Thank You, Dubya: “(T)he election of George W. Bush, combined with the furies of 9/11, jolted the editors. Since 2001, the Review’s temperature has risen and its political outlook has sharpened. Old warhorses bolted from their armchairs. Prominent members of the Review ‘family’–a stable that includes veteran journalists (Thomas Powers, Frances FitzGerald, Ian Buruma), literary stars (Joan Didion, Norman Mailer) and academic heavyweights (Stanley Hoffmann, Ronald Dworkin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.)–charged into battle not only against the White House but against the lethargic press corps and the ‘liberal hawk’ intellectuals, some of whom are themselves prominent members of the Review’s extended family. In stark contrast to The New Yorker, whose editor, David Remnick, endorsed the Iraq war in a signed essay in February 2003, asserting that ‘a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all’; or The New York Times Magazine, which gave ample space to Michael Ignatieff, Bill Keller, Paul Berman, George Packer and other prowar liberal hawks, the Review opposed the Iraq war in a voice that was remarkably consistent and unified.

The firepower it directed against the liberal hawks reveals much about the Review’s political mood these days. Like many in the liberal hawk camp, the publication sanctioned US military intervention in the Balkans on humanitarian grounds. But when Ignatieff & Co. invoked the logic of humanitarian intervention as a basis for military action against Saddam Hussein, the Review (which has showcased Ignatieff’s work for years) insisted that Bush’s crusade against Iraq was something closer to old-fashioned imperialism. As Ian Buruma wrote in a quietly devastating assessment of Paul Berman’s 2003 book Terror and Liberalism: ‘There is something in the tone of Berman’s polemic that reminds me of the quiet American in Graham Greene’s novel, the man of principle who causes mayhem, without quite realizing why.’

What blew the dust off The New York Review? In no sense, really, has the paper returned to its New Left sensibility of the late 1960s: Chomsky, Hayden and Willis have not been reinstated; young lions like The Baffler’s Tom Frank and The Village Voice’s Rick Perlstein have not been invited to contribute; Eric Foner, Bruce Cumings, Richard Rorty, Chalmers Johnson, Stephen Holmes, Anatol Lieven, Elaine Showalter and Carol Brightman continue to publish much of their finest work not in The New York Review of Books but in the more radical, eccentric and sprightly pages of the London Review of Books. In short, the Review’s liberal (and establishment) soul remains intact. What has changed significantly, in the age of Bush, is the Review’s style of rhetoric and degree of political focus and commitment.” (The Nation)