Peter Beinart in his latest essay on the Daily Beast of March 21, 2011, ‘Behind the Libya War’ displays his usual contempt for ‘ordinary Americans’ who are, in his narrative, unable to read a map, or to read English. A startling assertion based on what data? Contempt for his audience, his readers is, perhaps, unbounded. He also asserts:
‘But foreign policymaking is generally an elite affair, and Bosnia was the crucible in which a whole generation of American and European elites forged their view of the world.’
He cites the names Samantha Power and Bernard- Henri Levy, two dubious Public Intellectuals who assume a necessary background to his commentary, as does the Bosnian conflict. All are carefully knit into his seamless but unconvincing, self-serving narrative. His closing paragraph could constitute the whole of his thought, on the matter of a particular man with a particular set of neo-imperial prejudices:
‘In a way, that is the question that Bosnia hawks (a category in which I include myself) were always able to evade. Twice in the Balkans, Milosevic caved just in time. We should all pray that Gaddafi does the same. Because if he does not, humanitarian hawks will be forced to face a painful truth: Americans will tolerate a lot of casualties in a humanitarian war, just so long as none of them are ours.’
Prayer is irrelevant to the issue of the behavior of Mr. Gaddafi. That is an assertion based on his unseemly haste: his random jottings do not constitute a serious, coherent political essay. One could sum up the American policy quandary as this: America has spent its moral and military capital on a series of wars of neo-imperial adventurism and has exhausted the world’s good will and forbearance, and in the process vulgarized, indeed, betrayed it self-concept.
This essay of Mr. Beinart convinces of two things: His contempt for his readers i.e. ‘ordinary Americans’, as an expression of his elitist self conception: and his need to fashion Bosnia as the moral/political nodal point of policy, ex post facto. I am convinced of one thing, as a long time reader of his essays, the trivial, improvisational character of Mr. Beinart’s ‘political thought’.
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