Progressive Nation

September 29th, 2005

How to Be a Bad Princetonian Columnist

Textbook example today:

We can easily imagine why this argumentative strategy might work. By suggesting that the war has come at the expense of vital domestic priorities, Byrd casts the invasion of Iraq as an unaffordable luxury. The beauty of this approach is that it could conceivably persuade the sort of person who tends to think that our efforts in Iraq are mostly benign. If we must choose between doing good abroad and taking care of each other at home, isn’t the choice obvious?

Even the most ardent antiwar activists should be wary of this logic. The crucial “choice” on which Byrd’s essay is premised does not really exist. Does the Senator actually expect us to believe that we can have either levees or foreign interventions — but never both? Are our resources so very limited that we must abdicate any active role in world affairs on the grounds that “our own people are so much in need”? Surely, there is something perverse about the pretense that our nation is too needy to remain active on a global stage.

This is so bad you almost wish they’d replace it with a sex column. To suggest that the Katrina efforts haven’t been hampered by our presence in Iraq is to ignore, well, um, what Republicans have to say. More broadly, America’s grand strategy is unsustainable, largely because we’re in a much weaker economic situation than most people believe, as Sherle Schwenninger pointed out a while back.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 29th, 2005 at 11:09 am and is filed under Middle East. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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