Friday, October 13, 2006

Seriously

Yglesias writes:

When PNAC Democrats like Peter Beinart, Ivo Daalder, Michele Flournoy, Will Marshall, Michael O'Hanlon, and James Steinberg do something like sign PNAC's letter on the need for more American ground forces they serve to further cement the notion that people like Frank Gaffney, Bill Kristol, Cliff May, Daniel McKivegan, Danielle Pletka, and Gary Schmitt should be taken seriously as authorities on national security policy. Well, they shouldn't be taken seriously. And nobody serious about improving America's national security should be publicly collaborating with them.



I won't presume to speak for his list of PNAC Democrats individually, but I think we must acknowledge that many of such people have in fact for years considered the neoconservatives to be credible people "who should be taken seriously as authorities on national security policy." Certainly more seriously than, say, dirty hippies like myself who had the temerity to oppose the stupidest fucking foreign policy decision in the history of the universe. It's naive to assume that the Iraq war was somehow their come to Jesus moment and that they've now rethought their worldview entirely. They sign letters with people like May and Pletka because they quite frequently agree with them.

As Lind reminded us
, Daalder once wrote, "the real debate [in America] is not whether to have an empire, but what kind." The foreign policy establishment in Washington is deeply misguided and deeply rotten. It's very bad.