From the “Reading File” in today’s New York Times:

Bush-Trotsky Link? Let’s Count the Ways

Jeet Heer, writing in The National Post in Canada on June 7, tried to establish a link of sorts between Leon Trotsky and George W. Bush. He argues, in part, that a number of influential ex-Trotskyists helped support the Bush administration’s foreign policy. He says that Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi dissident, was frequently asked by Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, and Vice President Dick Cheney, for advice about Iraqi society. Mr. Heer quotes the writer Christopher Hitchens, whom he describes as a former Trotskyist, as calling Mr. Makiya a onetime leading member of the Trotskyist organization the Fourth International.

He also says the historian Stephen Schwartz, whom he describes as a neoconservative, “spent his formative years in a Spanish Trotskyist group.”

In a response, Mr. Schwartz is dismissive of the article, saying, for example, about Mr. Makiya: “That his Trotskyist past had nothing whatever to do with his role in advising the Bush administration is something nobody sane could deny.”

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.