OK, we’re making some progress here….

Blog debates tend to have diminishing marginal returns after the initial volley of posts, so I’d like to walk away from debating Glenn Greenwald before we run into Godwin’s Law. Fortunately, his latest post clarifies our points of agreement and disagreement quite nicely. First, I think we’re in agreement about the following:

1) You can critique members of the foreign policy community (FPC) for getting Iraq wrong — but they are not responsible for the war itself. As Greenwald says:

The Bush administration would have invaded Iraq no matter who was on board. They only sought an AUMF from Congress once Congress promised to vote in favor of it…. So in that regard, Drezner’s point is correct that the war would have happened even without the FPC “scholars” cheering it on.

Of course, many on the left — including Greenwald — still think that liberal FPC members played a legitimating role. That might be true, but that’s a very different discussion than saying these people are responsible for the war. 2) Ideological rigidity or narrowness is bad. Greenwald writes:

Personally, I would not want a foreign policy community composed solely or predominantly of netroots ideologues. Debates benefit from a clash of ideas, from inclusion of the full spectrum of positions. That is precisely the point.

Fair enough. At this point, the netroots perspective on U.S. foreign policy certainly deserves more of a hearing than the neoconservatives.

Greenwald and I factually disagree about the following:

1) The reputational costs incurred by Iraq hawks within the foreign policy community. Greenwald believes that O’Hanlon and Pollack have not paid a steep enough price for their past mistakes:

[T]he credibility hits are still relatively minor — they can still walk onto the Op-Ed pages of the NYT, WP and cable news shows at will, will still be treated as “serious experts,” and almost certainly will occupy key national security positions in the next Democratic administration, particularly in a Clinton administration. That is rather extraordinary, given how consistently, unrepentantly, dishonestly, destructively and fundamentally wrong they have been about the single most important foreign policy question of our time.

I disagree — in fact, I’ll bet Greenwald that neither Pollack nor O’Hanlon will be given a Senate-confirmable position in any Democratic administration. Furthermore, as Shadi Hamid observes, neoconservatives have lost a lot of influence inside the beltway. But this is a matter of interpretation going forward, so we’ll see. 2) The extent of the post-Iraq shift within the FPC. Greenwald writes:

[There have been] some rhetorical changes on the margins. But the central premises that led us into Iraq — particularly the right of the U.S. to use military force even against countries that have not attacked us and the placement of faith in the ability of wars to achieve complex ends — seem as strong as ever. Compare who the “experts” are and what they are saying now (about, for instance, Iran and Iraq) to the ones who were predominant in 2003 and one sees very little difference.

OK, let’s go to the latest Center for American Progress survey of foreign policy wonks. We find the following:

Chastened by the fighting in Iraq, the U.S national security community also appears eager not to make the same mistakes elsewhere. For instance, though a majority?83 percent?do not believe Tehran when it says its nuclear program is intended for peaceful, civilian purposes, just 8 percent favor military strikes in response. Eight in 10, on the other hand, say the United States should use either sanctions or diplomatic talks to negotiate an end to Iran?s nuclear ambitions. Similarly, a majority of the experts favor some kind of engagement with groups that may be labeled terrorist organizations but have gained popular support at the ballot box, such as Hamas in the Palestinian Territories or Hezbollah in Lebanon. It?s one indication that, after six years, we may be entering a new chapter in the war on terror.

To me this is more than a marginal shift. These numbers would have looked radically different in 2003.

Greenwald and I conceptually disagree about the following:

1) The utility of the term “imperial”. Greenwald writes:

[A]nyone who challenges the general entitlement of the U.S. to intervene at will is generally relegated to the leftist fringes, and “pacifist” is a nice dismissive slur that accomplishes that. By stark contrast, I use the term “imperialist” because it is accurately describes the predominant foreign policy ideology, not because it demonizes.

Give me a break. I certainly did not mean “pacifist” as a dismissive slur — but Greenwald took it that way. Funny how the words you believe to be value-neutral are interpreted in a different way by others. Does he seriously believe that members of the foreign policy community would not take the term “imperial” as pejorative? It’s a loaded term, and as this back-and-forth with Greenwald suggests, conceptually slippery enough to be of little use. Citing a few examples of its use in mainstream discourse is insufficient. Beyond a brief embrace of the term by neocons between 2001 and 2003, the concept is viewed as tainted inside the beltway. If Greenwald and the netroots want to hold onto the “imperial” categorization, that’s their choice. But it’s a loaded term that will poison any debate with the foreign policy community.

There’s more conceptual disagreement (I don’t think the foreign policy community is as big into “slaughtering innocents” as Greenwald claims), but that’s a good statement of the lay of the land of what has, so far, been a fruitful debate from my perspective. Let’s hear it from the commenters. UPDATE: Over at Democracy Arsenal, Michael Cohen offers a rejoinder to Greenwald that is also worth reading.