{"id":2988,"date":"2006-09-18T11:21:40","date_gmt":"2006-09-18T18:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/18\/bushs-useful-idiots\/"},"modified":"2006-09-18T11:21:40","modified_gmt":"2006-09-18T18:21:40","slug":"bushs-useful-idiots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/18\/bushs-useful-idiots\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush’s Useful Idiots"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new piec<\/a>e by Tony Judt<\/a> in the London Review of Books<\/em> contains more than its fair share of memorable phrases — “America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s liberal armchair warriors are the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcuseful idiots\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of the War on Terror” — and one is tempted to simply copy and paste the whole thing, but I’ll resist and give you this delightful snippet:<\/p>\n

“… [T]hose centrist voices that bayed most insistently for blood in the prelude to the Iraq War \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the New York Times<\/em> columnist Thomas Friedman demanded that France be voted \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcOff the Island\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 (i.e. out of the Security Council) for its presumption in opposing America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s drive to war \u00e2\u20ac\u201c are today the most confident when asserting their monopoly of insight into world affairs. The same Friedman now sneers at \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcanti-war activists who haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t thought a whit about the larger struggle we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 (New York Times<\/em>, 16 August). To be sure, Friedman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Pulitzer-winning pieties are always road-tested for middlebrow political acceptability. But for just that reason they are a sure guide to the mood of the American intellectual mainstream.<\/p>\n

“Friedman is seconded by [Peter] Beinart, who concedes that he \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdidn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t realise\u00e2\u20ac\u2122(!) how detrimental American actions would be to \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcthe struggle\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 but insists even so that anyone who won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stand up to \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcGlobal Jihad\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 just isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a consistent defender of liberal values. Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate<\/em>, writing in the Financial Times<\/em>, accuses Democratic critics of the Iraq War of failing \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcto take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. The only people qualified to speak on this matter, it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially. Such insouciance in spite of \u00e2\u20ac\u201c indeed because of \u00e2\u20ac\u201c your past misjudgments recalls a remark by the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade to Edgar Morin, a dissenting Communist vindicated by events: \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcYou and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122”<\/p>\n

Judt, you’ll remember, authored a perceptive piece<\/a> on the Mearsheimer-Walt controversy, speaking of which: the London Review of Books<\/em> is sponsoring a debate on the question “The Israel Lobby: Does it have too much influence on American foreign policy?” September 28, at 7 p.m., in the Great Hall, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Cooper Square, New York. Debaters: John J. Mearsheimer, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Martin Indyk, Tony Judt, Rashid Khalidi, and Dennis Ross. Go here<\/a> for more information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new piece by Tony Judt in the London Review of Books contains more than its fair share of memorable phrases — “America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s liberal armchair warriors are the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcuseful idiots\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of the War on Terror” — and one is tempted to simply copy and paste the whole thing, but I’ll resist and give you this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-2988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2988\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2988"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}