"One reluctant liberal interventionist signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 that said: “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein.” His name was Bill Clinton. Baghdad is closer to Sarajevo than the left has allowed.
For this left, anyone who supported the Iraq invasion, or sees merits to it despite the catastrophic Bush-Rumsfeld bungling, is a neocon. That makes Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik and Kanan Makiya and Bernard Kouchner neocons, among others who don’t think like Norman Podhoretz but have more firsthand knowledge of totalitarian hell than countless slick purveyors of the neocon insult.
Has Iraq deep-sixed liberal interventionism? Kouchner, a socialist, is now French foreign minister — hardly a sign the credo’s dead. He, in turn, is close to Richard Holbrooke, who brought peace to Bosnia and may be secretary of state in a Hillary Clinton administration. (…)
When John Kerry was vilified as a flip-flopping liberal by those armchair warriors, Bush and Cheney, I knew where I stood. When Michnik and Kouchner are neocons and MoveOn.org is the Petraeus-insulting face of never-set-foot-in-a-war-zone liberalism, I’m with the Polish-French brigade against the right-thinking American left".
Roger Cohen, opinionista di sinistra del New York Times
4 Ottobre 2007
