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03-16-2015, 05:45 PM
A nice note I got from Pat Buchanan congratulating me on being one of the few other conservatives who understands the neocon heresy; Hint: Neither Pat nor I flirted with socialism in our youth. (Paul Mulshine)
Paul Mulshine | The Star Ledger By Paul Mulshine | The Star Ledger
on March 16, 2015 at 6:00 PM, updated March 16, 2015 at 7:06 PM
"To my last breath I will defend the Trotsky who ..." - neocon writer Stephen Schwartz
After I wrote the other day about Rand Paul's ill-advised decision to sign that nutty neocon note to Iran, I got an email from my friend Dave the Liberal.
Dave objected to my description of Joshua Muravchik, who wrote a piece for the Washington Post talking about how wonderful a war with Iran would be. I termed Muravchik a left-winger.
"Muravchik, the Johns Hopkins egghead, is no Washington Post liberal," wrote Dave. "He's a Wolfowitz-Bolton-level American Enterprise Institute neocon."
I wrote Dave back to say that in the eyes of us traditional conservatives, all neocons are liberals. The philosophy of endless military meddling in foreign affairs for the benefit of liberating foreigners is, and always has been, a liberal enterprise. It goes back of course to Woodrow Wilson, easily the worst and most liberal president of the 20th century.
That's why it is also called "Wilsonianism" and "liberal internationalism."
It's also why the liberal Washington Post is so eager to promote that liberal point of view.
But even by the loony standards of the liberals, the Post went too far with the column headlined War with Iran Is Probably Our Best Option" by a certain Joshua Muravchik.
In fact, a peace deal with Iran is obviously our best option, for the simple reason that the Iranians are providing the troops that are actually defeating the forces of the Islamic State.
Another reason, one obvious to us conservative realists if not to the Beltway liberals, is that the Shiite Iranians can't expand into the West for the simple reason that the Sunnis hate them. And the Sunnis are nine-tenths of the world's Muslims.
When you see women parading around London and France in burkhas, those are almost invariably Sunnis. They'd be about as likely to take orders from the Pope as from an ayatollah.
Contrary to what Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress, the enemy of our enemy really is our friend.
And we're certainly not going to advance our national interest by starting a war with our friend. So why would Muravchik suggest a policy so plainly not in our national interest?
The forces of the Islamic State in Syria; isn't it strange that the liberal Washington Post editorial page keeps pushing policies that would advance the interests of ISIS? Not to us conservatives.AP Photo/ Raqqa Media Center of the Islamic State group
Because that's what left-wingers always do. And Muravchik has the finest of left-wing pedigrees. If you doubt that, read this passage from his Wikipedia entry:
"Muravchik was National Chairman of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) from 1968 to 1973, and executive director of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority from 1977 to 1979. He was also an aide to the late Congressman James G. O'Hara (D-Mich.) in 1975 and to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) in 1977 and as a campaign aide to the late Senator Henry M. Jackson in his pursuit of the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination."
Gee, who could have predicted that pedigree? Any conservative with a knowledge of recent American history, that's who.
I have a particularly good knowledge thereof. Back in the late 1960s, I attended the University of California at Berkeley. That's when I first met the '60s radicals.
I didn't like them. I was on the track team and just wanted to do my runs in peace, not have to work my way through endless demonstrations for endless rich-kid causes, like the establishment of a "People's Park" and the strike by the "Third World Liberation Front."
Her's a nice picture of the pleasant campus scene at Berkeley that I took on a trip to the old school a few years ago.Paul Mulshine
I saw a lot of the same thing when I later switched to Rutgers and ran the student newspaper, I used to let the Marxists in the Student Union run whatever articles they wanted, but I often added a common-sense conservative corrective.
Muravchik would have fit in perfectly with those lefties. What they all had in common was not a love of liberty but a love of power. And when they realized there was more power to be gained by pretending to be right-wingers, that's when they made the switch. Charles Krauthammer somehow gets classified as a conservative despite pedigree only slightly less liberal than Muravchik's. (And then there is Bill "My mommy really was a commie" Kristol.)
When these and other lefties-turned-neocons became anti-communist, it wasn't because they were pro-capitalist. Most were simply anti-Stalinist because they were followers of Stalin's worst enemy during the formation of the Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky.
As some other conservative has noted, there's such a thing as an ex-Stalinist but there's no such thing as an ex-Trotskyite.
If you doubt that, read the notorious National Review piece by Stephen Schwartz in which he praises old Leon:
"......To my last breath I will defend the Trotsky who alone, and pursued from country to country, and finally laid low in his own blood in a hideously hot little house in Mexico City, said no to Soviet coddling of Hitlerism, to the Moscow purges, and to the betrayal of the Spanish Republic ...." and so on,
And then consider that it was Schwartz - along with another unrepentant Trotskyite, the late Christopher Hitchens - who claimed to have invented the term "Islamofascism."
Anyone who understands politics will understand why that term was made up: to fool the boobs into conflating fascist dictators like Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad and so on, with their most bitter enemies, the Islamic fundamentalists.
It is now obvious to anyone paying attention that the effort to remove secular dictators designed by the neocons under the term "Arab Spring" has been a complete disaster - unless of course you favor the efforts of the Islamic State.
Don't look now, but the neocons do. These ex-Marxists are nothing if not smart. They understand perfectly that deposing Assad in Syria would lead to Islamic State control of the entire region. Yet they propose doing it anyway when they by call for war both the Assad regime and Iran, the two forces capable of defeating ISIS.
If you think it Muravchik's advice makes any sense, go to the Sic Semper Tyrannis site of former Vietnam Green Beret and longtime Mideast military expert Pat Lang.
There you will read as Adam Silverman's piece documenting just how disastrous such a strike would be for the U.S. Silverman shows how the IRanians have located all of the relevant facilities in heavily populated areas. He writes:
When you compare the locations of the nuclear sites, the military sites, and the population centers it becomes clear that an attempt to militarily reduce Iran's nuclear facilities, let alone degrade their military facilities, essentially amounts to reducing Iran. The potential for radioactive fallout from the destruction of Iran's nuclear facilities, combined with other forms of collateral damage, would likely create a humanitarian crisis of almost unprecedented proportions. The only state with the strategic capabilities to provide the necessary humanitarian relief is the US - no one else has our strategic lift and response capabilities.
Basically, a successful reduction of Iran's nuclear facilities and capabilities will create a humanitarian crisis that only the US can successfully respond to. A response that would have to be amongst a population that is suffering because of the humanitarian crisis that the US just created. And all of this for what most agree would be a modest setback for Iran in developing a nuclear weapon
Meanwhile an effort to reach deal with Iran would stall development of highly enriched uranium while preserving the power to attack the Iranians if they reneged on the deal.
And of course it would preserve the ability of the Iranians to fight ISIS, a Sunni group that represents a real threat to U.S. interests - real to us conservatives if not to ex-Marxists
And then ask yourself why the undeniably liberal editorial page of the Washington Post keeps endorsing neoconservative ideas.
Uhh, because neocons are liberals.
That's why.
ALSO, here's that 2007 column I referenced above on the rather silly effort by the New York Times to portray Bill Kristol as a conservative. It's quite instructive for those who can't understand the difference between real conservatives and lefties like Kristol:
If you were a member of the liberal media who wanted to discredit conservative thought in America, how would you do it?
Here's an idea: Search for the most incompetent commentator in America, a guy who still hasn't figured out the Iraq War was a classic example of big-government bungling. Make sure this guy's not a self-made man; far better to hire someone who got his start in life thanks to a famous father. Better yet, make sure the father in question is one of the primary creators of a thoroughly wacky system of thought that has its roots in the fevered rantings of a Russian revolutionary.
So far, so good. And for a finishing touch, once you find this nutcase, you then label him your "conservative" columnist.
That's what the New York Times did the other day with the announcement that William Kristol will become a weekly columnist on the opinion page. Editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal tried to sugarcoat the announcement by stating that Kristol is "serious, respected conservative intellectual" in the words of Times.
Nonsense. Kristol is not serious, he's not respected and above all he's certainly not conservative.
Kristol is in fact a neoconservative and neoconservatism is, as conservative columnist George F. Will so aptly put it, "a spectacularly misnamed radicalism."
The radicalism of the neocons is rooted in the thought of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary whose theory of worldwide liberation was passed down to the lesser neocons by Kristol's father, New York intellectual Irving Kristol. (If you are not aware of this connection, please Google "Kristol and Trotsky" before you go any further).
Far from providing balance to the Times' editorial policy, Kristol fits squarely within it. The fight between the neocons and the liberals has always been an insiders' game between Manhattanites. Long before Kristol came along, the Times published the work of a neocon who had an even bigger role in leading us into the Iraq War than Kristol and his cohorts at the Weekly Standard.
That would be Judy Miller. The role of Miller in relation to the Iraq War is roughly equivalent to the role of William Randolph Hearst in relation to the Spanish-American War. Remember the Maine? If you do, then you realize that the hyping of that incident prior to the 1898 war was the equivalent of the hyping of so-called "weapons of mass destruction" prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
And the New York Times was right in the middle of it. It was reporter Miller who was the single most effective voice in hyping the WMD threat. Miller's work, subsequently retracted by the Times, was essential to the war effort in several ways.
For one, it made the neoconservative spin on Iraq acceptable to liberals. If even the New York Times accepted the theory that Saddam Hussein was a menace to the United States, then Democratic politicians had the go-ahead to vote for the war.
But the effect on conservatives was even more important. Saddam was a right-winger and we conservatives are right-wingers. Saddam was therefore a more likely ally than enemy. Saddam, for all his faults, was the leading opponent of Islamic fundamentalism in the Mideast and had in fact killed hundreds of thousands of Iranian fundamentalists in the 1980s, when he was a U.S. ally.
American conservatives therefore needed to be convinced that Saddam was a threat not just to his neighbors but to to the United States. Central to this campaign was the reporting of Miller, who was very close to Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and the rest of the now-discredited neocons who led the gullible George W. Bush into this war.
One old-fashioned conservative, the late Jude Wanniski of Morristown, wrote the following about Miller's reporting shortly after the war began:
"To any serious reader of her coverage in Iraq it has been plain for many, many moons that she is joined at the hip to the neo-cons at the American Enterprise Institute who cooked up the war, particularly Richard Perle and Laurie Mylroie."
Who's Laurie Mylroie? Here the plot thickens. Mylroie was the author of the conspiracy theory that helped convince Americans that Saddam was linked to the 9/11 attacks. He wasn't, of course, but the Weekly Standard did a tag-team with Vice-President Cheney to sell the notion that he was.
That notion was based on the writings of Mylroie, who was a fellow at the aforementioned American Enterprise Institute, the nutty neocon think tank that thought up this war. Like so many neocons, Mylroie has her roots in the left. She was an advisor to Bill Clinton on Iraq.
After the 1993 World Trade Center attack, Mylroie became the leading proponent of a conspiracy theory that pinned the blame for that attack on Saddam. She also tried to pin the 2001 WTC attack on Saddam and made a case that Al Qaeda was, as she put it, "a front for Iraqi intelligence."
In the run-up to the war, Mylroie's theories were trumpeted by Kristol's Weekly Standard. And Miller was not merely "joined at the hip" with Mylroie. She was joined at the publisher's office. In 1990, the two co-authored a book on Iraq that was published by the Times.
So the idea that Kristol's hiring by the Times represents some sort of break with tradition is pure nonsense. His hiring represents a continuation of a tradition that has been prominent at the paper since before the Iraq invasion. It wasn't just Miller. Neocon columnist William Safire was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the invasion. Meanwhile the supposedly "liberal" Thomas Friedman voiced neocon hopes for the region perfectly in a column two months before the invasion:
"It is not unreasonable to believe that if the U.S. removed Saddam and helped Iraqis build not an overnight democracy but a more accountable, progressive and democratizing regime, it would have a positive, transforming effect on the entire Arab world - a region desperately in need of a progressive model that works," he wrote.
What is the difference between that "liberal" view of Friedman's and the neocon rantings of Kristol?
The only difference I can think of is that Friedman was smart enough to recognize that the Bush administration was bungling the exercise. Kristol, meanwhile, was making idiotic comments like:
"There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's been almost no evidence of that at all . Iraq's always been very secular."
As a real conservative commentator, one of the few non-neocons at a major newspaper, I for one don't mind in the least if the Times wants to hire another big-government left-winger for its opinion page. But don't call a radical a conservative.
Paul Mulshine | The Star Ledger By Paul Mulshine | The Star Ledger
on March 16, 2015 at 6:00 PM, updated March 16, 2015 at 7:06 PM
"To my last breath I will defend the Trotsky who ..." - neocon writer Stephen Schwartz
After I wrote the other day about Rand Paul's ill-advised decision to sign that nutty neocon note to Iran, I got an email from my friend Dave the Liberal.
Dave objected to my description of Joshua Muravchik, who wrote a piece for the Washington Post talking about how wonderful a war with Iran would be. I termed Muravchik a left-winger.
"Muravchik, the Johns Hopkins egghead, is no Washington Post liberal," wrote Dave. "He's a Wolfowitz-Bolton-level American Enterprise Institute neocon."
I wrote Dave back to say that in the eyes of us traditional conservatives, all neocons are liberals. The philosophy of endless military meddling in foreign affairs for the benefit of liberating foreigners is, and always has been, a liberal enterprise. It goes back of course to Woodrow Wilson, easily the worst and most liberal president of the 20th century.
That's why it is also called "Wilsonianism" and "liberal internationalism."
It's also why the liberal Washington Post is so eager to promote that liberal point of view.
But even by the loony standards of the liberals, the Post went too far with the column headlined War with Iran Is Probably Our Best Option" by a certain Joshua Muravchik.
In fact, a peace deal with Iran is obviously our best option, for the simple reason that the Iranians are providing the troops that are actually defeating the forces of the Islamic State.
Another reason, one obvious to us conservative realists if not to the Beltway liberals, is that the Shiite Iranians can't expand into the West for the simple reason that the Sunnis hate them. And the Sunnis are nine-tenths of the world's Muslims.
When you see women parading around London and France in burkhas, those are almost invariably Sunnis. They'd be about as likely to take orders from the Pope as from an ayatollah.
Contrary to what Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress, the enemy of our enemy really is our friend.
And we're certainly not going to advance our national interest by starting a war with our friend. So why would Muravchik suggest a policy so plainly not in our national interest?
The forces of the Islamic State in Syria; isn't it strange that the liberal Washington Post editorial page keeps pushing policies that would advance the interests of ISIS? Not to us conservatives.AP Photo/ Raqqa Media Center of the Islamic State group
Because that's what left-wingers always do. And Muravchik has the finest of left-wing pedigrees. If you doubt that, read this passage from his Wikipedia entry:
"Muravchik was National Chairman of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) from 1968 to 1973, and executive director of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority from 1977 to 1979. He was also an aide to the late Congressman James G. O'Hara (D-Mich.) in 1975 and to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) in 1977 and as a campaign aide to the late Senator Henry M. Jackson in his pursuit of the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination."
Gee, who could have predicted that pedigree? Any conservative with a knowledge of recent American history, that's who.
I have a particularly good knowledge thereof. Back in the late 1960s, I attended the University of California at Berkeley. That's when I first met the '60s radicals.
I didn't like them. I was on the track team and just wanted to do my runs in peace, not have to work my way through endless demonstrations for endless rich-kid causes, like the establishment of a "People's Park" and the strike by the "Third World Liberation Front."
Her's a nice picture of the pleasant campus scene at Berkeley that I took on a trip to the old school a few years ago.Paul Mulshine
I saw a lot of the same thing when I later switched to Rutgers and ran the student newspaper, I used to let the Marxists in the Student Union run whatever articles they wanted, but I often added a common-sense conservative corrective.
Muravchik would have fit in perfectly with those lefties. What they all had in common was not a love of liberty but a love of power. And when they realized there was more power to be gained by pretending to be right-wingers, that's when they made the switch. Charles Krauthammer somehow gets classified as a conservative despite pedigree only slightly less liberal than Muravchik's. (And then there is Bill "My mommy really was a commie" Kristol.)
When these and other lefties-turned-neocons became anti-communist, it wasn't because they were pro-capitalist. Most were simply anti-Stalinist because they were followers of Stalin's worst enemy during the formation of the Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky.
As some other conservative has noted, there's such a thing as an ex-Stalinist but there's no such thing as an ex-Trotskyite.
If you doubt that, read the notorious National Review piece by Stephen Schwartz in which he praises old Leon:
"......To my last breath I will defend the Trotsky who alone, and pursued from country to country, and finally laid low in his own blood in a hideously hot little house in Mexico City, said no to Soviet coddling of Hitlerism, to the Moscow purges, and to the betrayal of the Spanish Republic ...." and so on,
And then consider that it was Schwartz - along with another unrepentant Trotskyite, the late Christopher Hitchens - who claimed to have invented the term "Islamofascism."
Anyone who understands politics will understand why that term was made up: to fool the boobs into conflating fascist dictators like Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad and so on, with their most bitter enemies, the Islamic fundamentalists.
It is now obvious to anyone paying attention that the effort to remove secular dictators designed by the neocons under the term "Arab Spring" has been a complete disaster - unless of course you favor the efforts of the Islamic State.
Don't look now, but the neocons do. These ex-Marxists are nothing if not smart. They understand perfectly that deposing Assad in Syria would lead to Islamic State control of the entire region. Yet they propose doing it anyway when they by call for war both the Assad regime and Iran, the two forces capable of defeating ISIS.
If you think it Muravchik's advice makes any sense, go to the Sic Semper Tyrannis site of former Vietnam Green Beret and longtime Mideast military expert Pat Lang.
There you will read as Adam Silverman's piece documenting just how disastrous such a strike would be for the U.S. Silverman shows how the IRanians have located all of the relevant facilities in heavily populated areas. He writes:
When you compare the locations of the nuclear sites, the military sites, and the population centers it becomes clear that an attempt to militarily reduce Iran's nuclear facilities, let alone degrade their military facilities, essentially amounts to reducing Iran. The potential for radioactive fallout from the destruction of Iran's nuclear facilities, combined with other forms of collateral damage, would likely create a humanitarian crisis of almost unprecedented proportions. The only state with the strategic capabilities to provide the necessary humanitarian relief is the US - no one else has our strategic lift and response capabilities.
Basically, a successful reduction of Iran's nuclear facilities and capabilities will create a humanitarian crisis that only the US can successfully respond to. A response that would have to be amongst a population that is suffering because of the humanitarian crisis that the US just created. And all of this for what most agree would be a modest setback for Iran in developing a nuclear weapon
Meanwhile an effort to reach deal with Iran would stall development of highly enriched uranium while preserving the power to attack the Iranians if they reneged on the deal.
And of course it would preserve the ability of the Iranians to fight ISIS, a Sunni group that represents a real threat to U.S. interests - real to us conservatives if not to ex-Marxists
And then ask yourself why the undeniably liberal editorial page of the Washington Post keeps endorsing neoconservative ideas.
Uhh, because neocons are liberals.
That's why.
ALSO, here's that 2007 column I referenced above on the rather silly effort by the New York Times to portray Bill Kristol as a conservative. It's quite instructive for those who can't understand the difference between real conservatives and lefties like Kristol:
If you were a member of the liberal media who wanted to discredit conservative thought in America, how would you do it?
Here's an idea: Search for the most incompetent commentator in America, a guy who still hasn't figured out the Iraq War was a classic example of big-government bungling. Make sure this guy's not a self-made man; far better to hire someone who got his start in life thanks to a famous father. Better yet, make sure the father in question is one of the primary creators of a thoroughly wacky system of thought that has its roots in the fevered rantings of a Russian revolutionary.
So far, so good. And for a finishing touch, once you find this nutcase, you then label him your "conservative" columnist.
That's what the New York Times did the other day with the announcement that William Kristol will become a weekly columnist on the opinion page. Editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal tried to sugarcoat the announcement by stating that Kristol is "serious, respected conservative intellectual" in the words of Times.
Nonsense. Kristol is not serious, he's not respected and above all he's certainly not conservative.
Kristol is in fact a neoconservative and neoconservatism is, as conservative columnist George F. Will so aptly put it, "a spectacularly misnamed radicalism."
The radicalism of the neocons is rooted in the thought of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary whose theory of worldwide liberation was passed down to the lesser neocons by Kristol's father, New York intellectual Irving Kristol. (If you are not aware of this connection, please Google "Kristol and Trotsky" before you go any further).
Far from providing balance to the Times' editorial policy, Kristol fits squarely within it. The fight between the neocons and the liberals has always been an insiders' game between Manhattanites. Long before Kristol came along, the Times published the work of a neocon who had an even bigger role in leading us into the Iraq War than Kristol and his cohorts at the Weekly Standard.
That would be Judy Miller. The role of Miller in relation to the Iraq War is roughly equivalent to the role of William Randolph Hearst in relation to the Spanish-American War. Remember the Maine? If you do, then you realize that the hyping of that incident prior to the 1898 war was the equivalent of the hyping of so-called "weapons of mass destruction" prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
And the New York Times was right in the middle of it. It was reporter Miller who was the single most effective voice in hyping the WMD threat. Miller's work, subsequently retracted by the Times, was essential to the war effort in several ways.
For one, it made the neoconservative spin on Iraq acceptable to liberals. If even the New York Times accepted the theory that Saddam Hussein was a menace to the United States, then Democratic politicians had the go-ahead to vote for the war.
But the effect on conservatives was even more important. Saddam was a right-winger and we conservatives are right-wingers. Saddam was therefore a more likely ally than enemy. Saddam, for all his faults, was the leading opponent of Islamic fundamentalism in the Mideast and had in fact killed hundreds of thousands of Iranian fundamentalists in the 1980s, when he was a U.S. ally.
American conservatives therefore needed to be convinced that Saddam was a threat not just to his neighbors but to to the United States. Central to this campaign was the reporting of Miller, who was very close to Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and the rest of the now-discredited neocons who led the gullible George W. Bush into this war.
One old-fashioned conservative, the late Jude Wanniski of Morristown, wrote the following about Miller's reporting shortly after the war began:
"To any serious reader of her coverage in Iraq it has been plain for many, many moons that she is joined at the hip to the neo-cons at the American Enterprise Institute who cooked up the war, particularly Richard Perle and Laurie Mylroie."
Who's Laurie Mylroie? Here the plot thickens. Mylroie was the author of the conspiracy theory that helped convince Americans that Saddam was linked to the 9/11 attacks. He wasn't, of course, but the Weekly Standard did a tag-team with Vice-President Cheney to sell the notion that he was.
That notion was based on the writings of Mylroie, who was a fellow at the aforementioned American Enterprise Institute, the nutty neocon think tank that thought up this war. Like so many neocons, Mylroie has her roots in the left. She was an advisor to Bill Clinton on Iraq.
After the 1993 World Trade Center attack, Mylroie became the leading proponent of a conspiracy theory that pinned the blame for that attack on Saddam. She also tried to pin the 2001 WTC attack on Saddam and made a case that Al Qaeda was, as she put it, "a front for Iraqi intelligence."
In the run-up to the war, Mylroie's theories were trumpeted by Kristol's Weekly Standard. And Miller was not merely "joined at the hip" with Mylroie. She was joined at the publisher's office. In 1990, the two co-authored a book on Iraq that was published by the Times.
So the idea that Kristol's hiring by the Times represents some sort of break with tradition is pure nonsense. His hiring represents a continuation of a tradition that has been prominent at the paper since before the Iraq invasion. It wasn't just Miller. Neocon columnist William Safire was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the invasion. Meanwhile the supposedly "liberal" Thomas Friedman voiced neocon hopes for the region perfectly in a column two months before the invasion:
"It is not unreasonable to believe that if the U.S. removed Saddam and helped Iraqis build not an overnight democracy but a more accountable, progressive and democratizing regime, it would have a positive, transforming effect on the entire Arab world - a region desperately in need of a progressive model that works," he wrote.
What is the difference between that "liberal" view of Friedman's and the neocon rantings of Kristol?
The only difference I can think of is that Friedman was smart enough to recognize that the Bush administration was bungling the exercise. Kristol, meanwhile, was making idiotic comments like:
"There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's been almost no evidence of that at all . Iraq's always been very secular."
As a real conservative commentator, one of the few non-neocons at a major newspaper, I for one don't mind in the least if the Times wants to hire another big-government left-winger for its opinion page. But don't call a radical a conservative.