A quick note on some game-playing on Andrew Sullivan’s site on the Drudge/Clark business.
I don’t want to get into all the particulars. But two points stand out to me.
One is that Sullivan doesn’t seem bothered by the fact that Drudge not only took the quotes out of context but actually reordered them to change their meaning. Why no concern over that? That seems like a problem.
Then he goes on to tendentiously misconstrue most everything Clark said. His final judgment is that Clark’s stance was basically identical to Bush’s but that at the key moment he wimped out and got cold feet about the war. He also tosses in the self-justifying canard that the whole issue was one of getting the permission of France.
I’ll leave it to you to read the testimony or not read it and make your own judgments about what Clark says. My read is that it’s pretty clear that Sullivan’s readings in several cases are just tendentious misconstruals.
But this really isn’t about Clark, who can stand or fall on his own. (Like any candidate he has inconsistencies in his positions over time — just not the extreme, cartoonish ones that certain operatives keep trying to push.) This is about a bigger question, a more fundamental debate.
To Sullivan and those who share his view, if you believed that Iraq remained a serious and unresolved security question for the United States which had to be confronted, and you didn’t support the war that the president chose to fight, that means that you had a failure of nerve (add in here, of course, the standard Munich references.)
But that’s only true if you had an extremely myopic view of the Iraq question and believed that quite literally everything had to give way before it.
That was always a foolish read of the situation, and for some it was a dishonest one too.
For my part, the fundamental issue and the issue of urgency was finding out the status of Iraq’s WMD programs. Once we’d done that (and we’d largely done that before we went to war, particularly on the nuclear arms front) the question became one of much less urgency — one which we had to balance against a series of other priorities.
What priorities? Al Qaida, for one — which the Iraq adventure set back. More importantly, I think, was creating an international order in which American power is durable and enduring.
As Fareed Zakaria (another weak-willed peacenik) wrote about a year ago, in the process of solving the Iraq problem the administration created an America problem. As he wrote …
[T]he administration is wrong if it believes that a successful war will make the world snap out of a deep and widening mistrust and resentment of American foreign policy. A war with Iraq, even if successful, might solve the Iraq problem. It doesnât solve the America problem. What worries people around the world above all else is living in a world shaped and dominated by one countryâthe United States. And they have come to be deeply suspicious and fearful of us.
I think it’s pretty clear now that we haven’t solved the Iraq problem — or perhaps we got rid of one Iraq problem and created another. But even if we had solved it, I think the bargain that Zakaria sketches out was a bad one, especially after it’d become quite clear that the threat from Iraq was minimal.
These are complex questions, ones not easily reasoned through by the standard nah-nah-nah. But there are some folks who can’t get over their 1939-envy, their hunger for the Orwell moment. But this wasn’t one of them. It never was. And the failure to understand that — whether by deception or myopia or an honest mistake or the simple need for drama that is the curse of intellectuals — has done us real harm.
