As if we needed more evidence that The New Republic is a laughing stock, here's todays inadvertenly hilarious nonsense form John Chait, via Digby:
Or go back to the last war we fought with Iraq. Schell insisted that we could force Iraq to leave Kuwait with sanctions alone, rather than by using military force. But the years that followed that war made it clear just how impotent that tool was. Saddam Hussein endured more than a decade of sanctions rather than give up a weapons of mass destruction program that turned out to be nonexistent. If sanctions weren't enough to make him surrender his imaginary weapons, I think we can safely say they wouldn't have been enough to make him surrender a prized, oil-rich conquest.
I had to read that a few times to make sure Chat wasn't being sarcastic.
You see, Chait is one of those assholes native to the pages of TNR (Beinart, Peretz, etc).
He sees himself as a "liberal hawk," "serious" about foreign policy. Which involves, apparently, nothing more than scolding people with similar political views to his own for not cheering louldy enough when U.S. bombs fall on someone else thousands of miles away. Apparently, they make him look bad at DC cocktail parties.
And he sneers at Schell for opposing the glorious 1991 Gulf War. Which, to Chait, demonstrated that sanctions are not effective because they are so... effective.
I could go on, but why bother. Sure Chait hates Bush. So does everyone else these days. But he's still spending his ink scolding the dirty hippies for being right.
So a fat "fuck you" to John Chait. Wrong, humiliated, disgraced, intellectually feeble John Chait.
Credibility matters, you shite cunt.