I started frequenting DKos about 20 years ago, motivated primarily by vehement opposition to Bush and Cheney’s Excellent Adventure in Iraq. As many of you could appreciate, it was enormously comforting to find a community that was so reliably opposed to the Iraq War.
At about the same time, I was reading Anne Applebaum’s views on the Iraq War. She was squarely in the neocon camp, right there with Bush/Cheney/Bolton/Kristol.
I’ll resist the temptation to do a deep dive on her long foreign policy record. You can google it. I will concede that she is perhaps a less cynical neocon than, say, Dick Cheney. But she is a neocon nonetheless. She’s not always wrong, as Jon Heer noted:
“I bring up Iraq in part because if Applebaum is going to write a book about the sins of her former friends, it’s also worth noting the sins of the friends she still has. According to the acknowledgments for Twilight of Democracy, these friends include David Frum, the author of George W. Bush’s 2002 “axis of evil” speech; Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor in chief who commissioned the essay on which her book is based and who also reported for The New Yorker in 2002 about the since-discredited connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; and Leon Wieseltier, who championed the Iraq War and who fell from grace in 2017 after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment during his long tenure as literary editor of The New Republic.”
I’ll try to be concise. I find the support for Ms. Applebaum’s views on the Ukraine war a little disturbing. She plainly want’s to ramp up the West’s commitment to the war, with the objective of taking down Putin’s perverted regime.
I am staunchly committed to the West’s response to Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. Putin crossed The Big Red Line — violating the borders of a sovereign nation; in the case of Ukraine, a sovereign nation the sovereignty of which was recognized by Putin’s own country in 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved.
I believe President Biden has done a fine job in marshaling Western/NATO support for Ukraine. This isn’t a phony coalition, like Bush’s bullshit “Coalition of the Willing”. It’s real, it’s holding, and is prepared, in my opinion, to defend Ukraine for as long as it takes.
Applebaum, however, wants more. She wants regime change. Remember that term, “regime change?” It came into vogue in the lead up to the Iraq War. It’s a euphemism for “let’s invade another sovereign country because its leader is a bad guy.”
Yes, absolutely, Putin is a bad guy. So was Saddam. I’d love to see Putin disappear, just as I would have loved to see Saddam disappear. Just as any liberal would love to see an authoritarian dictator disappear. But this perfectly laudable impulse of the left was cruelly exploited by Bush/Cheney in 2002 and 2003, and many Democratic and liberal leaders cynically signed on to Bush/Cheney’s war.
One of those leaders was Joe Biden. He’s susceptible to the blandishments of the Applebaums in the foreign policy community. Frankly, his foreign policy record as Senator — from the perspective of many liberals — kinda sucked. But, like a lot of other things, he’s found his stride as President. From his economic policies, to his efforts to rebuild Union support for Democrats, to his leadership of the West in the Ukraine war, his presidency has to date been an enormous success.
And, most importantly, he’s our last line of defense against Trump. And that means the last line of defense of our Republic. So I’m rooting for Joe like I’ve never rooted for a President before.
I’ll be clear about my motivations. It is the domestic threat of Trump that I fear most. And I fear that if Biden were to follow Anne Applebaum’s advice he would be making a tragic error. He would lose support on the left, give credence to the radical right’s “Forever War” thesis, and gain virtually no support from the radical rightwing, which will reflexively oppose ANYTHING Biden does. In short, he’ll be doing Trump a huge favor.
We — and I mean we here at DKos — have to be on guard against the efforts of people like Anne Applebaum to draw the U.S. further into a direct confrontation with Putin. We must be skeptical of any argument that fundamentally comes down to “let’s pursue regime change.” If we aren’t skeptical, if we aren’t advocating caution, if we don’t remember the lessons of the Iraq War fraud, then no one will. Certainly not our pathetic mainstream media.
Obviously, I don’t think Anne Applebaum has earned any of the respect she apparently has among certain DKos commenters and diarists. I’ll be frank: I think anyone who backed the Iraq War is suspect. And that includes Joe Biden. And that’s why I think it’s so important that The Left — that we — make sure the President understands that defense of Ukraine is imperative, but that regime change in Russia - that direct confrontation with Russia — is OUR POLICY RED LINE.
