On fighting the last war over the last war
by digby
Shorter Jonathan Chait: Being skeptical of US government intervention in Syria is just like being skeptical of US government intervention in health care. (I'm not even being snarky. That's what he said.)
I notice that on twitter Yglesias and Klein unsurprisingly aren't particularly enamored of Chait's argument. When he gets mad at liberals for being squishy on this sort of thing he tends to get a bit churlish. In today's scolding he claims that young liberals are always fighting the Iraq war and it's very annoying to him to have to deal with it. They are intellectually confused, at best, while he is apparently a clear thinker who judges each circumstance purely on the merits.
I can't help but recall that in Chait's Iraq war (kinda sorta) mea culpa a few months back he wrote this:
The Gulf War took place during my freshman year in college. It was the first major American war since Vietnam, and the legacy of Vietnam cast a heavy shadow — the news was filled with dire warnings of bloody warfare, tens of thousands of U.S. deaths, uprisings across the Middle East. None of it happened. And again, through the nineties, the United States intervened in the Balkans twice under Bill Clinton, saving countless lives and disproving the fears of the skeptics, which had grown weaker but remained.
These events had conditioned me to trust the hawks, or at least, the better informed hawks. They also conditioned me unconsciously to regard wars through this frame, as relatively fast attacks without a heavy occupation phase. People tend to think the next war will be somewhat like the last. That is a failing I will try to avoid again.
It may be true that my formative experiences left an imprint so deep it can’t be covered over. I try to guard against that.
And yet, in spite of all this careful "guarding" every intervention turns out to be one worth doing. It's quite remarkable, what with him being so thoughtful and introspective and all while Matt Yglesias etc are blindly adhering to the callow beliefs of their youth, "conditioned" as they are to trusting the doves.
As he concluded in his admittedly graceless Iraq mea culpa:
My reading of history is that sweeping, myopic responses to major recent events usually spawn errors of their own. The people demanding apologies today will find themselves being asked to supply apologies of their own tomorrow.
Yes, it's a good thing the Iraq war hawks have all learned their lesson. If only the doves could follow suit.
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