Miller was a leftist, right up until 9/11. Immediately afterwards he was a champion of the right.
To put it plainly, the terrorists scared him into becoming a conservative.
I don't think of it so much as cowardice than of naive in his convictions: he was a liberal because he thought it was hip, not because he had thought it through. The world is a dangerous place; always has been and always will be. I'm a (classical) liberal BECAUSE of that, not in spite of it. I believe that in the marketplace of ideas, liberalism will win out. But I'm also aware that others with different idealogies are going to fight my ideas with guns, bombs, and terror and my side must be willing to respond with spptriate levels of lethality when neccessary. To wit - Aghannistan sorely needed cleasned out. Iraq could have waited. In both countries, however, we HAVE to win the war of ideas with the common folk which means getting infrastructure back up and running regardless if that means we have to put 300000 more troops in. Only a small group of the enemy is out to kill americans becasue they want us out of the mid east. But there are large groups of them who are willing to do so when it's seen that the Americans are the ones who can't keep the lights on and the roads safe.
However, to get back on subject, Miller castigated the US Military every chance he got because he didn't really think they'd ever be needed for anything more than suppport for UN peacekeeping missions. When he found out that he was wrong, he jumped to the other side of the fence because he hadn't really thought that non nuclear warfare would ever be used again. He started "studying war no more" a whole lot sooner than the rest of the world did.
