The appropriate weight

I've been sending you over to Jeff Weintraub's quite a bit lately. Well, why not? Before Jeff started his blog, I carried a number of guest posts by him here. And that isn't a complaint. It struck me early on that Jeff was a blog just waiting to happen. More strength to his elbow.

I direct you now to this post of his: partly just so, and partly because it's directly relevant to the discussion between Chris Young and me. Chris was wanting to establish - as a general principle - that there might be good reasons for not giving credit to someone for positive outcomes they have brought about. As I said yesterday, I wasn't persuaded that the examples he laid out applied to the matter in hand. But in any case it is also clear that there can be bad reasons for not giving credit where it's due. And there can be bad reasons for not being willing even to recognize when something good has come about as a result of a policy which you opposed; as if it couldn't really be good just because you opposed it - rather than assessing the thing for what it is.

Anyway, my remarks are merely by way of introduction to these forthright sentiments from Jeff Weintraub apropos a column in the New York Times by Bob Herbert:

Sure, why should he talk about something so trivial as the first real parliamentary election in Iraq in a half-century, which also happened to be one of the most free and possibly consequential national elections in the history of the Arab Middle East - accomplished in the midst of massive social dislocation, ongoing civil war, a savage campaign of terrorism against Iraqi civilians, and credible threats to murder anyone who voted? I might slide over this remark as simply an example of bad taste, except I know that Herbert has consistently advocated that the US simply abandon Iraq, so that the Iraqis who voted last week can be slaughtered by the fascists and jihadis at the heart of the so-called "insurgency." Since Herbert is committed to this position, why complicate it by offering more than a dismissive passing mention of the Iraqi election - just enough to make it clear that no intelligent person should take that nonsense seriously?...

To be perfectly honest, I have to admit that reading this kind of stuff - with its breezy, irresponsible, and ultimately cynical dismissal of Iraqis, their suffering, and their struggles - makes me sick. Is that unfair? I also have to admit that at times one of the few things that can counteract my own rage at the Bush administration and its works is to listen to some of its critics and opponents, at home and abroad, from Jacques Chirac and Brent Scowcroft to Ramsay Clark and the clearly deranged Harold Pinter and so many others - "realists," pseudo-humanitarians, pseudo-radicals, and pseudo-statesmen alike. (I've occasionally wondered whether people like the appalling Naomi Klein, for example, are really on Karl Rove's payroll. That's a joke, of course, but it would be good value for money. No, most of them are free-lancing... and some of them... appear to have been on Saddam Hussein's payroll, not Karl Rove's.)
.....
[W]hen it comes to talking about torture, political repression, and other threats to "freedom, democracy, and the rule of law," then in my humble opinion people who favored leaving Iraq under the rule of a genocidal fascist regime with a proven history of ongoing torture, mutilation, rape, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder on a massive scale, and who now favor unconditional surrender to the fascists and jihadis engaged in murdering Iraqi civilians in order to bring back this kind of regime - in other words, people like Bob Herbert... well, it doesn't seem to me that such people really have a lot of moral credibility on these issues. (Unlike, say, John McCain.) Am I being unfair? I don't think so.

As strongly as he expresses it, Jeff is urging us to maintain our intellectual and emotional balance, as you will see if you read the whole thing.