Bill Kristol wants to transform the Dumb War into another Good War.

It is no small task Bill Kristol has set himself. After all, when someone who has made no great sacrifices in life wants to tell us that men who paid the ultimate price really died for some good reason, one might think there would be some logical justification for his pontification. Not really, his screed does little more than tell us to suck it up for the country, because that's good, or something.

He quotes the poem of Wilfrid Owen wherein the poet disagrees that Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is as sweet as it sounds. Owen, unlike Kristol, actually saw service and near the end of the conflict was killed in action.

Kristol does not mention Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon was also a war poet and as brave a soldier as Owen. He was decorated with the Military Cross. After being wounded, he refused to go back to the war. The futility was too much and he turned against the whole project.

Kristol notes that the beginning of “The Great War” is the bicentennial of the War of 1812. He quotes the Star Spangled Banner Then Conquer we must verse. So a war we incompetently drifted into justifies all the silly deaths of 1914-1918? 

One is tempted to ask if they taught logic at Harvard. That is irrelevant. Kristol surely understands a valid syllogism. What is going on is he is being cute. His conservatism is all pretense. A conservative foreign policy would emulate Switzerland's. We, as a people got nothing out of our intervention in the First World War. We are getting none out of our Middle-Eastern adventures.

Kristol and the Weekly Standard staff are going on a cruise to schmooze with the subscribers. Let us all applaud that sacrifice as our boys in Afghanistan hunker down in a meaningless conflict. I doubt Mr. Warrior will be too upset if there are casualty reports while he is at sea.

Kristol, would probably quote with approval the words of Herbert Croly when he was pushing for WWI, "The American nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure."  Croly was one of the founders of The National Review and an uber-progressive and like Kristol a chickenhawk.  I don't really believe Kristol is stupid enough to believe the stuff he spouts, but if he does, he's a lunatic.

Hat tip to Mediaite and Lew Rockwell blog.