The war of the liberals

Must read article (actually a review of two books) from The Nation. An excerpt:

More instructive than the speechlessness of the Democratic Party, unable to react coherently to the bloody impasse in Iraq, is the debate among progressive writers about the justice of the invasion. To penetrate the thinking of the prowar liberals, whose zeal for toppling a malignant dictatorship split the left and therefore eased the slog to disaster, we need to cast our eyes back to the 1990s. Written by thoughtful observers of the current crisis, two new highly personal books help us understand the gestation of liberal hawks in the dozen years between the fall of the wall and the fall of the towers. Images of Rwanda and Kosovo were not especially poignant for the principal Bush Administration insiders who made the decision to invade Iraq. At the outset, for them, humanitarianism was not even a pretext for war. But the appalling failures and modest successes of humanitarian intervention during the 1990s did shape the thinking of certain sparkling liberal intellects. Their heady support for war played little or no role in the decision to invade Iraq. But it did diminish and isolate voices of dissent, helping insure that Bush’s ill-fated war was set afoot with little national debate, even in the high-circulation liberal press.