Harold Meyerson on George Will, Bill Kristol, and the direction of the conservative movement:
The dispute that, predictably enough, erupted yesterday in the ranks of the right over George Will’s call for U.S. disengagement from Afghanistan underscores just how marginalized Will’s traditional conservatism has become within the movement that calls itself conservative when it is actually anything but.
Will’s Washington Post column should not have come as a surprise. He was always a skeptic about George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, fearing, rightly, that once we had deposed Saddam Hussein, we would be saddled with bringing order to a country that had been held together only by tyrannical rule. Similar arguments inform his new column, though in the case of Afghanistan, nation building is even tougher than it is in Iraq, since, as Will writes, Afghanistan “has never had an effective central government.”
