Being a neocon means you never have to read a book before criticizing it

I don't know MJS neocon columnist Patrick McIlheran, I don't know MJS reporter Bill Glauber. I don't know if they're friends or not. Still, if the Brawler were Glauber he would be less than thrilled with our buddy P-Mack.

Why? Glauber did a longish piece looking at the bleak picture painted in Iraq by three recent books, including the excellent Cobra II and The 1% Doctrine (which the Brawler is now reading). He also writes up a Q&A with Ron Suskind, author of Doctrine. Glauber's been around, he's been to Iraq. One imagines he felt these articles had some importance.

Here's how McIlheran begins his Sunday column:

And the Bush administration's at the point where people have retired and want to vindicate themselves in books.

"The West Wing" is off the air, so there's a mIarket for inside dish, leading to things such as "The One Percent Doctrine," called unintentionally hilarious by reviewer Andrew McCarthy in The New York Sun. You get a critique, he says, of how the administration went to war - along with potboiler bits such as the description of Condi Rice as "a fierce academic achiever, alone at forty-six, bemused and appraising, cool, and sealed each morning in a snug Oscar de la Renta."

I'm going on reviews, but I'm sure I'll read Ron Suskind soon, just as I read The Times' indiscretion on banking surveillance. You can regret loose lips and sunken ships, but once the story's public, you ought to be informed.

Glauber devotes hours to two stories revolving around Doctrine -- then  McIlheran  pisses all over without having it!  "I'm going on reviews," intones McIlheran. Great day in the morning! And the review he chooses to share is from Andrew McCarthy, a contributor to the National Review Online's Corner, a hothouse of the "unintentionally hilarious" and, the Brawler fears, the source of many of McIlheran's "ideas."

As per usual, P-Mack's column is a plodding read. And as per usual, it's replete with howlers:

It is, however, one king-sized insurgency by some Muslims against free societies, particularly us. It's been going on at least since Iran's president was, maybe, blindfolding our embassy staff in Tehran. It's been decades of hijackings and bombs and, belatedly, an understanding on our part that we are at war. We, voting public included, need to be informed, adaptive and patient in fighting it.

This is not one "king-sized insurgency." The Hostage Crisis had nothing to do with why we are in Iraq or Afghanistan. Even if Iran is now egging on Hizbollah, trying to lump events of the 70s with today, talking about "decades of hijackings and bombs" -- with the villains of the theory including everyone from Khomeni to the PLO to Abu Nidal to the Sadrists -- clouds more than clarifies. Then there's this:

But this point in the war very much demands something from us, the voting public. It is a contribution to the war effort to accept that progress in Iraq or against al-Qaida won't seem as decisive as fiction. It serves our country to react to leaks and reconstructed history and disgruntled memoirs by asking what is the way forward.

What if the way forward is out of Iraq?

The Brawler did enjoy a supporter of a war founded on lies -- or at least a deliberate effort to not tell the American public the truth -- using the term "fiction" and "reconstructed history."

Right next to McIlheran, Gregory Stanford succinctly runs through the credits and debits of the Iraq occupation.  He says the negatives have outweighted the positives. McIlheran's piece meanders and garbles.

There's a reason for that: That is because he's urging people not to hold accountable the people he took us into Iraq and to continue to trust them after they have lost all reason for that honor. He's asking people not to believe what they see with their eyes. Yes, I imagine it would be difficult for a columnist to say that. (PunditNation makes a similar observation.)

UPDATE: Talking Points Memo had a nice piece today about the right's new message (of which McIlheran's dispatch is a piece) that the Middle East has always been a violent place, so we should cut Bush some slack over his costly and tragic failure in Iraq. The conclusion:

While it is true that you can understand little about the Middle East without understanding its history, conservatives have an obvious motive for wanting to compress the last 20-30 years of events in the Middle East. Linking the brutal events of the recent past with the brutal events of today allows them to skip over the fact that real progress toward peace and stability in the region was made in the 1990s, in part due to U.S. leadership and diplomacy. In doing so, I suppose conservatives hope to obscure what a hash they have made of the Middle East in the last 5 years.

Comments

[grumps]

We need to make it damned hard for the reconstructionists and revisionists who apologize for the administration. These are the people who now want to invoke the hostage crisis in Iran, the bombing of the barracks in Beirut and the withdrawl from Somalia as part of the set-piece justification for Iraq.

These same fools have been telling us for 5 years that 9/11 changed everything, that none of the old assumptions or causes meant anything.

[Cream City]

Thanks for your headline, my laff of the day.

Reminds me of . . . Frau Bucher, who went after Barrett for what he said in a book not even published yet -- and what he taught in a course not even taught yet.

Wonder if Frau Bucher knows the phrase "thought police"?