There's an old saying that a conservative is a liberal who got mugged. So what is a neoconservative who has come to see Iraq as a war without end? A realist.You can put Lawrence Kaplan in that camp.
Kaplan is senior editor at The New Republic and has written for a number of conservative publications. He was executive editor at William Kristol's The National Interest before moving to TNR.
This is the part of the movie where I note that like Kaplan, I supported the invasion of Iraq in principle, buying into the notion that Saddam Hussein was a very bad man who had very bad weapons and was a very bad threat. Unlike Kaplan, I forsaw the post-invasion occupation as the U.S.'s undoing and accurately predicted that it would founder because the Bush administration had spent 59 minutes on the war and barely a minute on what came next.But that's all water down the Euphrates now.
Kaplan is just back from Iraq (with a stopover in Kuwait) and the fine reportage and eloquent writing in his New Republic dispatch cannot mask his despair over the bloody hell that the four-year-old occupation has devolved into.
Kaplan still clings to the slim thread that the war can be somehow "won" through attrition, but at heart he is a chastened man.
Some excerpts:
A conventional wisdom has emerged in Washington, arguing that U.S. forces have been "hunkering down" - the title of a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly - and patrolling less. Indeed, the president himself has pledged "less U.S. patrols, less U.S. presence." But this does not make it true. After the February bombing of the Shia mosque in Samarra, the number of U.S. patrols quadrupled in Baghdad. On a recent week, the Army sent 1,100 of them into the capital. It did so for a simple reason: Letting go has become the whole point of American policy, but officers know that, every time they let go of a sector, it comes apart at the seams.