Dear Roger Cohen

[ProSense]

Dear Roger Cohen

by tristero


Dear Roger Cohen,

I find it hard to maintain my composure when confronted by your blatantly misleading, self-serving, and malicious essay.

Neocon, for many, has become shorthand for neocon-Zionist conspiracy, whatever that may be, although probably involving some combination of plans to exploit Iraqi oil, bomb Iran and apply U.S. power to Israel’s benefit.

Beyond that, neocon has morphed into an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability and still thinks the muscular anti-totalitarian U.S. interventionism that brought down Slobodan Milosevic has a place, and still argues, like Christopher Hitchens, that ousting Saddam Hussein put the United States “on the right side of history.”

Let's stop right there. "Ousting Saddam Hussein" is not, and never was the issue. Roger, my friend, the world knows the truth: Iraq was invaded and conquered by the United States (with the help of a few British and the indispensible 4 soldiers from Palau). As a by-product of that utterly illegal, utterly immoral, and utterly stupid invasion, Saddam Hussein fled, was eventually captured, and killed. Few people mourn his death.

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No, Roger, I honestly don't think you're a neocon. I just think you're a goddammed fool.

And you're a fool who still doesn't understand that only incompetents who rose to unimaginable power, like Bush and Rumsfeld, would ever have thought the invasion of Iraq was a good idea in the first place.

<...>

And that, Roger, is the kind of liberalism that warned you and warned you and warned you that Bush/Iraq was a catastrophe. And warned you in 2002! And you wouldn't listen. And Berman wouldn't listen. And so many others, who should have known better.

And the war came. And here we are. You were dead wrong about Bush/Iraq, and you are dead wrong now about the liberals who were absolutely right. Roger, let me ask you a question:

In 2002, your hero, Kanan Makiya, once declared that the conquest of Iraq would succeed as a "triumph of hope over experience". And you still want to stand by that schmuck? Really? What kind of nut are you?

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