The Neocons Neocan't Explain It

TomPaine.com is on fire this week. Today, John Brown, the American diplomat who quit rather than participate in the run-up to the Iraq War, dissects the crude and crucial incoherence at the core of the neoconservatives' explanation of the current bombing wave:

At that time of the presidential elections, �ber-neocon Norman Podhoretz announced in a long Commentary article (September 2004) that a reason we were in Iraq - a campaign, he argued, of World War IV - was to prevent the terror of Islamic jihadism, including from Iraq, from reaching our shores. But today, the neocons - who long argued for a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein - claim there's no connection between the coalition's presence in Iraq and the terror outbreak in England. "Islamist malignancy long predates Iraq," declared Charles Krauthammer in The Wall Street Journal (July 18) "[I]t is ludicrous to try to reduce [the London bombings] to Iraq," says Christopher Hitchens (Slate , July 7).

Quite the conundrum, eh?