http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/28577

George Packer's War
By Danny Goldberg | bio

This week’s New Yorker has a sixteen page article about Iraq by George Packer. Like his widely praised book, The Assassins Gate, Packer’s piece is beautifully written, carefully researched, filled with compelling personal stories, and insistently myopic as it ornately reiterates the theory of many intellectual liberal hawks that the failing of the Iraq War was not in its conception but in its execution. Echoing Michael Dukakis, Packer and his ilk think that the problem with George Bush is not ideology but competence.

This is nonsense and dangerous nonsense because it informs the public stance of most nationally known Democrats.

Here is what liberals should be saying:

1.The idea of a post Cold War American Empire, while beneficial to certain politicians ,their courtiers, and certain businesses, is bad for the vast majority of the American people. The people of the United States would do far better if their government had a foreign policy which supported international agreements such as Kyoto and which only took military action in conjunction with the U.N or in instances which clearly involve self-defense. The war in Iraq never came close to either criteria.

2. War should genuinely be a last resort. In his book, Packer referred to most war critics as “pacifists,” which is patently inaccurate given the fact that most of those who opposed the War in Iraq supported the one in Afghanistan. However it is both morally and politically correct to truly (not merely rhetorically) view war as a last resort. It should have come as no surprise that the Iraq War has turned out much worse than expected---wars usually do. The “Viet Nam syndrome” was intentionally mis-named to de-construct the valuable lessons that the United States needed to learn after that disastorous and unnecessary war. Neocons and others successfully intimidated too many liberal journalists and politicians into thinking that they would appear “weak” if they opposed the war. The “Iraq Syndrome” is the obsession with the notion that a nation can only be strong if it periodically wages war. War should only be waged as a necessity; people who relish it as a demonstration of their or their nation’s potency need therapy, not accolades.

3.To the extent that the United States needs morally and politically to maintain a presence in Iraq, those who supported the original war should be disqualified from designing this next stage. They have proven a lack of perspective, they are discredited with many other countries of the world whose help is needed to rationally move forward, and ,as Packer’s recent work demonstrates, are likely to be defensive. At a minimum Democrats should call for administration of the next stage in Iraq by a group at least half of which was originally opposed to the war.