Richard Cohen’s latest WaPo column has received ample derision today, but I’d like to pile on anyway. The piece is just that annoying.
Cohen spends the first two-thirds of his column explaining the ways in which the president has shown liberal tendencies. He expanded Medicare (a liberal idea), passed a national education reform measure (another liberal idea), spent lots of money (which is characterized as a liberal thing to do), and created an ethnically-diverse cabinet (and apparently only liberals care about diversity).
All of this is true, I suppose, but it’s also old news. Conservatives have been complaining about Bush being a “big government conservative” since 2001, if not the 2000 campaign. Cohen is crashing through an open door, making a point that others have made repeatedly for several years.
But then Cohen gets to his real point: the war in Iraq is fundamentally a liberal idea.
I acknowledge that the war is a catastrophic mistake and was incompetently managed. But if you don’t think it was waged on behalf of oil or empire, then one reason for our involvement was an attempt to do some good — rid the world of a really bad guy and make life better for Iraqis and others in the region. This “liberal” intent may have left Dick Cheney cold and found Don Rumsfeld indifferent, but it appealed to Bush and it showed in his rhetoric and body language. […]
Bush’s neoliberal instincts have come a cropper across the board. His appointees have too often been incompetent, and his well-intentioned education act is underfunded. But it is with Iraq that real and long-term damage has been done. For years to come, his war will be cited to smother any liberal impulse in American foreign policy — to further discredit John F. Kennedy’s vow to “pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” We shall revert to this thing called “realism,” which is heartless and cynical, no matter what its other virtues. The debacle of Iraq has cost us — and others — plenty in lives. But in the end, it will cost us our soul as well.
My, my, Richard. What are we going to do with you.
First, let’s tackle this notion that Bush wanted to wage war for liberal reasons (helping people, humanitarianism). Even if we put aside the fact that Bush, under this scenario, was dishonest about the rationale for the invasion, Cohen backs up his assertion by pointing to the president’s “body language.” It’s an argument so silly it’s beyond mockery.
But more importantly, while Richard Cohen praises Bush’s rationale for this disastrous war now, it was the same Richard Cohen who criticized Bush’s rationale for the disastrous war a year ago. As Greg Sargent noted, “Cohen didn’t know why Bush invaded. Cohen said he thought that Bush appeared driven to have a war no matter what — perhaps in order to avenge the assassination threat to his dad, or perhaps in order to secure a place for himself in history, Cohen speculated. Yet today, Cohen suddenly is convinced by Bush’s ‘body language’ that Bush’s chief motive was ‘to do good’ — and this makes him a ‘neo-liberal.'”
As for Cohen’s lament that future presidents won’t want to follow in Bush’s footsteps — waging pre-emptive wars for “liberal” reasons — this is where Cohen’s argument goes from bad to bizarre. As Ezra explained:
You see this lament on occasion, and it almost always suffers from the same internal dissonance exhibited in Cohen’s column. Cohen “acknowledge[s] that the war is a catastrophic mistake and was incompetently managed,” but he seems disturbed that future policy-makers will shy away from repetition of those mistakes. In other words, he grants the lessons of the war, but laments our willingness to learn them. It’s baffling.
C’mon, Richard, you can do better than this. I realize there’s a temptation to be contrarian about, well, everything, but this just isn’t working.