Steele In Aspen

Jeffery Goldberg on Shelby Steele's talk:

Steele is arguing for the end of white guilt, which is something legitimate to argue about, but now he's saying that America conducts itself with excessive politesse in Middle East war zones because of white guilt. And I always thought we tried to respect human rights whenever possible because it's the right thing to do, and, by the way, slaughtering people indiscriminately doesn't tend to win over the people you let live.

Yglesias's take:

I thought he went awry by alleging that we’ve been overly “sensitive” in our conduct of war recently for reasons of white guilt and that this is why we’re bogged down in Iraq -- too much focus on the legitimacy of our efforts, and not enough focus on “winning.” I think this mostly shows that Steele has a lot more background in social policy than in military policy.