Maybe I've missed it, but I expected to see a blogosphere explosion over David Brooks's Saturday column in the NY Times, "A More Humble Hawk." (
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/17/opinion/17BROO.html) The piece was a huge crack in the neocon defense of the Iraq disaster they dreamt up, as Brooks, the neocon world's most highly placed representative in the straight media, conceded the fantasy basis of the thinking behind invading Iraq.
Brooks offers the stunning admission that he got the fundamental point, the neoncon's projection that America would be embraced as a liberator, wrong:
"Most of all," Brooks writes, " I misunderstood how normal Iraqis would react to our occupation. I knew they'd resent us. But I thought they would see that our interests and their interests are aligned. We both want to establish democracy and get the U.S. out.
"I did not appreciate how our very presence in Iraq would overshadow democratization."
While fleeting, it's an admission that comes close to conceding the whole shooting match. Yes, Brooks goes on to cling to the passion of the fantasy ("I was still stirred by yesterday's Bush/Blair statements about democracy in the Middle East") and even to conclude that the Administration still coulda done it right (more troops, not "on the cheap"). But a year of disaster has made it through the first ring of this noncon mind, normally as data-proof as rest of the lot: Maybe pre-emtive invasion and democratization are kinda opposites, he seems to be grasping. Maybe everything we think Iraqis would "naturally" be thinking (except for the bad actors, who "naturally" think the opposite) really is nothing but what WE think they'd be thinking--what's on our minds, not theirs.
Neocons used to take inordinate pleasure in pointing out Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer's dictum that Marx erred fundamentally in believing that nationalism, the feeling of identity as a political actor through the nation, would be superceded by class identification. Funny--tragic!--that the neocons have reproduced that error, this time thinking that "democracy" (their version, that impossibly non-participatory thing they bring to others) could trump the "natural" response of nationalism in a country that was invaded and occupied by a power against which it had not raised a hand. On Saturday, a glimmer of this came through to David Brooks after only a year of being pounded upside the head by reality. Could it be happening to others?