Glenn Greenwald: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past

[meegbear]

Anne-Marie Slaughter -- a supporter of the Iraq invasion, a member of the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party Foreign Policy Community, and the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs -- has written an amazingly petulant and self-pitying piece at The Huffington Post that is worth looking at because its mindset is the norm for our political and media elite. Much of her post is devoted to complaining that Tom Hayden and others have unfairly distorted her 2004 observation that "the biggest problem with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far enough." As she notes, that sentence has been widely debated and I'll leave it to others to decide what she really meant by it.

I want to focus instead on her other complaint -- that the debate over Iraq is focused too much on assigning blame to those who were wrong in the past, and not focused enough on what to do now:

Hayden's post and many other commentaries surrounding the fifth anniversary of the invasion are a microcosm of the problem with our Iraq policy as a whole. The debate is still far too much about who was right and who was wrong on the initial invasion and far too little about how, in Obama's formulation, to be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. That does not mean that those of us who were wrong about Iraq -- with whatever nuances, explanations, and justifications we might care to offer -- do not have a great deal to answer for. We do. But it does mean that until we can fix the mess we are in, everyone who cares about what happens both to our troops and to the Iraqi people should force themselves to face up to the hard issues on the ground rather than indulging in the easy game of gotcha.

She goes on to warn that the desire to withdraw troops as soon as possible must be tempered by the need to "achiev(e) the most progress on the goals that the administration stated publicly as a justification for invading in the first place" -- including the extremely ambitious objectives of weakening terrorist groups, "improv(ing) the human rights of the Iraqi people"; and "establish(ing) a government in Iraq that could help stabilize and liberalize the Middle East." Waiting for those things to happen is a recipe for staying forever, which is completely unsurprising coming from someone like Slaughter who thought invading Iraq was a good idea in the first place.

And that's the point. This plea that we all just forget about the unpleasant past -- stop trying to figure out who was responsible for the Iraq War -- has become the principal self-defense weapon of the pro-war political establishment. That's their only hope for evading responsibility for what they've done. It's also the central hope on which the entire McCain campaign rests - that we should just all forget about the painfully wrong and misleading things John McCain said and did in making himself into the prime cheerleader for the most disastrous and unpopular war in American history, and focus instead on how he (somehow) has the experience and judgment to lead us to glorious Victory.

<snip>

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

[Supersedeas]

1. there is that element within the DNC and it needs to be recognized for what it is

[meegbear]

2. Does anybody check if something was posted before posting?

[laststeamtrain]

3. K & R

:hi:

[acmavm]

4. This 'war' is unwinnable. And the occupation is unsustainable.

And it's being 'financed' on invisible funds.

What an idiot. Her problem is more that they refuse to admit that they were WRONG rather than we should just forget that they were/are WRONG.

[DCKit]

5. "...a member of the hawkish wing of the Democratic..." blah, blah, blah.

Would a DINO, by any other name, be as putrid?

[Solly Mack]

6. Coward