Avedon Carol has a really great post. So good I'm tempeted to C&P and pretend it's mine, but that would be too obvious, so I'll behave and just link and excerpt:
Looking over the last week or so of Blowback brings up something that's been bugging me for a few weeks now, which is the growing feeling that all the fears of the nay-sayers and peaceniks may be coming true. Not that it took prescience to expect Team Bush to fall down on the job of stablizing Afghanistan in any meaningful way, but such warnings were ignored earlier on and then forgotten in the triumphant glow of sheer relief that we'd gotten rid of the Taliban government at last.
There's something ironic if you compare Bush1 with Bush2 on war rhetoric versus outcomes. Poppy Bush went to war in the Gulf to drive the Iraqis back from Kuwait. Whatever else can be said about him (which is quite a lot, really), he did that. And made short work of it. He didn't get bogged down in the dreaded "quagmire", he didn't aim at the wrong country, and he didn't make a load of promises he couldn't (or wouldn't) keep.
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I feel kinda sad that all the people who've been joining the bandwagon to attack the lefties who demurred from pro-war rhetoric are probably not going to come around soon and say, "Perhaps we have been hasty...." Whether or not you agree with them, those pacifists and high-volume critics of US foreign policy are part of a necessary dialog that makes us consider our actions with prudence, and it's a mistake to marginalize them completely from the debate.
I remember reading once, perhaps in Slate, the argument that if Jesse Helms didn't exist you'd have to invent him. Someone had to take his foreign policy positions in order to force his opponents to justify theirs. While this was a bit too generous to that 'ole racist, as his obstructionist ways went too far, I did agree with the central notion.
Post 9/11, despite the Right's obsession with the "anti-War Left", which if they were not dishonest propagandists they'd have had to amit there was almost as big a counterpart on the Right, such an entity was so on the margins that Andy Sullivan had to track down its secret headquarters on a web site in the Netheralands which got at least 5-10 hits per day. Their hysterical rantings against anyone who would dare question Great Leader silenced or at the very least delegitimized the other side of the debate. As Avedon says, those people are a necessary party of the foreign policy debate, at least as necessary as 'ole Jesse is.
