The American Spectator

p>The strange thing about Rich Lowry’s critique of “The ‘To Hell With Them’ Hawks,” the cover story of the current National Review , is that the subject is never identified by name, only by description. It’s worth reviewing that description (especially since Lowry’s full article is only available to NR subscribers), and it is worth separating the components: br> /p>

[A] [T]he “to hell with them” hawks want to write off reforming Islam, since they consider it inherently unreformable. They are in favor of varying levels of frankness about this evaluation, wanting either to pass over it in silence or to be open about what they see as a clash of civilizations, with Islam itself the enemy.

[B] They don’t see any relation between spreading democracy and fighting terrorism, so want to give democracy-promotion a much lower prominence in U.S. foreign policy.

[C] They see the Iraq War as essentially lost, and want to pull up stakes either immediately or as soon as is plausible without creating further disaster. They agree on the imperative of never launching such a project again.

[D] “To hell with them” hawks are not isolationists. Almost all of them supported the Iraq War at its inception on national-security, weapons-of-mass-destruction grounds. They began to have doubts only as the retrospective justification for the war and the war aims themselves became increasingly Wilsonian.

[E] They will support military action again — against Iran, say, if nothing else will stop its nuclear program — but only if there is the guarantee against any repeat of the kind of intimate on-the-ground engagement with a native population that we’ve seen in Iraq.

[F] The “to hell with them” hawks are not protectionists either, although some of them might be tinged with protectionist attitudes.

br> Who is Lowry talking about? His piece grew out of a post at The Corner , identifying John Derbyshire as the patron saint “to hell with them” hawk. Indeed, Derbyshire fits all six parts of the description, and, as Lowry has noted , is the only one of those criticizing Lowry’s article who seems willing to embrace the label (complaining only of its clunkiness). But one can’t help suspecting that Lowry is drawing his line much, much too specifically.