Not-Really-Antiwar-Leftists

Michael Brendan Dougherty offers his thoughts on the Musings of Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias (or Rosey and Yggy, if you prefer - I'm going to start increaing my use of nicknames, I think) on liberal interventionism.

In general, I agree with Mr. Dougherty that interventionism is troublesome, and that attempts to distinguish between interventions often seem to be, to a great extent, ad hoc rationalizations in order to justify the wars started by one's own party and ot by the other guy's party.

However, I will agree with Yggy and Rosey on one thing: Bush did botch the war. Not that the war would be winnable, at least not without an entirely different model that would be anathema to Americans (more on that later), but Bush's incompetence, and failure to plan have made an already foolhardy mission even more destructive.

For example, while it is true that we did not have enough troops to send in the 500,000 that Shinseki suggested, Rumsfeld could have at least acknowledged that we were going in short-staffed and tried to plan with that in mind, instead of just assuming that we had enough troops and it wasn't going to be a problem, as James Fallows (subscription required to read entire article) indicated.

Of course, as Yggy and Rosey also point out, there was some naivete in assuming that Bush wouldn't have "screwed up as bad as he did." To me, anyway, the fact that the president was not looking at Iraq realistically was obvious back in 2002. In fact, in an article in The American Conservative's first issue Pat Buchanan predicted the insurgency that we have come up against. No one should be able to use Kerry's excuse that "I didn't think he'd **** it up this badly."

That ranks way up there with "I didn't think that 'Ernest' movie would be so stupid!" Or, "I didn't realize that Carrot Top would use that as a prop!"

Sp in short, the war was a bad idea no matter who was running it, Bush screwed it up even more, but anyone who trusted Bush and his administration to be competent cannot be held blameless, because they should have known better.

That is all.