Letters

Despondent About Iraq

To the Editor:

John Agresto’s account of his efforts with higher education is sobering to one like myself who supported the Iraq war from the beginning, and devoutly hopes that the “surge” is even now leading to something positive.

Irving Kristol famously said that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. Agresto’s book title Mugged by Realitysuggests all kinds of ironies. As a young man in the early 1970s, I was deeply impressed with neoconservatives such as Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. I also learned a great deal reading the likes of Allan Bloom and his mentor Leo Strauss, not least a renewed appreciation of the value of study of the great works of the Western tradition. Now I find myself agape at the apparent failure of judgment on Iraq, of neoconservative “public