In the comments to this post, Topsecretk9 shares an excerpt from a 1992 Atlantic Monthly piece, “Tales From the Bazaar: As individuals, few American diplomats have been as anonymous as the members of the group known as Arabists,” in which the trajectory of the term “Arabist” itself is discussed, and in which the venerable Joseph Wilson makes a notable appearance.

I’ll share several excerpts that I found particularly interesting:

In the wake of Iraq’s August, 1990, invasion of Kuwait, which most Arabists did not anticipate, the term “Arabist” became even more negative. Francis Fukuyama, then a Reagan Administration appointee on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, and now a consultant for the Rand Corporation, commented after the invasion, “Arabists are more systemically wrong than other area specialists in the Foreign Service. They were always sending cables, and coming into the [Planning Staff] office, saying things about Saddam being a potential moderate that now they’re claiming they never said.”

[…]

[…] even during the hottest moments of recent history in the Middle East, few diplomats have been more anonymous than the Arabists have. With the exception of April Glaspie, the recent U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Arabists are just an opaque “them,” even to many of their worst enemies. Arabists, I found, are privately talkative, publicly shy. Like other bureaucrats and civil servants, they don’t call attention to themselves. They don’t pontificate on talk shows or op-ed pages. Peter Rodman, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute, who ran the Policy Planning Staff in the Reagan Administration, believes that the breadth, depth, and texture of the Arabists’ knowledge of the Arab world may work to immobilize their analytical thinking about it.

[…]

The postmortem on the Gulf War has been under way for more than a year. The indications are that it will continue for some time, as congressional committees and other investigators reconstruct in fine detail the aims and mechanisms of the foreign policy of the Bush and Reagan Administrations. There will no doubt be many revelations. It is unlikely, however, that any of them will alter the general picture of what occurred: a policy of support for Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran led, after the war, to a policy of coddling and drift. Why did this occur? What role, if any, did the Arabists play?

The answer is not a simple one, but I will lay out some of the elements. First, for a long time—indeed, during most of the period when Iraq was actively at war with Iran—the Arabists had very little say in U.S. policy toward Iraq. Washington did, however, have a well-defined policy of helping the one thuggish regime against the other thuggish regime, which was openly and viciously anti-American. That policy may have been imperfect and cynical, but it made some sort of sense and it was a policy.

A second element is the following: Arabists by and large were comfortable with this policy anyway, for reasons, as we shall see, that have everything to do with the history and psychology of their profession.

A third element is this: When the Iran-Iraq war ended, U.S. policy entered a period of ambiguity. Washington had no clear aims with respect to Iraq, except to permit various financial and military interests in this country to do business with Saddam Hussein. Secretary of State James Baker, moreover, was increasingly preoccupied with German reunification and getting Arab-Israeli peace talks under way. This was the time when Arabists might usefully have sounded a warning—a warning at the very least to disengage. Instead, conditioned by their past and by their training, and by their perception of Iraq as the Arab country of the future, they pushed to maintain the status quo: a measure of engagement, a measure of appeasement.

This is, of course, the very “realism” that many on the left would rail against at the time — and that they now support in retrospect, when the alternative is an idealistic and ambitious foreign policy that has sought to change the conditions in the middle east that have long allowed rogue regimes like Saddam’s Iraq to survive and wreck havoc.

Even the names are the same, with James Baker pushing for the same policies today that he did then, policies that the Robert Kaplan in 1992 was calling the “status quo”, consisting of “a measure of engagement, a measure of appeasement” — when what it should have been doing, the implications are, was sounding “a warning to disengage.”

Marisa Lino, the U.S. consul-general in Florence, who served with [William] Eagleton in both Iraq and Syria, explains that there are two kinds of State Department Arabists, the Washington policy type and the overseas cultural type, and that Eagleton was definitely the overseas type. Eagleton ran the U.S. Interests Section in Baghdad from 1980 through 1984, helping pave the way for the resumption of diplomatic relations between Iraq and the United States which occurred following the end of his tenure. He later became the U.S. ambassador to Syria, and then left the Foreign Service to work for the United Nations in Vienna in behalf of Palestinian refugees. Eagleton is the only U.S. diplomat with a working knowledge of both Arabic and Kurdish to have served in Iraq. If ever someone in the State Department had the mental tools to understand Iraq and where it was headed, it was—or should have been—William Eagleton.

His critics on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and on the National Security Council in the early 1980s—Reagan Administration appointees, for the most part—were never impressed, however. “Eagleton was a classic case,” one of them told me. “He didn’t know how to apply his cultural and ethnographic background knowledge to political analysis. We’d laugh at his cables.”

I first met Eagleton in Baghdad, in March of 1984. It was in the wake of a horrific incident that the media generally failed to report. In June of 1983 Robert Spurling, an engineer from Illinois who was overseeing operations at the Novohotel in Baghdad, had arrived at Saddam International Airport with his wife and three daughters, in order to fly home to the Midwest. At passport control an Iraqi official informed Spurling that there was a “small problem” with his exit visa and asked him to wait while the rest of his family proceeded to the departure lounge. After his wife and daughters passed through the barrier, Spurling was arrested as a spy. Iraqi officials then ordered Spurling’s wife and children onto the plane without him. Somehow his wife managed to phone the U.S. mission.

For three months the Iraqi authorities denied any knowledge of Spurling. Then, in August, after Eagleton’s persistent appeals, Iraq admitted that it was holding such-and-such a man. Eagleton’s own check into Spurling’s background revealed that the Iraqi allegations of espionage were nonsense. In October the Iraqis delivered Spurling to Eagleton’s doorstep. Spurling had been subjected to electric-shock torture in his genitals and elsewhere. He had been beaten with weighted fists and wooden bludgeons. His fingernails and toenails had been ripped out and his fingers and toes crushed. He had been kept in solitary confinement on a starvation diet.

A Canadian diplomat in Baghdad first told me the story, all of which Eagleton confirmed, adding that Spurling had spent several days recovering at Eagleton’s official residence before flying back to the United States. “This is a completely arbitrary system,” Eagleton told me during our conversation in 1984. “There are no laws, no charges filed; anything can happen. I wish I could recommend one Iraqi official who would be worth talking to, who might say something to you meaningful about his country. Unfortunately, there is no one I can think of. They’re simply too scared.” Eagleton added that the Iraqi security apparatus responsible for Spurling’s arrest and torture was headed by Saddam’s half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Takriti. Barzan later became Iraq’s human-rights delegate in Geneva.

Eagleton also spoke about the Kurdish mountains. He indicated that one could not comprehend the puzzle of Iraq by knowing the Arab pieces alone—an insight that was less ordinary in 1984, when he expressed it, than it is now. Yet Eagleton was enthusiastic about the Arab portions, too: “You should read what the British had to say about Iraq. They loved this place.” Though Eagleton dutifully noted the Spurling incident in his annual human-rights report, he urged me to see the matter in perspective. Never before had something like that happened to a U.S. citizen here, and Eagleton implied that he had obtained a commitment from the Iraqi authorities that it never would again. (So far it hasn’t.) “Saddam is at the tough end of the moderate Arab world,” Eagleton assured me in 1984. “Even when the Iran-Iraq war ends, Saddam could not return to his radical policies, because Iran will continue to be a threat and Iraq will need help from the Gulf Arabs.”

When I saw Eagleton again, seven years later in Washington, after the end of the Gulf War, he defended that last statement. “I don’t think I did anything wrong. Saddam was at the time moving precisely in the direction we wanted him to go—toward moderation. There was a period of a year back then when we had no documented evidence of Iraqi involvement in terrorism. So our policy, encouraged by [King] Fahd and [Hosni] Mubarak, reflected this. But I despised Saddam. I knew Iraq in the good old days [before the 1958 military coup, which ended the monarchy]. Now I couldn’t even invite my friends from the bazaar to come to my house and look at my rugs. They would have been arrested.”

Eagleton, who was held in suspicion by some of Saddam Hussein’s clique because of his demonstrated concern for the Kurds, and who deserves credit for Spurling’s release, did not feel in 1983 that the impending resumption of relations between the United States and Iraq was worth disrupting over a single incident, however unfortunate. An innocent American had been torn from his wife and children and tortured in the manner of a dreary bureaucratic procedure, unconnected to any war or invasion with which the United States was involved. If appeasement was a force gathering from a variety of particulars, then the U.S. government’s ability to overlook the troubling implications of what Saddam’s half-brother had done to this American seems indeed seminal. But appeasement does not perfectly describe our tragedy in Iraq. There are other factors. There is that faiblesse that Hume Horan spoke about, and there is also that ineradicable impulse among diplomats to find something useful to do in a country where there may be little useful to be done.

[my emphasis]

So who was right? — the realists or those calling for human rights intervention?

Which is to say, how useful, exactly, are the Arabists in gauging, from the perspective of Western liberal interests, the cultural ethos in which they immerse themselves?

David Newton, another “top-of-the-curve” Horan contemporary, and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 1984 through 1988, brought a similar enthusiasm to his job.

[…]

Like Eagleton before him, Newton had a romantic interest in Iraq that, it must be said, in no way blinded him to its horrors. These two men were always willing to talk to the few journalists who happened to show up in Baghdad to write about the regime’s brutalities. When I first met Newton, in the Iraqi capital in August of 1986, another foreigner—Ian Richter, a British businessman—had just been arrested by the Iraqis on trumped-up charges. “This is the most terrified population in the Arab world,” Newton told me. “If the security services somehow get it into their heads that you’ve done something, there’s not much any of us can do to help.” During that same visit I had my own brush with Iraq’s regime-induced paranoia. I had been granted a visa to visit a group of pro-Saddam Hussein Kurds in the north who held territory over the border in Iran. But upon introducing me to my Kurdish hosts, Iraqi security men confiscated my passport. I did not see it again until two weeks later, when, in a car stuffed with the same morose-looking security men, it was handed back to me en route to the airport. Last spring I sought Newton out again to discuss what, exactly, he had thought he was accomplishing in Baghdad.

[…]

Prominently displayed in Newton’s office are color photographs of himself and April Glaspie—his successor as the U.S. ambassador to Iraq—in the presidential palace in Baghdad, both smiling as they introduce Saddam Hussein and Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz to a congressional delegation led by Senators Robert Dole and Alan K. Simpson. This was the occasion, a few months before the invasion of Kuwait, when Dole and Simpson apologized to Saddam Hussein for Voice of America broadcasts critical of his regime. “I keep these photos in the office as a teaching device: they fascinate my students,” Newton told me. He seems to be a man completely at peace with himself, who talks easily and honestly about his mistakes.

“Saddam put a lot of emphasis on nation-building and the Westernization of the economy, which was popular. Because he had everybody scared, one would have thought that there was no reason for excess brutality. Obviously, the gassing of the Kurds [in March of 1988] affected my view. We worked on intuition, with very few sources.”

“After the Kurds were gassed, why didn’t you just pull out—close the embassy?” I asked, alluding to a conversation I had had some years back with Robert Keeley, a former ambasssdor to Greece who now heads the Middle East Institute, in Washington. Keeley shut the U.S. embassy in Uganda at the time of Idi Amin’s reign of terror. “You maintain a diplomatic presence as long as you’re effective,” Keeley told me. “But in Uganda there came a point when we really were no longer able to have an effect. To be true to our own values, the only thing we could do was to leave, and scream about Amin from the outside.”

Newton said, “That made sense for Uganda”—a landlocked country of no strategic or economic importance to the United States. “But it’s naive to think you can just pull out of a militarily powerful and oil-rich developing country on the Gulf with which American companies were doing hundreds of millions of dollars of trade.” What might have been accomplished in Iraq, according to Newton, was that over time, with U.S. help, “Iraq’s level of repression could have been improved to that of Syria.”

Again, the question — for both today’s hawks and today’s neo-realists, is who was correct?

In retrospect, it is clear that Saddam’s “containment” was illusory, particularly if you happen to be an Israeli who was targeted by Palestinian suicide bombers financially subsidized by the Ba’athist dictator, or a US pilot patrolling the no fly zone, or one of the Iraqi children starving under an international attempt to use sanctions against Hussein (who enriched himself, and seems to have gathered a few allies along the way thanks to the Oil for Food scam). Too, the calls for an end to sanctions were growing, even as Hussein had done nothing to staunch human rights abuses, continued his refusal to cooperate with weapons inspectors, and flouted UN dictates.

But from the realist perspective, Saddam’s containment was suffering from only a slow leak — much of it manageable (and, frankly, remote, the thinking went), until 911 turned the prospect of Saddam providing aid and perhaps biological and chemical weapons to stateless terrorists whose goal it was to kill as many westerners as it could manage, leaving no specific geographical target for response, into a gathering threat, one that the Bush administration argued could not allowed to become “imminent.”

It is only in retrospect of this latest Iraq campaign, after the stockpiles of WMD didn’t materialize, that the realists have dared reassert themselves — finding a new generation of supporters on the political left, the same left that had spent the decades before excoriating realist policy as cynical and unsavory, part and parcel of a type of vulgar, selfish nationalism.

The irony, of course, is that Bush’s response to 911 was both idealistic AND realist — given that it sought political and social sea change in the Middle East as a way to curb Islamic aggression. Democracies, the thinking went, don’t war easily — and clearly, to Bushco’s way of thinking, what we’d be doing for the 5 decades before 911 hadn’t worked.

Which, of course, used to be the position of many liberal Democrats and foreign policy idealists — a position that changed once hard leftists (like International ANSWER) infiltrated the progressive camps and rallied the “peace” brigades, turning idealists into proto-isolationists, and repackaging foreign policy realism into self-satisfied bromides that railed against American occupation and hegemony and colonialization and imperialism, the language of the academic left, itself born from the same intellectual laziness that gave rise to boutique multiculturalism, identity politics, and western self-loathing, along with the linguistic constructs that fortify such anti-liberal projects and attitudes.

Likewise, the cynical desire to retake power at whatever cost has turned former foreign policy idealists into political opportunists of the worst sort — those willing to surrender their principles, if only temporarily, in order to get the “right” people back into office. This group — combined with the genuine hardcore lefties — has, through a pattern of groupthink, rationalition, media manipulation, and propaganda, convinced themselves of their own righteousness, and have blinded themselves (willfully in some cases, accidentally in others) to their shift in principles.

Which is to say, they have become, from a foreign policy standpoint, the Republicans of the 1990s, ranging from the “realism” of Baker and Bush I to the isolationism (appeals for an end to “outsourcing”; avoidance of foreign conflicts that “don’t concern us”) of the Buchananites.

And so the question becomes, were they right then or are they right now? Or, to be less broad, is their concern now more with the execution of what appears, on the surface, an idealistic foreign policy? Or are they able to convince themselves through wild conspiracies about Halliburton and Bush’s War for Oil, that the gambit in Iraq was not, in fact, properly idealistic, and so can be rejected even if its effect is to bring democracy to the country — the (astounding) argument being that, the Bushies’ dubious motives make it necessary for them to actively agitate against a democratic outcome they would have previously celebrated, had it been attempted by someone whose motives they considered pure.

For my part, I came out against Bush I because he didn’t finish the job and depose Saddam; at the time, I considered myself a broadminded, idealist Democrat (albeit one who occasionally supported Republicans like Reagan, whose doctrine of strength through power resonated with me, and against which Jimmy Carter’s morose defeatism seemed decidedly anti-American).

And today, I support Bushco’s foreign policy, realizing that it is indeed a gamble, particularly when half the country is actively agitating against it.

Which means that if I was wrong then, I’m wrong now — a consistency that may or may not show well on me, but one that I am committed to not out of some blind partisan loyalty, but rather out of philosophy concerning US foreign policy that speaks to ideals I’ve held for quite some time.

Others, though, had (and have) different priorities:

hrough Eagleton’s and Newton’s tenures in Baghdad the area specialists were at least operating within a well-defined policy construct. In 1988, however, the Iran-Iraq war ended, and Saddam Hussein provided a glimpse of his postwar self by exterminating five thousand Kurdish civilians. That was the time to begin a vigorous reassessment of the eight-year tilt toward Iraq, especially since a new Administration was entering the White House and a new ambassador was about to be dispatched to Baghdad. But the policy review seems never to have taken place.

Part of the reason for this was the new Secretary of State, James Baker, and the way in which he shifted the balance of power inside the State Department. Baker is the most powerful and interesting Secretary of State since Kissinger. At the outset both men distrusted the career Foreign Service, particularly the area specialists. But, according to Freeman, “Kissinger quickly acquired the talent to dig into the bowels of the bureaucracy while circumventing senior officials, in order to suck out the bank of information the area experts represented.” Baker is different. One former assistant secretary says, “To a greater extent than Kissinger, Baker operates alone. He meets with a Middle Eastern leader, then he tells Dennis Ross [the head of the Policy Planning Staff] what Ross needs to know, then Ross gives orders to his own subordinate, and so on. It’s a narrow chain of command.”

The only Middle East issue that really energized Baker was the one with a domestic political payoff: the Arab-Israeli question. That is why one saw the elevation of people like Ross and Deputy Assistant Secretary Daniel Kurtzer—people who are not traditional Arabists but, in the words of an Arabist colleague of theirs, “Arab-Israeli wallahs,” with limited interest in peripheral inter-Arab disputes. This may partly explain why, as critics observed, by 1990 Iraq was completely “off the radar screen.”

Ambassadors, Horan says, can and should make policy recommendations, but as Foreign Service professionals they have a duty to reflect, exactly, Washington’s current attitude toward a particular country. April Glaspie’s fate was to succeed Newton as ambassador to Iraq at a time when there was more drift than actual policy. And so, as in the days of Her Majesty’s colonial administration—when the British Arab Bureau was a law unto itself—the area specialists were left to fill the vacuum with their own goals and justifications for being in the awful country they were in, goals and justifications not always fully congruent with those of the nation whose interests they were supposed to serve.

[…]

Samuel W. Lewis, the president of the United States Institute of Peace and a former ambassador to Israel, provided a more exacting interpretation of the ambassador’s role at a recent conference in Washington devoted to diplomacy: “The responsibility of the ambassador and his staff is to know more about the country they’re in than anyone else and to make policy recommendations to the government.” In the view of Lewis, Horan, and others, the ambassador’s recommendations, if not always approved, should at least serve as the basis for ongoing policy discussions regarding a particular country. By this definition [April] Glaspie may not have been the villain that the scandal- and personality-obsessed media require in order to simplify the complex question of why the United States was caught off guard by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. But more than any other individual in the career State Department, she does bear responsibility. Therefore, a close look at her record is called for.

“April has never been involved in any issue where she was not a policy-driver,” says a former colleague who knows her well. “She was dynamic and aggressive, and supremely confident. April dominated issues. It was just not in her character to be a passive ambassador implementing a policy she did not fully agree with.” Indeed, Glaspie’s influence on U.S. Middle East policy was significant even before she became ambassador, when she headed the State Department’s northern Arabian division, which put Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan within her domain.

In fact, it was Syria’s alleged terrorist activities that may have revealed Glaspie’s policy viewpoint most clearly. In 1986 British and Israeli intelligence caught an Arab terrorist, Nizar Hindawi, attempting to smuggle a bomb aboard an El Al jetliner at London’s Heathrow Airport in the suitcase of his unsuspecting, pregnant girlfriend. Electronic eavesdropping revealed that Hindawi had been receiving orders through the Syrian embassy, whose ambassador was subsequently expelled. The European Community took the unusual step of imposing sanctions on Syria before the United States did. “April and Bill Eagleton were violently opposed to a tough American reaction,” says a former colleague. “I remember violent discussions with them.” One source describes the policy dispute between Glaspie’s northern Arabian division and State’s counterterrorism people as a bureaucratic “guerrilla war.”

“April Glaspie was much more protective of radical Arabs than our policy justified,” says a bureaucratic rival at the State Department. With respect to Iraq, Glaspie advocated everything possible to make the Iraqis feel comfortable to avoid a disruption in relations. A Capitol Hill staff member adds, “Her meeting with Saddam Hussein was the culmination of a failed policy line that she and [NEA Assistant Secretary John] Kelly had been tirelessly advocating since 1988.” This same person indicates that Dole and Simpson’s apology for the VOA broadcasts calling for democracy in Iraq was the result of a prior briefing by Glaspie, which “conditioned the senators for the cave-in.” A second source, who accompanied the senators on the trip, is of the same opinion: “I am a hundred percent sure that the apology was the result of Ambassador Glaspie’s briefing.”

[…]

ot only was April Glaspie perhaps the victim of a distracted policy apparatus, but those signals that Washington did transmit to her could only have been confusing. The Administration, concentrating on the Baltic States, the reunification of Germany, and Arab-Israeli issues in early 1990, while indicating its intention to withdraw from the Gulf those ships that remained from the l988 Kuwait reflagging operation, seemed to encourage its diplomats in Baghdad to ignore Iraq’s behavior toward Kuwait (even as behind-the-scenes aid to Iraq continued). To confront a powerful and volatile dictator, an ambassador needs specific support from Washington. Otherwise—as the Foreign Service drills into the heads of its career officers—an ambassador is supposed to ferret out the ruler’s intentions, take notes, and report immediately to the State Department.

April Glaspie met with Saddam Hussein one week before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Glaspie saw Hussein without a notetaker, because she had been summoned to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry on short notice and did not know that she was about to meet the Iraqi President, with whom she had never had a private meeting during her two years in Baghdad. She wondered if this could be the beginning of an “opening,” says a colleague of hers, and she obviously wanted the meeting to go well, especially as there was no time to get special instructions from Washington.

Glaspie told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at an open hearing that the Iraqi transcript of the meeting, which depicts her as acting in a fawning manner toward Saddam Hussein, and as appearing to indicate that the United States did not care how Iraq settled its border dispute with Kuwait, was doctored. But Senate staffers say that the Iraqi transcript and her own cable of the event “track almost perfectly.” Glaspie, they and other observers conclude, was the ultimate staff person—obsessed with the diplomatic process to the point where she couldn’t accept that sometimes it is better for the process to collapse than for it to continue.

And yet, if you believe today’s liberal left, diplomacy is always the answer, except when the answer is more diplomacy or joint diplomacy.

But in retrospect — given what happened 911, and given that we’d already routed the Taliban and forced al Qaeda on the run — what would you have done, as a matter of foreign policy, to prevent what (the overwhelming consensus held) was “just the beginning” of a war with radicalized Islamists who had finally managed a major attack on US soil? Would your plan have included any other planks beyond playing “Where’s Osama”?

These are legitimate questions — asked in a way that is not meant as deliberately and pointedly partisan — questions that I think this trip in the wayback machine bring to light forcefully once again.

More from Kaplan, which, in hindsight, is positively eerie:

Peter Rodman, of the Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute, wonders whether the Arabists’ best days actually lie ahead. “Since we will no longer have to look at the Middle East in East-West terms, it might be more appropriate, as Arabists have always urged, to treat the region on its own terms. But Arabists may blow their opportunity if they take a sentimental view of the fundamentalist phenomenon, which is the new strategic danger.” In a new climate, in which various forces impel Arab leaders to focus inward on their own societies rather than on Israel, the interstices that Arabists operate within should be wider and remain open for longer periods.

And so long as we’re taking eerie trips back in time — to the days before Arabists wrote op-eds or spoke publicly about policy — let’s take the time to visit Joe Wilson:

In the summer of 1987, after finishing his assignment in Yemen, [US press and culture officer in Iraq Jack] McCreary was posted to Iraq. “On a strictly political level, nothing was happening,” McCreary explained. “The embassy people knew nobody at the palace. We had no access to the Baath Party. We’d invite Iraqis to receptions and they were too frightened to show up. For us to claim we knew Baghdad would have been like a Third World diplomat claiming to know Washington because there was one desk officer at the State Department who returned his phone calls. But on the cultural level in Iraq there was tremendous hope.”

Western secular culture was a bone that Saddam tossed to his affluent urban subjects. Among other things, Baghdad was the lone Arab capital offering classical piano and violin recitals and a degree program in European music. McCreary’s daughters took ballet lessons at an Iraqi government school. McCreary became involved in a jazz club, Al-Ghareeb (“The Stranger”), in downtown Baghdad, where he played the saxophone and Joseph Wilson, the embassy’s deputy chief of mission, sang, while McCreary’s daughter Kate—along with a crowd of Iraqi artists—made charcoal sketches of the performances. “It was a marvelous place: jazz at night, me playing, Kate and the Iraqis drawing away. From the point of view of my job, the Iraqis’ interest in classical music and jazz was certainly to be encouraged.”

The jazz club and his daughters’ ballet lessons bought McCreary and his wife rare entrees to the homes of numerous Iraqi families. “It was an artsy crowd of ancient regime types and politically neutered intellectuals. Carol and I worked constantly to give these people a sense of American values, to demonstrate how free people think and behave: to show them it was possible. But they were cowed. The big crisis in one family was the teenage daughter, whose beauty had attracted one of Saddam’s Takriti goons.” (Takrit is Saddam Hussein’s birthplace, and that of many of his closest associates.)

This is a man today’s left holds up as a hero, even as they huzzah over the ludicrous prosecution of Scooter Libby.

And yet, yesterday and today, there was Joe Wilson, clueless interloper and diplomatic fraud, a pampered bureaucrat who, having conspired with his CIA agent wife, tried to swing a presidential election by lying to the American public and undermining a war effort that he should have known was, if not necessary, at least strategically and morally defensible.

What a loathsome creature.