The anti-anti-war campaign.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye

"We have been Where before, writes Martin Peretz in an August 7 Wall Street Journal column. "Leftwing Democrats are once again fielding single-issue 'peace candidates.'" Peretz goes on to smear U.S. Senate candidate Ned Lamont, who beat Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary, as a descendant of "that most highborn American Stalinist Corliss Lamont." (Never mind that Corliss Lamont was the author of a tract titled "Why I Am Not a Communist," as my colleague John Nichols noted in the Madison Capital Times in response to similar Red-baiting by the conservative Waterbury Republican-American.)

Why, in 2006, are we suddenly refighting the Cold War?

It's not just Peretz (the editor-in-chief of The New Republic) and the cranky Republicans of Waterbury, Connecticut. In Newsweek, Jonathan Alter issued a dire warning that anti-war activists and candidates like Lamont would be the undoing of the Democrats. "The revival of the romance of the anti-war left is a potential disaster for the Democrats," Alter wrote, reminding readers that "ideologically pure liberals who backed Eugene McCarthy in the primaries refused to rally around Hubert Humphrey because Humphrey was 'complicit' in the Vietnam War machine." Hence, Richard Nixon's win in 1968.

Peretz makes a similar point, though in more feverish Red Scare terms. He goes back to George McGovern, calling him "a morally imperious isolationist with fellow-traveling habits" who "augured the recessional--if not quite the collapse--of such Democratic politics, which insisted our enemy in the Cold War was not the Soviets but us."

Into the breach, according to Peretz, stepped "muscular, " brave" centrists like Joe Lieberman.

You would hardly recognize the Bush-kissing, Democrat-bashing Lieberman of Fox News stardom in Peretz's description. This Lieberman is all about considered compromise, deep moral choices, and independent integrity. What about calling his colleagues who dared to criticize the President dangerously disloyal? What about the Terri Schiavo nonsense?

Lieberman can be "treacly," Peretz concedes, but, particularly on Iraq, he is a profile in courage.

As for the merits of the Iraq War debate, "There are many reasonable, and even correct, reproofs that one may have for the conduct of the war," Peretz writes, adding, disingenuously: "They are, to be sure, all retrospective." (I guess our little magazine got lost in the mail on the way to The New Republics editorial offices, along with those...