Winter 2009

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In the run-up to the war in Iraq, liberal hawks were so close to neoconservative hawks that only an expert political ornithologist could distinguish between the species. Kanan Makiya, the eloquent Iraqi dissident, played the same role on the left as Ahmad Chalabi played on the right, enumerating the evils associated with Saddam Hussein’s regime. Human rights activists such as Samantha Power and Michael Ignatieff, who had demanded an end to genocide and ethnic cleansing, included Saddam in their catalogue of evil, even if Power herself opposed the war. Kenneth Pollack’s The Threatening Storm, with its melodramatic Churchillian title and its solemn call to action, did more to build support for the war than the more obviously partisan pamphlets produced by the right. Even as difficulties mounted in the aftermath of the invasion, liberals generally stuck to their guns. As George Orwell had done in the face of totalitarianism in his day, liberals would resolutely stand with liberty, even if doing so seemed to have turned at least one of them, Christopher Hitchens, into a conservative. 
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