We didn’t want to like Michael Kinsley’s little dismissal of the Downing Street Memo, but in the end you just can’t argue with reason, even if it’s coming from Wax Museum Mike. (We like Kinsley fine, we just think he should stay off TV if he can help it. With Crossfire officially gone, there is little reason to worry.)
When we read the memo and the initial coverage, we had the sinking feeling ourselves that it was never a secret how much the neo-con hawks wanted to march into Iraq, and how little it mattered what the revolving carousel of reasons would be. Americans have proven time and again that we (that is, a slim majority of us) can’t be bothered with all the niggling little details that may or may not politically justify Iraq. In this respect, it really is a lot like Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin, for example, was merely the expedient that made it possible for many Americans to endorse Vietnam on the larger spiritual quest to stand up to communism–just as we wish today to stand up to terrorism, whatever that’s supposed to mean. It may also be instructive to consider that communism, from Marx to Mao, eventually burnt itself out independent of our failure in Southeast Asia. If we’re really, really lucky, our failures in Iraq will be complemented by a similar, historic petering-out of terrorism independent of our efforts. In other words, Islamic terrorism may fail due to its own inherent contradictions and inward rotteness, rather than from any sabre-rattling on our part.
But what we really wanted to say was that Kinsley certainly made a monkey out of Time magazine–normally a source of deep inner conflict for us, seeing as how that magazine manages to be so smart and so stupid at the same time.
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