Circular debate

Most of the neocons who are aggressively promoting the Libyan intervention hail from the same crowd that promoted the Iraq War in 2003. Andrew Sullivan and others are aghast. In their view, these folks are morally and intellectually bankrupt.

New Republic writer Jon Chait is tired of the fuss:

"I don't get this obsession among critics of this operation with arguing over moral authority. It's another hangover from the Iraq war, and the exaggerated but not totally false interpretation that George W. Bush was a helpless dupe led to war by neoconservative intellectuals. It's a mode of analysis that makes writers into powerful actors and figures like the President into bit players. The most important figure in this debate by several orders of magnitude is Iraq War critic Barack Obama. This argument over who has the right to comment about the war, or the endless philosophical discursions into the relative merits of anti-malarial nets -- an issue that hardly anybody ever brought up until it was discovered as a foil against intervention in Libya -- is a bizarre distraction."

And the beat goes on ...