His takedown of the anodyne critic Louis Menand in TNR this decade

powells.com/review/2003_01_09.html

was memorable, amusing to reread after the drubbing Menand took just the other day in the same rag from its literary chief Leon Wieseltier,

tnr.com/toc/story.html?id=16b25ba2-ca6c-4af3-89a2-22b44b6bddef&p=1

defending the latter’s legendary Columbia teacher Lionel Trilling from the “whatever” tone of Menand’s recent New Yorker treatment.

newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/09/29/080929crat_atlarge_menand

Here’s Bromwich from early October, in the special NYRoB sympo on the election:

nybooks.com/articles/22017#bromwich

Hillary Clinton, it is now clear, mistook her situation by pushing to the center and running a general election campaign in the primaries. Obama appears to be running Clinton’s primary campaign in the general election. So his statement that the US must begin to “withdraw responsibly” from Iraq is suitably hedged by masculine avowals of the utility of bombing al-Qaeda bases in Pakistan and the necessity of expanding the war in Afghanistan. Obama has in this way greatly impaired his value as an educator of public opinion. So long as he vouches for the War on Terror—the larger “war we are in,” as he calls it—he cannot possibly explain the hollowness of a war against terror-as-such, a war against a technique.

Obama’s conformity is the more dismaying because—as Andrew Bacevich has recently pointed out—the US military is promoting a dangerous consensus about the Global War. Where the Powell doctrine required the use of overwhelming force, a clearly delimited mission, and an exit plan, the new Petraeus doctrine licenses a general militarization of US foreign policy. According to this doctrine, violent instability of any kind in any country by definition threatens American interests, and is to be crushed or tranquilized by the methods of counterinsurgency. Where Powell had justified self-contained interventions, Petraeus’s doctrine can be used to justify war practically everywhere, all the time.

There is a good reason why we have heard nothing of this from John McCain. His advisers—Randy Scheunemann, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, James Woolsey, John Bolton, Max Boot—all come from the neoconservative war establishment. Indeed, these advisers, who pull the strings on McCain’s opinions from Georgia to Iran, are co-originators of the doctrine; and, since it is an exorbitant idea, which will cost the country blood and treasure, it is not in their interest to see it discussed. Obama’s silence is at first harder to understand. But look closely at his tacking and shifting and adjustments over the past seven months, and the fairest conclusion seems to be that he has no settled views on foreign policy…