SILENCE=BETRAYAL?
But I was surrounded in Washington by confident, successful young men who argued for military intervention in Iraq, while most of those who opposed it were of the older generation, or culturally so far to the left of me that I was uncertain whether their politics were somthing I should take seriously. If you
On the one hand: Jon Chait, Peter Beinart, Richard Just. Being pro-war was almost a form of generational rebellion against the boomers who we’d long felt.
The first anti-war protest I ever attended was a pro-war one, demanding U.S. intervention, in 1992, on behald of the women of Bosnia, against whom rape was being used as a weapon of war and ethnic cleansing. (I had been invited to anti-war protests during the Gulf War in 1991, but I did not attend them. Protesting against wars seemed so retro — a kind of repetition compulsion by the post-Vietnam generation, seeking the glory days of their youthful activism.) I wanted the U.S. to intervene in Rwanda and considered it a mark of national dishonor that we failed to act. I supported the U.S. air campaign in Kosovo wholeheartedly. I never thought about Al Qaeda, though my friends who lived across the street from the World Trade Center had had a kitchen window blown out in the 1993 bombing, and though the terrorists had contributed to the tight building security I experienced when I visited my father in the North Tower, where he had an artist’s studio, in 2000-2001.
After 9/11, .
But unlike some of my peers, I actually think I have a reasonably good track record . I was one of the first reporters to write about the rise of Howard Dean and the blogs. I predicted the Edwards surge and Dean crash in Iowa.
