Dear Joe Klein

by tristero

In your effusively positive review of Peter Beinart’s latest typing, you write:

This is not to say Beinart has always been right. He supported the war in Iraq — for two reasons, he writes. He wanted to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear weapons, which was reasonable. He also hoped the American-led invasion might produce an admirable democratic government in Iraq, which was not. “On both counts, I was wrong,” he writes. “It is a grim irony that this book’s central argument is one I myself ignored when it was needed most.”

Beinart’s humility is charming, but unfair to himself. The argument at the heart of “The Good Fight” is a product of intellectual growth. It evolved as Beinart watched the disaster unfold in Iraq; it is the result of a rigorous search for principles that might guide the United States as it confronts the challenge of Islamist totalitarianism and the other viral threats of the Information Age.

I have a problem with this, Joe. Y’see, for this liberal, the public space is not first and foremost a sandbox for drooling kids. It’s a place for the intellectually grown. You seem to forget that people died to advance Beinart’s, Remnick’s, and Packer’s (to name just three) intellectual development. Thousands upon thousands of them.

Am I actually saying that Beinart, et al nurtured their intellectual growth in a soil they fertilized with countless litres of innocent human blood? Yes, Joe, that is exactly what I am saying. But this isn’t a bad horror film. They really were, despite all their pretenses to worldliness and wisdom, naive and stupid. And to this day, those who were neither cannot find regular purchase anywhere in the mainstream American discourse.

Being intellectually mature does not equal Bush-style mental sclerosis. Indeed, many of us have grown intellectually in the past five years. Krugman has changed dramatically, for example.

But here’s the thing: we were already intellectually mature to begin with. Beinart wasn’t. And based on the attitudes you describe in the review, he’s still in short pants. And if ever there was a time to hear from the grown-ups, that time is now.

Love,

tristero