Matthew Yglesias Throws the Yellow Flag on Jacob Weisberg
I'm not sure what the penalty is. Fifteen yards and loss of down?
Me? I take this as more evidence that liberal hawks are cognitively dysfunctional:
Matthew Yglesias / proudly eponymous since 2002: Weisberg argues:
As Iraq descended into mayhem, a disengaged president continued to put forth the absurdist goal of establishing liberal democracy in a catastrophically damaged country where it had no root.
This is no fair. Establishing a liberal democracy in Iraq was absurd but it was the mission. You can't argue that the mission wasn't doomed to failure and only failed because of incompetence, and then cite as an example of incompetence the national leadership's pursuit of the mission objectives. Yes, yes, a smarter, wiser president could have invaded Iraq and made things turn out less bad. The question on the table, however, is whether "competent" execution of the invade-occupy-democratize plan could have achieved the goals of the plan.
We really do deserve a much better press corps than this one we have got.
