"the invasion of Iraq would not have occurred were it not for the attacks of September 11"

Well it would have played out differently but it is clear that at least several people in the Bush Admin. had it out for Saddam long before then, incl. Bush himself. I agree that the atmosphere after 9/11 was more conducive to taking military action. But PNAC was clearly interested in using military muscle, so we should consider whether some other cooked up excuses would have been used, absent 9/11. Or even the same excuses with slightly different emphases...

The "philosophy" of war as a handy tool was present before 9/11. I won't try to claim that PNAC represented neo-Wilsonian thought to some extent, but I cannot say it did not.

"State of shock" for a few days or weeks in Fall 2001 explains the cockamamie rush to blunder into unplanned regime change in Iraq in Spring of 2003? Nonsense. And if you read John Milton Cooper on Woodrow Wilson, you cannot help but appreciate how very different the world was 90 years ago. 9-11 was a pimple on a sick body. America was "sleep-walking through history" in 2002 and still is today.

I would like to take this discussion in a different direction. A retreat to realism isn’t an adequate response to the ravages of the Bush era, or the best response to the mistakes of Wilsonian nationalism and exceptionalism. We need to take a longer view to understand what has gone wrong with the left-liberal movement in this country. Here is my litany:

1. Once upon a time there were internationalists in America – lots of them. Some were socialists; some weren’t. But they were everywhere. They formed organizations. They proclaimed their internationalism loudly. They dreamed of world governments, global communities and a variety of starry-eyed but noble realizations of global unity.

{Definition I: A genuine internationalist is a person who believes that our commitment to the well-being of the broad human community, the totality of humanity, should supersede our obligations to our nation, or state and the smaller communities of human beings of which we are a part{

{Definition II: A nationalist, on the other hand, is a person who believes our obligations to our nation or country should supersede both our obligations to the smaller sub-national communities of which we are a part and our obligations to the well-being of broader humanity.}

2. Internationalists typically didn’t feel guilty about their internationalism. Every self-respecting liberal or leftist intellectual regarded internationalism as the natural and normal philosophy of human engagement among educated and enlightened people. Nationalism was viewed as an outlook characterizing unenlightened, reactionary and superstitious provincials, including fascists.

3. Internationalists sensibly recognized that reasonable and healthy forms of national citizenship were compatible with internationalism: just as I can be a perfectly good and respectable citizen of my State of New Hampshire while recognizing that my obligation to the United States supersedes my obligation to New Hampshire, so I can be a perfectly good and respectable citizen of the United States while recognizing that my obligation to humanity supersedes my obligation to the United States.

{Clarification I: Being an internationalist doesn’t mean believing one is a citizen of the world. One can only be a citizen of a republic. It might be nice if there were a world republic, but there isn’t one. So, at this point one cannot be a citizen of the world. Nevertheless, one can recognize that one has a supreme obligation to humanity that doesn’t consist in an obligation flowing from citizenship. It flows from the common-sense observation that the good of the many is more important than the good of the few.}

{Clarification II: Being and internationalist doesn’t mean hating one’s country. I have abundant affection for New Hampshire while believing that my obligation to the United States supersedes my obligation to New Hampshire. In the same way, one can have abundant affection for the United States while recognizing that one’s obligation to humanity supersedes one’s obligation to the United States.}

4. Nationalism was killed off by a rightist terror campaign: Several decades of Hoover, red scares, purges, McCarthyism, black lists, Cold War, persecutions, John Birchers, right-wing militias accumulating weapons arsenals, thundering preachers and railing pundits served to cow and intimidate internationalists, give them a guilty and paranoid conscience and drive internationalism underground. What is left now is a hollow, timid, so-called “internationalism” that is really just a form of nationalism with a slightly less selfish outlook, and that is constantly looking back over its shoulder with hurried steps, worried about rightist persecutors in the shadows.

5. Nationalism won in America. But it didn’t win by reason. It won by fear and terror. The melancholy descendants of the internationalist forbears of the left are a knee-knocking and intimidated lot. We were licked by cowardly brutes using the oldest of means: sheer physical intimidation.

6. It is an utter tragedy that the best and brightest Americans have for some time now been trained to confine their aspirations inside the crabbed and tortured outlook of nationalism. Liberals try to compete with rightists by offering up unconvincing, bad faith, internally conflicted versions of uber-patriotic pap, when they should recover and embrace their natural internationalist instincts, and proclaim them unapologetically.

7. The true spirit of internationalism was memorably expressed in the Russell-Einstein Manifesto in 1955:

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.

Remember your humanity, and forget the rest! Who today would be so bold? What establishment Washingtonian would dare suggest that the human race is more important than the American race?

8. You may not be attracted to genuine internationalism. Fine. But if you are attracted to genuine internationalism, but are thinking such things as:

“Oooh, that’s scary; let’s keep it down, because …

… The conservatives won’t like it;
… The conservatives will say we are traitors;
… The conservatives will persecute us;
… The conservatives will pipe-bomb us, or shoot
us, or fry us like the Rosenbergs;
… The conservatives will run election campaigns
against us, call us names, and win;
… The conservatives will try to put us in jail.”

Then you have been licked by bullies. Your noble cerebral cortex has been sat upon and squashed by the lizard-brained Glenn Beck within.