Over on the blog-I-didn’t-know-he-had, Roger Cohen shows us all that he’s actually the kind of liberal hawk who likes going in for a little McCarthyite red baiting now and again, analogizing my former colleague Mike Tomasky to a Stalin apologist. He doesn’t cite any actual examples of Tomasky excusing or denying Saddam Hussein’s depredations and, indeed, he has to concede that Mike did, in fact, acknowledge Saddam’s crimes.

As Chris Hayes points out, Cohen’s logic seems to be that anyone who didn’t favor launching an unprovoked war with the USSR was, as such, an apologist for Stalinism.

And here we see the basic point that the I-was-wrong-but-I-was-right-anyway crowd on Iraq doesn’t really think they were wrong at all. They regret nothing! Sure, spending over a trillion bucks on an operation that’s led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis while leading hundreds of thousands — if not millions — to become refugees doesn’t seem like a very sound humanitarian position but the point is that they took a stand, damnit. And against Saddam Hussein. So there. In “Politics as a Vocation”, Max Weber calls this sort of thing the “ethic of ultimate ends” and contrasts it with an “ethic of responsibility”:

You may demonstrate to a convinced syndicalist, believing in an ethic of ultimate ends, that his action will result in increasing the opportunities of reaction, in increasing the oppression of his class, and obstructing its ascent–and you will not make the slightest impression upon him. If an action of good intent leads to bad results, then, in the actor’s eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God’s will who made them thus, is responsible for the evil. However a man who believes in an ethic of responsibility takes account of precisely the average deficiencies of people; as Fichte has correctly said, he does not even have the right to presuppose their goodness and perfection. He does not feel in a position to burden others with the results of his own actions so far as he was able to foresee them; he will say: these results are ascribed to my action. The believer in an ethic of ultimate ends feels ‘responsible’ only for seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions is not quenched: for example, the flame of protesting against the injustice of the social order. To rekindle the flame ever anew is the purpose of his quite irrational deeds, judged in view of their possible success. They are acts that can and shall have only exemplary value.

And that’s what this is all ultimately about — an effort to evade responsibility by suggesting that what’s really at issue here is a controversy over ends. The hawks must have felt Saddam’s evil more intensely, must have been more moved by Kenan Makiya’s pleas, been more attuned to the gulag, whatever. But no. Everyone knows and everyone knew that Saddam was a bad man. What some also knew was that invading Iraq was unlikely to have beneficial consequences. Cohen considered this possibility and rejected it. Or perhaps he failed to consider it. But either way, he was wrong.

A little glance back at the 2002-vintage thoughts of Bernard Lewis, every conservative’s favorite Middle East expert. Speaking before the invasion of Iraq, he notes that “Parallels to the Iraq quandary can be found by looking at post-World War II Germany and Japan” which were turned into successful liberal democracies. And then:

I am particularly optimistic that the same can be done in Iraq, which has many positive features upon which it can build. For example, of all the oil-producing countries, Iraq made the best use of its oil revenues in terms of creating a real infrastructure, including a good secondary and university education system. Here I speak from personal knowledge. Earlier in my career, when I was teaching at the University of London, the overwhelming majority of my graduate students came from the Middle East. All of these Middle Eastern students were graduates of Arab universities and, before that, of Arab high school systems. I got to evaluate them well enough to know what sort of education and training they had received and, more particularly, whether their credentials really meant something. In the case of Iraqi students, their degrees were more reliable than those of students from other countries; the students from Iraq had received better training under more rigorous standards.

For this and other reasons, there is genuine hope. The main task is not creating opportunities, but removing obstacles.

Prescient!

Bill Kristol calls for military action in Burma.

If Lebanese factional leader Saad Hariri tells Jackson Diehl the US should isolate Syria then I guess the only thing to do is follow Diehl in uncritically endorsing the idea that Hariri has America’s best interests at heart here. I mean, surely it’s not possible that Hariri is trying to push an agenda that he thinks serves Hariri’s interests or those of his faction inside Lebanon rather than America’s.

Did you know that in Afghanistan the US government is pushing a poppy-spraying plan that just so happens to be opposed by such trivial figures as Hamid Karzai and “American military and intelligence officials and European diplomats in Afghanistan.” Mark Kleiman, a drug policy specialists, notes that not only is this daft national security policymaking, but it’s not useful as drug control policy either.

Meanwhile, take note of the broader context. Our first post-war charg

As you’ll recall, when the “surge” was announced in January, its stated purpose was to create the conditions for progress toward the goal of national reconciliation. We were promised a report in September on the surge’s results. What we got in September was a very, very, very quiet admission that, in terms of its stated goals, the surge had completely and utterly failed. This combined with a loud insistence that the surge was succeeding in terms of some other goals, and that reconciliation was around the corner so why do you hate the troops and want al-Qaediranians to kill little children?

Now we read this morning that top Iraqi politicians want to abandon national reconciliation as a goal. They’re not missing benchmarks or running behind schedule, they’re just saying it’s not going to happen. The surge hasn’t worked, isn’t working, and won’t, according to Iraqis, ever work.

Kerry Howley argues that the PRC has less influence over the ruling junta in Burma than a lot of people would like to think, and cites a variety of experts to that effect. Burma is, in her telling, something of a DPRK-lite whose rulers have deliberately courted isoloation in order to avoid being subject to foreign pressures. See more on the general theme of Burma-related China-bashing from James Fallows and Steve Clemons. To make a long story short, the notion that the US can productively bully China into bullying the Burmese generals into turning their country into a democracy seems like one of these pieces of foreign policy wishful thinking that the country’s had quite enough of already.