For anyone who fell for wannabe president Hillary Clinton's claim last week that she did not vote for pre-emptive war in Iraq, and thus she is really more of a peacenick than a villainous hawk, American journalist Matthew Yglesias was on hand to provide a "history lesson"�He then goes on to discuss pieces written in 2002 and 2003 for TAP by Richard Just, Adam Kushner, Brendan Nyhan, and Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay that took various liberal interventionist positions on Iraq specifically and post-9/11 foreign policy more generally. O'Neill says "it is a little bit rich of Yglesias to accuse Clinton of revisionism without revisiting his own magazine's approach to Iraq during those critical, life-and-death debates in 2002 and 2003." Two points in response, one petty one about TAP and one more broad one:However, Hillary isn't the only one suffering from what we might call liberal amnesia, conveniently forgetting that she supported a war that has left Iraq a bloody and barbaric mess. Other liberals also gave the green light to the invasion and now seem to be suffering from a similar bump-on-the-head forgetfulness. Consider Yglesias's own magazine, American Prospect.
The thing about Hillary Clinton is that she's a single human being. It makes sense to ask a person to account for what they themselves believed or did in the past. The thing about a magazine's content is that it is written by many different human beings over different periods of time. The Prospect is a liberal political magazine, but that encompasses a range of opinions on subjects and we've aired plenty of different voices and views over the years on all sorts of things. The articles O'Neill cites are all freely accessible on our archives, as is all of our past content -- it's hard to say what "accounting" is owed here, just as it's hard to know what he means by "amnesia." Matt, for one, has always been upfront about being an initial supporter of the war who now thinks he was wrong, and the magazine has published plenty on the subject of reconceiving and/or clarifying liberal foreign policy doctrine in light of the Iraq debacle. (Ooh, here's an example!) That's precisely what critics of Hillary Clinton's new claims about her own 2003-era position are saying the senator is failing to do. (Also, for clarification's sake, TAP hasn't been a "liberal bi-weekly" since January 2003.)
The broader point is a simple one. O'Neill never actually says that he thinks most American liberals or American liberal intellectuals initially supported the war, and I won't ascribe that claim to him. But it's important to stress that such a notion really is wrong: I love as much as the next guy to bash liberal hawks and the "strategic class" and agree that they have disproportional influence in progressive circles, but the expressed majority line at TAP was always against the war, as was the line at every left-of-center publication except TNR, as it was with most liberal writers and pundits, as it was with the majority of the combined House and Senate Democratic caucuses, etc. As Richard wrote in the column O'Neill cites, "We now find ourselves about to go to war with Iraq, and most liberals have lined up against such an invasion." That was true!
--Sam Rosenfeld
