CAN WE HOPE?

My column in yesterday’s Sunday Times of London.

TWO NEW PIECES: Defending Hillary Clinton on abortion and Larry Summers on women.

“I’M JUST APPALLED …”: Juan Cole vents on the Iraq elections.

WHY THE RIGHT WON’T CONCEDE ERROR: Here’s an email that says that the right’s failure to acknowledge specific errors in Iraq is directly connected to the left’s visceral hostility to Bush:

I am utterly convinced to the point of certainty that the ‘failure of the people on the right to see the serious problems in the way we’ve administered the occupation’ was based on not wanting to give into the left’s countless methods to undermine the success of a George Bush-led anything. They will take a contrarian position no matter what the topic. They will lie and distort their own past stated positions, The ends justify the means, and all. The same people who claim to have been for the Afghanistan action in order to justify their exceptional opposition to the Iraq action were, for the most part, against Afghanistan. They lie with ease; they don’t want us to win anything; they want America to be publicly chastened, especially by our European intellectual ‘superiors’. Conceding anything to this crowd, right or wrong, feels like it will lead to giving them something they don’t deserve, the higher ground, and, worse, carte blanche to take us back to a pre-911 ostrich-like security strategy. We know things aren’t going perfect. But we never expected that standard in the first place.

That may well be empirically true. But it’s depressing nonetheless.