More Baer

I don't want to focus too much on Ken Baer's Iran column, but since he's a professional at rhetoric rather than at foreign policy analysis, the column is a veritable font of key argumentative moves. One of the real signature ones is that Baer uses the failure of the Bush/Baer approach to the Persian Gulf region as a reason to continue the Bush/Baer approach to the Persian Gulf. In other words, instead of trying to grapple with the substantive reasons why lots of people have now reached the conclusion that preventive war is not a good approach to non-proliferation policy, he's psychoanalyzing opposition to his preferred Iran policy as based in the fact that "many progressives–so chastened by the Bush Administration’s deceptions over Iraq and the egregious mistakes that followed–are in danger of letting the past prevent them from focusing on the real threats looming ahead."

In short, the failure in Iraq is construed as putting a higher burden of proof on the doves since we now must operate under a cloud of suspicion that we're irrationally overreacting to Iraq. The hawks, meanwhile, just get to blithely move on without reexamining any aspect of their own beliefs. Instead, Iraq can just be dismissed as merely reflecting "the Bush Administration’s deceptions" and unspecified "egregious mistakes."