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Read other letters about this article
Glenn, my responsive interlineations below:
What's the point of inventing imaginary arguments in your head, attributing them to me, and coming to argue against it?
> Didn't mean to do that. <
I don't really have a problem stating what my point is. I don't harbor secret points that you need to discern using powers of intuition. If I don't make a point, it's probably not very constructive to fantasize that I really meant to make it and then spend your day trying to disprove it.
> Fair enough. <
If you don't consider the fact that someone re-writes their own arguments and contradicts what they said in the past to be relevant to their credibility, that's fine -- that's a bizarre why of looking at things, but fair enough.
> Seems like an exercise in pluperfectionism - a lot of pointless picking of even more pointless nits. <
That, though, has nothing to do with my point. I said what my point was pretty clearly:
But with this intense Friedmanesque revisionism well underway -- whereby war cheerleaders like Friedman were Right and Good all along and it was only the incompetent Bush and Rumsfeld who ruined everything with their "bumbling" -- it seems increasingly likely that the opposite lesson will be learned. Attacking, invading and occupying other countries in order to change their governments to ones we prefer is the smart, wise and just thing to do. Friedman's term for it today is "collaborating with them to build progressive politics." Especially if there is another terrorist attack on U.S. soil -- but even if there isn't -- the only lesson being drawn from the Iraq debacle in these precincts is that from now on, we just need to plan and execute it better, so that the Good and Just people who cheer these wars on have their noble schemes vindicated a lot sooner and a lot more proficiently.
