Similarly, TNR's hubris remains unchecked:

At this point, it seems almost beside the point to say this: The New Republic deeply regrets its early support for this war. The past three years have complicated our idealism and reminded us of the limits of American power and our own wisdom. But, as we pore over the lessons of this misadventure, we do not conclude that our past misjudgments warrant a rush into the cold arms of "realism." Realism, yes; but not "realism." American power may not be capable of transforming ancient cultures or deep hatreds, but that fact does not absolve us of the duty to conduct a foreign policy that takes its moral obligations seriously. As we attempt to undo the damage from a war that we never should have started, our moral obligations will not vanish, and neither will our strategic needs.

Is there anyone in the Democratic Party arguing for the strawman of TNR's creation?

I had a similar experience debating Peter Beinart about his then new book "The Good Fight," but ironically in reverse -- the Left was not "realist" but naive and anti-American:

Beinart argues that:

[W]hile liberals pride themselves on their empiricism, their empiricism is no match for a narrative of the present based upon a memory of the past. When liberals finally got their shot at George W. Bush in 2004, it turned out that Americans did not much care which candidate could recite his six point plan for safeguarding loose nuclear material. They gravitated to the man with a vision of national greatness in a threatening world, something liberals have not had for a very long time.

Beinart's central problem is that he has married his analysis to the story of the Henry Wallace movement in the Post-World War II period and has convinced himself that it describes and explains contemporary liberal views of the United States and its role in the world. What does Henry Wallace have to do with today`s liberalism? Nothing of course. But like his TNR colleague Jon Chait, Beinart wants those liberals and Democrats who disagree with them to be wild eyed useful idiots who "coddle terrorists," are crazy Leftists and haters of America. He is wrong and for obvious reasons.

Consider Beinart's description of his ideal- Cold War Liberal Foreign Policy. He refers specifically to Harry Truman`s 1949 Inaugural Address. Beinart gleans the following:

Essentially, it rested on three interlocking planks. The first was containment: military efforts to prevent Soviet aggression . . . The second element in liberal foreign policy was development . . . If democracy couldn't provide economic opportunity it would lose people's faith. This was the principle behind the Marshall Plan. . . . Thirdly, liberal foreign policy involved restraint. Rather than wield its enormous power alone, the United States would share it with other countries. NATO was an expression of this idea. So was Truman's support for the UN, the IMF and the World Bank. Partly this reflected the Truman Administration`s recognition that in an interdependent world, the United States could guarantee neither its security nor its prosperity alone. But it reflected another recognition as well . . . Americans should not fall in love with their own virtue, and should not expect non-Americans to take that virtue on faith. . ." We all have to recognize - no matter how great our strength," Truman declared, "that we must deny ourselves the license to do as we please." . . . As one State Department official put it, the goal was to foster allies "string enough to say 'no' both to the Soviet Union and the United States, if our actions should seem so to require."

(Emphasis supplied.) What an indictment Beinart lays upon himself and his allies who supported the Iraq Debacle. He and his allies violated EVERY single principle of a liberal foreign policy he now lionizes. It was those of us he now condemns who followed the precepts of the liberal foreign policy established by Truman. It was he and his allies who forgot our proud liberal foreign policy. . . . Beinart writes of the conservative mendacity of the world reaction after 9/11:

In their book, An End To An End,David Frum and Richard Perle wrote "The United States asked its friends and allies to join in the fight against terror - and discovered that after the first emotional expressions of sympathy for the victims, those friends and allies were prepared to do little." The irony is that far from spurning U.S. requests for help in the weeks and months after 9/11, NATO for the first time invoked Article Five, which required member nations to aid an ally under attack. . . . But the Bush Administration interpreted these efforts as a subtle bid to rein in American power. And since it assumed foreign constraints could only weaken the United States, never strengthen it, the Bush Administration rejected NATO's help in Afghanistan.

(Emphasis supplied.) And this is the Administration that Beinart and Co. chose to trust implicitly in the senseless dive into the Iraq Debacle. Again, the self indictment is devastating.

Beinart writes:

George W. Bush has faithfully carried out the great conservative project. He has stripped away the restraints on American power, in an effort to show the world we are not weak. And in the process, he has made American power illegitimate, which has made us weak.

And Peter Beinart and his allies were holding Bush's coat and cheering him on.

Ironically, the finest chapter in the book is Beinart's discussion of the Iraq Debacle. He writes in great detail and with incisive analysis precisely why the Iraq Debacle should not have happened and how the Bush Administration has continued to bungle it to this very day. As I said, Beinart is a very smart man.

In his introduction, Bienart explains what he was thinking on Iraq:

I supported the war because I considered it the only remaining way to prevent Saddam Hussein from obtaining a nuclear bomb. I also believed it could produce a decent, pluralistic Iraqi regime, which might help open a third way to the Middle East between secular autocrats and their theocratic opponents - a third way that offered the best long-term hope for protecting the United States. On both counts I was wrong. Partly I was wrong on the facts . . . But even more important than the facts, I was wrong on the theory. I was too quick to give up on containment, too quick to think time was on Saddam's side. And I did not grasp the critical link between the invasion's credibility in the world and its credibility in Iraq. . . It is a grim irony that this book's central argument is one I myself ignored when it was needed most. If at times I judge others for having failed to appreciate certain aspects of the liberal spirit, I do so with keen awareness that I have not always been its most faithful custodian myself.

(Emphasis supplied.) While it is a gracious admission by Beinart, it is also seriously flawed. Those of us who opposed the Iraq Debacle were very faithful to the liberal spirit and the liberal foreign policy. And we were in real time. And not just nobodies like me. But also folks Beinart should have listened to:

GEN. CLARK: Mr. Chairman, at the end of World War II, when the United States had a nuclear weapons monopoly and when our gross domestic product was 50 percent of the world's production, President Roosevelt and, later, President Truman recognized that even with that strength, the United States by itself wasn't strong enough, wasn't capable of handling all of the world's problems in assuring peace and security by itself. And so they sought to create an institution which would be better than the defunct League of Nations, and they built the United Nations. And President Truman said that the method of the United Nations should be that right makes might.

We've spent the 55, 57 years since then trying to develop international institutions that would help strengthen America and help protect our interests as well as the interests of people around the world. But we recognized that a world in which nations are only regulated and guided unilaterally in seeking their self-interest is not a world that's in our best advantage. And so for that reason, I think it's very important not only that we've gone to the United Nations but that we do everything we possibly can do to strengthen the United Nations to stand up to this challenge to make itself an effective organization to be able to cope with the challenge of Saddam Hussein's defiance of its resolutions.

Beyond the issue of the United Nations and the international institutions we seek to live in, I think going to the United Nations has another important -- very important benefit. In the long run, we're going to have to live with the people in the Middle East.

They're our good neighbors. They're just like us. Many of them have the same hopes and dreams. The more we can do to defuse the perception that America's acting alone, America's striking out, America's belligerent, America's acting without allies, the more we can do to defuse that. The more we can do to put that in a context of international institutions and the support of the governments in the region, the greater chance we have of reducing the recruiting draw of al Qaeda, following through with the successful post-conflict operation in Iraq, promoting a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict and promoting peaceful democratization in a number of moderate Arab governments. So I think the long-term consequences, the long-term benefits of operating through the United Nations are very high.

And finally, there's an immediate, short-term benefit. It'll be very, very useful to us to have allies. Many nations in that region want us to go through the United Nations. They'll be empowered by a United Nations resolution. So I think if we can get that resolution, it's to our near-term military advantage and our long-term advantage as a nation.

. . . GEN. CLARK: I think that the United States always has the option of acting unilaterally. But I'd say in this case it's a question of what's the sense of urgency here, and how soon would we need to act unilaterally? And so I think it's very important that we recognize that so far as any of the information has been presented, as General Hoar said, there is nothing that indicates that in the immediate, next hours, next days, that there's going to be nuclear-tipped missiles put on launch pads to go against our forces or our allies in the region. And so I think there is, based on all of the evidence available, sufficient time to work through the diplomacy of this.

. . . I think the third requirement is that we have the ingenuity and patience to work on the coalition partners we need and our allies, from many different directions and many different perspectives.

We need to go to NATO. Have we gone to NATO? NATO came to us after 9/11 and said, "This is a violation of the North Atlantic Charter. This is Article 5. We want to work with you." This is a great opportunity for NATO to come in. Have we done that? Mr. Rumsfeld's over there today, talking to NATO ministers. So I think that's one indication.

I think from NATO you go back to the United Nations. I think you make your case in front of all of the Islamic organizations. You make it at various levels, from the military level on up to the head of state level, and you work it.

. . . GEN. CLARK: I've been concerned that the attention on Iraq will distract us from what we're doing with respect to al Qaeda. I don't know all of the particulars today of how we distribute our resources around the world. These are details that are classified; they're handled by very well-understood processes. But it was my -- it's been my experience from commanding and combat that I would like every bit of intelligence I could get, and we used a lot going after only that small part of Europe which we were attacking in 1999, inside Yugoslavia and in Kosovo.

So I think, as a minimum, that when one opens up another campaign, there is a diversion of effort. The question is whether the diversion of effort is productive or counterproductive. I really -- it's -- there are forces operating in both directions at this point. You can make the argument, as General Shalikashvili did, that you want to cut off all sources of supply. Problem with that argument is that Iran really has had closer linkages with the terrorists in the past and still does, apparently, today, than Iraq does. So that leads you to then ask, well, what will be the impact on Iran? And that's uncertain. But it does -- if you could take these weapons out quickly, then it would cut off that potential source of supply.

On the other hand, by lumping the two together -- al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein -- it's also possible that we will have incentivized Saddam Hussein now as a last-ditch defense to do what we wouldn't have done before, which is, "Go find me the nearest members of al Qaeda. Here, take this sack and do something with it." So it's not clear which way this cuts right now, but at some point, we are going to have to deal with Saddam Hussein. We are going to have to work against the weapons of mass destruction -- not only there but also, in the case of Iran.

And whether this is the right way, the right time to do it depends in large measure on how we proceed. And this is why I underscore again and again the importance of diplomacy first and going through the United Nations, because I think that gives us our best way of reaching out to achieve this objective with minimum adverse impact on the struggle against al Qaeda. The longer we can reasonably keep the focus on al Qaeda, the better that war is going to go, in my view.

. . . SEN. CLELAND: And if you took out Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party, the secularist party, don't the Sunnis and the Shi'ite Muslims make up a majority of the population in Iraq, and wouldn't that give Iran a strong hand there, and we ultimately end up creating a Muslim state, even under democratic institutions?

GEN. CLARK: Yes, sir. I think that there is a substantial risk in the aftermath of the operation that we could end up with a problem which is more intractable than we have today.

One thing we're pretty clear on is that Saddam has a very effective police state apparatus. He doesn't allow challenges to his authority inside that state. When we go in there with a transitional government and a military occupation of some indefinite duration, it's also very likely that if there is an effective al Qaeda left -- and there certainly will be an effective organization of extremists -- they will pour into that country because they must compete for the Iraqi people; the Wahabes with the Sunnis, the Shi'as from Iran working with the Shi'a population. So it's not beyond consideration that we would have a radicalized state, even under a U.S. occupation in the aftermath.

(Emphasis supplied.) Not everyone forgot the liberal foreign policy of the Truman Era. Those of us who opposed the war did not forget. It was Beinart and his allies, in their blind adherence to the Bush Administration line, who forgot what Harry Truman taught us.

Beinart has found his way while mistakenly stating those who opposed the war lost ours. But TNR and the DLC still reside in a fantasyland. By inadvertence, they are dangerous people who must be kept away from the levers of power. Their recent works demonstrates they have learned nothing.