Peter Beinart makes a puzzling remark while criticizing the three remaining hawkish Republican candidates for their support of the Iraq war:

The point is not that candidates who support a failed war should be disqualified from high office.

Maybe that isn’t Beinart’s point, but why shouldn’t this disqualify them from an office whose main responsibility is the conduct of U.S. foreign policy? If that doesn’t disqualify them, what kind of policy blunder would? Supporting a war that was both unnecessary and harmful to U.S. interests would seem to be one of the bigger errors that a would-be President could make. Support for a debacle suggests poor judgment and with it a failure to consider the unintended consequences of policy decisions. What could be more damning for an aspiring presidential candidate than a track record of poor judgment on matters of war and peace?

Then again, if support for the Iraq war disqualified candidates, there wouldn’t have been many presidential candidates for the last eight years. Republican presidential candidates are perversely shielded to some extent from the political cost of backing the Iraq debacle because of the original breadth of support for the war in the political class. The blunder that Gingrich and Santorum (and Romney to a lesser extent) supported was a blunder by the leaders of both parties, and it indicts a large part of the political class a whole. This allows them to agitate for new wars with relative impunity, and that is exactly what they have done.

Hawks are quite clear that they consider “failure” to support what they deem necessary wars disqualifies candidates from high office. Many prominent opponents of Operation Desert Storm effectively killed their future presidential ambitions by voting against the war, and the lesson for all later ambitious pols was that they should always support the war whether it made sense to do so or not. What’s more, hawks believe that such a “failure” to support one of their proposed wars removes a person from the political “mainstream.” To understand why the U.S. keeps fighting unnecessary wars, remember that there is very little political price for reliable interventionists to pay, but there is an extremely steep political price for war opponents if they are perceived to have judged incorrectly just once.