Was the Iraq War a huge coup for liberalism?
Some prominent conservatives are laying the GOP's branding problems at the feet of George W. Bush's foreign policy. Is that fair?
"Last week's many Iraq war mea culpas were rich in irony," says Ross Douthat in The New York Times. "One by one, prominent liberals lined up to apologize for supporting a war that's responsible for liberalism's current political and cultural ascendance."
Douthat continues: The Obama presidency, the Democratic majority in the Senate, and a whole host of liberal policies far bolder "than either Al Gore or John Kerry had dared to offer" can all be attributed to "the backlash against George W. Bush's Middle East policies."
As Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway notes, "Douthat isn't alone in making this claim." As we mark 10 years in Iraq, a whole host of conservatives — Philip Klein at The Washington Examiner, Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal, The American Conservative's Daniel McCarthy, and Samuel Goldman at The Week, among them — are blaming the Bush team's mismanagement of the Iraq War for the Republican Party's electoral setbacks and branding problems.
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But Douthat doesn't stop with the damage that Bush's foreign adventurism has inflicted on Republicans. He also argues that the war destroyed Bush's own second-term agenda, leaving a "domestic policy vacuum" that was filled with a liberal wish list from Democrats emboldened and shaped by the anti–Iraq War movement. And the leftist gains weren't just in the legislative realm:
Not everyone thinks this is a fair assessment. While Douthat is right that the war galvanized the left, says John Amato at Crooks & Liars, "he's omitting a key ingredient of Bush's epic failure scope — the global financial meltdown." Without the economy imploding in September 2008, and Bush's $700 bank bailout, we might well have had a President John McCain.
Indeed, the Iraq War had nothing to do with the wave of social liberalism that has "proceeded apace all through the '70s, '80s, and '90s," says Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. And remember, while Obama has had some big domestic-policy achievements, he "has all but adopted Bush's foreign policy as his own."
Actually, says Outside the Beltway's Mataconis, Douthat and the other blame-Iraq conservatives are "making some excellent points, and providing some guidance for a Republican Party that is still engaged in a conversation about how to re-create itself in the light of two consecutive presidential election losses in a row."
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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.
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