I’m told that last year in a panel at Columbia Journalism School, a writer for The New Yorker said that only one member of the magazine’s staff who dealt with foreign policy opposed the Iraq war. Wow. Why did this leading magazine that told people how to think about Vietnam flub this one so bad?
There is no introspective spirit in this New Yorker piece by George Packer about why we went to war with Iraq. Apparently, Peter Beinart and Packer himself did so because of Republicans, and a spirit that fairies implanted in the American establishment:
Reagan’s rhetorical call for an end to the Soviet Empire prompted second-generation neoconservatives, such as Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Elliott Abrams, to imagine that democracy could be delivered to the whole world by F-22s…
President George H. W. Bush’s invasion of Panama, in December of 1989, now seems hardly more consequential than Reagan’s splendid little war in Grenada. But, as Beinart reminds us, Panama became a dress rehearsal for the ideological battle over Iraq, and a key transition from the hubris of toughness to the hubris of dominance.
