Not long ago, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen unveiled a self-pitying lament about the hard-shake 'neocons' have gotten over the Iraq War and, more pointedly, how the collapse of Iraq has left little room for "liberal interventionists," a group Cohen defines as people who think like he does.

After an initial stir, Cohen has now returned to the subject in his Times blog 'Passages.' And here we have, again, confirmation that at the heart of "liberal hawk" attachment to the Iraq War is moral vanity.

As I first wrote several years ago, from the moment the "global war on terror" was christened, there's been a breed of intellectual who has glommed onto it for a kind of energizing world-historical play-acting. May you live in interesting times, the Chinese curse has it. But for some of us, it seems, our times are not sufficiently interesting. Orwell couldn't have been Orwell if he hadn't had around Fascism and Communism and fellow-traveling intellectuals -- things that were quite a bummer to live through but did generate a lot of good writing. So without those big ticket isms, how will we be able to compare? And thus the constant effort to puff up the times we live in, because if they're great then we can be too.

And from Cohen you hear it in spades, like living through 2002 again or like a bad dream. Strained historical allusions come forth like a verbal tick:

"Here’s a monster called Saddam Hussein (no “annoying thug” as L.K. Burnett suggests in comment 45), with a Stalinist personality cult [ding! #1], heading a Baath party that borrowed heavily from Nazi totalitarian organization [ding! #2], sitting for decades at the head of a country he’s turned into a nightmarish realm of terror, populated by a circles within circles of cowed informants who make the Stasi [ding! #3] look like a plaything."

Nazis, Stalinists, the East German Stasi. He manges to outdo himself later only when he dubs Saddam a "middle Eastern Pol Pot" -- an equation that amounts to unknowing self-parody. Just after the Iraq War I went to a conference sponsored by Social Democrats USA in which a fastidious and preening University of Maryland professor named Jeffrey Herf grandiloquently announced that those who had opposed the Iraq War (including but not limited to the Schroeder government in Germany) had failed to "learn the lesson of armed anti-fascism." And on and on it went ...

In any case, Cohen's animating grievance really comes into focus as he winnows away those who disagree with his views in a tolerable manner from those who do so in ways that are simply beyond the pale. "Why then is it so easy for people who know far less about Iraq than Makiya or deputy prime minister Barham Salih (a Kurd in a country where Saddam slaughtered about 180,000 Kurds) to be so certain about everything," he writes at one point. And then ...

What I find intolerable is the way a smug left personified by Michael Tomasky (see his attempt at humor in God, what a bunch of whiners) can drone on about Iraq for 25 paragraphs or so without ever mentioning what Saddam’s murder-central was like. Perhaps Tomasky should think a little more about how the Soviet Gulag slipped out of the awareness of wide swathes of the European and American left, some of whom would not even see the horror for what it was when Solzhenitsyn finally rammed it down their throats. If he did search his untroubled conscience, Tomasky and others like him might be less inclined to reduce Saddam’s Gulag to a subordinate clause.

And there it is again, like a tic -- the Soviet Gulag, Solzhenitsyn, the fellow-traveling left. A number of people have jumped on Cohen for red-baiting Tomasky. But that misses point. The real rub is that he can't stay focused on Iraq or the present for more than a couple lines before he needs to scurry back to mid-20th century to re-inflate the self-importance he's upset with Tomasky for puncturing. "It's just like then!," you can almost hear his stomach churn. Just as serious!

And that's the core of it. "I respect," Cohen writes at one point, "those who denounce the invasion and believe it has produced, and will produce, only disaster." It's folks like Tomasky who won't grade him on a curve, give him the respect and credit for grappling with the deep moral dramas he's spun around him, that he simply can't brook.

At one point, Cohen lays before himself the horror of Saddam's rule with the catastrophe of its aftermath ....

When I weigh this picture — a middle Eastern Pol Pot (and who cares that the United States once supported him, it makes no difference to anything at this stage) on one side; more than four years of war and killing and Iraqi disintegration on the other — I agonize.

It's a revealing sentence because it's one filled with a telling self-regard. He agonizes. And to agonize is to achieve merit. Cohen doesn't jump reflexively to one side or the other, but agonizes over the thorny complexities of the great questions. It's a serious pose because Cohen is a serious person who loves to mop up his own moral seriousness. Puncturing that bubble is a grave offense.