"Fox News' Steve Doocy told viewers this morning that "some" are referring to the president's visit to the Middle East "as President Obama's Muslim apology tour. "Who are these "some"? Doocy didn't say. If pressed, the Fox News personality would probably have to point to the frequent references to an "apology tour" on his own standards-free network." -- Steve Benen
Ah, yes. Because in the minds of the neocon gallery, explanation is tantamount to apology. To a lot of these folks, even having to defend our policies is a sign of weakness and cowering before the world. Not only is the American way of life not open to debate, it isn't even open to discussion. Take it or leave it. For us or against us.
But let's just take this idiocy at face value. Let's say that President Obama were to publicly apologize for the War in Iraq while abroad. It seems far from obvious to me that this would be indefensible. Regardless of the intentions of the people who started the war, it is now pretty difficult to dispute that the war was prosecuted incompetently for a substantial period of time. Hell, even Bill Kristol said that Don Rumsfeld was a terrible Defense Secretary on the Daily Show a few years ago. Would it be wrong to apologize for how poorly the war was prosecuted initially? I suspect that intellectually honest neocons would be able to accept that. Taking this further, what if Obama were to apologize for the outcome of the Iraq War and that it was ever waged? After all, it hasn't exactly worked to spec. Would the neocons have a problem with apologizing for that inconvenient fact? I suspect so. After all, we liberated the Iraqis, no? Sometimes one reads grumbling from neocons about how ungrateful Iraqis are at being liberated, though this is sort of like expecting the family in the Cat in the Hat to thank the Cat after messing up their house, liberation or no. Going from a stable, if dreary, existence to an unstable, "free" one is still going to be a net negative for actual Iraqis who can't fulfill their basic needs. An even stronger statement would be to apologize for the broad thrust of American foreign policy in the Middle East since Mossadegh was ousted and admit that it was motivated by America's insatiable need for oil. This would have the virtue of being mostly true, and this seems to be what Doocy is suggesting Obama is saying. This is, however, not at all what the Cairo speech says. That something so manifestly obvious can only be stated by the Noam Chomskys of the world is a hint of its correctness--why would both the mainstream right and left be so angry at this assertion, were it not substantively true in such a way that implicated them both in a disastrous and immoral foreign policy?
One suspects that neocons don't want a discussion (let alone a debate) on their ideas because their ideas do not withstand scrutiny. The only reason why anyone signed up for their vision in the first place was because the Bushies scared the bejesus out of Americans after 9/11. Hence the heavyhanded deployal of a patriotic litmus test with respect to aggressive war and "democracy promotion", such as it is. Anything less than that would have allowed critics to pick apart the glaring contradictions in the neocon worldview and conclude that they relied upon ridiculously oversimplified models of civilization and human nature and that they simply had no idea what they were talking about. Democracy is not the default style of governance for humanity--before the 18th century, it was practiced very little, save for the examples of the ancient Greeks and, for a time, the Roman Republic. And yet, this is one of the core assumptions in the neocon worldview. How defensible can the rest of it be? Trotting out the apology insult seems to be an attempt to defuse any detente between America and the Middle East, as the possibility of some less costly and less belligerent way of dealing with the Middle East and the terror threat will necessarily make their conflict-centered model less attractive to a war-weary populace. I will by no means predict that neoconnery is in its final throes--such declarations tend to backfire on the issuers--but it's certainly on the run, and its supporters are desperate.
