A war against an enemy whose threat to us remains a matter of debate. The need to commit troops indefinitely. Growing doubts at home. As the American involvement in Iraq has become a commitment of unknown duration, comparisons to the Vietnam War are more and more common.

Whether or not the comparison proves valid, there is another historical parallel to the Vietnam War, one that involves a group of intellectuals responsible for articulating the rationale for the Iraq war. Among the enduring legacies of the earlier era was the split between liberals who opposed the war and the small splinter group that would become known as the neoconservatives. The group's decision to support the Vietnam War — or at least to oppose those who opposed it — was a shift that would lead them to a new level of power and influence.

The war in Iraq has shown signs of a similar split: a pro-war faction of the liberal intelligentsia has rejected a reflexive antiwar stance to form a movement of its own. The influence of these voices isn't to be underestimated. The marginality of intellectuals is a myth; even in the resolutely hermetic world of Washington, their voices are heard.

For the liberal intellectuals of this generation, the war in Iraq has required nuanced positions.

Atlas cites the opinons and positions of Paul Berman, Michael Walzer, Christopher Hitchens and Michael Ignatieff.

A mandate of intellectuals is that they be open to changing their opinions. Skepticism, the weighing of options, "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind simultaneously," in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, are the tools of the trade. Why should a liberal be required to be a liberal at all costs? What if historical events demand a revision of beliefs?

[...]

This generation of liberal intellectuals, like its precursors, prefers to see itself less as a political coalition than as an assemblage of writers with diverse views — which of course it is. Ideological labels are always provisional. Yet however much their attitudes toward the war in Iraq differ from those of such contemporary neoconservatives as William Kristol and Robert Kagan, they are heirs of the same intellectual tradition. Given this, can they still be classified as liberals? Or could it be that they've become . . . neoconservatives?

I think Atlas is wrong, or, at least, has yet to be proved right.

The 50's liberals who started the neoconservative movement changed their views about the world radically, to the point where they could no longer be consider to be "liberal" even by themselves. That is certainly not the case for the men he cites, who remain decidely liberal, even in their foreign policy positions. What they reject is not liberalism, which councils us to judge separately and individually every particular situation by empathetic and humanistic standards and the full extent of the available information, but reflexive and dogmatic leftist pacifism, anti-interventionism and, especially, anti-Americanism. In this, they are in the mainstream of (yes) center-left practice, as represented if not by liberal intellectuals of the academy, then by almost all politicians who are generally considered to be liberal, and in the blogging world by folks like Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias, among others.