Did Paul Berman Oppose the War?

Spencer Ackerman catches Paul Berman trying to convince us that he was against the war in Iraq. Berman, in this incident, tries to chalk up the fact that many people think he supported the war to the fact "that afterward I haven't made a career of running around saying I told you so." Did he tell us so? The answer is that no, he didn't. Indeed, he's been telling us he told us so while simultaneously bragging that he hasn't been telling us so since at least November 2007.

But the record is clear -- Berman didn't tell us so. He supported the war. He offered some caveats, yes, but they were caveats to his argument in favor of the war. Not only that, but as I showed in my earlier post on this subject, Berman was happy to be counted as a war supporter back in 2004 when he still thought that put him on the right side of history.

Comments

To me this falls under the category of "People Whose Minor Dissents From The Exact Approach of the Chief And His Most Enthusiastic Lackeys Thinks This Makes Them Dissenters".

Posted by El Cid | April 1, 2008 10:28 AM

So Paul Berman and Joe Klein are alike? Who knew?!?!

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | April 1, 2008 10:30 AM

So Paul Berman, neocon in drag, is an unscrupulous and opportunistic fraud? That is news.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | April 1, 2008 10:35 AM

Dude was for the war. I read his book.

Posted by southpaw | April 1, 2008 10:44 AM

I watched that Bloggingheads episode last night and still can't get over how frighteningly strange and bizarre Paul Berman comes across on the web video. Aside from his dissembling on support for the war, his general inability to respond to any of Heather Hurlburt's simple questions with succinct answers made him seem really untrustworthy. He kept going off on ludicrous tangents and even found a way to criticize Heather for not paying more attention to the fact that Saddam Hussein wrote a ridiculous novel in the weeks prior to the invasion. I kept wanting to scream "Who gives a shit! The boys are dying on us. Right now!" But he's a Serious Person who's much respected by other Serious People like George Packer et al., so nothing else matters.

Posted by fnook | April 1, 2008 10:44 AM

Is Paul Berman anything other than a creation of Charlie Rose's attempt to get "balance" on his program by airing a variety of neo-cons?

Posted by Martin | April 1, 2008 10:53 AM

Want to understand the ever-conflicted Berman? Read Suzy Hansen's interview with Berman, which she aptly titled "Bush was an Idiot but he was right about Saddam":

http://dir.salon.com/story/books/int/2003/03/22/berman/index.html

Posted by AKBY | April 1, 2008 11:06 AM

Oh yeah, there's also his A Friendly Drink in a Time of War, about how the left's non-support of the Iraq war is a "tragedy:"

A tragedy for the American soldiers, the British, the Poles and every one else who has gone to Iraq lately, the nongovernmental organization volunteers and the occupying forces from abroad, who have to struggle on bitterly against the worst kind of nihilists, and have been getting damn little support or even moral solidarity from people who describe themselves as antifascists in the world's richest and fattest neighborhoods.

"What a tragedy for the left-the worldwide left, this left of ours which, in failing to play much of a role in the antifascism of our own era, is right now committing a gigantic historic error. Not for the first time, my friend! And yet, if the left all over the world took up this particular struggle as its own, the whole nature of events in Iraq and throughout the region could be influenced in a very useful way, and Bush's many blunders could be rectified, and the struggle could be advanced."

And if that wasn't strident enough . . .

My friend said, "I'm for the UN and international law, and I think you've become a traitor to the left. A neocon!" I said, "I'm for overthrowing tyrants, and since when did overthrowing fascism become treason to the left?" "But isn't George Bush himself a fascist, more or less? I mean-admit it!"

My own eyes widened. "You haven't the foggiest idea what fascism is," I said. "I always figured that a keen awareness of extreme oppression was the deepest trait of a left-wing heart. Mass graves, three hundred thousand missing Iraqis, a population crushed by thirty-five years of Baathist boots stomping on their faces-that is what fascism means! And you think that a few corrupt insider contracts with Bush's cronies at Halliburton and a bit of retrograde Bible-thumping and Bush's ridiculous tax cuts and his bonanzas for the super-rich are indistinguishable from that?-indistinguishable from fascism? From a politics of slaughter? Leftism is supposed to be a reality principle. Leftism is supposed to embody an ability to take in the big picture. The traitor to the left is you, my friend . . ."

Posted by southpaw | April 1, 2008 11:06 AM

Lesson to dictators: Shave the stache.

Posted by LGM | April 1, 2008 11:16 AM

Berman's whole shtick is wholly unoriginal and tiresome. For god's sake, Glucksmann and BHL have pushed the same buttons 30 years ago, at least they had some intellectual panache. It's high time for these vain, aging 68ers to shut up and retire - I'm sick of them, all of them.

Posted by novakant | April 1, 2008 11:17 AM

Sure, I planned the robbery. And sure, I brought guns in case we needed them. And sure, I was even the one who pulled the trigger when everything went haywire, but...I wasn't the one who made things go haywire. That was my buddy Paul, who I brought into the plan.

So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it's obvious I'm completely innocent of all charges, including robbery and murder. After all, I had warned Paul to follow the plan; he's the one who went crazy, which he has a history of doing. But I had warned him several times against doing what he did, so this just isn't my fault.

Posted by Doctor Biobrain | April 1, 2008 11:24 AM

Hey Paul:

Shut the fuck up.

Posted by The Fool | April 1, 2008 11:24 AM

"A traitor to the left"?!? Does anyone really talk that way?

This guy is the Homer Simpson of punditry.

Homer: Strike three, Marge! I remember that meeting and I have a photographic memory.

Ugh. Just disgusting. Someone put this guy back in his cage, and keep him far, far away from grown-up discussions about policy.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | April 1, 2008 11:25 AM

The blood is all over Berman's paws.

Posted by Crystal Stair | April 1, 2008 11:31 AM

Proposed shorthand: Berman to Tuzla!

Posted by elle loco | April 1, 2008 11:33 AM

Matt is right about Berman. But it's also true that when you read a lot of the prewar writings of foreign policy thinkers, public intellectuals, columnists and essayists, you discover this remarkable fact: It turns out that there are a whole bunch of purportedly well-informed and well-educated people who didn't take any clear position at all on the most important foreign policy decision of our generation. They offered endless analytical synopses, wrung their hands nobly, anguished impressively, hemmed and hawed, articulated magnificent principles, delved deeply into the nuances of the nuances of the nuances - but then discreetly punted. They artfully positioned themselves so as to evolve gracefully into whatever dominant outlook emerged in the postwar environment, depending on how things went, and offered just enough argumentation in favor of each position so as to be able to plausibly pass themselves off later as an early defender of whichever position turned out to be the most popular, and as a "critic" of the unpopular position.

The foreign policy establishment is still dominated by compulsive centrists whose entire career seems based on a highly cultivated talent for not pissing anybody off, for talking impressively without saying anything, and for being everybody's friend. (See the 2002 O'Hanlon for some exemplary lessons in this art form.)

Posted by Dan Kervick | April 1, 2008 11:40 AM

As Matt notes, Berman wanted us to go to war, but he wanted us to do it in a warm and cuddly manner.

Berman's article, "Resolved: What Lincoln knew about war," in the March 3, 2003 New Republic, said the following:

"The United States has come under military attack, requiring military responses. . . .
"[M]ilitary feats cannot be avoided. . . .
"[W]e find ourselves in the midst of a Lincolnian war, a war for the liberation of others, yet led by people with Hobbesian instincts . . . .
"Our military is armed to the teeth, which turns out to be a good thing. (I admit it.) But our government has for some reason disarmed itself unilaterally in the realms of persuasion, inspirational example, philosophical clarity, and moral leadership. . . ."

Basically, Berman wanted war augmented by propaganda by liberal hawks like himself.

Posted by LMA | April 1, 2008 11:52 AM

I'm sorry, but this post does nothing to refute Paul Berman's central argument. Namely, that the ostensible justification for war -- the claim that Iraq had WMD -- was advanced in place of the stronger, more central argument -- that fascist, totalitarian dictatorships should not be tolerated.

Berman said in the interview that he "was in favor of getting rid of Saddam but Bush's way of going about it was quite bad." It's the same thing that he said in 2003, and he's saying it now.

Why is it so unacceptable that someone who agree with the ends of the Bush administration, i.e., the removal of Saddam, and at the same time disagreement as to the means and the justification? The problem here is not any inconsistency on Beman's part. The problem is your oversimplified definition of what it means to be "pro-war."

Posted by Andrew | April 1, 2008 11:54 AM

Why is it so unacceptable that someone who agree with the ends of the Bush administration, i.e., the removal of Saddam, and at the same time disagreement as to the means and the justification? The problem here is not any inconsistency on Beman's part. The problem is your oversimplified definition of what it means to be "pro-war."

"Why is it so unacceptable that someone agrees with the ends of the Hitler administration, i.e., the removal of Stalin and destruction of Bolshevism, and at the same time disagrees as to the means and the justification? The problem here is not any inconsistency on the part of those who supported the invasion of the Soviet Union. The problem is your oversimplified definition of what it means to be pro-war."

Posted by timmah | April 1, 2008 12:06 PM

I ask Berman the same question I would ask the Friedmans and Joe Kleins of he world - you have made lots and lots of money spouting your pro-war wankery. Have you given any to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi families whose relatives you helped kill and whose lives you've destroyed?

No - didn't think so.

Posted by blogenfreude | April 1, 2008 12:07 PM

Dude, didn't MY support this war, too! I mean it’s one thing to entirely disassociate oneself with previously hawkish advocacy for a war you now to believe to be both waged for the wrong reasons and executed criminally incompetently, acknowledging it along the way, even appending it to your now reconstructed, conventionally unsurprising, sentiments, but acknowledging it still. It’s an entirely different thing to not, while at the same time offering all of these conventionally unsurprising sentiments that aren’t that rhetorically persuasive.

Berman clearly isn’t a performative intellectual, and does a disservice to himself and his intellectual positions (if they still obtain) when he lectures people about what exactly they should be reading or should have read. He’s an intellectual historian who may be overstating ideological similarities for his own doctrinal consistency.

People are now less willing to hear him out than they obviously were four years ago, which is nothing but a change in the landscape of political feasibilities. But he’s still talking about his positions, rightly or wrongly.

Posted by Ron Mashate | April 1, 2008 12:09 PM

The problem is your oversimplified definition of what it means to be "pro-war."

Wrong verb tense. "Meant", it should be. Because in 2003 there was one, and only one, war on offer. George Bush's war. It was not war a la carte.

Why is it so unacceptable that someone who agree with the ends of the Bush administration, i.e., the removal of Saddam, and at the same time disagreement as to the means and the justification?

It wasn't per se "unacceptable" to support some parts and oppose other parts if you were willing to see the Iraq War as a purely hypothetical, fantasy enterprise. Anything is "acceptable" in thought experiments. But it was deeply *irresponsible* for someone who claimed to be a public intellectual, lending the rest of us the benefit of sound, sober, informed judgment about real-world problems, because in the real world of people dying there was only one war to choose from. Either you supported it or you didn't. Berman did.

Posted by Ryan | April 1, 2008 12:10 PM

If you were under forty in 2003 and you supported the war, you have an obligation to be over in Iraq today, humping a rifle and dodging IEDs. No exceptions. Pennance for being a fucking idiot, I call it.

Sorry, Matt. Hope you get adequate body armor.

Posted by calipygian | April 1, 2008 12:11 PM

Why is it so unacceptable that someone who agree with the ends of the Bush administration, i.e., the removal of Saddam, and at the same time disagreement as to the means and the justification?

Because there was never any other war on the table besides Bush's war.

You want to give Berman credit for the imaginary war, go ahead. But in the world where things actually happen to real human beings, that is worth the grand total of jack plus shit. It's a morally and intellectually bankrupt argument made by morally and intellectually bankrupt wankers.

Posted by Thers | April 1, 2008 12:18 PM

Berman's not quite a neocon. But like the neocons, he's obsessed with the WWI-WWII period and its significance for Western civilization. So he is powerfully tempted to view all questions through the lens of the great liberalism/fascism struggle. He wanted to turn the Iraq war into the idealized anti-Fascist struggle he wished he'd been around for in the 30s.

Posted by mq | April 1, 2008 12:20 PM

Why is it so unacceptable that someone who agree with the ends of the Bush administration, i.e., the removal of Saddam, and at the same time disagreement as to the means and the justification?

Because that's irrelevant. The "means and the justification" are what matter in the world. That's the way you go from talking about what would be nice in the world to talking about what to do about the world.

We all wish things. For example, China should be a democracy, and the various Central Asian Republics shouldn't be tyrannies which torture dissidents. And Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe should leave.

Or I wish Bush Jr. and his cronies weren't a bunch of deregulatory freaks who have already massively screwed the economy and are about to pull another fast round of deregulation in the guise of re-regulation. Wish, wish, wish.

That's what we call desires, or even fantasies. I could list many, many more, and no, it isn't the slightest bit more moral for one person to declare their desires for things like that more publicly than someone else.

Posted by El Cid | April 1, 2008 12:21 PM

Berman supporting the war did little to persuade anyone. Berman's more pernicious role was his quicky book about the roots of "radical Islamism" in fascism. It wasn't so much an exercise in history as a big lie. Real intellectual history is always a balancing act between context and ideas. Fake intellectual history is following a cherrypicked path through various texts (which, I suspect, Berman could not read in the original Arabic) to a predetermined point. You can't write about the rise of Islamism and ignore the Cold War - basically, the almost fifty years from 1945 to 1990 in which the U.S. used Islam, the more radical the better, as a counter to communism. Who, after all, invented the idea of a global network in which dark money, manpower and arms were shunted about to fight for an Islamic cause? Answer: the U.S. did. That's how the U.S. fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. Who encouraged the Saudis to spend money building mosques whereever there was a diasporic Arab or Islamic population (except, of course, in the U.S.) - again, the U.S. did. That was the whole deal - the cleverness of the U.S. strategy was to use the Saudis as the keystone of a policy that would keep the oil flowing, keeping Nasserite nationalism on the backfoot, support Israel, and stop the Soviets.

And of course the U.S. had no trouble installing Nazi sympathizers in the Middle East if it served that policy. Thus, the Shah, whose father was exiled by the British in WWII for his pro-German sympathies, was put in power by the CIA and surrounded with Iranian military men who, during WWII, had been interned as German sympathizers.

In spite of the debacle in Iraq and the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Radical Islamism in the Middle East is in much worse shape than it was ten years ago. Its strongest backer withdrew its support. That strongest backer was the U.S.

Berman erased that history, floated the bogus notion of Islamofascism, and found a spot in that elite group consisting of the makers of historic forgeries.

Posted by roger | April 1, 2008 12:26 PM

...this post does nothing to refute Paul Berman's central argument. Namely, that the ostensible justification for war -- the claim that Iraq had WMD -- was advanced in place of the stronger, more central argument -- that fascist, totalitarian dictatorships should not be tolerated.

Berman may believe that "facist, totalitarian dictatorship" was the primary justification for going to war, but for Bush it wasn't, and for the U.S., it couldn't be. Why?

The U.S. can't legally justify a war based on that premise. WMD as the main justification for war supported the Bush Doctrine's idea of preemption...that "rogue states" with weapons of mass destruction posed a potential threat to the United States.

Posted by AKBY | April 1, 2008 12:31 PM

Berman has company. My douchebag father - who spent nearly his entire career in defense electronics and never saw a war of which he didn't approve - now claims that he was against the war from the beginning.

Despite the fact that I recall quite clearly his numerous belligerent statements in favor of the war, back when it was all the rage to be pro-Iraq-war.

This war will become like Nixon - in the future, no one will admit to having been in favor of it.

Posted by r€nato | April 1, 2008 12:38 PM

Andrew wrote, The problem is your oversimplified definition of what it means to be "pro-war."

Either Berman was in favor of this particular war, viz, the invasion of Iraq that Bush conducted, on its eve, or he wasn't.

I'm claiming Berman was in favor. Which makes him pro-this-war, regardless of whether he would have been even more in favor of a different war.

Posted by liberal | April 1, 2008 12:43 PM

I completely forgot about you, Mr. Limited Inc.

Posted by Ron Mashate | April 1, 2008 12:45 PM

If you were under forty in 2003 and you supported the war, you have an obligation to be over in Iraq today, humping a rifle and dodging IEDs. No exceptions. Pennance for being a fucking idiot, I call it.

Sending ~58% of the under forty population in the US to Iraq would be, among others things, quite expensive.

Posted by southpaw | April 1, 2008 12:55 PM

Anatol Lieven, in "http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041025/lieven", has a good takedown of Berman, showing what an ignoramus he is:

Berman's central argument in his book Terror and Liberalism is perhaps the most historically illiterate and strategically pernicious of all the lines advanced by liberal hawks and their de facto allies on the right. This is the suggestion that secular radical Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism are essentially the same phenomenon, since both are supposedly expressions of an antiliberal, totalitarian international ethos and tradition stemming originally from the Europe of Fascism and Communism. "The Baathists and the Islamists were two branches of a single impulse, which was Muslim totalitarianism--the Muslim variation on the European idea," he writes. The "global war on terror" is therefore a continuation of America's past struggle against Nazism and Communism. ... By dating the start of this "wave" to twenty-five years ago, Berman identifies it temporally with the Iranian revolution. This was, of course, a Shiite revolution in a Persian land, fed by Iranian nationalism; yet Berman attributes to this wave an Arab identity. Baath Arab nationalism began more than four decades earlier. It has absolutely no interest in restoring the "Islamic caliphate of ancient times." This is indeed the dream of Al Qaeda and its Islamist allies, but the Baath is dedicated to creating one modern, united Arab nation under the quasi-Fascist rule of the Baath Party. In other words, with the exception of a common hostility to Israel, this whole picture is a farrago of nonsense.

Posted by liberal | April 1, 2008 1:19 PM

Sending ~58% of the under forty population in the US to Iraq would be, among others things, quite expensive.

Point being that for people as young and inexperienced as MY, Berman, Goldberg, etc., its easy to sit around today, point fingers, assign blame, etc.

There is a real world outside the ivy covered walls of Harvard and that girls school Goldberg went to and that real world included people getting shot, bayoneted and blowed the fuck up on a daily basis.

People in the fake world of intellectual pointy head land have the luxury of sitting around and point fingers while real people who do real things in the real world pay the price.

Im sick to death of all this intellectual jerking off on all sides.

I was in the unit that sent a lot of specialists to the 75th XTF. While people in the blogosphere were attacking each others patriotism and giving each other virtual reacharounds, my buddies were ahead of the forward edge of battle, kicking in doors in full MOPP gear and worrying about getting done.

Maybe a few more of those 58% coming home in body bags will discourage this kind of idiocy in the future.

Posted by calipygian | April 1, 2008 1:25 PM

[Lieven:] Berman's central argument in his book Terror and Liberalism is perhaps the most historically illiterate and strategically pernicious of all the lines advanced by liberal hawks and their de facto allies on the right... this whole picture is a farrago of nonsense.

For Berman's enabling idiocy -- now compounded by his claims that he was never an idiot -- he's an April Fool.

Posted by Jemand von Niemand | April 1, 2008 1:42 PM

Support for the war was high on the eve of the battle, but most Americans were lukewarm at best about going to war in Iraq

December 2002 (LA Times poll):

The overwhelming majority of respondents -- 90% -- said they do not doubt that Iraq is developing weapons of mass destruction. But in the absence of new evidence from U.N. inspectors, 72% of respondents, including 60% of Republicans, said the president has not provided enough evidence to justify starting a war with Iraq.

...63% of respondents said war would be justified only if the United Nations finds a pattern of serious violations by Iraq. Just 22% agreed with the administration's position

So most took Bush at his word that Iraq was a danger, many believed the Osama-Saddam connection and most believed Bush was determined to go to war regardless of what anyone thought. A majority supported the war, because they believed Bush knew something they didn't.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1217-03.htm

Posted by Jinchi | April 1, 2008 1:56 PM

Berman on April 15, 2004
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E6DA173BF936A25757C0A9629C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2

"As for the results -- well, in one respect, these have turned out to be, in spite of everything, almost comically successful. Baathism's super-weapons may have been a figment of the universal imagination; but as soon as the United States elevated this figment into a world crisis, astonishing progress was made in tracking down weapons programs and trafficking in Libya, Iran, Dubai and Pakistan. Some people will go on insisting that sudden progress on these matters has nothing to do with Iraq, and the dominoes tumbled simultaneously by sheer coincidence -- but some people will believe anything."

Our soldiers and their families are falling about with laughter at the comic successfulness of Bush and Berman's War.

"Nobody can doubt, however, that even in its planning stages, the invasion and occupation of Iraq were depressingly bungled. The whole thing was done in an odd mood of hysteria and parsimony, a bad combination. It is tempting to conclude that, all in all, we would have been better off staying out of Iraq altogether -- and maybe this will turn out to be the case."

No one could possibly have foreseen that Bush would bungle the invasion and occupation of Iraq. No way. No one could have imagined that it might be better not to give him the opportunity.

"But everyone who feels drawn to that conclusion had better acknowledge its full meaning: the unavoidable implication that we would be better off today with Saddam Hussein in power; better off with economic sanctions still strangling the Iraqi people; better off with American army bases still occupying Saudi soil (Osama bin Laden's original grievance against us); and better off without the progress on weapons proliferation in the Muslim world (unless you believe in the sheer-coincidence theory, in which case, you think that progress would have happened willy-nilly). That is a pretty horrifying set of alternatives."

Indeed. If we hadn't invaded Iraq, the Pakistani government, that stands between nuclear weapons and Muslim extremists, might become less stable. The Iranian people might elect a hard-line Islamist government that insisted on refining uranium that could be used in bombs. The Taliban might make a comeback in Afghanistan, financing world-wide terrorism with renewed production of narcotics. There might be recurrence of suicide bombing in Israel and fighting in the Gaza strip. Israel might even invade Lebanon. The U.S. might be crushed under a federal deficit and in hock up to its eyeballs to the Chinese. Jealous at losing our attention, North Korea might test a nuclear weapon.

Oh wait. Those things have happened. But I'm sure it's all sheer coincidence.

Posted by cowalker | April 1, 2008 2:00 PM

Okay, Berman's completely lost me now. He's got some interesting things to say about early 20th century history, but I HEARD him on WNYC in 2003 pimping the war. Could not have been louder and clearer. To pretend otherwise is wankery most foul, not to mention morally reprehensible, given the body count.

Berman, give it the hell up. You were WRONG. Admit your mistake and retain some dignity, don't give us this dodgeball crap.

Posted by the matthew show | April 1, 2008 2:17 PM

Okay, Berman's completely lost me now. He's got some interesting things to say about early 20th century history, but I HEARD him on WNYC in 2003 pimping the war. Could not have been louder and clearer. To pretend otherwise is wankery most foul, not to mention morally reprehensible, given the body count.

Berman, give it the hell up. You were WRONG. Admit your mistake and retain some dignity, don't give us this dodgeball crap.

Posted by the matthew show | April 1, 2008 2:19 PM

No one could possibly have foreseen that Bush would bungle the invasion and occupation of Iraq. No way. No one could have imagined that it might be better not to give him the opportunity.

Oh, it was forseen. It's just that speaking it aloud, even in an oblique way, had consequences for those in a position to do something about it. Ask GEN Shinseki.

But the point is still valid. The deserting coward maladministration will have many competing derisive nicknames, but I like the "No one could have forseen gang" as a strong candidate.

Posted by Apprentice to Darth Holden | April 1, 2008 2:48 PM

Dear Paul Berman:

Sit the fuck out of the next one. Just sit in the corner with McArdle and Beinart and the other people trying to rewrite their own personal histories. If bombing Iran is on the table, your opinion is not needed.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | April 1, 2008 3:16 PM

um, who the hell is Paul Berman? some TNR weenie? who cares what he says about anything?

Posted by onceler | April 1, 2008 3:19 PM

um, who the hell is Paul Berman?

That's actually the good thing about Berman: nobody knows him.

Heck, most people don't even know who Hitchens is. And I know a lot of people who don't know what a blog is.

So let's not take ourselves too seriously.

Posted by novakant | April 1, 2008 3:57 PM

At least Hitchens manages to be tedious and disinformational with more panache than Berman. That bloggingheads was barely watchable. That this guy is apparently paid as a pedagogue by a respectable university is alarming.

Posted by brucds | April 1, 2008 5:32 PM

Josh Marshall over at TPM (talkingpointsmemo.com) hasn't issued his liberal-hawk mea culpa yet. I'd really like to see one from him. Seriously, read the archives at his site from before the war. He caveats his support, but support the war he does.

Posted by Memoryhole | April 1, 2008 11:49 PM

Dan Kervick: "They offered endless analytical synopses, wrung their hands nobly, anguished impressively, hemmed and hawed, articulated magnificent principles, delved deeply into the nuances of the nuances of the nuances - but then discreetly punted."

Actually, that kinda sounds like Matt most of the time.

He STILL hasn't answered my two simple questions on Iran. So he's punted on that issue. He's clueless about Pakistan, and has punted on that issue. He's made some fatuous statements about Afghanistan, but generally punted on that issue.

And he's scared to death of talking about the Palestinian situation lest his Jewish relatives and SLC tear him a new one. So he's punted on that issue as well.

The only thing he doesn't punt on is Democratic politics and sports, and maybe some social issues - and now that it's safe, the Iraq war.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | April 2, 2008 2:37 AM

The creepy Berman persists in pretending neoconservatism is, or ever was, "the Left," by the way. For instance in his Slate "Should we love Che?" diatribe. Actually, Gary Hart, who couldn't possibly be more of a mainstream politician, wrote much more honestly about Che Guevera in his wildly speculative fiction than Berman can write about anything in his ostensible non-fiction.

Posted by Marion Delgado | April 14, 2008 2:54 PM