Still Wrong After All These Years

Liberal foreign policy intellectuals like Strobe Talbott and Morton Halperin have enjoyed fairly lucrative careers despite being wrong about almost every aspect of the Cold War.

Now, Halperin's decided it would be fun to start establishing a record of being wrong in the 2000s. In a Washington Post op-ed today, he argues that containment and deterrence are working with regard to Iraq, but that there is one more step the U.N. could take that would REALLY be effective: indicting Saddam Hussein as a war criminal.

No, I'm not kidding.

For those of you who wonder how a President Gore might have handled the war on terror (and Iraq specifically), this is a pretty good place to look. Folks like Halperin and Talbott would surely have been involved in selecting foreign policy personnel, and might well have been appointed to senior positions themselves. They represent the Dem bench on foreign affairs, after all.

Fortunately, there's a much more serious foreign policy team in place at the moment.

As a related matter, Charles Krauthammer wrote several weeks ago about the affinity of the foreign policy left for (mis)applying old Cold War strategic concepts to the war on terror. They're still getting it wrong, after all these years.

[Posted at 19:52 CST on 02/11/03] [Link]