Ezra Klein on the Neocon Approach to Terrorism

Ezra must have been inspired by an interview of Barack Obama with Fareed Zakaria:

And that lumping together Shia extremists with Sunni extremists, assuming that Persian culture is the same as Arab culture, that those kinds of errors in lumping Islam together result in us not only being less effective in hunting down and isolating terrorists, but also in alienating what need to be our long-term allies on a whole host of issues.

Ezra notes:

As Obama says, one of the clear distinctions between the Left’s approach to terrorism and the Right’s approach to terrorism is that the Left wants to limit the scope of the conflict, while the Right wants to expand it.

Bingo – but the money quote has to be:

Rather than this being an effort to hunt down al Qaeda, it becomes a war to hunt down al Qaeda, destroy Hezbollah, eradicate Hamas, overthrow Saddam Hussein, change the regime in Tehran, crush the Muslim Brotherhood, and confront Syria, and whatever else Bill Kristol thought of while eating his Cheerios that week.