Wilson's heroic reputation is not universal.

It never was:

A truly devastating piece of criticism is to be found in The Story of a Style, by Dr. William Bayard Hale. The style is that of poor Woodrow, and Dr. Hale operates upon it with machetes, hand grenades and lengths of gas-pipe. He is one peculiarly equipped for the business, for he was at one time high in the literary and philosophical confidence of the late Messiah, and learned to imitate the gaudy jargon of the master with great skill--so perfectly, indeed, that he was delegated to write one of the Woodrovian books, to wit, The New Freedom, once a favorite text of New Republic Liberals, deserving Democrats, and the tender-minded public in general. But in the end he revolted against both the new Euphuism and its eminent pa, and now he tackles both with considerable ferocity, and, it must be added, vast effect. His analysis of the whole Wilsonian buncombe, in fact, is downright cruel; when he finishes with it, not even a Georgia postmaster or a Palmer agent provocateur could possibly believe in it. He shows its ideational hollowness, its ludicrous strutting and bombast, its heavy dependence upon greasy and meaningless words, its frequent descent to mere sound and fury, signifying nothing. In particular, he devotes himself to a merciless study of what, after all, must remain the fallen Moses’s chief contribution to both history and beautiful letters, viz., his biography of George Washington. I have often, in the past, called attention to the incredible imbecility of this work. It is an almost inexhaustible mine of bad writing, faulty generalizing, childish pussy-footing, ludicrous posturing, and naive stupidity. To find a match for it one must try to imagine a biography of the Duke of Wellington by his barber. Well, Hale spreads it out on his operating table, sharpens his snickersnee upon his boot-leg, and proceeds to so harsh an anatomizing that it nearly makes me sympathize with the author. Not many of us--writers, and hence vain and artificial fellows--could undergo so relentless an examination without damage. But not many of us, I believe, would suffer quite so horribly as Woodrow. The book is a mass of puerile affectations, and as Hale unveils one after the other he performs a sound service for American scholarship and American letters.I say that this book is cruel, but I must add that his laparotomies are carried on with every decorum--.... &c. &c.

Happy days.

Professor Sasskia has a very impressive bio, and its 100% free of typos, unlike the blog itself.

We know that the Bush administration's attraction to internationalist ideals was minimal and opportunistic, to say the least. They began their administration by backing out of a variety of international deals, and showed a general contempt for international law, international consensus, "permission slips" and multilateralism throughout.

We also know that some liberals who were much more sincerely attracted to various kinds of internationalist ideals supported the Iraq War, in some cases for reasons that could be seen as sincere expressions of their internationalism.

Woodrow Wilson, himelf? He's long dead. I don't really see how the question, "What would Woodrow do?" is particularly germane, pressing or of more than academic interest. If we want to know what caused the Iraq war, who supported it, and for what reasons, that is an empirical historical question that one can attempt to answer mainly by looking at the historical record of events from the past eight years. The same is true for the question, "What happened in Iraq and elsewhere following the US invasion of Iraq?"

And if we want to debate which actions were right and which wrong, which defensible and which indefensible, which reasonable and which unreasonable, those are moral and political question we can ponder among ourselves and our contemporaries, and I doubt considerations bearing on Woodrow Wilson would play any significant role. Any person with a normal conscience and a command of the facts can discuss this issue without first obtaining and oracular consultation with Woodrow Wilson's ghost.

By the way, no matter how often chastened liberal foreign policy types come forward wearing sackcloth, chanting "mea culpa" and clawing at their breats, I'm going to have a hard time taking them seriously so long as they continue to refer to the Iraq War mainly as a "US foreign policy disaster" or a "US foreign policy blunder". This suggests to me that they still don't get it; that they are still lost in abstract and inhumane ivory tower musings detached from the concrete effects of actions on human beings; and that they are disturbingly obsessed with the ways in which the Iraq war was or was not good for us.

It's like the captured serial killer who appears initially to be expressing remorse, but is in fact only regretting the ways in which his trail of murders has affected him personally: "Yes, that Tuscon episode was a disaster. Three rapes and murders in one weekend left too hot a trail and ultimately lead to my capture. What a mistake that was. What a blunder! And it has destroyed my reputation! I would classify the Tuscon killings as my most serious interpersonal policy error in years."

Of course, we easily recognize this type of talk as bizarre and psychopathic. But when it comes to foreign policy, we treat the psychopathic as normal.

The Iraq War was an atrocity, a wretched crime and an enduring humanitarian disaster whose hideous human toll of death, injury, loss, barbaric destruction, immiseration and refugee flight is still being felt. Who can contemplate this spectacle and wonder only how much the carnage and butchery has "damaged the US position in the world"?