David Brooks’ sickening Iraq apologia: How the New York Times hack just rewrote history
New York Times columnist David Brooks was once an enthusiastic backer of George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq. He’d write columns for the Weekly Standard – the official journal of bankrupt neoconservative thought – glorifying Bush for his steely-eyed determination and tartly mocking the pansy liberals and other anti-war types who opposed Bush’s righteous exercise in nation-building and freedom-spreading. “History will allow clear judgments about which leaders and which institutions were up to the challenge posed by Saddam,” Brooks prophesied in the March 2003 column, “and which were not.”
That prediction didn’t quite pan out. Yes, the Iraq war ended up being a disaster, but contrary to Brooks’ assurance, the “clear judgments” about who was right and who was wrong about Iraq are still pending, as evidenced by the fact that so many people who got it so terribly wrong haven’t faced any real consequences. Let’s use Brooks himself as an example. He landed his plum gig on the Times op-ed page a few months after the war started and used his perch to continue singing the praises of Bush and the Iraq experiment, like in this September 2004 column predicting that Iraq’s elections would help undermine the insurgency. What judgment did Brooks face for being constantly and consistently wrong about Iraq? Well, he’s still writing for the Times op-ed page.
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Obama, of course, has also intervened in Iraq, sending fighter planes and drones to attack the Islamic State. Brooks wants more than that, but less than a full-scale invasion. He wants… I don’t know. Something. He’s landed at a mushy and undefined middle ground, which indicates to me his belief in interventionism hasn’t substantially changed, but the failure of Iraq is forcing him to express it differently.
But let’s go back to Brooks’ 2003 assurance that history will render its verdicts on those who endorsed the Iraq debacle and those who did not. History hasn’t yet allowed “clear judgments” on the backers of the Iraq misadventure because the people who should be feeling the sting of those judgments – like David Brooks – are doing their level best to water down and explain away the appalling conduct that led to the actual war. What makes Brooks’ column so galling is that he’s trying to present his self-serving exculpation of the Iraq war architects as a lesson learned. Brooks pretty clearly hasn’t learned a thing, and that’s to be expected when you suffer no consequences for being completely and catastrophically wrong.
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/19/david_brooks_sickening_iraq_apologia_how_the_new_york_times_hack_just_rewrote_history/
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