America vs. Evil

Daniel Larison lays waste to Abe Greenwald’s shoddy rendition of the history of American wars.  Greenwald is attempting in his National Review piece to demonstrate how Obama is “going neocon.”  He uses the Nobel acceptance speech as his leaping board and claims that because Obama invoked “evil” and America’s role in stopping it, he is on the path to neoconservatism.  Writes Greenwald:

If Obama has not yet been mugged by reality, he is at least being shaken by ever-dropping approval ratings. In his role as war president, he may find an opportunity to halt the slide. A new Rasmussen poll shows that 53 percent of voters support President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, while 47 percent support his plan to begin a troop drawdown in 18 months. This means a majority — slim though it may be — do not accept the conception of morality advocated by present-day liberals. Perhaps this is a reality up to the task of mugging our commander-in-chief.

Larison has already covered the historical silliness of Greenwald’s piece. Go read his picking apart of the notion that the War of 1812 was somehow a war to end evil monarchical rule, or that the overarching purpose of World War I was to fight totalitarian regimes which largely emerged after World War I.  Yes, in Greenwald’s world the founding fathers were all neocons themselves.  (He’d be correct to some degree that the neoconservative exuberance owes at least some of its heritage to Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy, however.)

But I’d like to focus on this “conception of morality advocated by present-day liberals” that Greenwald is throwing out there.  Setting aside the historical accuracy of Rasmussen polls, because 53% of Americans approve of Obama sending more troops to Afghanistan does not mean 53% of Americans agree with the neoconservative foreign policy agenda.  Far more likely people find themselves in Obama’s shoes, wondering how they would honorably end such a conflict, wondering how they would tie up such disarray.  Most Americans are neither hawks nor doves and are certainly not foreign policy experts.

Even more absurd is the idea that because these people support Obama’s Afghanistan strategy that now a slim majority don’t share the conception of morality advocated by liberals.  What does that even mean?  Neocons like Greenwald assume that the only people who could possibly oppose war are liberals.  Such is the state of affairs on the right, I suppose.  But even worse, to weigh someone’s morals on their support for war (and to call the lack of support immoral) strikes me as fairly awful.  The old trick is to question someone’s patriotism, and that’s cynical and arrogant enough, but to define an entire group’s morality based on their belief that interventionist wars are wrong is absurd.