WALL STREET JOURNAL
by Bret Stephens
August 25, 2014

ISIS makes liberals rediscover the necessity of hard power.

So now liberals want the U.S. to bomb Iraq, and maybe Syria as well, to stop and defeat ISIS, the vilest terror group of all time. Where, one might ask, were these neo-neocons a couple of years ago, when stopping ISIS in its infancy might have spared us the current catastrophe?

Oh, right, they were dining at the table of establishment respectability, drinking from the fountain of opportunistic punditry, hissing at the sound of the names Wolfowitz, Cheney, Libby and Perle. And, always, rhapsodizing to the music of Barack Obama. Not because he is the most egregious offender, but only because he’s so utterly the type, it’s worth turning to the work of George Packer, a writer for the New Yorker. Over the years Mr. Packer has been of this or that mind about Iraq. Yet he has always managed to remain at the dead center of conventional wisdom. Think of him as the bubble, intellectually speaking, in the spirit level of American opinion journalism.

Thus Mr. Packer was for the war when it began in 2003, although “just barely,” as he later explained himself. In April 2005 he wrote that the “Iraq war was always winnable” and “still is”—a judgment that would have seemed prescient in the wake of the surge. But by then he had already disavowed his own foresight, saying, when he was in full mea culpa mode, that the line was “the single most doubtful” thing he had written in his acclaimed book “The Assassins’ Gate.”

Then the surge began to work, a reality the newly empowered Democrats in Congress were keen to dismiss. (Remember Hillary Clinton lecturing David Petraeus that his progress report required “a willing suspension of disbelief”?) “The inadequacy of the surge is already clear, if one honestly assesses the daily lives of Iraqis,” wrote Mr. Packer in September 2007. The title of his essay was “Planning for Defeat.”….

READ MORE BEHIND PAYWALL

http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/bret-stephens-the-neo-neocons-1409008955?mobile=y