is over at TNR
lambasting Tim Robbins' new anti-neo-con play. To be fair, the play sounds ridiculous, but it looks like Lawrence Kaplan should be spending more time cleaning up his own house before he pushes his way into ours. Here's Kaplan:
Indeed, when it comes to peddling the noble lie, no one outdoes Robbins himself. About Embedded, Robbins has this to say: "I'm not interested in any polemic. I'm not interested in any lecture." But Embedded is all polemic--a talking political pamphlet that doesn't even aspire to be aesthetic. If it's true that all art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art, then Robbins has produced a masterpiece of artless propaganda.
Unfortunately for Kaplan and his friends, their pernicious influence on American foreign policy is becoming obviouser and obviouser. The new article in Salon is quite something:
From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
and then, as if on cue for Robbins:
While this commandeering of a narrow segment of both intelligence production and American foreign policy matched closely with the well-published desires of the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, many of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and liberals alike, felt that this agenda, whatever its flaws or merits, had never been openly presented to the American people. Instead, the public story line was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take Congress and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on false pretenses, and a war one year later Americans do not really understand.
Democracy in Iraq, say the neo-cons. I say "clean up your own house."