David Brooks' Crisis of Confidence

Is he talking about himself? About neo-conservatism?


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/opinion/08BROO.html?pagewanted=print&position=

May 8, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Crisis of Confidence
By DAVID BROOKS

...

Yesterday, members of the administration were once again called to Capitol Hill to testify about a gruesome mistake. Once again investigations were begun and commissions were formed. Once again those of us who support this war and this administration were hard pressed to excuse what had just happened. Once again, baffling questions arose. Whose bright idea was it to keep Saddam's gulag open as a U.S. prison, anyway?

It's hard not to be impressed with the way the military crisply opened criminal investigations into the depravity at Abu Ghraib. It's hard not to be appalled by the Pentagon's blindness to the psychological catastrophe these photos were bound to create. Even yesterday, months after the atrocities were first known, Rumsfeld and company were incapable of answering the most elemental questions from John McCain, Lindsey Graham and others about who was in charge of the prison, and why the photos weren't immediately seen as weapons of mass morale destruction. If Rumsfeld had held a conference and pre-emptively presented these photos to the world, with his response already set, things would not look nearly as bad as they do now.

Believe me, we've got even bigger problems than whether Rumsfeld keeps his job. We've got the problem of defining America's role in the world from here on out, because we are certainly not going to put ourselves through another year like this anytime soon. No matter how Iraq turns out, no president in the near future is going to want to send American troops into any global hot spot. This experience has been too searing.
...

"no president in the near future is going to want to send American troops into any global hot spot."

I hope that little boot licking war monger doesn't ever get to
have another neo-con war again.

Let him whine in the political wilderness about moral certainty
and democratization of the "Muslim" world.

He is a POS.

that's David Brooks.

Let's look at this little straw man he's made for us:

In this climate of self-doubt, the "realists" of right and left are bound to re-emerge. They're going to dwell on the limits of our power. They'll advise us to learn to tolerate the existence of terrorist groups, since we don't really have the means to take them on. They're going to tell us to lower our sights, to accept autocratic stability, since democratic revolution is too messy and utopian.

Notice he doesn't reference any example of these critics where they actually say these things. Who is calling for us to "tolerate the existence of terrorist groups"? People objected to the Iraq misadventure precisely because it took resources AWAY from the war on terror, and in the end has damaged that effort on a huge scale. And how can anyone describe what we did in Iraq as "democratic revolution"? That was no revolution. It was a democratic imposition. We shoved it down their throats. To paraphrase Anne Coulter, we invaded their country, killed their leaders, and converted them to democracy.

It's the year of cognitive dissonance. It will take him a lifetime, probably, before his cognition is tuned again.

So it was just an invasion.

He's upset about the effect of the pictures, not the acts themselves. His proposal is to create a new, US run UN-type organization to continue to spread the good work we've been doing in Iraq worldwide.

What an asshole.

David Brooks has a case of buyers remorse. He sucks, i hope he always stays a republican.

what an idiot...how bout give it another try when the world decided it is time to sanction the US economy...how will all the freepers live with that when they can't get their cheap made crap from walmart.