Yglesias starts to knock down this silly isolationist idea which has been obsessing Peter "prime fighting age" Beinart and now apparently George W. Bush. Go figure.
There have long been isolationist strains on both the far right and far left. In addition, massive foreign policy interventions of any kind are generally complicated and costly and messy with unpredictable results and it's perfectly understandable that people on the left are a wee bit more likely to expect a Democrat to handle these things a bit better and those on the right to expect a Republican to handle it better. Call that bias or partisanship or whatever, but that's the way it is.
So, anyway, even in normal times it would be expected for isolationism on the left to have a wee uptick and isolationism on the right to be reduced. But, now, in addition to that we're at a time when George W. Bush lied to take us into war and then totally fucked it up. Fucked it up more than even I imagined they could fuck it up. Fucking it up so badly that we're constantly having to come up with new words to describe the degree of fuckingupness.
I opposed the Iraq war, in part because I thought the Bush administration was pretty much prone to fucking just about everything up. Call it bias or partisanship or simply a well-informed opinion, but I did. It wasn't the only or most important reason I opposed the war, but much as "fake WMDs" was the "reason for war" all the Bushies could agree on, "everything they touch turns to shit" should've been the reason all the liberal hawks could agree on to not support the war. So much for that.
As I was saying, if you combine standard every day "I don't trust their party's president to do the right thing" with pretty much ironclad proof that "everything Bush touches turns to shit" it's perfectly understandable that those of us to the left of Joe Lieberman are pretty wary of Commander Cuckoo banana's further attempts to stride across the Risk board in his majestic codpiece.
And, when Peter "prime fighting age" Beinart's book appears to tell us how horrible it is that Bush's Iraq's war has made us liberals isolationists, whatever that means, we will just have to remind him that he should've thought of that before he supported the damn thing.
