Doom & Groom

Why I Don’t Read Ross Douthat

STAY THE COURSE. | Mushroom cloud here, beard here, Douthat’s beard colour here.

Like his fellow Times conservative David Brooks, Ross Douthat is more interested in showing the world that he is thinking really hard than coming up with ideas that are worth a read. It’s like getting credit for showing your work, but still getting the answer absurdly wrong. Star for you!

But there’s a difference with Douthat: Down-low neocon street cred—with a fantastic beard.

Here’s a good example:

These twists and turns make Iraq look less like either Vietnam or World War II — the analogies that politicians and pundits keep closest at hand — and more like an amalgamation of the Korean War and America’s McKinley-era counterinsurgency in the Philippines.

—Basically, he says, everyone was wrong. "And look—I read books on Korea and The Philippines!"—

Like Iraq, those were murky, bloody conflicts that generated long-term benefits but enormous short-term costs. Like Iraq, they were wars that Americans were eager to forget about as soon as they were finished.

"With the emergence of the fantasy Iraq that I envision in the never-to-be-written future history texts of my dreams, the brilliant, catastrophically wrong old white guys will be proven right. AGAIN."

For although everyone is wrong, Ross Douthat seems to think some people are right: Really out-of-touch, imperial-minded foreign policy conservatives, who in another time and place would have been Britain’s pro-empire liberals. For them, the means are always justified by ends achieved via a suspect post-hoc selection of random facts, falsehoods and stupid assertions.

Speak of the devil:

But America’s most important interest remains a stable, unified Republic of Iraq, even if takes longer than any domestic faction wants. Afghanistan may be “the good war” to most Americans, but Iraq’s size, location, history and resources mean that it’s still by far the more important one.

This multi-part magical mystery pronouncement is brought to you by the following facts:

...

Ahem.

Look! More time-traveling “facts” and historical materialism!

Yes, the 9/11 plot got its start in a chaotic, conflict-ridden Afghanistan. But a Middle East-wide war could get its start in a chaotic, conflict-ridden Iraq. Indeed, before the surge, it almost did. This reality will keep us heavily involved, one way or another, long after our “withdrawal” is complete.

Because the best and only way to be proven right is with suspicious reasoning and selective memory—after everyone has stopped paying attention.

Let’s do a neocon argument count:

The surge worked and would have worked even in the case it didn’t.
Let’s not talk about Iraq War motives or WMD. That’s all in the past, you past-loving jerk.
What Al Qaeda? What loose nukes in Pakistan? IRAQ IRAQ IRAQ UH-RAAAAK OIL! (shit!)
Did I mention I’m really, really smart? I went to Harvard! Have you even seen my sagetastic senior year beard?
All those neoconservatives were wrong. Especially the deeply unpopular ones.
Oh yeah, and Hillary Clinton liked the war, too, just like us (I mean, them). [I believe in boxing, they call that Mike Tyson’s "Holyfield bit somebody too!" argument, except that Holyfield is not on the congressional record for actually having bitten someone.]
Stay the course. Because everything—Iraq, Afghanistan, new iPhones, Peeps—will blow up otherwise. And then I can tell you "I told you so," especially after no one cares anymore. And you will stay the course anyways. Didn’t you know Obama is a neoconservative? Not one of the radioactive ones I’m keeping my distance from, but...