Why the left can't get Iraq right

Michael Berube took a swipe at the antiwar left in yesterday's Boston Globe. Here are his closing paragraphs:

The antiwar left once knew well that its anti-imperialism was in fact a form of patriotism - until it lost its bearings in Kosovo and Kabul, insisting beyond all reason that those military campaigns were imperialist wars for oil or regional power. And why does that matter? Because in the agora of public opinion, the antiwar left never claimed to speak to pragmatic concerns or political contingencies: for the antiwar left, the moral ground was the only ground there was. So when the antiwar left finds itself on shaky moral ground, it simply collapses.

In foreign affairs both left and right claim to speak for the conscience of America, but on Iraq the right has no moral clarity and the left has lost its moral compass. This is not a problem for the masters of realpolitik, who have long since inured themselves to the task of doing terrible things to human beings in the course of pursuing the national interest; but it is utterly devastating to those few souls who still dream that the course of human events should be judged - and guided - by principles common to many nations rather than by policies concocted by one. The emergence of the antiwar right, however, may yet hold a lesson for the left, insofar as it relies on Brent Scowcroft's internationalism rather than Pat Buchanan's isolationism: The challenge, clearly, is to learn how to be strenuously anti-imperialist without being indiscriminately antiwar. It is a lesson the American left has never had to learn - until now.

Much of what he says bears a striking resemblance to the points Adam Shatz raised in last week's edition of The Nation.

Update: An earlier elaboration on post-9/11 politics from Berube is available here.