The New Republic‘s Lawrence Kaplan explains here (sub. may be req’d):
The contradiction pits the liberal ideal that discourages impinging on the autonomy of others against the liberal ideal that no people ought to be governed without their consent–and that liberals ought therefore to support the democratic aspirations of foreign peoples. The tension between the two manifests itself in every war, with liberals who heeded Hans Morgenthau’s admonition to mind our own business arguing that we have no right to violate the sovereignty of a Yugoslavia or an Iraq, while the descendants of Woodrow Wilson argue that to do otherwise would amount to a betrayal of liberalism. The latter group had the upper hand during the presidency of Bill Clinton, who, if a president earned a ribbon every time he resorted to military action, would be sporting a chestful today. But those days are long gone. What we have in their place is a crude and cheap version of realism, which, although ostensibly a method of analysis that eschews ideology, is rapidly becoming an ideology of its own. Unfortunately, its key tenets as laid out by the Gary Harts and Paul Krugmans of this world–non-interference, narrowly defined vital interests, a foreign policy scrubbed of idealism–provide no adequate response to the war of ideas in which we’re presently engaged and will be long after the war in Iraq draws to a close.
