Haven't we already seen this movie? Steven R. Weisman is back on A1, renting himself out yet again as a neo-con billboard:

For more than a year, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his aides have tacitly acknowledged that he was concerned before the war about what could go wrong once American forces captured Iraq.

But Mr. Powell's apparent decision to lay out his misgivings even more explicitly to the journalist Bob Woodward for a book has jolted the White House and aggravated long-festering tensions in the Bush cabinet. ...

Critics of Mr. Powell in the hawkish wing of the administration said they were startled by what they saw as his self-serving decision to help fill out a portrait that enhances his reputation as a farsighted analyst, perhaps at the expense of Mr. Bush. Several said the book guaranteed what they expected anyway, that Mr. Powell will not stay as secretary if Mr. Bush is re-elected.

"Airing of Powell's Misgivings Tests Ties in the Cabinet"

As is depressingly typical for Weisman, the piece is a land-grab for Bush officials who want to be quoted saying snarky things about their opponents (or anybody they just want to knife in the back) anonymously.

This piece of insider gossip—whose only sustained interest is in whether or not Colin Powell and Dick Cheney are willing to talk to each other at parties—goes below the fold on A1. And in the midst of all the other Woodward-related stuff that one might want to discuss—as, for instance, Bush's self-evidently unconstitutional misappropriation of $700 million in Afghanistan funding for Iraq war planning, or his deal with the Saudis (whose Prince Bandar was informed about the Iraq war decision before Powell, incidentally) to have them depress oil prices just prior to the November election—this is the only aspect of Woodward's book the Times sees fit to notice today.

Is the Times simply incapable of embarrassment, or incapable of learning? Or was Bill Keller just not paying attention to how the story developed after his staff came out ready to facilitate the White House's Two-Minute's Hate against Richard Clarke last month?

posted by michael  5:02:59 PM  
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So, how soon will we get the Times' puff piece for this one? Calling Dexter Filkins: John Negroponte is on his way to Iraq (via AP).

In Honduras, Negroponte played a prominent role in assisting the Contras in Nicaragua in their war with the left-wing Sandinista government, which was aligned with Cuba and the Soviet Union.

For weeks before [the] Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing [on his nomination as U.N. ambassador], Negroponte was questioned by staff members on whether he had acquiesced to human rights abuses by a Honduran death squad funded and partly trained by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Negroponte testified that he did not believe the abuses were part of a deliberate Honduran government policy. "To this day," he said, "I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras."

"He's a diplomat's diplomat," said Bernard Aronson, the State Department's top Latin America official in the first Bush administration, when Negroponte was ambassador to Mexico.

I threw that last graf in to help you get started, Dexter.

posted by michael  1:00:13 PM  
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But it felt so right at the time ... David Brooks' mea minima culpa of Saturday has been eliciting some interesting responses around the liberal blogosphere. My own version of a shorter David Brooks:

I was wrong about Iraq, and fully expect to be vindicated.

And while we're at it, here's a shorter Matt Yglesias, whose own (genuine) mea culpa in response to Brooks has kicked off a round of commentary:

I was wrong about Iraq, and should have opposed the invasion, but that doesn't mean I'm one of those greasy antiwar types.

[For that commentary, look particularly to Atrios, Brad DeLong, and Kos. Ezra at Pandagon offers his own admission of error, which looks to me a great deal more forthcoming than Matt's.]

OK, I'm being a little unfair to Yglesias, but only a little. What regularly cheeses me off about mainstream liberals is that, when push comes to shove, the gut-level horror they feel at their caricatured notion of left-wing protest trumps any concern they have about getting in bed with the other side. They'll do somersaults to avoid association with the hippies and weirdos and loonies—the people who (gasp!) chant at antiwar rallies, to take a snarky aside from Matt Y. Those people aren't serious, after all, they're not adults. When push comes to shove, in other words, it's the moral and intellectual standard of the Wolfowitzes and the Perles by which the mainstream libs prefer to be judged. I've seen this sort of thing far too often in my (intermittent) career as a lefty activist not to recognize the symptoms. [If you want to see the disorder in full flower, pop up the comments to Matt's post and look for commenter SamAm.]

My hopeful position here is that one outcome of the Iraq debacle will be that the self-described "realist" liberals—the position that underlies the more transient one of war liberal—are forced to understand the political cost of their reflexive disdain for those of us to their left. Matt's post gives evidence that the lesson is at least partially learned, though his continued insistence that the anti-war movement was advocating a "bad policy"—as if, in the pre-war crisis, anyone opposed was advocating any policy at all except not going to war—shows that he has a way to go yet:

Neither the policies being advocated by Bush nor the policies being advocated by the anti-war movement (even at its most mainstream) were the correct ones. What I wanted to see happen wasn't going to happen. I had to throw in with one side or another. I threw in with the wrong side. The bad consequences of the bad policy I got behind are significantly worse than the consequences of the bad policy advocated by the other side would have been. I blame, frankly, vanity. "Bush is right to say we should invade Iraq, but he's going about it the wrong way, here is my nuanced wonderfullness" sounds much more intelligent than some kind of chant at an anti-war rally.

To all you "realist" liberals: we were the realists in this one. Most of the people I know who chanted (as uncomfortably as always, in my case) at rallies—and marched, and got spat at by "patriots," and risked arrest—got there having informed themselves about Iraqi history and sociology and having taken a cold, hard look at the motives of the Bush regime and what we could expect from a Bush war. We knew the chances for promoting democracy at the point of a gun, we knew who was in office and we could extrapolate sufficiently from the way we were being run up to war to have a good idea about how that war was going to be conducted and how likely it was to have a good aftermath. Some of us, many of us, may have opposed the war on moral grounds, some of us (horror!) may even have been convinced pacifists—but those moral objections didn't fail to map onto realistic political calculation.

So, Matt, my question now is: are you prepared to listen to us loonies a bit less judgementally next time?

posted by michael  12:04:33 PM  
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