MONOLITH MYOPIA: Tom Hayden has a long post on how conservatives are exploiting 9/11 to advance their Dr. Evil-like plans for empire. Refuting Hayden's claims is too easy. What's more interesting is his assumption that all conservatives have acted in a monolithic fashion. Please. No power on earth is going to make Charles Krauthammer, Paul Kennedy, Max Boot, Robert D. Kaplan, and Dick Cheney see eye-to-eye on foreign policy. This is the natural tendency to assume that political adversaries always act in a monolithic fashion. Conservatives are just as guilty when they presume that liberal media bias is responsible for all negative press.

As bad as this type of thinking is in Washington, it's much worse in Europe. Because European elites are generally to the left of the American center of political gravity, they also assume all conservatives think alike. So when they hear Bill Kristol extol the virtues of invading Iraq, they naturally assume this is the official Bush administration position. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of Republican politics knows that Kristol is not an administration mouthpiece. European elites not only lack that knowledge, they show little interest in getting it.