Unlike some of the other reviewers of Heads in the Sand, I think Eli Lake actually makes some salient points here. Eli believes the objective of US foreign policy should be to militarily choose sides in intra-Islam disputes. The problem is, Eli's not always clear on which side -- he sort of suggests the good guys and not the evil guys, but life is more complicated than that -- and doesn't deal with the fact that our interventions have a tendency to go disastrously awry. The fact that the US wants a particular group to win does not mean that are involvement will render their triumph more likely. The parties and groups dominating the post-Saddam Iraq are inarguably more theocratic than Hussein was. But at least Eli is honest in raising his flag: If he thinks US foreign policy should be a series of endless invasions meant to destroy popular Islamic movements we dislike, well, we can have that debate, and we should talk, in particular, about the way our history of disastrous interventions, both covert and military, and our current occupation, allow radical Islamist groups to conflate and strengthen their religious agenda by mixing it with a Pan-Arab, anti-American nationalism. This, however, is the correct argument: Lake is some odd modern mixture between freedom fighter and neocolonialist, and Matt is a liberal internationalist. They should argue!Lake also touches on a criticism I've been meaning to make of Matt's book. Matt spends a fair amount of time suggesting that John Kerry -- and many Democrats -- were bedeviled by a tortured position on the Iraq War, neither quite for nor actually against. Their lack of clarity, he says, eroded public confidence in their leadership and rendered them incapable of putting forward a coherent argument. A more forthrightly anti-war position would not only have been substantively superior, but as we saw in 2006, politically superior, too. LAKE VS HITS.
Unlike some of the other reviewers of Heads in the Sand, I think Eli Lake actually makes some salient points here. Eli believes the objective of US foreign policy should be to militarily choose sides in intra-Islam disputes. The problem is, Eli's not always clear on which side -- he sort of suggests the good guys and not the evil guys, but life is more complicated than that -- and doesn't deal with the fact that our interventions have a tendency to go disastrously awry. The fact that the US wants a particular group to win does not mean that are involvement will render their triumph more likely. The parties and groups dominating the post-Saddam Iraq are inarguably more theocratic than Hussein was. But at least Eli is honest in raising his flag: If he thinks US foreign policy should be a series of endless invasions meant to destroy popular Islamic movements we dislike, well, we can have that debate, and we should talk, in particular, about the way our history of disastrous interventions, both covert and military, and our current occupation, allow radical Islamist groups to conflate and strengthen their religious agenda by mixing it with a Pan-Arab, anti-American nationalism. This, however, is the correct argument: Lake is some odd modern mixture between freedom fighter and neocolonialist, and Matt is a liberal internationalist. They should argue!Lake also touches on a criticism I've been meaning to make of Matt's book. Matt spends a fair amount of time suggesting that John Kerry -- and many Democrats -- were bedeviled by a tortured position on the Iraq War, neither quite for nor actually against. Their lack of clarity, he says, eroded public confidence in their leadership and rendered them incapable of putting forward a coherent argument. A more forthrightly anti-war position would not only have been substantively superior, but as we saw in 2006, politically superior, too. 
