I've held VDH in high regard for a long time, ever since reading The Western Way of War back in 1989. His elevation to the ranks of the Soothscribes Emeritus Causa owes more to the lucidity of his reasoning and the clarity of his exposition than to my agreement with his neo-con POV.
For those not acquainted with his work, "Obama's Amazing Achievements" on NRO is a good introduction. It is also a biting review of the amoral hypocrisy of American leftists, all of whose allegedly lofty principles, as enunciated in their frenzied attacks on the Bush administration, have been abandoned in the face of exactly the same acts or worse when committed by The One.
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Facing and dealing with the problems of American post-Bush foreign policy must be like shovelling
ReplyDeleteout the Augean stables with a plastic airline spoon. Bush involved the US in two wars which it can neither win nor quit. His accomplices in what can only loosely be termed 'government' also abetted a profiteering, insider-dealing conspiracy which nearly brought down the world economy.
That Obama does not walk on water can scarcely
be a surprise to anyone. That he hesitates before pouring oil on the present mideast conflagration brought him only scorn from both left and right. His attempts to help the Libyan
people from being massacred by their tribal opponents in the government is limited but laudatory.
Hanson, like the super media flack Alex Singleton of the Telegraph, apparently feels that Obama should ....excuse me ....do exactly what? Obliterate the hypocrisy of world-wide foreign relations?
Tu quoque is something I try to avoid, but Hanson's point about the highly selective morality of "progressives" is demonstrably valid. I do not find fault with how Obama/Clinton have handled the Libyan opportunity; but then I did not find fault with knocking over Saddam Hussein. The "progresives" media did, and it is for them to explain how this time the mission lives up to their high moral standards.
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