[Mb-civic] On Iraq, Plenty of Scores to Settle Even If the Dust Hasn't - Howard Kurtz - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

On Iraq, Plenty of Scores to Settle Even If the Dust Hasn't

By Howard Kurtz
The Washington Post
Monday, March 20, 2006; C01

For some liberal pundits, it's payback time.

For some conservative commentators, it's time for uncomfortable 
explanations.

For the rest of us, it's the best show in town.

It was probably inevitable, once the Iraq war started to go badly -- 
though how badly remains a matter of political dispute -- that those who 
opposed it from the start would begin kicking sand in the face of those 
who backed it from the start. Had the war been a smashing success, 
accusing fingers would undoubtedly be pointing in the opposite direction.

Some of those on the right now say they were wrong, or that they 
miscalculated, or that the Bush administration has bungled what remains 
a noble effort. Others insist the war is not going all that badly, given 
the difficulty of bringing democracy to Iraq, and that history's verdict 
is not yet in.

But this is no high-minded debate about military strategy and ancient 
religious hatreds. It is an old-fashioned smackdown by those who detest 
George W. Bush against those who once defended him.

Andrew Sullivan, the author and blogger, wrote in Time that he and his 
fellow neoconservatives made "three huge errors" in underestimating the 
difficulty of invading Iraq three years ago this week. "We have learned 
a tough lesson," Sullivan wrote, "and it has been a lot tougher for 
those tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraqis and several thousand 
killed and injured American soldiers than for a few humiliated pundits."

This drew a blast from Paul Krugman, the liberal New York Times 
columnist, who wrote: "Mr. Sullivan used to specialize in denouncing the 
patriotism and character of anyone who dared to criticize President 
Bush, whom he lionized. Now he himself has become a critic, not just of 
Mr. Bush's policies, but of his personal qualities, too. . . .

"If you're a former worshipful admirer of George W. Bush who now says, 
as Mr. Sullivan did at Cato, that 'the people in this administration 
have no principles,' you're taking a courageous stand. If you said the 
same thing back when Mr. Bush had an 80 percent approval rating, you 
were blinded by Bush-hatred. If you're a former hawk who now concedes 
that the administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you're to be 
applauded for your open-mindedness. But if you warned three years ago 
that the administration was hyping the case for war, you were a 
conspiracy theorist."

Sullivan conceded that he "lionized George W. Bush for a while after 
9/11" and "criticized many whose knee-jerk response immediately after 
9/11 was to blame America, and whose partisanship, like Krugman's, was 
so intense they had already deemed Bush a failure before he even had a 
chance." But he accused Krugman of "grossly distorting" his record, 
noting that he has criticized Bush on a wide range of issues, from Abu 
Ghraib to federal spending, and endorsed John Kerry in 2004.

A similar squabble erupted after National Review founder William F. 
Buckley, the intellectual godfather of modern conservatism, wrote that 
Bush must face reality: "One can't doubt that the American objective in 
Iraq has failed. . . . And the administration has, now, to cope with 
failure."

David Corn, the Nation's Washington bureau chief, used the concession to 
jab at Rich Lowry, National Review's editor, for having said while 
debating him that opponents of the war were enemies of democracy and 
freedom. "How can he not apply the same label to Buckley?" Corn 
demanded, adding: "If one side is willing to accuse the other of being 
weak, treasonous, and fans of tyranny, it is difficult to have a decent 
discourse."

Lowry responded by saying he didn't remember using that phrase, but that 
"I do remember complaining that in all our debates David had never once 
expressed the slightest pleasure at Saddam's ouster or the Iraqi 
elections. . . . For the record: I don't think David is an enemy of 
democracy, just a partisan blinded by Bush hatred. And I see no 
connection between the crowd-pleasing bile he sometimes spews at our 
debates, and Buckley's prudential doubts about nation-building in Iraq."

It would be easy to dismiss all the sniping as pundits behaving badly. 
After all, the usual drill is for liberals to declare some 
administration policy a failure (the economy, Hurricane Katrina, the 
Medicare drug program) and for conservatives to insist that things are 
going much better than the Bush-bashers and left-leaning press would 
have you believe. There were exceptions to this pattern -- many 
conservatives savaged the Harriet Miers nomination and the Dubai ports 
deal -- but their rarity made them especially newsworthy.

As Bush continues to flounder in the polls, more on the right are 
breaking ranks. Bruce Bartlett, who was dropped by a free-market think 
tank over his new book "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America 
and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," recently called the administration 
"unconscionable," "vindictive" and "inept."

Peggy Noonan writes that she would not have voted for Bush had she known 
he was going to turn into a big-spending Lyndon Johnson. Jonah Goldberg 
writes that "most conservatives never really understood what 
compassionate conservatism was, beyond a convenient marketing slogan," 
and the "reality" is "that there was nothing behind the curtain."

Not everyone is jumping ship. Fred Barnes, executive editor of the 
Weekly Standard, who remains a strong Bush supporter, writes that "the 
mainstream media likes nothing more than to play up conservatives who 
attack other conservatives."

Maybe so. But the war is the overriding issue of the Bush presidency, 
and when conservative commentators begin shifting their stance on 
whether the conflict has been mishandled, it's hardly surprising that 
their liberal counterparts are going to pile on. Iraq, like Vietnam, may 
well stir passions for a generation, and those in the opinion business 
will not be able to escape the question: Which side were you on?

Color Blindness

"The cover photograph in The Times Magazine on Sunday rendered colors 
incorrectly for the jacket, shirt and tie worn by Mark Warner, the 
former Virginia governor who is a possible candidate for the presidency. 
The jacket was charcoal, not maroon; the shirt was light blue, not pink; 
the tie was dark blue with stripes, not maroon. . . . The film that was 
used can cause colors to shift, and the processing altered them further; 
the change escaped notice because of a misunderstanding by the editors." 
-- Wednesday's New York Times.

Huffy Over Huffington

It all depends on the meaning of the word blog.

George Clooney is mighty steamed at Arianna Huffington for stitching 
together comments from a couple of his interviews and running them as a 
posting on her Web site. Clooney says the Huffington Post created the 
false impression that he wrote the short essay about being a proud liberal.

The Oscar-winning actor told the New York Daily News he feels "abused" 
and that Huffington had warned him that his griping would be "bad for my 
career. . . . I'm not going to be threatened by Arianna Huffington!"

Huffington's blog response is that it was all "an honest 
misunderstanding" and she believed she had written permission from 
Clooney's PR person. "But any misunderstanding that occurred, occurred 
between Clooney and the publicist." Over the weekend, however, 
Huffington apologized for making a "big" mistake and said she will now 
make clear when blog postings are reprinted from elsewhere.

Veteran magazine editor Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.com is siding with 
Clooney: "How Hollywood can this go: 'I'll have my person link to your 
person'? . . . Huffington was wrong to try to create a faked-up post 
under Clooney's name."

NPR's High Standards

"I was so micromanaged that they were telling me how to pronounce 
syllables of words." -- Bob Edwards on his former employer, National 
Public Radio, telling Newsweek he feels liberated at XM Satellite Radio.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/19/AR2006031901169.html?nav=hcmodule
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