What I'm reading these days

For most of the afternoon I've been reading an addictive symposium from Slate, which asks the question, "How did I get Iraq wrong?" A convenient table of contents of all the contributors can be found here. Slate, along with The New Republic, are probably the best known examples of liberal publications that initially supported the Iraq War, although basically everyone at this point has changed their mind. Slate itself says the question is posited towards "liberal hawks," although Andrew Sullivan, a decidedly non-liberal sometimes hawk, is on there, and gives one of the best and most heartfelt replies. Everyone has a decidedly different take on their own foibles, from Jeffrey Goldberg ("I didn't realize how incompetent the Bush administration could be") to William Saletan ("Rather than bore you with my answer, here are lessons from the experience") to Christopher Hitchens ("I didn't"), and it's refreshing to read about journalists talk about the limits of their own understanding and experience (except for Hitchens I guess, who apparently has none).

Most importantly, though, I can now after all these years come to understand why they felt that way initially. I'll quote Jeffrey Goldberg:

This is why I find it impossible to denounce a war that led to the removal of a genocidal dictator. To borrow from Samantha Power, the phrase "never again" has in recent years come to mean "Never again will we allow the Germans to kill the Jews in the 1940s." The Holocaust proved that the world is a brutal place for small peoples, and it defines for me the nonnegotiable requirements of a moral civilization: to be absolutely intolerant of dictators who have committed documented genocides. The tragedy of this war—one of its tragedies—is that its immorally incompetent execution has, for the foreseeable future, undermined this idea. I believe, for instance, that Darfur demands our armed intervention, but we are now paralyzed because of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq occupation.

Moral absolutism on this issue isn't really possible. Too many of my friends object to the Iraq War on the grounds that war is evil and kills people, or that we are foisting our own way of life who want nothing to do with us. This is facetious arguing because a) in the case of severe human rights violations, we could and should be able to intervene to help people who otherwise would be killed, and b) a western, so-called democratic way of life is eminently preferable to situations where, say, women are stoned to death for being raped. If you can't recognize that, than you are just an ideological tool that cares more about so-called "progressive" politics than actual human beings, and you are no better than Hannity.

Anyhow, wouldn't it be great if The Weekly Standard or National Review did something like that? It would never happen. Again, that's what I'm talking about: to be an absolutist is to be an idiot. You can quote me on that.