The argument now picking up a good head of steam among commentators on the right -- and sure to last for as long as seems useful to them -- is that we on the left, broadly defined, have disgraced ourselves by essentially cheering for our own country to lose the war.
Our hatred for George W. Bush, the line goes, runs deeper than our love of country. We predicted quagmire. We mocked the notion that the Iraqi citizenry would greet U.S. soldiers as liberators. We politicized a circumstance that, involving as it does life and death and loyalty to flag, should be above politics. The Weekly Standard made great sport of throwing certain quotes back in certain faces. Washington Times columnist Mona Charen did the same. More is surely on the way.
Undoubtedly there was some rife nonsense floating around in left-wing circles. I learned in the wake of the first Gulf War that a person who has not made a life's study of military strategy -- me, say -- should not engage in the business of predicting quagmires. This time I didn't. In fact I wrote the opposite in this space a few weeks ago, when the au courant spin was that we were getting bogged down on day seven. But others did predict quagmire, and it was silly.
Moreover, there is a hard-shell left that did indeed say far worse. This approach was typified by Columbia University assistant professor Nicholas de Genova. (As the right figured out during the culture wars: Scour the academy and eventually you're bound to strike gold!) De Genova wished, during hostilities, for "a million Mogadishus," a foul sentiment that crossed the line that separates opposing policy from opposing the success of U.S. troops under arms.
But the likes of de Genova and Sean Penn aren't important to the right. They are useful as speed bags, always good for a cathartic 10-minute punch-up on the cable shows. What's important, rather, is discrediting more serious liberals, writers and politicians alike, and that is accomplished by conflating de Genova with Tom Daschle, or Penn with Paul Krugman, and advancing the argument that all liberals are birds of a kindred feather.
It's an old trick, but it has been reintroduced to the desired effect. Daschle's pre-war remarks, made infamous by repeated Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity retellings, were primarily a criticism of the administration's failed diplomacy. Who can argue that the diplomacy failed? I'd have thought this was one thing we all agreed on. (Many on the right have implicitly conceded the point by expressing barely concealed joy at its failure.) And the more serious liberal journalists were careful not to cross the de Genova line. Krugman never did. Joe Conason was rigorous about opposing the policy while cheering the fall of Saddam Hussein. Eric Alterman did doubt that U.S. soldiers would be hailed, but he copped to the mistake quickly and honestly.
If the point of such finger-wagging by the conservative contingent were merely to get some jollies by showing that some people on the other side played Cassandra -- no doubt motivated in part by their opposition to the war -- and ended up being wrong, who could begrudge that? I gleefully do the same, keeping in my head, for example, a list of pundits who predicted Bill Clinton's swift demise after the Monica Lewinsky story broke. It's the game. (And by the way, the mention of Clinton reminds me: It sure wasn't liberals who turned domestic politics into ceaseless partisan warfare.)
But having a laugh is not the point. The long-term points are more insidious, and one can't help but suspect that the right is warming its skillet for bigger fish than Susan Sarandon. Wesley Clark is thinking of joining the Democratic presidential parade. To my viewing and to that of any reasonable person, Clark was careful in his CNN commentaries to say where he disagreed with the administration's civilian command structure but not to undercut the military leaders or the soldiers. But he was on television for hours, and people who spend that much time in a TV studio don't always end up expressing themselves perfectly. It's likely that at some point he delivered an infelicitous arrangement of five or six words. We can be sure the Republican National Committee has it on tape, and that the tape will be used to try to convert an awkward phrase or perhaps a misjudgment into evidence of anti-Americanism -- on the part of a four-star general.
The right will try to discredit Clark. But it will also try to intimidate the liberal punditry into silence -- so that when Syria or Iran's number comes up, there is no debate at all.
This war was predicated on the most dramatic change in the theory of American foreign policy in the last half-century. That was well worth debating, and still is. The military part went beautifully, and thank goodness it did. But now comes the phase for which conservative ideologues might be less well prepared.
I hope this part, too, goes swimmingly. A democratic state in Mesopotamia would be a handy thing for America, and something more than handy for the Mesopotamians themselves. I won't make predictions about whether it will or won't work, but I will say that if it does succeed, it will do so only and exactly because this generation of conservatives has learned from a liberal generation that came before it.
The template was set during the domestic debate over postwar Germany. Henry Morgenthau, Harry Truman's treasury secretary, drafted a plan to "pastoralize" Germany and turn it into a feeble and agrarian society. "I don't care what happens to the German people!" Morgenthau thundered in September 1944. "I would take every German mill and factory and destroy it."
Fortunately, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, John McCloy, George Marshall and Truman himself all thought Morgenthau nuts on this question. They pressed for a strong (economically, not militarily) and democratic German state. After a transition, they stepped aside to let Konrad Adenauer -- no one's idea of a toady -- take the helm. They sought the preservation, to the extent practicable after 12 years of dictatorship and six years of mayhem, of German culture and history up to 1933. This last point should resonate especially. The unbearably sad pillaging of the Iraqi National Museum -- the administration was working with archaeologists before and during the war to protect these antiquities, and then, poof, somehow decided it wasn't worth the trouble, even with American soldiers just two blocks away, according to some reports -- suggests a low regard in our Pentagon for the constituent elements of a culture and a civil society. It was a tragedy. It should be a scandal. Let us hope it was also an aberration.
If members of the Wolfowitz Brigade succeed in Iraq, it will be because they have the model of these liberal internationalists to follow -- because, in other words, they are behaving as functional liberals, engaging in just the sort of behavior they mocked during the 2000 campaign. And it will be in part because today's liberal critics will work to make sure they keep their word to both the American and the Iraqi people. We don't need to make dire predictions about the future to know that their word hasn't always been so trustworthy. (Al-Qaeda links? Enormous stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction?) So, no; no silence from this end.
Michael Tomasky's column appears every Wednesday at TAP Online.
