The Week

■ As NR goes to press, the dictator of Iraq is still alive. We make no guarantees for next issue.

■ It’s become a cliché in punditland that President Bush mishandled the diplomacy before the war. Some liberals say that they used to be hawks, but jumped on the peace train because of Bush’s alleged blunders. Others never were hawks, but pretend that they might have been if the diplomacy had been handled better. These criticisms of Bush—which have been echoed by Sens. Daschle and Kerry—are frivolous. Doubtless there have been mistakes. But no one has identified an alternative course of action that would have kept France, or the British Left, in our comer while we took on Iraq. The “balking hawk” position amounts to the view that it’s worth risking American troops to keep nuclear weapons out of Saddam’s hands, but it’s not worth losing points in the European polls. That’s a strange set of priorities.

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■ As NR goes to press, the dictator of Iraq is still alive. We make no guarantees for next issue.

■ It’s become a cliché in punditland that President Bush mishandled the diplomacy before the war. Some liberals say that they used to be hawks, but jumped on the peace train because of Bush’s alleged blunders. Others never were hawks, but pretend that they might have been if the diplomacy had been handled better. These criticisms of Bush—which have been echoed by Sens. Daschle and Kerry—are frivolous. Doubtless there have been mistakes. But no one has identified an alternative course of action that would have kept France, or the British Left, in our comer while we took on Iraq. The “balking hawk” position amounts to the view that it’s worth risking American troops to keep nuclear weapons out of Saddam’s hands, but it’s not worth losing points in the European polls. That’s a strange set of priorities.