I'm beginning to think David Brooks is seriously losing his touch since he became a New York Times columnist earlier this year. In his latest (NYT 12/27/03), he actually argues that it's a good thing that we didn't have any real plan for postwar Iraq and that we should be happy things are a mess:
[W]e [Americans] stink at social engineering. Our government couldn't even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq - thank goodness, too, because any "plan" hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality. ...
[T]he Americans and Iraqis are now ... muddling through, devising shambolic, ad hoc solutions to fit the concrete realities, and ... we'll learn through bumbling experience. In the building of free societies, every day feels like a mess, but every year is a step forward.
That's just sad. And, no, I don't believe I've ever seen anyone use the word "shambolic," either. I looked it up; it's a mostly British usage meaning disorganized or confused. And he thinks this is a good thing that our Iraq occupation policy is this way.
Brooks and his former colleagues at the prowar Weekly Standard weren't exactly telling us this a year ago. If they had explained before the war that the US had no real plans for the postwar period and that the war suporters considered that a good thing, it might have made a difference.
Brooks is a pretty good bellwether for major Republican polemical themes. If he's adopting an argument that says it's a good thing that our Iraq policy's a mess, that's a sign of how panicky some leading Republicans must be about this war.
But at least they can't accuse us war critics of not talking about the good news any more. Because when we talk about what a mess things are, that is the good news by this new line of argument. Oh, that is strange.
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