Today’s nugget of conventional wisdom comes from liberal hawk George Packer:
In this election, the isolationist candidate is the Texas congressman Ron Paul. He frequently attacks the core rationale of Bush’s foreign policy, and receives enthusiastic applause for doing so, which indicates that Republican views about the war in Iraq might be more heterodox than the leading candidates and their strategists assume. But his brand of anti-interventionism reduces the Republican debate to hawks versus cranks. “They attack us because we’ve been over there. We’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years,†Paul said at a debate in South Carolina. “I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it.â€
Packer, who worked so hard to get us into Iraq that he cannot bear the thought of leaving, begins the very next paragraph as follows: “The room for genuine discussion in the Republican field is so limited…” Yes, it’s a shame that there are such narrow limits on our foreign policy discourse. How did we ever reach this sorry pass?
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