[Crossposted from www.hiramhover.typepad.com]

Sometimes even your friends find it hard to say something nice about you. But give this to George Will–at least he’s willing to try.

And it’s fun to watch as he twists, contorts, and flaps his arms in his column today, a send-off for Paul Wolfowitz as he prepares to leave the Department of Defense for the World Bank.  The tough part for Will, of course, is that he has to work hard to  ignore Wolfowitz’s responsibility for the current mess in Iraq, and indeed, the entirety of his tenure in Washington for the last four years.

Instead, Will would much rather talk about Wolfowitz’s service on Scoop Jackson’s staff in the 1960s, and his role in the Ford and Reagan administrations a generation ago–subjects that Will can frame in the neo-con’s tried-if-not true “we singlehandedly brought down the Evil Empire” way.

Will finds himself adrift, however, when it comes time to discuss Iraq, and can only manage the following:

Although Wolfowitz has been accused of being irrationally preoccupied with Saddam Hussein, he says he actually consistently underestimated Hussein’s malevolence. “I did not think he would invade Kuwait; or that when he did he would take all of it; or that when driven out he would not say enough is enough; or that he would try to kill President (George H.W.) Bush.” But, he says, it is an unusual man who tortures children to intimidate parents.

Today, he says, the most dangerous Iraqi insurgents are from the tens of thousands — still only a fraction of a percent of the population — of “hard-core killers” who ran Hussein’s regime. From his visits to Turkey, a secular Muslim democracy, and from his service as ambassador to Indonesia, with the world’s largest Muslim population, he has acquired considered confidence in the capacity of what he calls “mainstream Muslims” for freedom. Note well: he says his confidence derives from experience, not theory.

Confidence derived from “experience, not theory”? Well–if by “experience” you mean studiously ignoring current-day Iraq to talk about Turkey and Indonesia, and engaging in gross and condescending generalizations about the capacities of “mainstream Muslims”–then, sure.

But I guess that’s what passes for “realism” on the right….

 

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