And this ideology is what ultimately makes the Pollacks of this world political hacks. Ideology trumps all. "Preventative war" is a war of aggression, making the US the aggressor.

That's a partial definition of imperialism. What makes the ideology Orwellian is the war is conducted in the name of democracy.

Bleh...Cue the clowns in the tiny cars.

The problem in Washington is that you have to go along to get along. How else are you going to be invited to a conference in the beautiful surrounds of Bellagio in northern Italy where US think tanks offer short visits? Group think! Intellectual rigour and honesty have been early casualties since 2000: that is Bush's great contribution to the think tanks. He lowered his standards (which assumes he had any) and they lowered theirs.

I think the most light can be shed on the debate by examining the assumptions implicit in the phrase "national interest".

Nations are not monoliths. They are collections of individuals who share a common area of birth and traditionally act for their collective defense. To treat them as single entities is convenient and helps simplify a complex world but it is morally unjustifiable. Put simply, most of the people who have died in the Iraq war had done nothing in particular to warrant being killed. They were not guilty of anything except living under the Hussein regime and doing what was necessary to survive under those circumstances. But to point this out is to spoil the party. One can analyze the actions of nations and even speak generally about how the various factions within them interact but to do so, it is necessary to deny the humanity of the individual actors that comprise the nation in question. This is the actual sin of foreign policy analysis. The resulting carnage is the just the inevitable by-product.

The degree to which you are able to indeed dehumanize your object of study, is the degree to which you can earn the mantle of "seriousness".

REAL intellectuals constantly question themselves, their assumptions, their frame of reference, and their concepts. They periodically tear down their results to re-examine everthing that led them to their conclusions. They welcome critique as a challenge to the veracity of the process and their results, as well as an independent quality control measure. They are not afraid.

The US "foreign policy community" on the other hand, serving only as a platform for insecure poser/imposter intellectuals seeks just the opposite - to suppress all questioning of their positions and accept only like thinkers. Hence they behave more as a cult than as any kind of honest intellectual community.

The mere fact that the "national discourse" is unable to say anti-war without also saying left wing tells you that the arbiters of foreign policy are saturated in politics.

A decade ago or more I realized that Washington figured that someone died and made us god. When Slick Willie shot a couple of cruise missiles at Sudan and Afghanistan after the bombings of American embassies in Africa, I thought to myself, Gee, it must be nice to be able to go around kicking countries who can't kick back. Translation: We committed an act of war; who's going to call our hand on it? Not the country in question, they don't even have the capacity to mount an attack on the United States. Not the UN which is incapable of sanctioning any of the permanent members of the security council.

The more that we ignore the "rules" of civilized behavior, the more we will destabilize the world and bring the very thing we claim to want to stop - terrorism - to the fore as people who can't fight back "fairly" will fight back by any means possible.

Bravo Glenn for illuminating how foreign affairs orthodoxy has ossified and been institutionalized, to the ultimate benefit of course of not just the "clerisy", but of "defense contractors" the length and breadth of the country.

Well there isn't. There's people here who shout and shake their fists, more or less, on their blogs. But if 300,000 people camped out in front of the White House and Congress for a month the Iraq war would be over.

But if 300,000 people camped out in front of the White House and Congress for a month the Iraq war would be over.

There were massive marches and protests against the invasion of Iraq before it began, including in the U.S. The media largely ignored them, but they did occur. How did that work out in terms of stopping the war?

In this critical period leading up to the September report from Petraeus and Crocker, I think that it is important for us to hold our noses and employ the language and tactics that the neocons have been using on us.

The Op-Ed from the Seven Sergeants needs to be cited in every discussion between now and the report. It needs to be cited as "real", "serious" and unvarnished truth on what is really happening on the ground in Iraq. Further, and most importantly, it should be cited as evidence that, like the beginning of the occupation, the surge has failed. It would be a sign of moral and intellectual weakness to continue on this failed course of action.

As was suggested in the thread last night, we all need to send the op-ed to our Representatives and Senators, our friends and our local newspapers. In each case, we need to cite the evidence therein as proof that the surge has failed, withdrawal from Iraq should begin and our current Foreign Policy should be scrapped in favor of a policy in line with the original ideals upon which our country was founded.

A few thousand here and there. And then the whole thing died. And if you're going to protest don't limit yourselves to liberal college campuses. That's kind of like "Taking Back the Night" without ever leaving the rape crisis center. No, the simple fact is that there is no antiwar movement. There's an antiwar SENTIMENT. Totally different thing. And falling back on blaming the media the government the weather the corporations etc etc those are just excuses.