Sullivan on Iraq -- Again

Sullivan really comes a croppper lately on his war commentaries, starting off with this post:

But I went to the pre-war anti-war marches as an observer. I did not hear arguments about the difficulties of managing a sectarian society, nor questions about troop levels, nor worries about the impact of the war on Iran's status in the region. I heard and saw often reflexive hostility to American power, partisan hatred of Bush, and blindness toward Saddam's atrocities.

Two comments on this statement:

You don't hear reasoned arguments at marches and rallies. You hear slogans. If you go to a rally or demonstration expecting to hear reasoned arguments, you're too stupid to live. To take the pose that the anti-war forces were a bunch of knee-jerk hate-America-first libruls based on behavior you saw at an anti-war march is beyond disingenuous. Being a right-winger, of course, Sullivan forgets that on the left, everyone can join in. They just represent themselves, and not necessarily anyone else.

Second, Sullivan's interpretation of what he heard is just that -- his interpretation. I happen to participate in online forums in which the immediate response on some parts to any criticism of Bush or the administration is accusations of "knee-jerk Bush-hatred" and "anti-Americanism," which seems to be Sullivan's stance in this case. That does not constitute a valid response, as far as I'm concerned -- the minute that no one is allowed to criticize Our Leader or his policies, we've lost it. It appears that Sullivan can witness events but not really see them.

I don't know if he's deliberately ignoring the commentaries of people like Josh Marshall, Atrios, John Aravosis, Jane Hamsher and the other members of the "real" progressive blogosphere, or if he's just not aware of them, steeping himself as he seems to have done in East-Coast elitist right-wing publications and Farenheit 9/11. Despite his stance, there was a lot of closely reasoned and highly accurate argument against the war in the beginning. It's sort of like me taking the sentiments expressed in the comments at LGF as representative of the right.

In another post, he starts off by agreeing with a reader's comment, but moves back into the same indiscriminately anti-left territory immediately (known technically as a bait-and-switch):

But it doesn't detract from my continued opposition to those Michael Moore elements that dominated the rhetoric of the anti-war forces before the war, many of whom opposed the war in Afghanistan as well.

Sullivan is moving into Malkin/Coulter/Reynolds territory here in trying to lump everyone who opposed the war in Iraq with the Michael Moore wing of the left. I might as well call Michelle Malkin the voice of the right. In point of fact, as I recall there was widespread support for the war in Afghanistan because that's where the enemy was. The Iraq war was so obviously illegal and unjustified that the administration had to cherrypick intelligence and lie to Congress and the public to make a case for it at all, and it was obvious to some of us that was happening. Sullivan has taken refuge in a sanctimonious and self-serving stance of "But Saddam was a bad man," which in itself cannot justify our invasion of Iraq, because he can't seem to deal with the fact that he supported the American violation of international law and our own treaty obligations with regard to that particular misadvernture. Even when he has criticized Bush for the conduct of the war, he has refused to face the fact that there was no legitimate justification for the war to begin with. His attempt to cast all those who opposed Bush's policy as radical leftists is just a cheap way to dodging his own responsibility and his own fallibility and a reflection of his inability to introduce any real rigor into his own thinking.

But I'm not clinically delusional.

"Clinically delusional"? Probably not. Shallow? Much more likely.

Here's the original post. Sullivan's characterization of it as "condescending" is typical, if not particularly accurate. The man just doesn't get it.

(The Ur-post, Sullivan's analysis of the Escalation Speech. He's at least got part of it right.)

As for the "Bears uber Alles" issue, I'll deal with that some other time.