A perennial question among the more thoughtful political types is why things don’t change, why the discourse doesn’t get better. A big part of that is that we have no history. The news cycle is relentless and people never seem to look back. It takes failure of world-historic proportions to prompt retrospective consideration of the wisdom of previous commitments, and as we saw with the hand-wringing over Iraq, that never actually leads to anybody losing their jobs because they got it wrong. But it’s still better to look back than not to. If we have no history, nothing will ever, ever get better.
Well: Libya is a nightmare. A humanitarian intervention has led to a humanitarian crisis.
So: you guys want to step up and talk about why you were wrong? I mean I don’t expect the real Samantha Power warmongering types to admit they were wrong. But can we get a little social pressure for our political class to own up to the fact that they were wrong, please? You guys want to weigh in, here? Zack Beauchamp? Spencer Ackerman? Juan Cole? Jon Chait? Garance Franke-Ruta? John Judis? Christopher Hitchens, I’m sorry to say, is no longer around to apologize. But how about you, Fareed Zakaria? John Heilemann? Andrew Sullivan, at least– and his readers– are getting frank about the damage done. But Shadi Hamid, how about you? Anne-Marie Slaughter, we already know, is beyond helping. The whole New Republic will never stop being wrong about war. And Jeffrey Goldberg has built a career on being wrong but acting really pompous about it. But you, Peter Beinart? You have another of those brooding apologies in you? Matt Steinglass, still feeling good?
I could go on. I keep score, you guys. Because every time you get these things wrong, people die.
Me, I wrote dozens of posts about Libya, at the time. You can check my record. (And right on, Matt Yglesias, Radley Balko, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and of course the always prescient Daniel Larison, among others.)
You guys. The people who want to make things better. The people who think there should be accountability in punditry. The ones who think professionals should take responsibility for their professional work. This is where it happens, or it doesn’t. Either the community that is the elite political media pressures people to examine their support for this failed intervention and in so doing perhaps gain insight for the future, or it doesn’t. But this is where it happens. This is where the rubber meets the road. So what are you guys gonna do?
