It’s right vs. right as war news sours

John Podhoretz can barely contain his anger. When asked about the turmoil in right-wing intellectual circles over the war in Iraq, Podhoretz, a conservative New York Post columnist and author, practically sputters.

“I find the lack of steadiness on the part of some people to be intellectually appalling,” he says. Members of the pro-war intelligentsia, says Podhoretz, should buck up. “If they’re losing heart, it’s because they didn’t think things would be tough for them. They thought they could dance around and say, ‘We were right and you were wrong.’ Well, people in Iraq have it tougher than the columnists and intellectuals who are having people say mean things to them at cocktail parties.”

Cocktail parties are the least of it. A kind of bad-news spiral -- the detainee-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, the vicious killing of American Nicholas Berg, the protracted insurgency in Fallouja and Najaf, sinking presidential approval ratings, testy congressional hearings, calls for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- has many conservative thinkers quarreling among themselves and put many into an unaccustomed defensive crouch.

Just listen to William Kristol, the vociferously pro-war editor of the influential neoconservative Weekly Standard, a recent guest on “The Daily Show,” Comedy Central’s left-leaning sendup of the news. Host Jon Stewart is comparing President George W. Bush’s prosecution of the war in Iraq to a driver who ended up in a ditch. And Kristol momentarily finds himself agreeing.

“Well, that’s right, he did drive us into a ditch,” says Kristol, before catching himself and stammering: “Or not into a ditch -- we’ve had a slight -- we’ve slightly veered off the road -- you’re sucking me into that one,” he protests, as the audience howls.

“I’ve never seen you this easily slumping before,” says Stewart.

“It’s been a tough week,” says Kristol. “It’s been a tough six weeks. What can I tell ya? I need to put my game face on better when I get back to Washington.”

A couple of days later, Kristol is back in form. “I am an unrepentant hawk,” he says by phone from Washington. “On one hand, the war is right. On the other hand, the administration has botched it. On the third hand” -- your veteran Washington pundit is never restrained by anatomical limitations -- “we have to tell them what they’ve done wrong and how to make it right.”

Kristol points out that he and his regular writing partner, Robert Kagan, have always been critical of the administration for taking on the task in Iraq with what they consider to be anemic troop levels. But that doesn’t mean he’s changing his mind about whether the war should have been fought at all, as has, say, CNN’s Tucker Carlson, who told the New York Times last week: “I supported the war and now I feel foolish.”

Conservatives are attacking -- or loudly counterattacking -- one another in opinion journals, on newspaper op-ed pages, over the Internet and on the Sunday morning TV talk shows, using mild internecine name calling.

“Are you a man or a mouse? Squeak up,” Kristol began a recent editorial. “Forty years ago, I thought this playground taunt witty. It isn’t, really, but it seems apt right now. We’re certainly hearing a lot of squeaking.”

The “squeaking,” he added, is not coming from the American people. It’s coming from some war supporters who, “having previously written eloquently of America’s generational commitment, the magnitude of the cause and the transformational nature of 9/11, have now decided that a few months of bungling by the Bush administration require throwing in the towel on the central front in the war on terror.”

You can practically hear liberals smacking their lips over such expressions of conservative angst. “The neoconservative war faction is facing the reality that it may well be discredited for some time,” said journalist David Brock, once a darling of the right who has defected to the left and has just written a book about the rise of conservative media called “Republican Noise Machine.”

“There’s a lot of interesting tumult in intellectual conservative circles about how the war should be managed and fought,” says Daniel Casse, senior director of the White House Writers Group, a Republican-oriented communications firm. (So much tumult, in fact, that Kagan says he is declining most requests to appear on TV and radio. “The cacophony is so great, the level of debate is so intense. I think it’s important to express oneself as clearly as possible, and that’s why I prefer to write what I think.”)

Casse, who was a special assistant to President George H.W. Bush, says the dissent on Iraq comes from two distinct points on the conservative spectrum. “Paleoconservatives,” as he calls them -- along with libertarians and such anti-interventionists as Patrick Buchanan -- have opposed the invasion of Iraq since the beginning. And they haven’t changed. “But more disturbing is a thoughtful group of conservatives, the group that thinks the war is not being well managed or has failed to meet anybody’s expectations, and that runs from George Will to [novelist] Mark Helprin.”

In a recent Newsweek column, Will raised the idea that the United States’ “Wilsonian” efforts in Iraq -- “expressing President Woodrow Wilson’s belief that America’s mission -- a practical mission -- is to pacify the world by multiplying free governments” -- may be futile.

In last Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Helprin published an essay, written in a tone of controlled fury, calling the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners “a symbol of the inescapable fact that the war has been run incompetently, with an apparently deliberate contempt for history, strategy and thought, and with too little regard for the American soldier, whose mounting casualties seem to have no effect on the boastfulness of the civilian leadership.”

Other high-profile conservatives have had second thoughts about their support, either for Bush’s war plan, in the case of Andrew Sullivan, or for the war itself, in the case of Carlson.

On Wednesday, Sullivan wrote on his blog that the president had squandered the trust of the American people. “After the [weapons of mass destruction] intelligence debacle and the Abu Ghraib disgrace, he [Bush] has run out of that capital. He has to tell us how we will win, what we are doing, how it all holds together, why the infrastructure repair is still in disarray and how a political solution is possible. I’m not sure any more that this president has the skills or competence to pull it off.”

Then there are those, including Podhoretz, author of the new book “Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane,” and the eternally pugnacious radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who refuse to entertain doubts at all. Abu Ghraib, said Podhoretz, “is not like My Lai. One hundred and twenty nine people didn’t die. It’s not a wartime atrocity at that level. These were acts of ritual humiliation, and everyone who did it should be photographed in the same positions they put other people in.”

Limbaugh told his listeners that what happened at the prison “is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation.... You ever heard of needing to blow some steam off?”

To those whose support for the war remains unvarnished -- including Podhoretz, who says, “We have nothing to apologize for in Iraq” -- the images out of Abu Ghraib represent nothing more than isolated incidents of abuse by a handful of wayward soldiers.

“Bush said it was going to be hard, and Americans just don’t like things that are hard,” says Podhoretz. “Hard doesn’t just mean that people are dying, it means that the policy is being challenged. Tough times require that people who adopt a position hold firm when things get tough.”