A critique of the foreign policy "Community"

Glenn Greenwald:

The dominant ideology of the Community is, in fact, so enamored of war that there is no such thing as placing oneself outside of the mainstream of the Community through excessive warmongering.

As I said the other day, there is no such thing in the Community as "unserious war advocacy"; that term is an oxymoron. That is why you can travel as far along the spectrum as possible, arrive at the most extremist neoconservative point, and still be comfortably within the acceptable range of Serious Community Views. Kristol's partner, Fred Kagan, is a revered member of the Community. Rudy Giuliani knows that he can hire as his top foreign policy advisor an outright psychopath like Norman Podhoretz and not be deemed unserious because the Community takes Seriously all war advocacy. That is its nature, its ideology, its identity. Argue for the U.S. to start a war now with Iran and you are Serious; but argue that we should take off the table nuclear weapons when attacking a terrorist camp or that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was illegitimate, and you are an unserious leftist.

Much of our national punditocracy really has learned nothing over the past four years. It is as if Neville Chamberlain were still taken seriously in 1942 after claiming in 1938 to have achieved "peace for our time" and not revised his views at all. "We are making progress in Iraq" exhibits that level of insanity.