New Republic Editors 'Regret' Their Support of Iraq War (WP)

[diamond14]

New Republic Editors 'Regret' Their Support of Iraq War

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 19, 2004; Page C01


Ever since the New Republic broke with liberal orthodoxy by strongly supporting President Bush's war with Iraq, the magazine has been getting a steady stream of e-mails from readers demanding an apology.


"We feel regret, but no shame. . . . Our strategic rationale for war has collapsed," says an editorial hammered out after a contentious, 3 1/2-hour editors' meeting.

"The central assumption underlying this magazine's strategic rationale for war now appears to have been wrong," it says. Even without nuclear or biological weapons, Hussein may have still been a threat, "but saying he was a threat does not mean he was a threat urgent enough to require war."


Wieseltier goes further than the editorial, saying flatly: "If I had known that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I would not have supported this war." He says he has "come to despise" some of the officials running the war.

Others, like McCain, stand their ground: "Even if Saddam had forever abandoned his WMD ambitions, it was still right to topple the dictator."


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53812-2004Jun18.html?nav=headlines

[neuvocat]

1. This might be a better link.

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040628&s=editorial062804

[legin]

9. "We were wrong ... just very slightly"

would be a better title for this crap.

You'll notice the actual title is "We Were Wrong?".

That little question mark makes all the difference to what they are saying in the title.

Bastards ? (irony)

[Jack Rabbit]

2. Please join me in commending the editors of The New Republis

They were wrong. They have the courage to admit it.

Even if Saddam had forever abandoned his WMD ambitions, it was still right to topple the dictator.

Senator McCain should choose his words more carefully. An unelected head of state is a dictator, and the use of prevaricated rationales for going to war seems sufficient cause for his removal.

[Barrett808]

7. Not too impressed - TNR still ascribes honest motivations to BushCo n/t

[bushwakker]

10. Amazing isn't it

I'm just an avaerage citizen. I have no foreign policy credentials. I've never served as a diplomat. I don't have an advanced degree in Middle East or foreign studies from the Ivy Leagues or Georgetown. Hell, I've never even travelled to the middle east (or Europe for that matter). I have no "inside sources" in Capitol Hill or the WH or in the diplomatic community. How is it that a moron like me knew these fuckers were lying about Iraq and all these "smart" people got taken in? To paraphrse a Sy Hersh article in the New Yorker in regards to Chalabi's playing of the Us Gov't - "they got suckered because they wanted to get suckered". Screw TNR trying to cover their ass now.

[ElectroPrincess]

16. Exactly!

I had a subscription to New Republic which I promply canceled in the run up to this war. And I will NOT subscribe again. I'm getting tired of the "who knew?" excuse. There were world wide protests, the neighboring Arab countries were screaming "Don't do this!"; and we could not get approval within the UN. A LOT of people knew that invading Iraq was a crime. Now George W. Bush is making the tax payers in the USA (all but the top 1%) pay for his grand failure.

[bushwakker]

25. I stopped reading it during the Clinton years

I remember they had a huge cover article by the former GOP Liuet Gov of NY Betsy McCaughey (Sp?) eviserating the Clinton health care proposal. The piece was very influential at the time (a "liberal" mag disiing health care reform) and later shown to be total bunk - but the damage was done. TNR is a way station for ex-progressives who are on the move to join the right wing.

[David Zephyr]

32. Good For You.

I cancelled years ago.

"The Nation" still is the best.

[fsbooks]

22. no sh_t

any honest person with half a brain with only one eye open knew the justifications for invading Iraq were a sham.

[bushwakker]

11. They got suckered because they wanted to get suckered

fuck them.

[Ripley]

3. Well, well. A little late for all of these folks to keep coming out..

saying they are sorry they didn't do their fucking jobs BEFORE the war and fact check just a teensy weensy bit.

:nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke:

[TahitiNut]

4. Self-righteousness is the refuge of a bully

It's detestable. The US is an outlaw nation. Neither the invasion of Afghanistan nor the invasion of Iraq were either morally or legally justified.

[Skittles]

5. too little WAY TOO LATE, f***wits

you have BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS

[jeanmarc]

6. I regret it as well

I regret that they no longer are a reliable website. I used to visit them daily, but after their support, I stopped going. I hope they lost alot of their readership over their stupid support for this war.

[Jazzgirl]

17. I actually am a paying member!

Pissed me off when they started spouting bullshit. I haven't been there in months and they better not automatically bill me for another year. I will definitely protest the charge. I thought they were okay until they started mouthing their r/w crap. :puke:

[bushwakker]

8. New Republic...liberal... ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

fuck you Mr Kurtz

[struggle4progress]

12. I agree. If memory serves TNR was a great apologist for Reagan ...

during his terms in office.

[pollock]

15. The New Republic has been conservative for a long time.

and irrelevant...

[chaumont58]

20. It ought to be called the New Likud

Remember, they endorsed Holy Joementum Lieberman.

[struggle4progress]

21. I haven't even glanced at TNR since the early 80s.

[Tinoire]

24. They are NeoLiberals- peas in a pod with the NeoConservatives

and disgustingly enough, they are a good representation of the New Democrats aka the DLC. There's not a dime's worth of difference between the NeoConservatives and the NeoLiberals- there only difference is an argument over which of the two darts is in the exact center of the bull's eye. I canceled my susbcription years ago & join you in your greeting to Kurtz.

The New Republic, 1220 19th Street NW, Washington DC, Tel: [phone] (editorial), 800-827-1289 (subs). $70/year (48 issues); $35 for new subs.
For decades, The New Republic (founded in 1914 by Walter Lippmann and friends) and The Nation were sister weeklies, peas in a left-liberal pod. But in the aftermath of the 60s, TNR owner and quondam radical Martin Peretz became an ultra-hardliner on the issues of Israel and the Soviet Union -- for him, as for so many others, really one issue. And Peretz's TNR writers helped invent the cynical knowingness that defines "neoliberal" discourse -- wittily brushing off most suggestions for social melioration here at home, while often backing Reagan on "defense" and (particularly) the economy. During the 80s, TNR contributors thronged the ill-mannered bull sessions that passed for public-affairs TV. Their antics helped fix the contemporary persona of the "liberal" -- a querulous know-it-all who went to an Ivy League school, skipped military service, and today agrees with about 60-80 percent of the Reagan revolution.
Peretz's current politics are signaled by TNR's new editor: Andrew Sullivan, a young Englishman and unrepentant Thatcherite. But Clinton-Gore neoliberals (e.g., Sidney Blumenthal, Michael Kinsley) remain a TNR presence, and TNR's superior arts and letters section retains its separate editor, Leon Wieseltier. -- Steve Badrich

http://www.namebase.org/sources/FG.html



That's why you now hear Senate Republicans praising Kofi Annan. That's why a hawkish senior administration official recently insisted, "I'm not anti-U.N." That's why responsible Democrats like Joe Biden, Evan Bayh and Hillary Clinton and Republicans like George Bush and Dick Cheney echo similar themes when they sketch out the years ahead. That's why Germany's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld may joust about who was right in 2003, but they generally agree on how to proceed in 2004. That's why, no matter how much they bicker, there's not a dime's worth of difference between neoliberals and neoconservatives over Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/14/opinion/14BROO.html?ex=1087790400&en=5ef051327229f44c&ei=5070
(I'm not a fan of David Brooks but I agree with his assessment)


I took this from IRC. Fascinating web-site; Noam Chomsky is a http://www.irc-online.org/content/index.php. [br />

<snip>

Origins and History

<snip>

Pondering the Mondale defeat, a gathering coalition of Southern Democrats and northern neoliberals expressed concerns that the Democratic Party faced extinction, particularly in the South and West, if the party continued to rely on its New Deal message of government intervention and kept catering to traditional constituencies of labor, minorities, and anti-war progressives. In 1985 Al From, an aide to Rep. Gillis Long of Louisiana, took the lead in formulating a new messaging strategy for the party’s centrists, neoliberals, and conservatives. Will Marshall, at that time Long’s policy analyst and speechwriter, worked closely with From to establish the DLC and then became its first policy director. Today, Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the DLC think tank he founded. (11)

In his “Saving the Democratic Party” memo of January 1985, From advocated the formation of a “governing council” that would draft a “blueprint” for reforming the party. According to From, the new leadership should aim to create distance from “the new bosses”—organized labor, feminists, and other progressive constituency groups—that were keeping the party from modernizing. From’s memo sparked the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council in early 1985. According to Balz and Brownstein, “Within a few weeks, it counted seventy-five members, primarily governors and members of Congress, most of them from the Sunbelt, and almost all of them white; liberal critics instantly dubbed the group ‘the white male caucus.’” (7)

Although DLC members shared, for the most part, the neoliberal perspective of centrist Democrats such as Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, and Michael Dukakis, they took a much harsher, conservative stance on social justice and foreign policy issues. Regarding foreign policy, the DLC attempted to resurrect the hard-line anticommunism of Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson but rejected the New Deal politics that Jackson and other traditional “New Deal liberals” embraced. In the late 1980s, DLC Democrats supported aid to the contras, applauded President Reagan’s “Evil Empire” rhetoric, and offered their support to those militarists calling for missile defense and rejecting arms control negotiations. While the neoliberals foresaw an end to the cold war, the DLC still viewed the Soviet Union as an unmitigated threat.

In a 1986 conference on the legacy of “Great Society” of the Johnson administration, DLC Chairman Gov. Charles Robb of Virginia took up the neoconservative critique of liberalism first articulated in the early 1970s by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Norman Podhoretz, and other neoconservatives. According to Robb, “while racial discrimination has by no means vanished from our society, it’s time to shift the primary focus from racism—the traditional enemy without—to self-defeating patterns of behavior—the enemy within.” This speech signaled the end of the “New Politics” of the 1960s and 1970s in the Democratic Party and the rise of a new social conservatism in the party. Robb’s speech opened room for Democratic Party stalwarts to back away from political agendas that proposed government initiatives to address poverty, discrimination, and crime, and to join the traditional conservatives and neoconservatives in opposing affirmative action, social safety-net programs, and job-creation initiatives. Thus, the New Democrats of the DLC added their voices to the chorus of those calling for stiffer sentences, an end to affirmative action, reduced welfare benefits, and less progressive tax policies.

<snip>

Writing shortly before the November 2000 election, John Nichols observed that the DLC had been founded “with essentially the same purpose as the Christian Coalition,” namely, “to pull a broad political party dramatically to the right.” According to Nichols, “the DLC has been far more successful than its headline-grabbing Republican counterpart.” (9) Although the DLC can rightly claim to have yanked the Democratic Party to the right, it has repeatedly failed to sideline what Progressive Policy Institute President Will Marshall has disparaging labeled “the party traditionalists.” Since its founding the DLC has aimed to subsume all Democrats under its ideological umbrella. But persistent (and resurgent) resistance to neoliberal prescriptions, neoconservative foreign policy, and social conservative domestic policies (((that's us!)))has curtailed DLC ambitions and obliged it to operate more as a powerful agenda-setting and lobbying group within the party. In effect, the DLC has focused on controlling the party’s platform and leadership rather than on selling “big tent” politics to all Democratic Party constituencies.

<snip>

<snip> blinded by their own triumphalism, New Democrat ideologues fail to acknowledge that they have fallen in line behind the ills of neoliberals, neoconservatives, militarists, and social conservatives who have transformed the Republican Party over the past three decades. What’s more, the DLC/Progressive Policy Institute has also proved itself an effective shill for transnational Wall Street capitalists, although it faces competition in this role from the Republican Party and its array of affiliated policy institutes and think tanks. Such rightward leanings prompted the America Prospect’s Robert Kuttner to call the DLC the “Republicans’ Favorite Democrats.” (2)

<snip>

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/demleadcoun.php



Funding of the DLC and of the Progressive Policy Institute


Corporate contributors

- AT&T Foundation
- Eastman Kodak Charitable Trust
- Prudential Foundation
- Georgia-Pacific Foundation
- Chevron
- Amoco Foundation

The Third Way Foundation (an umbrella group of the New Democrats in the DLC) receives funding from

- the Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation
- Howard Gilman Foundation
- Ameritech Foundation and General Mills Foundation.

DLC enjoys funding from

- Bank One
- Citigroup
- Dow Chemical
- DuPont
- General Electric
- Health Insurance Corporation
- Merrill Lynch
- Microsoft
- Morgan Stanley
- Occidental Petroleum
- Raytheon


Taken from John Nichols, “Behind the DLC Takeover,” Progressive, October 2000.
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1295/10_64/65952690/print.jhtml

===

Sources:

Sources
(1) New Democrats Online: DLC Biographies: Al From,
http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=86&subid=191&contentid=1131

(2) Robert Kuttner, “Republicans’ Favorite Democrats,” American Prospect, vol. 13, no. 12, July 1, 2002
http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/12/kuttner-r.html

(3) Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Policy, October 30, 2003
http://www.ndol.org/documents/Progressive_Internationalism_1003.pdf

(4) Ralph Nader, “The Corporatist Democratic Leadership Council,” In the Public Interest, August 1, 2003
http://www.nader.org/interest/080103.html

(5) Center for Public Integrity, Silent Partners: New Democrat Network.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/527/search.aspx?act=com&orgid=420

(6) New Democrats Online: New Dem Directory.
http://www.ndol.org/new_dem_dir.cfm

(7) Dan Balz and Ronald Brownstein, Storming the Gates: Protest Politics and the Republican Revival (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1996), pp. 67-73.

(8) William A. Galston and Elaine Kamarck, The Politics of Evasion, Progressive Policy Institute, 1989.

(9) John Nichols, “Behind the DLC Takeover,” Progressive, October 2000.
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1295/10_64/65952690/print.jhtml

(10) Kenneth S. Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (University Press of Kansas, 2000).

(11) “Will Marshall,” Progressive Policy Institute Bio, September 14, 2003
http://www.ppionline.org/

(12) “About the DLC,” Democratic Leadership Council, January 1, 1995
http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=86&subid=85&contentid=893

(13) Ronald Brownstein, “Dean Denounces Democratic Leadership Council, Stuns Centrists,” Los Angeles Times, December 25, 2003.
http://www.charleston.net/stories/122503/wor_25dean.shtml

(14) Joan Walsh, “The Democratic Weaselship Council,” Salon.com, July 29, 2003.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/howard_dean/109387.html

(15) “The New Democrat Credo,” DLC, January 1, 2001.
http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=86&subid=194&contentid=3775

(16) “New Democratic Coalition,” DLC, December 1, 2001.
http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=250061&kaid=103&subid=111

(17) “Progressive Policy Institute,” Capital Research Center, 2002
http://www.capitalresearch.org/search/orgdisplay.asp?Org=DLC101

(18) “Third Way Foundation,” Capital Research Center, 2002.
http://www.capitalresearch.org/search/orgdisplay.asp?Org=DLC102

[PROGRESSIVE1]

28. dlc = satan

[KissMyAsscroft]

13. Yet they never give us credit.

The people who had it figured out from day one.

Whores.

They want the truth reported? Hire us. I haven't had to modify my position one time. Looks like I'm the wise one, eh guys?

[bushwakker]

14. I know

I have conversations with friends who supported the war and I say "tell me one thing that I've been wrong about?" or "tell me one thing tht Bush said that turned out to be true?". Then they start hemming and hawing 9/11, Saddam, evil ....

[sadiesworld]

18. Tom Friedman mentality.

Use a great deal of knowledge, insight and common sense in explaining all the problems w/ going into Iraq...then say WTF let's do it anyway. :eyes:

:puke:

[aquart]

19. McCain remains a jackass.

Nice platitude about "toppling the dictator." Americans do NOT go to war to topple dictators, however. And if he wasn't a dishonest Republican asshat, he'd admit that.

[chaumont58]

23. I have never understood the adulation of McCain

He thinks its OK to spend 800 plus American lives to topple a dictator. Back in the 80s, the repukes were willing to fellate any and all dictators south of the Rio Grande.

[Lindacooks]

26. I have not been impressed with this publication

since the 2000 election, when it seemed like every single issue criticized President Gore, while giving chimpy a pass. I cancelled my subscription before the 2000 election because of that.

[PROGRESSIVE1]

27. The New "Repuliklan" never had any credibility to begin with.

[UTUSN]

29. How Come Most of Us DUers KNEW It Was a Phoney, Illegal War

from the get-go, without (most of us) having access to official, classified information?

[Toucano]

30. Prove your regret! Resign! n/t

[David Zephyr]

31. What They "Regret" Now is Loss of Subscribers & Money for Their Salaries

Fuck this magazine.

This is the DLC crowd who are now sucking up and want to make nice.

DU'ers, please always choose The Nation over this rag.

[lucky777]

33. I won't renew my subscription . . .

While I like the book reviews, and they sometimes have interesting articles, I've grown very tired of their professed neutrality in the wake of overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing.

I knew right away that Bush etc were total bullshit artists -- it was all there in front of our eyes. How could they not know?

Look, if they didn't know it was all bullshit at the beginning then they weren't being good journalists and demanding proof. And if they are so easily fooled, then they don't deserve to be getting my money.

I'm switching to Socialist Worker -- they are the only publication that tells it straight up, even if I am not really ready for a communist revolution just yet. Well, ok, maybe . ..

[devinsgram]

34. I just don't understand

how we all here knew it was all a bunch of sh*t, how then could they have not known it? I would think that they had some smart people on their staff.