Matt Yglesias has been developing his critique of the liberal hawk "incompetence dodge" in his blogging, but he and Sam Rosenfeld have honed a trenchant critique up at American Prospect.
Liberalism has always been an idealistic doctrine, and should continue to be. But if high ideals become detached from basic questions of feasibility, they serve nothing but their exponents’ self-regard — the fragrance of which has surrounded the liberal hawks like cheap perfume since this exercise began.
Liberal hawks joined neoconservatives in taking advantage of the public’s post–September 11 engagement with the world to unveil a comically promiscuous military agenda. The New Republic first argued that the Bush administration should have deployed more troops to Afghanistan, then proceeded to argue in favor of the war in Iraq, then criticized the administration for failing to send more of America’s already overstretched forces to interventions in Liberia and Haiti, then urged action to halt genocide in Sudan, and now takes the view that the problem with Iraq is that hundreds of thousands of additional troops should have been sent there from the beginning. Though arguably imbued with loftier motives than its neoconservative variant (The Weekly Standard has variously argued for attacking Iran, Syria, and North Korea), TNR’s stance is still knee-jerk hawkishness that is oblivious to the realities of the situation. It deserves to be tuned out in debates every bit as much as blanket pacifism does. Just as serious opponents of war must be prepared to countenance some wars under some circumstances, serious advocates of using force for humanitarian purposes must be willing to acknowledge some limits to what can and should be done.
As the irony of the fates would have it, a President who wanted us beyond the "Vietnam Syndrome" once and for all by showing that we could engage in a major war of choice for central foreign policy objectives ended up thrusting the country into another iteration of its Vietnam syndrome, and a liberal hawk commentariat who wanted to keep alive the liberal interventionism of Clinton foreign policy ended up discrediting liberal interventionism and driving liberals into the arms of Kissinger realism.
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