"And Yes, We Now Know, Republican Extremism as We Have Known It Can Become Far Worse"

"So the devil we thought we knew, the man whose saturnine image chilled many a liberal heart during his years in power, pointed at this new devil and suggested new depths of power-hungry mendacity were coming into sight. Perhaps Dick Cheney knowingly lied about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the U.S. invasion in 2003, or perhaps he was self-deluded. And maybe Cheney and George W. Bush swept into office in an election even more disputed than that of 2020. But they relied on the U.S. Supreme Court to consummate their victory, not a mob invading the U.S. Capitol."

Ed Kilgore at New York reacts to the death of Dick Cheney.

"An Augury of the Anti-Liberal Politics and Virulent Nationalism That Would Soon Reach Around the World, Even to America"

"Two decades after September 11, we're no longer those Americans who believed such things would never happen to us, and who, when they did happen, went boldly overseas to rid the world of monsters. Experts now see white-nationalist terrorism as a greater domestic threat than Islamist terrorism. The new fight is for our own democracy. It will require all the restraint and purpose and wisdom that we struggled to muster when the enemy wasn't us."

George Packer at The Atlantic writes that 9/11 "was the first sign that the 21st century would be a period of shock and disaster."

And Calvin Woodward, Ellen Knickmeyer, and David Rising of the AP discuss the event's impact.

Anti-Anti-Trump from the Left

"It should go without saying, though I know it does not, that none of this is a defense of these Trump failings or an attempt to mitigate the harms they caused. What this argument is, instead, is a vehement rejection of the grotesque historical revisionism that seeks to erase and whitewash the far worse moral evils, acts of violence and assertions of lawlessness that preceded him, all in order to propagate myths of American Exceptionalism and, worse, to rehabilitate the reputations and careers of the political and media cretins who perpetrated them."

Glenn Greenwald at Substack argues that "No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush/Cheney Administration Was Far Worse Than Trump."

"We Can and We Must Pursue a Different Option"

"Neither do we want a foreign policy that is based on the logic that led to those wars and corroded our democracy: a logic that privileges military tools over diplomatic ones, aggressive unilateralism over multilateral engagement, and acquiescence to our undemocratic partners over the pursuit of core interests alongside democratic allies who truly share our values. We have to view the terrorism threat through the proper scope, rather than allowing it to dominate our view of the world. The time has come to envision a new form of American engagement: one in which the United States leads not in war-making but in bringing people together to find shared solutions to our shared concerns. American power should be measured not by our ability to blow things up, but by our ability to build on our common humanity, harnessing our technology and enormous wealth to create a better life for all people."

Bernie Sanders in Foreign Affairs writes that "[t]he American people don't want endless war."

"The Nation's Only Existing Memorial to Its Middle Eastern Wars"

"Those whose names are engraved on the wall in Marseilles died in service to their country. Of that there is no doubt. Whether they died to advance the cause of freedom or even the wellbeing of the United States is another matter entirely. Terms that might more accurately convey why these wars began and why they have persisted for so long include oil, dominion, hubris, a continuing and stubborn refusal among policymakers to own up to their own stupendous folly, and the collective negligence of citizens who have become oblivious to where American troops happen to be fighting at any given moment and why. Some might add to the above list an inability to distinguish between our own interests and those of putative allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel."

For Memorial Day weekend, Andrew Bacevich at MintPress News writes about visiting the Middle East Conflicts Memorial.

"That Humility Has Been Lost"

"It's hard to recapture the horror that earlier generations of Americans felt about preventive war when it was still something that other countries did to the United States and not merely something Americans contemplate doing to others. They viewed it the way some Americans still view torture: as liberation from the moral restraints that human beings require. One of the things that frightened them most about the Nazis was that Hitler had dispensed with the concept of original sin. He had aimed to create a new class of infallible, god-like, humans who need not be encumbered by the fetters that bound lesser races. Totalitarianism, argued Arthur Schlesinger in The Vital Center, aimed 'to liquidate the tragic insights which gave man a sense of its limitations.' For Schlesinger, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann and other intellectuals who shaped America’s foreign policy debate in the early Cold War, acknowledging these limitations was part of what made America different. Because Americans recognized that they were fallible, fallen creatures, they did not grant themselves the illegitimate, corrupting power of preventive war."

Peter Beinart at The Atlantic looks at the American embrace of preventive war.

"A Party That Will Need to Significantly Change Its Ideological Direction—or One on the Verge of Breaking Apart"

"The white working-class base of the party has been devastated by stagnating wages, globalization and de-industrialization, and various forms of social and cultural breakdown. And through it all the Republican Party has offered little beyond tax cuts for the wealthy and stern, moralistic reprimands ('Stop whining and get a job!'). That's hardly a strategy inclined to generate long-term loyalty and enthusiasm for the party.
"But that's just the beginning."

Damon Linker at The Week looks at Donald Trump and the Republican primary in South Carolina.

And Jonathan Chait at New York reacts to Trump's South Carolina victory.

As does Michael Brendan Dougherty at The Week.

And Robert P. Jones at The Atlantic calls Trump supporters "nostalgia voters," while Ben Mathis-Lilley at Slate issues a warning about what making "America great again" means.

Rollback or Containment?

"Rather than assuming an offensive posture, the West should revert to a defensive one. Instead of attempting to impose its will on the Greater Middle East, it should erect barriers to protect itself from the violence emanating from that quarter. Such barriers will necessarily be imperfect, but they will produce greater security at a more affordable cost than is gained by engaging in futile, open-ended armed conflicts. Rather than vainly attempting to police or control, this revised strategy should seek to contain.
"Such an approach posits that, confronted with the responsibility to do so, the peoples of the Greater Middle East will prove better equipped to solve their problems than are policy makers back in Washington, London, or Paris. It rejects as presumptuous any claim that the West can untangle problems of vast historical and religious complexity to which Western folly contributed. It rests on this core principle: Do no (further) harm."

Andrew J. Bacevich in The Boston Globe argues that American and European leaders "have enmeshed the West in a war that it cannot win and should not perpetuate."

"There Will Be No Illusion About the Kind of Foreign Policy He Would Conduct If He Were Elected President"

"Bush’s story about the 'surge' isn’t surprising, but it is false and dangerously misleading. He celebrates the 'surge' without qualification as a 'success' and declares it a turning point, but both claims are untrue. As I said earlier, the 'surge' failed on its own terms, but more than that it means that the U.S. recommitted to a disastrous war at a time when the public had already expressed their overwhelming opposition to continuing the war. George W. Bush's admirers cheer his decision to escalate the war as a 'courageous' act because of the unpopularity of the war at that point, but it was really the most predictable and self-serving attempt to make the best out of an utter debacle. It isn't just that the 'surge' turned out to be unsuccessful according to the Bush administration’s own standards, but that it represented the worst instincts of our political class to escalate a lost war instead of cutting our losses much earlier. The fact that Jeb Bush sees this as an exemplary moment in recent history tells us all we need to know about his foreign policy judgment."


Daniel Larison at The American Conservative reacts to Jeb Bush's speech at the Ronald Reagan Library.

"Should Obama Pardon Bush?"

"ACLU director Anthony Romero offered a different approach: instead of prosecuting, Obama could pardon a highly visible group of Bush administration officials - including former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Bush and Cheney themselves. Romero mentions three important instances of 'preemptive pardoning,' when presidents have issued pardons in order to heal a national division: Lincoln and Andrew Johnson's pardons of Confederate soldiers, Ford's pardon of Nixon, and Carter's pardon of Vietnam draft-dodgers. The latter two are widely seen as having been politically costly, and Ford's pardon of Nixon even as a serious lapse in executive accountability. Writing last year about the political use of pardons, Leon Neyfakh suggests that a number of twentieth century presidents have used pardons to signal disagreement with existing policies."


Julia Azari at The Washington Monthly explores the question.

"A Hybrid Entity of Public and Private Institutions Ruling the Country"

"Its principal institutions are mostly large and obvious: the immense professional bureaucracies at the State Department, the Defense Department, Treasury and Justice, along with the CIA and NSA and Homeland Security and a laundry list of smaller and more mysterious entities like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose every action is a highly classified state secret. As Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks have partially made clear, the Deep State is tied by many subterranean threads to both Wall Street and Silicon Valley, so much so that it is not always clear who is the servant and who the master. While the functionaries of the Deep State profess to be non-ideological and above politics, they actually represent the 'Washington Consensus,' a self-reinforcing combination of neoliberal, free-market economic policies and an aggressive, militaristic foreign policy that defines the zone of American interests as the entire globe.
"Lofgren makes clear that he is not claiming the existence of a secret conspiratorial cabal, but you could almost say he's protesting too much."


Andrew O'Hehir in Salon considers Mike Lofgren's "Anatomy of the Deep State."

"Dad From 2150 Can’t Get Enough Iraq War Documentaries"

"Orkney added that although he could happily sit and view a whole weekend of documentaries on the early 21st-century conflict, he does not enjoy any of the popular romantic period dramas set during the quaint, old-fashioned Iraq War era that his wife loves."


From The Onion.

Stuff Happened

"A group of Republican neoconservatives and other political and government figures quickly gathered not only to respond to the 9/11 attacks but also, as they saw it, to restore the nation’s confidence and ideals. Cheney and Rumsfeld had privately deplored the decline of American power in the Nixon and Ford administrations during the Vietnam War. They saw in 9/11 an opportunity to revive American power and superiority, or as Cheney put it, to 'get it right this time.' Much of what happened after the attacks would very likely have occurred no matter who was in charge—the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the building up of intelligence organizations and other changes. But from the start, Cheney and Rumsfeld began pushing for a much wider change, what the president called a 'war on terror.'
"But what did a 'war on terror' mean?"

Alan Brinkley in The New York Times reviews two recent memoirs from Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

"They Have Learned Nothing and Forgotten Nothing"

Michael Lind in Salon and Ross Douthat in The New York Times warn Americans to stay out of Libya.

Guns or Taxes

"So far, Republicans have been able to delude voters and perhaps themselves that the budget can be balanced without higher taxes, and by cutting only domestic discretionary programs. When reality finally sets in and they have no choice but to accept that this is impossible, establishment conservatives like Brooks, Feulner and Kristol must decide which is more important to them: opposing all tax increases or preserving the defense budget. We will then find out if they genuinely care about our national security or are what Thomas Paine called summer soldiers and sunshine patriots."

Bruce Bartlett at The Fiscal Times criticizes Republican calls for high defense spending.

"One of Triumph of the Person over the Politics, or of the Politics over the Person"

"Eager to refute accusations in the British press that he was 'Bush’s poodle' or enabler, Mr. Blair reminds the reader of his own belief in an interventionist and morally driven foreign policy, articulated years earlier during the Kosovo crisis. He also argues that by being in the room, he hoped to press the United States to go the United Nations route and 'pitch to George the issue of the Israel-Palestine peace process.' 'If you wanted to be part of the planning,' he writes, 'you had to be, at least in principle, open to being part of the action.'
"Left unaddressed is the contention of many politicians and journalists that Mr. Blair failed to get the Bush administration to embrace a multilateral approach and a broader 'road map' for Middle East peace, because, in the words of the Blair biographer Anthony Seldon, 'he committed the greatest error in diplomacy: he declared his hand too early,' thereby enabling the Americans to take him for granted."

In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews Tony Blair's A Journey: My Political Life.

"Now, It Is Time to Turn the Page"

"Indeed, one of the lessons of our effort in Iraq is that American influence around the world is not a function of military force alone. We must use all elements of our power—including our diplomacy, our economic strength, and the power of America’s example—to secure our interests and stand by our allies. And we must project a vision of the future that is based not just on our fears, but also on our hopes—a vision that recognizes the real dangers that exist around the world, but also the limitless possibility of our time."

The New York Times prints President Obama's Iraq War speech.

And George Packer responds in The New Yorker.

"I Do Not Make This Decision Lightly"

"This review is now complete. And as Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home. These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative, while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan."

The New York Times prints President Obama's speech about the war in Afghanistan.

The Hope That House Built

"We put a question on the ballot and in November 1967 we got roughly 40 per cent of the people of Cambridge to vote against the war, roughly the same percentage as in other places. We then had a sociology graduate student study the vote and his report was very clear: the higher the rent you paid, the more expensive your home, the more likely you were to vote against the war. We got the Harvard vote, but we lost the working class. It was a blow to all of us young lefties who thought the key to everything was the working class. And that political division was really a split in the Democratic Party. [There were] the anti-war liberals who were well-educated and tended to have more money than the traditional base of the party. The split between them and the working-class base is the key to the next 30 or 40 years of American politics. We are maybe coming out of that period. But the struggles of the Obama administration suggest that one election does not transform a country."

Luke Slattery in The Australian interviews Michael Waltzer.

"A 'Leftism of Style'"

"Bérubé's story begins in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Hundreds of thousands of Americans united to protest what they considered unnecessary military aggression. Skepticism was expressed by every strain of leftward thought--from dovish independents (Lincoln Chafee) to libertarian socialists (Ed Herman). And yet, none of the individual messages were reflective of the group as a whole. The anti-war movement became associated with inflamed smash-the-state rhetoric and even its moderate voices were written off as 'dirty fucking hippies.' Left became a term of derision, and to be against the war was to be anti-American. As Bérubé describes, hawkish Democrats suddenly carried liberalism's banner; center liberals were dubbed radical; and radicals became the center of attention. The 'Manichean Left' is to thank for this--and it didn't have to be this way."

Alexandra Gutierrez reviews Michael Bérubé's The Left at War in The American Prospect.