NOW THAT MATTERS IN POSTWAR IRAQ have, to put it mildly, become challenging, antiwar liberals are exhibiting a new spring in their step, and a revivified eagerness to heap scorn on the Bush administration. One of the most bizarre examples of this appears in the June 9 issue of the New Yorker, in a truly unhinged “Talk of the Town” column by Hendrik Hertzberg. The article, “Building Nations,” begins with a description of the “catastrophe” that is postwar Iraq–a “Hobbesian state of nature” lacking water, phones, and electric power, and full of environmental degradation and rampant crime.
But Hertzberg isn’t content to make the (defensible) argument that Iraq’s current troubles result from incompetent American planning; instead, the blame lies with the administration’s ideological obsession. Hertzberg writes: “It’s tempting to suggest that the Bush Administration is failing to provide Iraq with functioning, efficient, reliable public services because it doesn’t believe in functioning, reliable public services–doesn’t believe they should exist, and doesn’t really believe that they can exist.”
