Peter Beinart and "The Good Fight"

Peter Beinart, editor-at-large at The New Republic and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, which was published May, 2006.

After 9/11 he was one of a number of leading liberal voices arguing for a strong response to what he calls the totalitarian spirit of radical Islam, and he supported the invasion of Iraq.

He has just penned an article that opens:

"Why, exactly, did you support this war?" asked my wife the other day.

His response, in part:

I was willing to gamble, too -- partly, I suppose, because, in the era of the all-volunteer military, I wasn't gambling with my own life. And partly because I didn't think I was gambling many of my countrymen's. I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought. It's a truism that American intellectuals have long been seduced by revolution. In the 1930s, some grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, some felt the same way about Cuba. In the 1990s, I grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the United States.

Read Beinart's essay (free registration required).

--Marshal Zeringue