This blog often dwells on the subject of the so-called liberal hawks of the New Republic and elsewhere, but seldom mentions the even more oxymoronic phenomenon of leftist hawks.

The Independent's Johann Hari supported the invasion of Iraq while still self-identifying, I believe, with the left. Hari's pre-war position was that the Iraqi people supported the invasion and therefore the invasion was justified. In other words he was on board with the neoconservative fantasy that US troops would be showered with rose petals, hugged by children, and generally treated in a manner that couldn't be characterized as serving primarily as targets for homemade bombs. Just before the invasion, for instance, Hari asked,

"Those who still deny all this evidence will know soon enough, once the war is over, what the Iraqi people thought all along. When it emerges… that they wanted this war, will the anti-war movement recant?"

But Johann is the one who has ended up recanting. From The Independent, 4/18/2006:

So when people ask if I think I was wrong, I think about the Iraqi friend – hiding, terrified, in his own house – who said to me this week, “Every day you delete another name from your mobile, because they’ve been killed. By the Americans or the jihadists or the militias – usually you never find out which.” I think of the people trapped in the siege of a civilian city, Fallujah, where amidst homes and schools the Americans indiscriminately used a banned chemical weapon – white phosphorous – that burns through skin and bone. (The Americans say they told civilians to leave the city, so anybody left behind was a suspected jihadi – an evacuation procedure so successful they later used it in New Orleans.). I think of the raw numbers: on the largest estimate – from the Human Rights Centre in Khadimiya – Saddam was killing 70,000 people a year. The occupation and the jihadists have topped that, and the violence is getting worse. And I think – yes, I was wrong. Terribly wrong.

The lamest defence I could offer – one used by many supporters of the war as they slam into reverse gear – is that I still support the principle of invasion, it’s just the Bush administration screwed it up. But as one anti-war friend snapped at me when I mooted this argument, “Yeah, who would ever have thought that supporting George Bush in the illegal invasion of an Arab country would go wrong?” She’s right: the truth is that there was no pure Platonic ideal of The Perfect Invasion to support, no abstract idea we lent our names to. There was only Bush, with his cluster bombs, depleted uranium, IMF-ed up economic model, bogus rationale and unmistakable stench of petrol, offering his war, his way. (Expecting Tony Blair to use his influence was, it is now clear, a delusion, as he refuses to even frontally condemn the American torture camp at Guantanomo Bay).

Good times, good times...