“Essentially what you’re saying is a Gore admin would have invaded Iraq…”

No, that’s not necessarily what I’m saying. A Gore admin would have been staffed to the gills with all of the pro-war Democrats and their advisors, so there would always have been a chance that they would attack Iraq, but it would have been less likely. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have started another war for different reasons more suited to humanitarian interventionist views. The leadership of both parties has accepted aggressive war as a legitimate means of policy; they disagree about targets, tactics and timing.

Obama is not vastly different from McCain in his foreign policy views; Gore and Bush were even closer together. This is not an accident, but a function of constraints imposed by entrenched interests and political forces. The argument I made against personalizing our relations with other countries applies to assessments of our own government’s policies as well. The differences between what Bush did and what Gore would have done are probably shockingly fewer than anyone would imagine.

Yes, a lot of people were fed baloney, as you say, but some of us were skeptical enough to understand that governments feed people baloney to get them to go along with their bad policies. Foreign policy experts and editors of major newspapers should have an overdeveloped sense of skepticism and caution in these matters rather than overflowing reserves of credulity. I don’t know why so many were so willing to trust the administration in everything it said, but if they deserve less criticism than people inside the administraton they are still accountable for what they said and wrote in public, because their opinions carried weight and lent credibility to the administration’s case for war.

Saying, “The government misled me” is the “the devil made me do it” of weak excuses for policy mistakes. Of course the government misled them and us; it is the government, and will do what it needs to do to pursue its goals. The frustrating thing is that pretty much everyone in the government believes he is doing right by his country and doing the right thing, but these ideas combined with vast power make for a lousy combination.

Several? I don’t think so. Perhaps one person out of the entire Democratic leadership opposed it, and I think that was Pelosi, who at that time was Gephardt’s whip. The nays in the Senate vote were a who’s who of safe-seat Democrats with no realistic aspirations of higher office. The Democrats split 29-22 in favor of the war, which is a bit more lopsided than 50-50, and would be even more if I weren’t counting Sanders with the Dems. Think about that: of 50 Senators registered as Democrats, only 21 voted no. Certainly, that’s better than the figures on the other side of the aisle, but hardly a cause for celebration. You can review the House nay votes and tell me if there are any other “leadership types” you can find.

Clearly, Kucinich is to be credited with putting together a decent number of nay votes, and a clear majority of Democrats in the House, and I have always respected Kucinich for his work on this, but the weight of the party leadership and its foreign policy thinkers was always on the other side.

This was exactly my thought when I read that the first time. It’s not a matter of litmus tests, it’s that the autonomy other of people means requires that, independently of whether we agree with them, we have very little if any fiat power over what they care about or put energy into.

Ie, immigration is obviouly a very topical issue in contemporary American political issue, whereas Americans could care less about the paleo narrative wrt Lincoln.

Or in the case of Iraq, most of criticism of the surge, imo, was motivated by need to justify or vindicate the critics’ opposition to the war in the first place.

Therefore, paleocons (or intellectual minorities in general for that matter) have to be willing to put aside their hobbyhorse issues or explicity justify their relevance to engage the mainstream cultural consensus about other things. Otherwise, it’s simply an injustice to the other party’s autonomy: a heckler’s veto.

It’s a very controversial claim. As I recall the Dems in the senate split just about 50/50 and their were several leadership types who voted against. In the house a clear majority of dems voted against. The most noted, or coherent Dem “foreign policy” voice against was Zbig but there were others.

I will try to dig up the op-ed, which I thought was in the Post, but second-hand evidence seems to confirm my recollection. Walt wrote about Holbrooke earlier this year:

Unfortunately, one of the topics he landed on was the invasion of Iraq, which he strongly supported. Holbrooke said Colin Powell’s infamous U.N. Security Council speech “documenting” Iraq’s fictitious WMD programs (an episode Powell later recalled as the “lowest moment of his life”) was “a masterful job of diplomacy.” While critical of the Bush administration’s pre-war diplomacy, Holbrooke nonetheless argued that Saddam Hussein “was the most dangerous governmental leader in the world,” and that the United States had “a legitimate right to take action.”

Then there is this, which also reminds me of other big Dem luminaries who backed the war to the hilt, namely Dennis Ross and Albright. Even if he did not write an op-ed, I think it is true that he played an important role in getting the Democratic leadership to roll over and follow the administration.

The statement Walt is quoting came from an appearance on MSNBC on Jan. 23, 2003. It may be that he endorsed the war on television and not in print, but the effect is similar.

…..Well I don’t agree with you about Holbrooke unless you produce some evidence. The rest are a very mixed bag. Daalder, O’Hanlon and Pollack would fit the category but not Hiatt and Friedman who are journalists, and not Walter Lippman type journalists either, and certainly not remotelyThe New Republic which is Marty Peretz and a bunch extreme pro Zionists.

Every Republican Senator except one voted for the resolution, and every Democrat in the leadership or with aspirations of higher office voted for it as well. The much more interesting thing is to try to track down which prominent Democratic foreign policy figures didn’t vocally support the war, much less oppose it outright. There weren’t many. I didn’t think this was a controversial claim.

Well, your memory has some gaps, then. Of those you mentioned, I believe only Scowcroft warned against the war before it started, and for the most part whatever dissenters there were in establishment circles kept their objections to themselves. Holbrooke naturally supported it whole-heartedly; I don’t think he has seen a military intervention in the last 20 years he didn’t embrace. Were neocons a moving, driving force, and probably the most important single faction behind the war? Yes. They took the initiative, but the foreign policy establishment either agreed with them or acquiesced.

I judge the “surge” on the terms the Bush administration laid out. They set out goals and failed to reach them. How else are we supposed to judge plans and policies? Much of the improvement in security came from other factors not directly related to the additional brigades. I am willing to credit U.S. counterinsurgency efforts with the emergence of the Awakening and the apparently temporary benefits that came from that, but this was not part of the “surge” itself.

Nation-building in Afghanistan is a waste of time and resources. I don’t think I’m going to look back in a few years and feel foolish for saying so now. I don’t believe I have ever compared Afghanistan to Vietnam. I know Thomas Ricks has, and that gives me pause, because he tends to know what he’s talking about, but I don’t see it that way. I was intrigued by that op-ed the other day co-authored by Deutch, which was making arguments about the importance of Pakistan and the need to re-orient our policy to focus on Pakistan that were very similar to mine.

I won’t beat the now-dead horse of the rhetorical disingenuousness of your “heckler” dismissal. Trying to imagine the alternative universe in which paleocons have anything approaching the power with which to veto a community consensus, though, was a bit of a fun exercise. The only veto I can see being pursued is the one that comes from overturning the consensus. Or perhaps you’re reacting to the populism? Rallying the population to not concede to the establishment consensus is perhaps a better description of what you have in mind?