War the Left Way

Brendan Conway reviews a new book by a so-called liberal chicken hawk, Peter Beinart's new book, "The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again," :

It begins with the new anticommunist consensus forged at Washington's Willard Hotel in 1947; it takes shape with the Truman administration; it reaches maturity with JFK and the "Scoop Jackson Democrats"; it falters during and after Vietnam; it gives way in the 1970s and 1980s to the "peace" movement; it then gets eclipsed by crusading Reaganites and makes Republicans of people who were once Cold War Democrats. The present moment of ascendant Deaniacs and the shunning of people like Mr. Lieberman is, for Mr. Beinart, the apotheosis of that trend... Mr. Beinart's "liberal" war on terror would be humbler than the Bush doctrine and the current administration -- rejecting what he claims is the right's tendency to think that "American actions, simply by virtue of being American, are beyond moral judgment" -- and it would also entail a Marshall Plan-like economic development program for the Middle East of several times the magnitude of President Bush's efforts.

Sounds more like Welfare for Terrorists than a Marshall Plan.