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Why Liberals Should Back Iraq Intervention
Michael TomaskyYes, the United States helped create ISIS. But that hardly means we shouldn’t try to correct the error. In fact, it means just the opposite.
We once thought, mistakenly, that the collapse of communism would bring with it the end of internal arguments within the broad left about American interventionism and, to dust off the old word that still gets plenty of exercise in some quarters, imperialism. There was, during the Cold War, a mainstream liberal-left that was anti-communist, and that sometimes rightly (Turkey, which Truman helped keep out of Stalin’s hands) and sometimes very wrongly (Vietnam) supported American action, including the military kind, to check the Reds. And there was a tendency farther to the left, where opinion might have been split on the USSR or China or Tito or Castro, but where said opinion clearly coalesced around the idea that most of the tragedy and evil in the world emanated not from Moscow but from Washington. Think George Kennan vs. Noam Chomsky.
That’s a history you either know or you don’t; I’ll not rehearse it further here (and actually I wasn’t entirely fair to Kennan above, since he was an early opponent of the Vietnam War). My point today is simply that this clash of ideas was supposed to stop mattering in 1991, when history “ended” and the Soviet Union ceased to be.
Well. History kept going, and it keeps reminding us that some things never change. Over the past decade, the same battalions have lined up against each other over Iraq and Syria and the larger questions that we face from the occupied territories to the Levant to Mesopotamia, lobbing exactly the same rhetorical grenades today as they did in the duck-and-cover era. And we’re hearing the arguments right now, with respect to the U.S. decision to bomb ISIS. Any thinking person should have reservations about getting drawn in to endless conflict and about the inevitable unintended consequences. But the logic of the anti-interventionist left is built today around the same moral flaw that it was during the Cold War. And the case against ISIS is about as clear as a case like this ever gets: We have to try and stop them.
You get into an argument with someone on the anti-intervention left—I’ve had lots of ’em, and as younger man I generally took that side—and what happens is, they tend to mention the United States’ great sins and crimes and think they’ve clinched the argument. Guatemala. Mossadegh. Allende. The Central American death squads. Indochina, East Timor, the Shah, our brief covert support for the Khmer Rouge. See, they say? That’s what you inevitably get when you want America to “exert her influence.”
more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/11/why-liberals-should-back-iraq-intervention.html
30 replies
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... fellow, (Michael Tomasky from the dailybeast)? Ed's show? Chris Matthews? I don't like his condescending attitude in this article. Not the best way to win anyone over, no matter what issue you're arguing.
And second, he sounds like a MIC cheerleader. "Come on! Step right up! Jump on this motorized merry-go-round! Forget about all those rumors about how fast it goes, how dangerous it is and how much it costs to ride on it!"
Never did like that merry-go-round. It made me nauseous. 
We once thought, mistakenly, that the collapse of communism would bring with it the end of internal arguments within the broad left about American interventionism and, to dust off the old word that still gets plenty of exercise in some quarters, imperialism. There was, during the Cold War, a mainstream liberal-left that was anti-communist, and that sometimes rightly (Turkey, which Truman helped keep out of Stalin’s hands) and sometimes very wrongly (Vietnam) supported American action, including the military kind, to check the Reds. And there was a tendency farther to the left, where opinion might have been split on the USSR or China or Tito or Castro, but where said opinion clearly coalesced around the idea that most of the tragedy and evil in the world emanated not from Moscow but from Washington. Think George Kennan vs. Noam Chomsky.
This "liberal" of yours seems to have his history a bit fudged. He seems to have forgotten about the anti-Vietnam War movement altogether--full of largely non-ideological people from all walks of life who mostly didn't want to kill anyone or be killed, or force anyone to do any killing or dying.
So, a silly piece from sentence two.
and run him over again.
ionist, libertarian claptrap. Everything's black and white for this group, with absolutely no shades of gray. When all else fails, there are instances when we can benefit people, and actually save lives. I agree with Tomasky here.
It's idiots like the ones pictured above that make me question the new "liberalism" (if you can call it that). What would they have happen? We don't need John Mccain types in the WH, but we don't need protectionist types like Pat Buchanan either.
