About the only time I like to blog my opinions on politics is to say that I’m wrong (such as about the war in Iraq). Otherwise, I don’t think I have anything important to add and prefer to write about my peepee. When I go to Republican gatherings these days, I’m disappointed by the lack of humility they demonstrate over the mess in Iraq. Few conservatives seem to be rethinking their support for the war and for the Bush administration. Slate’s Jacob Weisberg is spot on:
…Here was a Jewish scholar criticizing the pope for apologizing to Muslims for a holy war against Muslims, which was also a massacre of the Jews. Here were the theorists of the invasion of Iraq, many of them also Jewish, applauding the notion that the Crusades were not so terrible and embracing a time horizon that makes it impossible to judge them wrong. And here was the clubhouse of the neocons throwing itself a lavish ‘do, when the biggest question in American politics is how to escape the hole they’ve dug. Reality seemed to have taken up residence elsewhere for the evening.But whether or not the neocons are ready to face it, their moment has passed. At the Defense Department, their apostles and allies are largely gone. Donald Rumsfeld has been replaced by Robert M. Gates, a member of the Iraq Study Group and of the realist school associated with the previous President Bush. Paul Wolfowitz, the architect who tried to raise a new Middle East on Saddam’s rubble, has moved to the World Bank, where he observes a McNamara-like silence on the failure of his war. …But the largest factor in Cheney’s demise is that his neoconservative hypotheses have been falsified by events. Invading Iraq did not catalyze a new Middle East. Isolating North Korea did not retard but advance its nuclear program. High-handed unilateralism reduced American power and prestige.
