What Glenn Says

by tristero

It’s hard to improve on this, so I won’t try:

…Those who were most responsible for selling this devastating and grotesque war to the public — and O’Hanlon and his “Brookings colleague Ken Pollack” played as large a role in that as anyone — insist that what they did not be held against them, that it shouldn’t affect how their “expertise and scholarship” are perceived nor undermine their standing and credibility in any way. As O’Hanlon’s fellow war “scholar” Anne-Marie Slaughter petulantly protested a couple months ago: “The debate is still far too much about who was right and who was wrong on the initial invasion.” The only unfairness they voice — the only thing that provokes their passion or moves them to anger — is when they are excessively criticized for their war support. To them, that’s the grave injustice in all of this.

The only way one can think that way — the only way one can be so haughty and self-absorbed and unremorseful — is through complete indifference to the effects of their actions. There’s just no other way to be so relentlessly self-justifying and even indignant in the face of criticisms over their war support except by blocking out, just ignoring, the extreme, totally pointless human suffering and slaughter for which they’re responsible. Whether to attack Iraq and then whether to continue the occupation endlessly as we’ve done are far and away the most significant political questions of this generation. To act as though it’s just one of many interesting policy questions to add to someone’s “homework” tally is just staggering.

Twenty years from now, the Michael O’Hanlons and Ken Pollacks and various Kagan Family members of today are going to be viewed the way the Robert McNamaras of the Vietnam era came to be perceived: as coddled, sheltered monsters who — from a safe and sterile distance — viewed and endlessly cheered on “war” as some abstract, intellectualized and fun game to play at think tank parties, totally oblivious to the savagery and havoc it wreaked on other people’s lives. Perhaps in old age, they’ll write some self-flagellating, McNamara-like mea culpa. But nobody else needs to wait until then to describe what they actually are.[Emphasis added.]

To paraphrase a trope from a few years ago, if you’re not sick with shame at what your government’s done and is doing to Iraq, you haven’t been paying attention.