THE LOW POST: 101 Ways to Lie About Iraq

So, to translate, here's Klein's take on the army in the post-Vietnam era: After sending a generation of idealistic young whippersnappers off to war in Southeast Asia with snazzy new unis, we end up killing two million people from one of the poorest agrarian countries on earth, turning huge sections of North Vietnam as well as illegally bombed Laos and Cambodia into permanent moonscapes, and sending 60,000 Americans home in body bags, with tens of thousands more coming back crippled, poisoned or psychologically ravaged. We furthermore let it get out that we started the war under false pretenses and kept up the fight long after even the Pentagon knew the whole thing was a hopeless waste of lives and money. Beyond that, we dump deadly poison on 5.6 million acres on a country the size of New Mexico, creating conditions that would leave every hospital in South Vietnam filling storage rooms, for the next thirty years, with two-and three-headed babies in jars. Photographers like Philip Jones Griffiths would come back decades later with horrifying galleries of thousands of twisted genetic freaks left to lie for years on mats in malarial villages...

And yet, despite all of this, the real reason idealistic young people from the fancy classes have not been rushing into the services in the years since then is because the Army isn't offering them their own hat.

This piece lauding the "excellent nation-building efforts" and the "good news" from Iraq was written, incidentally, in November 2003, which is some time after September 2002, which is the date that Klein now tabs as the moment he came out against the war. He made this interesting announcement in a blistering passage on his blog about a month ago, one in which he blasted "leftists" for criticizing his stance on the war:

The illiberal left just hates it when I point out that the Democratic Party's naivete on national security -- and the left wing tendency to assume every U.S. military action abroad is criminal -- just aren't very helpful electorally. The fact that I've been opposed to the Iraq war ever since this 2002 article in Slate just makes it all the more aggravating. But it's possible to have been against the war and to hope for the best in Iraq...Listening to the leftists, though, it's easy to assume that they are rooting for an American failure.

OK, to begin with, I'm just absolutely tired of this bullshit coming from people like Klein who insist that "leftists" are "rooting" for American failure. Let's get this straight: there are no "leftists" in modern-day America. Or, rather, there about ten of them, and you can find absolutely every single one of them at the next antiwar or anti-anything protest in Washington; they all fit in one section of the park behind the White House, where you can find pretty much all of them passing out small stacks of socialist fliers, mainly to each other. These socialists are committed, dedicated, utterly serious political activists, which makes them absolutely atypical Americans, which is why there are so few of them.