Talk turned to the U.S. presidential campaign. Morse mentioned the pressure that Hillary Rodham Clinton was facing to apologize for her Senate vote authorizing Bush to go to war.
Makiya stared into his glass of red wine. “That’s so Maoist,” he said.
“People shouldn’t feel the need to apologize. What is there to apologize for?”
Accountability is Maoist? Accepting that the reality didn’t match the plans is Maoist?
Recall that Kanan Makiya was one of the spiritual drivers of the invasion:
“I rest my moral case on the following: if there’s a sliver of a chance of it happening, a 5 to 10 percent chance, you have a moral obligation, I say, to do it.”
The effect was electrifying. The room, which just minutes earlier had settled into a sober and comfortable rejection of war, exploded in applause. The other panelists looked startled, and their reasonable arguments suddenly lay deflated on the table before them.
Michael Walzer, who was on the panel, smiled wanly. “It’s very hard to respond,” he said.
It was hard, I thought, because Makiya had spoken the language beloved by liberal hawks. He had met their hope of avoiding a war with an even greater hope. He had given the people in the room an image of their own ideals.
In other words, he played to their vanity, hoping that in their conflicted souls — can you have been against the war Vietnam and be for an invasion of Iraq? can pundits and intellectuals who argue against the use of military force and who rejected the idea of military service in their turn be for its use now? — they would see a chance to burnish their self-image. Pathetic little people.