The War Lovers

Evan Thomas was at Politics & Prose on Wednesday night at 7 so after doing a bit of apartment hunting, I headed over. He is an editor at Newsweek and preceded his talk by admitting that he was a slight hawk on the Iraq war and wanted to explore his hawkishness by falling back on the general American Hawkishness that seems to date back at least 110 years. He wrote a book about five characters, three hawks and two doves, in the lead up to the Spanish American war. His book is descriptive, offering no pat solutions to prevent our culture's general hawkishness from leading us into the next war, but he was a great speaker and I hope a good author as I did end up purchasing the book.

The Question and Answer period was mostly interesting, including one guy who challenged Thomas's self description as only slightly hawkish, lumping him into the general category of journalist that was not only hawkish but was critical of criticism from the doubters. I do not really recall anything He specifically wrote so I am willing to believe his retort that if we were to go back and review the record, that he did not fall into that extreme category. The questioner's anger was palpable and the reality was that the category he refers too was not really that extreme. It was quite common for the media to be critical of the doubters. Even though I can say with pride that I fall squarely in the skeptics camp long before March 2003, it is interesting that I have mostly moved on. I can understand, even though I rarely think about it, the extreme frustration of those that were proven absolutely correct about the merits of that war be shunned while those that were proven absolutely incorrect keep their lofty and privilged positions as arbiters of the truth and of responsible opinion, Evan Thomas included.