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TNR Does Right

If you want to see some of the best analysis of what’s going on in Iraq, check out this week’s issue of The New Republic. It features a veritable murderer’s row of liberals and/or non-neocons who supported the war, including several TNR writers, plus Joseph Biden, John McCain, Paul Berman, Kenneth Pollack, and even- in a rare non-Times appearance- Thomas Friedman.

The package really puts the lie to that whole Republican notion that any criticism/pessimism whatsoever about Iraq is nothing more than “left-wing Bush-hatred,” usually followed by the laughably toxic non-argument of “how dare you attack the president- WE’RE AT WAR!”

The above names run the gamet from loyal Republicans (McCain) to “liberal hawks,” and most of the arguments are variations on “the war was right, but Bush did it wrong,” or “we should’ve used the morality case, not the WMD case,” or “we should have gone through the UN.” It’s only the staff editorial that actually repudiates support for the war. Most of the essays are anti-Bush on some level, but it’s not the shrill nonsense so often favored by “the Michael Moore Community,” as Hitch delightfully dubbed them.

Since it shows that center-leftists can disagree with Bush's methods without losing sight of the fact that we’re at war with barbarians, let’s just call this week’s TNR the magazine issue that the Bush campaign doesn’t want you to read.