Journalist Defends Bush’s War Plans

The United States should not allow criticism from the international community to slow its military and humanitarian efforts in Iraq, journalist and conservative commentator David Brooks said yesterday in a speech at the Kennedy School of Government.

Brooks, who is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard and a frequent contributor to Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, called Iraqi President Saddam Hussein a “genocidal maniac” and defended the Bush administration before a crowd of 50 students and faculty.

“We should listen to the criticism, but it shouldn’t necessarily paralyze us. We can’t be the Sally Field of nations—you know, ‘you like me, you really like me,’” Brooks said, referring to the actress’s famous Academy Award acceptance speech.

Brooks said claims that the U.S. is an unwelcome intruder in Iraq shouldn’t deter the army’s efforts to end Saddam’s regime.

“We’re not going to sit back while people commit genocide,” Brooks said. “The rules of national sovereignty don’t seem as important as those people getting killed.”

Asked to speculate about the 2004 presidential election, Brooks said he believes the war itself will not be a major issue, but the debate over foreign policy in general could be crucial—and could give a key advantage to Republicans, who have a more unified foreign policy agenda, he said.

“There is no foreign policy doctrine Democrats can instinctively go to for guidance. This is the fundamental problem with the Democrats,” Brooks said. “Democrats have advantage after advantage on health care and all sorts of domestic issues, but they have no desire to talk about foreign policy.”

On matters of national security—another key issue for the 2004 election—Republicans also have an advantage over Democrats, Brooks said.

“9/11 really did change everything,” he said. “People are conscious of conflict and the need for strong authority.”

Comedian Al Franken ’73, currently a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy, asked Brooks a question about the war which sparked a debate between the two.

“I was in favor of continuing inspections and containing Saddam, but the day [the war] started I did that flip that most Americans did and said, ‘I just hope they know what they’re doing,’” Franken said. “But we’re bombing holy sites we didn’t even know existed. I thought we were supposed to know this place.”

Brooks took issue with Franken’s assessment of the war’s progress.

“I think you’re too negative about this war,” Brooks replied. “No army in history has taken as much care not to kill civilians and not to kill soldiers.”