The Klein Takedown

Peter Wehner, in his evisceration of Joe Klein at Commentary, offers one of the most devastating takedowns I've read this year - and that says a lot, because Megan McArdle handed Glenn Greenwald his intestines this afternoon.

Recall in my earlier post, Dueling Patriotisms, I looked at the Klein-Wehner blogging kerfluffle. As with all good blog wars, this one's gotten down to the nitty-gritty, so let's check it out:

On Friday I wrote a response to Joe Klein’s most recent Time column – and apparently Joe didn’t like it very much. On Sunday he wrote not one but two responses to my posting. They are worth unpacking.

1. Klein refers to me as the “former chief White House propagandist for the Iraq war” and says “those who spent the past seven years as propagandists for the one of the worst, and needlessly blood-soaked, presidencies in American history, have such a fabulous record of self-righteous wrong-headedness that they needn't be taken seriously at all.”

One might think that when it comes to Iraq, Klein would tread carefully. As I have pointed out here, here, and here, Klein, despite his efforts to make it appear otherwise, supported the Iraq war before it began.

On February 22, 2003, he told Tim Russert on his CNBC program that the war was a “really tough decision” but that he, Klein, thought it was probably “the right decision at this point.” Klein then offered several reasons for his judgment: Saddam’s defiance of 17 U.N. resolutions over a dozen years; Klein’s firm conviction that Saddam was hiding WMD; and the need to send that message that if we didn’t enforce the latest U.N. resolution, it “empowers every would-be Saddam out there and every would-be terrorist out there.”

Earlier this year Klein called the Iraq war the “stupidest foreign policy decision ever made by an American President.” This raises a question: does Klein’s statements to Russert qualify as the stupidest endorsement of the stupidest foreign policy decision ever made by an American President? One difference between President and Klein is that the President didn’t pretend, as Klein has, that he was against the war after he was for the war. Another difference is that the President favored the surge, which Klein opposed. On January 8, 2007, for example, Klein wrote this:

I'm afraid I'm going to get cranky about this: The Democrats who oppose the so-called "surge" are right. But they have to be careful not to sound like ill-informed dilettantes when talking about it.

And on April 5, 2007 Klein wrote this:

Never was Bush's adolescent petulance more obvious than in his decision to ignore the Baker-Hamilton report and move in the exact opposite direction: adding troops and employing counterinsurgency tactics inappropriate to the situation on the ground. "There was no way he was going to accept [its findings] once the press began to portray the report as Daddy's friends coming to the rescue," a member of the Baker-Hamilton commission told me. As with Bush's invasion of Iraq, the decision to surge was made unilaterally, without adequate respect for history or military doctrine.

Klein, then, favored going to war with Iraq and was a critic of the strategy that has been succeeding and may actually help bring about a decent outcome in Iraq. All of which makes Klein’s effort to portray himself as an expert on and prescient about Iraq not terribly convincing.

2. It’s also worth pointing out that during the “Arab Spring” – the early months in 2005 – Klein praised the President and his efforts to promote democracy in the Arab Middle East (Klein has since ridiculed the President’s “naïve support for democracy in countries that aren’t ready for it”).

In February 2005, for example, in the aftermath of the first Iraqi elections, Klein wrote this:

And yet, for the moment, Bush’s instincts—his supporters would argue these are bedrock values—seem to be paying off… The foreign-policy priesthood may be appalled by all the unexpected consequences, but there has been stunned silence in the non-neocon think tanks since the Iraqi elections.

And several weeks later he wrote this:

Under the enlightened leadership of Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, the Shiite majority has played the democracy game with gusto…. Most important, it has resisted the temptation to retaliate against the outrageous violence of Sunni extremists, especially against Shiite mosques…. If the President turns out to be right—and let’s hope he is—a century’s worth of woolly-headed liberal dreamers will be vindicated. And he will surely deserve that woolliest of all peace prizes, the Nobel.

Klein was not only claiming possible vindication for George W. Bush in 2005; he was talking up the possibility of a Nobel Peace Prize for the President – something that not even I, the chief White House propagandist and Kool-Aid drinker, was doing.

3. The statement from Klein that set off our current back-and-forth was his explicit assertion that “the liberal message of national improvement is profoundly more optimistic, and patriotic, than the innate conservative pessimism about the perfectibility of human nature [emphasis added].” On Sunday morning Klein defended this charge – though by Sunday evening he was apologizing for using patriotism “as [conservatives] do – as a weapon.” But Klein’s use of patriotism as a weapon, he assures us, was only “marginal” – and nothing compared to what those nasty conservatives have done over the years.

In his initial defense, Klein wrote this:

I didn't question the patriotism of conservatives: I simply argued that it is more patriotic to be optimistic about the chance that our collective will--that is, the best work of government--will succeed, rather than that it will fail or impinge on freedom. In others words, it is more patriotic to be in favor of civil rights legislation than to oppose it...to be in favor of social security and medicare than to oppose them...and to hope that the better angels of our legislators--acting in concert, in compromise--will produce a universal health insurance system and an alternative energy plan that we can all be proud of.

This is, I think, a very unwise road to travel down. Does Klein really want prudential policy differences become a referendum on people’s patriotism? Is a liberal plan on health care and energy inherently more patriotic than a conservative approach to these issues? And what about those who favored the 1996 welfare reform legislation; were they more patriotic than those who opposed it? What about school choice, racial quotas, and policies on crime and abortion? What about support for a missile defense and appointing originalists on the Supreme Court? Are they a referendum on patriotism as well?

It strikes me that it is much wiser simply to make the case on behalf of particular policies and leave the matter of patriotism out of it.

Well, that's three of eight "unpacked" responses, so read the whole thing (especially the conclusion, which is dramatic).

Klein, like the rest of the "liberal war hawks," was for the war before he was against it.

(I also appreciate Wehner taking the time to write an elaborate essay laying out all the angles. It's something I like to do too, when I have a big blog war myself. Never surrender!!)