Right And Left
Illustrating the absurdity of conventional (or at least conventionally sloppy and pejorative) left-right descriptions in foreign policy discussions is Ed Morrissey’s labeling of Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Robert Malley as “radical leftists.” Robert Malley is maybe a couple of microns outside the establishment consensus on Israel and Palestine, and is therefore deemed here a “radical leftist.” As for calling Rice and Power this, well, I don’t know where to begin. Power is essentially a liberal interventionist, who, if anything, thinks that the government should generally be more aggressive in using force for humanitarian ends. Unless I am confusing her with someone else, she was a supporter of the war in Kosovo; the “radical left,” as I understand this term, was not or was certainly not unified if some did support it.
Morrissey is not satisfied with that, but opts for a partisan distinction that means next to nothing:
I’ll take Brent Scowcroft any day of the week over the Carter/Brzezinski model.
This contrast of Scowcroft and Brzezinski, who are virtually indistinguishable these days in their views, is just plain odd. When you consider how much in agreement Brzezinski and Scowcroft are, as the NYT reviewer of their conversation-turned-book put it, on “a remarkable number of basic strategic and diplomatic principles,” there is no great Obama movement or shift to Scowcroft away from Brzezinski. When you consider that Scowcroft also supported the Kosovo war (using the bogus regional stability and NATO credibility arguments), the lines get blurrier still between him and the aforementioned “radical leftists.”
[...] The silliness continues. [...]
Ed Morrisey: Radical leftists = people who don’t think exactly as I do on these issues. It’s name-calling, not analysis, a rhetorical tactic some pundits specialize in (heck, one of NRO’s finest based an entire book on it).
Kakutani is *such a hack*.
No doubt. Her remarks on Bacevich’s book prove that. That doesn’t change the truth of the observation about Scowcroft and “Zbig.”
Well, when the intellectual spectrum is about two feet wide, what else is a public ideologue to do? Tell his audience, “yeah, business as usual”? Not a lot of page views in that.
Kakutani’s “analysis” (a hagiography of the foreign policy establishment) indeed illustrates mkdelucas’ point about the narrowness of the public debate. Certainly, one can argue that a class of “realists” were ignored by the Bush crowd. But one can also argue that the notion of American hegemony was enshrined by Bush I and solidified by Clinton (after being given its pedagogical basis by Reagan.) The foreign policy elite that was virtually silent in opposing the Iraq War (and noticeably silent, including Scrowcroft and Zbig in challenging the false bases for it, not simply the methods) is now desperate to cast out the Bushies and exonerate themselves from responsibility. Indeed, Bush Iraq disaster has helped mask over the utter failure of Scowcroft and Zbig, etc., policies in the Balkans and the former USSR. If not for the failed war, more attention could be focused on the earlier failed war.
While I’d rather have Scowcroft, etc., in charge than Libby, Addison, etc., lets not pretend they aren’t all from the same party. Their criticisms of each other (even while agreeing on Russo-phobia) look like the sort of meaningless internal rivalries you used to see with the Left.