Beating Up On The Neocons

Gregory Djerejian offered a semi-mea culpa and semi-defense of "neo-con bashing" a few weeks ago:

[T]o be a purported Wise Man or foreign policy expert, you must be able to recalibrate and learn from one’s mistakes. Instead, as David Rieff once quipped to me: “(l)ike the Trotskyists of yore, these people are never wrong if only they had been listened to and allowed to follow their mad utopian schemes to their limit.” This failure to learn from experience, this rigid ideological lock-step (indeed they essentially look to double-down even post the Iraq debacle, now with some calling for bombing Iran), in my opinion, displays a lack of character that is very worrisome and frankly reprehensible, especially given the human and other costs (of which more in a subsequent post). Forgive me therefore for not trusting their policy suggestions on Iran, or any other issues, for that matter. And forgive me too for on occasion having gotten overly hot-headed.

Yglesias replies.