This week’s New Republic has a profile of Chuck Hagel written in a regretful tone by the usually-emulable John Judis saying that Hagel has become "unmoored" by the Iraq war. It epitomizes a leading attitude among liberals: Iraq was a good idea, it was kind of botched (and maybe it will still turn out well!).
The piece is written as a psychological foray: about how the Nebraska senator idealized his own Vietnam service, till Iraq came along, and then he turned on Iraq and turned on Vietnam too. Judis is saying, Well, he had Vietnam demons he repressed, and now Iraq has set them free. TNR’s headline says it all: Hagel is "unmoored." I.e., crazy.
This attitude is typical of liberal insiders, and it must be pointed out and deplored. It is complacent, reflecting the fact that no one at TNR is at any risk to be blown up in Iraq. So they look on the Iraq War as they would a game of chess, and marvel that anyone would be upset about it. Of course they criticize it, but wanly. And so they do the opposite of damning with faint praise: they praise the war with faint damnation.
No one in the liberal elite had such a smug attitude at this point during Vietnam. A lot of us were "unmoored" then and for good reason; we were witnesses to a horror, unleashed by our government. Again we’ve unleashed a horror, this time in the Middle East, and the acceptable attitude among liberal public intellectuals is, "Boy, what a mess." But they actually think it was a good idea, or an O.K. idea. Or they secretly think it was great that we gave it to the Arabs like that.When the whole idea was nuts.
Judis takes Hagel to task for not behaving like a politician, i.e., for not doing the shrewd thing, instead responding morally to Iraq. Oh my god, let us use the lens of the 60s again. Did we honor politicians then, when we were crying out against that war? Hell no. We honored people who responded for whatever reason in a moral manner to an atrocity, with the hope that they could limit the bloodshed. We need more Hagels now…
