The other day Ezra called for liberal magazines like The New Republic to drop the abstracted calls for "seriousness" and put forth ideas about Iran--even if those ideas happen to be violent ones. Jon Chait takes exception:
About a year ago, TNR published an editorial urging the Bush administration to "move ruthlessly" to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. This was, admittedly, a little vague, and a post on Tapped, the American Prospect's blog, wondered if TNR was fomenting war.
Then a subsequent TNR editorial urged "the West" to "get ruthlessly serious about Iran," and noted "No, bombing is not the only instrument of policy we have." I hoped this would clear things up. But then Tapped wondered if our editorial meant "That bombing would be insufficiently ruthless and we should mount a full-scale invasion?"
Uh, no. I figured any lingering confusion would have been cleared up a couple months ago, when TNR published a special issue on Iran, with four articles on the topic. The most hawkish of them urged:
military action really should be the last resort. By far the best option remains the marshalling of international political and economic pressure against Iran so as to isolate and impoverish the ruling elite and strengthen the hand of those who already may be questioning the wisdom of the current path.
None of the others came close to calling for war. Indeed, the policy synthesis that emerged from all four articles recommended strong multilateral diplomacy, economic pressure and allowing Iranian moderates space to push for reform.
It's perfectly possible that Ezra didn't read that issue. Next time I see him (which will hopefully be never) I'll ask him. But I don't know what difference it makes. That article, written by Robert Kagan, was called "To avoid conflict, prepare for war." And even if it wasn't, Ezra was imploring liberal hawks, and Kagan--whose opinions are not neccessarily the same as TNR's--doesn't really fall into that category.
It's perfectly possible that TNR as an institution doesn't, in fact, think we should go to war with Iran (that seems to be Jon Chait's feeling). But since war is what we seem to be inching toward, it would be nice to have TNR arguing forthrightly against it--unless, of course, that's not their position.
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