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All That Myopic Oversight Is Getting In The Way Of Clear-Eyed Warmongering

In many ways, this is how the Senate is supposed to work–questioning the actions of the executive, especially in such critical matters as war and peace. Yet one can’t but read these transcripts and see a group of lawmakers already so burned by the experience of Vietnam that their preoccupation with avoiding a repeat experience […]

In many ways, this is how the Senate is supposed to work–questioning the actions of the executive, especially in such critical matters as war and peace. Yet one can’t but read these transcripts and see a group of lawmakers already so burned by the experience of Vietnam that their preoccupation with avoiding a repeat experience was hampering their ability to respond to new challenges. Of course, none of them could have anticipated the stunning Israeli victory to come–or the conflict that such a win would fuel for the next four decades. However, there is a point at which oversight leads to myopia–where excessive focus on the mistakes of the past harden into a paralysis when confronted with the threats of the future. ~Ken Baer

Via Yglesias

So Mr. Baer thinks that it would have been a good idea to intervene directly in the 1967 crisis?  What exactly was myopic about the committee’s pointed questions to the Secretary of State?  

When the Senate engages in some minimal oversight after having already capitulated to an irresponsible administration in the escalation of one war, it has started down the dark path to myopic apologies for tyrannical regimes?  That’s remarkable.  One might have thought that it had been the shocking lack of oversight for most of the last four years that had landed us in the present debacle, but then one would not have the profound understanding of Ken Baer.

Baer went on to write:

But it would be a disservice to our progressive ideals if we allowed disgust with the Bush Administration to lead to a softness toward totalitarian, anti-egalitarian, atavistic regimes and movements. In this case, the ideological enemy of my political enemy is not my friend.  

Wouldn’t the “ideological enemy” of an American progressive also be someone on the American right?  Come to think of it, given the man’s economic populism and lavish promises of state subsidies to all and sundry (on which he has, of course, not delivered and which he has no effective means to deliver), arguably Ahmadinejad has more things in common with at least some progressives with respect to his own domestic policy priorities than he has sharp differences.  That would, however, remind us that Ahmadinejad was elected against the explicit wishes of the clerical establishment, which supported Rafsanjani, and that he won on a platform of Kingfish-esque demagoguery that appealed to the Iranian poor.  That would remind us that elections take place in Iran, which would in turn tend to poke holes in portrayals of the regime as a monolithic, undifferentiated mass.  None of this is to ignore the controls the regime has on these elections and the restrictions it places on who can run, nor is this an attempt to claim that Tehran is not a repressive regime.  That would be a strange thing to claim, since there obviously are political prisoners and repressive and brutal militias that enforce official codes of dress and conduct.  However, neither is Iran the uniform, fanatical, suicidal state that the administration and its supporters attempt to make it out to be.  Regimes can be brutal and nasty without being apocalyptic dangers to us and everyone else.  Typically, such regimes are surprisingly brittle and weak and are the exact opposite of the world-threatening powers jingoes describe them as being. 

We have been warned about new Hitlers a few too many times in the last fifteen years, and it doesn’t work anymore.  Here is a good antidote to the more hysterical fearmongering about the Iranians.

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