Do yourself a favor and read this important new article by John Judis in The New Republic:
‘History Lesson: What Woodrow Wilson Can Teach Today’s Imperialists‘. (It’s a tribute to TNR that they give Judis a forum to argue so persuasively against the editorial line they’ve been pursuing for more than a year.) One isn’t supposed to say such things publicly. But Judis is one of the few — probably the only political writer, actually — whose opinions and analyses I presumptively assume to be correct. Perhaps a better way to put it is that when I write X and he writes Y, the ground never feels wholly solid beneath my feet. This new article looks at the Iraq venture through the prism of the earlier, aborted heyday of American imperialism. We’ve never needed Cold War liberalism as much as we need it today — to save us from the right and the left.
