In foreign affairs, both left and right claim to speak for the conscience of America, but on Iraq the right has no moral clarity and the left has los… - Michael Bérubé

" "

In foreign affairs, both left and right claim to speak for the conscience of America, but on Iraq the right has no moral clarity and the left has lost its moral compass. This is not a problem for the masters of realpolitik, who have long since inured themselves to the task of doing terrible things to human beings in the course of pursuing the national interest, but it is utterly devastating to those few souls who still dream that the course of human events should be judged — and guided — by principles common to many nations rather than by policies concocted by one. The emergence of the antiwar right, however, may yet hold a lesson for the left, insofar as the antiwar right relies on Brent Scowcroft’s internationalism rather than Pat Buchanan’s isolationism: the challenge clearly is to learn how to be strenuously anti-imperialist without being indiscriminately antiwar. It is a lesson the American left has never had to learn — until now.