Blast From the Past

Daniel Pipes and Laurie Mylroie, "Back Iraq: It's Time for a U.S. Tilt", The New Republic, April 27, 1987.

Comments

TNR was simply bloodthirsty during the 80s. As bad as Commentary. I tell you, read the things they wrote about Latin America. Simply depraved.

Someday someone at TNR should take stock of magazine's long history of disastrous warmongering--which dates back to 1917--and attempt to atone. Perhaps your friend Ackerman could do it.

Posted by Patrick | October 8, 2006 9:14 PM

kinda like DeLong walloping the National Review every now and then with their earlier support for segretation.

But actually the Pipes/Milroy is also a complaint about how much the Reaganauts screwed things up by Iran-Contra-related arms deals with the Mullahs. Something to that.

Posted by kid bitzer | October 8, 2006 9:43 PM

Yes, well Pipes is upset that the Reaganites dealt arms to Iran. That they then handed the profits off to a collection of kidnappers and murderers--well, that's fine.

Posted by Patrick | October 8, 2006 10:09 PM

The phenomenon of having people quickly do 180s on policy without any indication of the motivaton (or mea culpas) is just disturbing in general. It almost makes it seem -- perish the thought -- that they're pens-for-hire and are, in general, simply liars. Rhetoricians paid to come up with nifty rationalizations and -- perish the thought -- nifty slogans and soundbites.

The only vague thing holding their past and present together is support for killing people who get in our way. That's core values like Grandma used to make.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | October 9, 2006 9:32 AM

Someday someone at TNR should take stock of magazine's long history of disastrous warmongering--which dates back to 1917--and attempt to atone.

I do know that there was a special issue a couple of decades ago that ran through the magazine's history and they did a bit of this (though not so much of the atonement).

Here is a precis: The editors of TNR supported WWI, but they became disillusioned by the manifest bad faith of the Versailles peace accord. They were cautiously optimistic about the Bolshevik revolution. Afterwards, TNR was sympathetic to socialism, and actually endorsed the communist candidate in the 1932 election, but the magazine eventually came around to supporting FDR after he had spent some time in office. When Hitler invaded Poland and Czechoslovakia the editorial responding to the crisis urged an isolationist policy. No wonder they never want to repeat the appeasement at Munich! (I really should scan and post that beauty at some point, and it should probably be mentioned on its wiki given the sheer density of Hitler allusions in the rag.) TNR only turned toward interventionism after the editor was replaced in 1941. They wanted to avoid the Cold War altogether, and there were a few articles early on supporting the creation of a World Federation and (ironically enough) the internationalization of nuclear technology so that America and Russia would not control the course of its development. TNR was also not particularly thrilled with the Vietnam war (and neither was Commentary, at least not until the Dolchstosslegende set in).

You should probably know the rest.

Posted by Yuri Guri | October 9, 2006 2:39 PM

Laurie Mylroie: twenty years of wrong, and still going strong.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | October 10, 2006 12:43 AM