"One can only admire Hendrickson’s candor in admitting what is usually hotly denied: that even many leading realists, along with many liberal internationalists, are rooting for an American defeat."
{snip} "Instead of taking to the streets, the realists and the liberal internationalists will go back to their word processors and redouble their ongoing efforts to turn public opinion against the Bush Doctrine. Mainly they will try to do so by demonstrating over and over again that the doctrine is already failing its first great encounter with "hard reality" in Iraq."
The "realists" are what Mark Steyn call "stability junkies", who value stability more than anything else in foreign policy. They don't hate America and think it's the source of all evil, as many on the left do, but they do believe that it is not possible to radically change the political nature of other countries.
I don't understand those guys at all, because Germany and Japan after WWII offer the only necessary counter-example.
The liberal internationlists are the ones that cheer the UN, France, et.al. over America, and many of them are America hating. So I expected no less from them. They want us to fail, so that their transnational authority can take control, for our own good, of course.
But for the realists to hope we fail... that's really disappointing. They apparently feel that their foreign policy wisdom is so special (despite the Japan/Germany counterexample), and they are so sure this effort to transform the Middle East will fail, that they want it to fail as soon as possible so that we get back to a more routine and realistic foreign policy (where they are calling the shots again, naturally). I would have hoped that anyone who believed in America as the leading light of freedom in the world would wish us well in this endeavor, even if they thought it would probably fail. Alas, no.
"The "realists" are what Mark Steyn call "stability junkies","
Otherwise known as sellouts.