July 22, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Maunderings on Iraq, etc.
Why am I not posting on Iraq, Niger, or associated topics? Mostly because I think it's too soon to tell.
In early June, Bill Emmott, the editor of The Economist, had a debate with Katrina Vandenheuvel (sp?), the editor of the Nation, on the topic of globalization. One of the most interesting points that he made was that the Marshall Plan wasn't even proposed until 1947.
The narrative of WWII in most American minds seems to go something like this: we won, the nations formerly ground under the Nazi heel rose up joyfully to greet us, the Germans realized the error of their ways, we slapped the Marshall plan together a couple of weeks later, and soon Europe and America were joining hands across the Atlantic to form NATO, singing "It's a Small World After All" as everyone gazed soulfully into the bright quasi-socialist future. . .
In short, the years 1945-1955 seem to have been edited out of the popular imagination.
There were, for starters, quite a lot of collaborators in all the countries we liberated, and they didn't immediately realize the Germans had lost. They apparently ran around the hedgerows with guns making trouble for Our Boys for quite some time.
Nor were the Germans very happy to see us. Or, rather, they were, but only in comparison to the Russians. That didn't stop them from shooting at us, though.
All those jokes about cleaning your plate because the poor, starving children in Europe would be glad to get your food had a source: millions of poor, starving children in Europe. People were eating grass, leaves, and other inedibles in a desperate attempt to fill their stomachs. Audrey Hepburn looked like a famine victim because she was one.
The Marshall Plan was nice and all, but while it was big in relation to our budget, it was trivial in relation to the actual economies that had existed before the war, which is why anyone who lived in Europe in the fifties can tell you that large swathes of it were rubble long after the war ended.
The point being that even a "good war" is not enjoyed by either those fighting it, or those in the places where it is being fought.
Are we doing a good job in Iraq? Damned if I know. (Which is probably why no one's asking me to administer a demilitarized zone.) I'm sure that mistakes are being made, but I'm spectacularly unqualified to tell which are the mistakes and which are the sound policies that will only bear fruit after ten years.
To be sure, I'm extremely disturbed that the Bush administration seems to have had absolutely no plan for what to do with Iraq after we got it. Given the exigencies of war, I would consider it par for the course if they'd developed an unworkable plan that had to be chucked and replaced -- but it looks to me as if no one in the administration gave any thought whatsoever to any scenario except the Iraqis joyfully rising up to greet us, installing a representative democracy, and sending representatives to Washington to join hands with the cabinet for a chorus of "It's a Small World After All". . . I find this extremely disturbing.
But that doesn't mean we're DOOMED! DOOMED! DOOMED! We may be, of course. But I'm withholding comment until the matter's a little clearer.
The troops hate being in Iraq. They also hated being in North Africa, Normandy, Sicily, Guam, Okinawa, and pretty much any other place we've ever fought a war. If you read any first person history of popular wars like the Civil War or WWII you will find that while you may have imagined them passing the time by delivering stirring speeches to each other on human rights, the primary occupation of soldiers in any war, no matter how well justified or pre-approved by the UN, is complaining. War is tiring, time consuming, often painful, and worst of all, usually excruciatingly boring. Imagine your own workplace, except that your stupid boss is around 24-7, and also, his mistakes could get you killed. Complaining fills the time between getting shot at and choking down awful food. The only place soldiers like occupying is Paris, and try getting that one through the Security Council.
As for Niger, everyone's too busy yapping about how Bush is AN EVIL, LYING BASTARD, or, alternatively, his critics are MENDACIOUS HYPOCRITICAL HELLSPAWN, for me to figure out what actually did, or should have, happened, and how seriously to take it. I'll wait until the furor has died down before formulating an opinion.
But I did have one thought this week. If you've been following what is, to my mind, the much more interesting story of the efforts to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure and economy, you know that Saddaam was robbing the oil trust to buy. . . whatever, which left the infrastructure in very bad shape. At the start of the war there was only about enough electricity, water, etc. to meet between 1/2 and 2/3 of current demand. Saddaam withheld supplies from the provinces in order to feed Baghdad and Tikrit, where all his supporters were. So even after we get the infrastructure back to where it was, which should be within six weeks, Baghdad will have the quality of its services degraded, because it was getting more than its fair share before we ousted Saddaam. Indeed, some provinces are even now getting more electricity than they did before the war.
So question of the day: is it possible that the picture we're getting of Iraq might be affected by the fact the most of the reporters are centered in Baghdad, where the hotels are, where most of Saddaam's supporters are, and where things seem to the residents to have gotten dramatically worse because they're no longer being funneled a disproportionate share of the resources?
Posted by Jane Galt at July 22, 2003 8:34 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksAmen, Sister. I am reading much less punditry these days because so much of it amounts to nothing more than ignorant, pompous, gas-baggery. Of course, most punditry is little more than this in normal times, but throw in the challenge of interpreting fluid, amorphous, events on the other side of the globe, involving a population emerging from decades of one-man rule, and the gas-bags really start to have a field day. In 10 or 20 years after events are unspool, gas-bags, often the same ones, will then write how it was all so obvious. Only dunces or knaves attempt to write history in real time, and while making guesses is unavoidable, it is best done with a great deal of humility, which is why those who confidently intone as to what the future holds, no matter what side they are on, should be immediately discounted by any who aspire to real wisdom.
Speaking of complaining troops. One of my favorite leadership quotes comes from an unkown union private.
"I wish half of our officers were knocked on the head by slinging them against a part of those still left."
Yeah, I've been waiting for the mainstream media to compare the timeline of Germany's capitulation to Iraq's.
I know things were sufficiently depressed in Germany after the war that millions emigrated to find jobs and send money home to the family to help rebuild. In my father's case that was 1952. If millions are still fleeing Iraq by 2010 we'll know for sure we're bogged down in a German-style quagmire.
What? No instant analysis, no querulous commentary?
Henry Kissinger meet with Chou En-lai, Mao Tse-tung’s long time right hand man in 1972 in preparation for Nixon’s trip to China. During a social moment in their schedule, Kissinger asked Chou what he thought about the French Revolution. Chou replied: "Too soon"
"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." G.W.F. Hegel
"There were, for starters, quite a lot of collaborators in all the countries we liberated, and they didn't immediately realize the Germans had lost. They apparently ran around the hedgerows with guns making trouble for Our Boys for quite some time."
Can you provide some support for this? There were certainly many collaborators, but my impression is that most of them were too busy claiming to have been in the resistance to do much guerrilla fighting.
When Mark Steyn went to Iraq a few weeks ago, Mickey Kaus chided him for not going to Baghdad. He replied something to the effect that Baghdad was a company town, where the company was Hussein's regime. A lot of folks (evil and otherwise) were thrown out of work there once the government fell, and many were unhappy about it, so it wouldn't be representative of the Iraqi people in general. So he made a left turn when he got to the outskirts and headed north.
Getting a feel for how the Iraqi people feel from Baghdad would not be dissimilar from trying to fathom the views of flyover country from DC...
Possible definition of a liberal: Someone who expects the legacy of slavery to endure for 140 years, and the legacy of Saddam Hussein to vanish within three months.
Isn't Katrina a mega-million trustfunder?
If so, what is it with their noblesse-oblige or guilt?
Get rid of the moolah, no guilt.
Good point; to the same effect, cf. "Germany Was Not a Piece of Cake", in the 7/28 Weekly Standard & also a recent "Vodka Pundit".
But, Heiligestrohsack, Meine Frau, you forgot Deutschland after WW I, esp. with the "stab in the back" rants & riots. A German American friend of mine tells how his ancestors came from Germany to America in the '20s 'cause one day they were beaten up by the Commies & the next by the Nazis.
For that matter, Reconstruction after our Civil War was not an example of Jeffersonian democracy.
And my ancestors from the Emerald Isle never understood that the English had conquered 'em in the 12th Century. Um, the latest accords in Northern Ireland....
TomCom
PS Ms Katrina did not know who her congressperson was when asked by Chris Matthews, I think in y2k. And her congressperson's a woman!
Excuse me, gang, but we didn't liberate Germany - we defeated Germany. One might almost say that, with considerable help from the Soviets, we conquered Germany.
If you're going to claim that the problems we have in Iraq can reasonably be compared to problems in Germany immediately after WWII (and I'm not at all convinced they are similar, but never mind) then stop talking about how we "liberated" Iraq.
Well, my grandparents sure felt liberated and they were some of the ones making bread with sawdust to "stretch it out a little."
Oh, I forgot (as did our sponsor): The "Wanna Go Home Riots".
After The War in Europe officially ended in May '45, initially, GIs got to go home on the basis of points. Some who'd served for almost 3 yrs would thereby have to have served 'til sometime in '46. The Reuther brothers helped start the "Wanna Go Home Riots" in Paris. The girls back home joined in the complaining.
Micro Result: Uncle Ed got home for Thanksgiving '45.
Macro Result: The US didn't look too resolute in the eyes of Hitler's Evil Twin, Stalin.
And also, after WW I, there was a clamor to get the boys home ASAP (that term wasn't in use then, of course). Uncle Ted was held in the service for an extra year & boy, was he p--sed for life. No one was held over any longer. The public was tired of a zillion deaths & didn't want to hear about Germany's problems or the Communist thugs in Russia; that could wait for another day. That day was WW II. In the meantinme, Germany & Russia weren't liberated from tyrany.
TomCom
I did make it up, Robert, but the odds are heavy against my being the only one. Glad it pleased.
"Possible definition of a liberal: Someone who expects the legacy of slavery to endure for 140 years, and the legacy of Saddam Hussein to vanish within three months."
Paul, you should be careful about how widely you propagate that... someone could point out that most people (including liberals) who opposed the war did so precisely because they knew the aftermath of Saddam's removal would be a mess. Advocates of the war were the people who believed that Saddam's legacy would vanish, enabling U.S. troops to leave after 30-60 days as a democracy took root.
Bush has made things worse than they had to be by failing to plan adequately for Iraq, but I think most liberals would concede that even perfect planning would not have resolved all of the problems we're seeing today.
I don't mean to be rude but as far as political cheapshots go yours is really, terribly off-key.
Brittain33 wrote:
Paul, you should be careful about how widely you propagate that... someone could point out that most people (including liberals) who opposed the war did so precisely because they knew the aftermath of Saddam's removal would be a mess. Advocates of the war were the people who believed that Saddam's legacy would vanish, enabling U.S. troops to leave after 30-60 days as a democracy took root.
Oh please, the only problem with trying to “point that out” is that neither claim has any basis in truth. The opposition to Operation Iraqi Freedom (at least that portion of it that wasn’t merely anti-Bush and/or anti-American) made very little argument over what would happen in the post-Saddam Iraq (and I defy you to find anyone from the Bush administration who ever said we’d be out in two months).
Instead they made all sorts of schizophrenic arguments ranging from “Iraq does have any WMDs” to “if we attack Iraq, they’ll use WMDs on our troops” to “only the UN weapons inspectors can find the WMDs.” We also got to hear “we need to get the approval of the UN before going into Iraq” and also “it’s fault of the first Bush administration for not taking out Saddam during Desert Storm” (even though that would have defied the UN edicts we are supposed to care about – I for one do not). Then there was the “there is no evidence that Iraq is linked to terrorism” to “if we attack then the Arab street will rise up and attack the United States” and so on.
The fact of the matter is that both the war and post-war situation in Iraq have both probably gone far better than anyone has any reason to hope. While there are certainly problems (although they seem overstated by a media driven by the credo of “if it bleeds, it leads”), would anyone care to bet that if we listened to those on the Left when they (now) demand that we bring out troops home now, that if the situation deteriorated, they would then criticize the Bush administration for not finishing the job?
The best course of action IMNHO is to recognize that the Left generally cares nothing for the national security of the United States and any “advice” or “criticism” they offer is simply geared towards trying to undermine Bush and has nothing to do with any credible or constructive suggestions about improving the situation and building on our success.
Thorley, I can speak for myself and my friends. We're not in the leadership of ANSWER so we may not count as The Official Voice of the Left, but I've wasted enough time on the Internet to know we weren't alone.
I had no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He was a crazy tyrant who was making his people's lives miserable. It was time for him to go. The President put forth a case for his being a threat and I was in no position to argue with what he was saying. I believed that he was doing this to avenge his father. I still believe that. But if Saddam really had all those weapons, well, maybe Bush was doing a necessary thing for the wrong reasons and I won't lose sleep over it.
However, I have also seen the President's lack of follow-through in Afghanistan, how once the Taliban was gone we allowed most of the country to fall back under the warlords and even the Taliban. I've seen him time and time again make promises that he has no intention of keeping--like the $15 billion in new AIDS funding that turned out to be considerably less money that was just shifted from other Africa programs. I knew we'd knock out Saddam but I didn't trust Bush to know or care about the consequences. I didn't know what the new Iraq would look like but I sure as hell knew Bush was fooling himself with his dreams of flourishing landscapes.
Yes, it worried me that every country in the world other than Britain and the fake Coalition of the Willing (have we heard from Palau or Micronesia lately?) opposed the war. It's not because I love French politicians or hate America. It's because we lost a lot of diplomatic capital and unlike some people I could see why that matters. Some of you are learning that lesson this month as every country has turned us down for aid.
The bottom line is that Paul's slogan is pretty stupid any way you look at it. If you think it's a winner and it makes you feel good, you can repeat here and on any other site. But I think it misses the point in a big way.
"if we listened to those on the Left when they (now) demand that we bring out troops home now..."
I don't know who those people are, but I don't think they have a point, either. We're in a mess and we have to find the best way through it. Running away is not an option.
Accepting the situation we're in also means accepting what Bush did wrong to get us there, and talking about it freely instead of pretending that everything is going according to plan. If it comes out that our troops are there because Bush misled the public about Iraq's WMD and ties to al-Qaeda and hates the UN too much to work with them for replacement soldiers, well, I'm afraid a lot of Americans *are* going to want to start some unconstructive conversations about how we got stuck policing Iraq. Maybe it would be best to ask them how we're going to get out of it and to stop whining... there are plenty of military families who are waiting to hear from you right now.
Or you can hang around on conservative blogs talking about how liberals are all traitors who hate their country. We all have our parts to play in the war effort, I guess.
"I defy you to find anyone from the Bush administration who ever said we’d be out in two months"
Newsweek did.
Newsweek did [the finding of someone in the Bush Administration who claimed we would be in Iraq for only 30-60 days].
From Brittain33
"'I defy you to find anyone from the Bush administration who ever said we’d be out in two months'
"Newsweek did."
And, her substantive comments are just as well thought out.
Um, is "Brittain33" the blog nom de plume for Britney Spears?
TomCom
Paul Krugman referenced it in this column:
http://www.iht.com/articles/102820.html
Presumably anyone who thinks that Krugman is lying can check through back issues of Newsweek to be sure, but the Krugman watchers are so thorough and effective that I can't imagine they'd let him get away with a cite like this if he were making it up.
Hit me baby, one more time.
A thorough guide to the naive assumptions driving Bush's planning for post-war Iraq is here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37468-2003Jul23.html?nav=hptop_ts
Brittain33
Now you've learned how grammar works & have reconstructed your submission to indicate that you were referring to Newsweek as your source & that you didn't really think it was a member of the Administration.
But you're still careless in argument 'cause you say: it's a secondary source, ya see, I really got that cite it thru Paul Krugman & if he wuz wrong, somebody would've pointed out that he wuz wrong, & QED.... Right! Nobody bothered to refute a Krugman assertion & so it must be correct.
I went to the Krugman column you cite &, as you say, he went into the third person: I got it from some source that some other source said.... Wow! (The exact Krugman quote on which you hang your hat is "Before the war, one official told Newsweek that the occupation might last no more than 30 to 60 days." Official. Um.)
If Newsweek said "an 'official' told us....", you don't have to be a "Krugman watcher" to understand that that's poor journalism & should be ignored by rockers like yourself. In any event, we are not convinced.
Safire tells the story of his experience as a Nixon speechwriter when Nixon would want some wild & bellicose statement attributed to some unnamed advisor put in a speech so that he could technically claim that he, the ever-reasonable Leader of the Free World, had rejected such wild & bellicose advice. E.G., Some of my advisors have urged me to invade N. Viet Nam. I reject that....
Safire's other duty was to come up with somebody somewhere in the Govt., even if it had to be some lowly gofer whom no one was paying attention to, urging such action. Sometimes this wild & bellicose guy would leak his position to a favored media guy who would report: "one official told this reporter that if we nuked the N. Viet Namese the war might last no more than 30 to 60 days."
Try harder.
TomCom
Brittain33
You gotta distinguish fact from belief. You refer to:
"A thorough guide to the naive assumptions driving Bush's planning for post-war Iraq...."
How about "A thorough guide to what the WaPo assumes, perhaps naively, were the naive assumptions driving Bush's planning for post-war Iraq...."
How about also acknowledging that the WaPo guys were guilty of naive assumptions as to how the war was gonna be conducted &, in real time, how the war was going. (They seemed to think we were losing, until, um, I don't remember if they ever conceded that the war has been won.)
TomCom
Brittain33 wrote:
Paul Krugman referenced it in this column:
http://www.iht.com/articles/102820.html
I see no such quotation from anyone from the Bush administration (much less a “she” which I think most of us took to mean Condi Rice) merely a reference to “one official told Newsweek that the occupation might last no more than 30 to 60 days” in which there was (a) no name assigned to the supposed “official” nor (b) a citation for the alleged article (and I doubt you or anyone else actually read it in Newsweek either if you have to use Krugman as your source) or even (c) an actual quotation so we can see what was allegedly said (if anything) rather than Krugman’s spin on it.
But let’s go back to your original charge which was the belief that somehow supporters of the war thought that we were going to be in and 0ut of Iraq within two months (paraphrase). Don’t you think that if this was really the case, you would have been able to find someone making that claim other than Paul Krugman? It seems to me that if the Bush administration was ever trying to make this prediction you would have found some other source to substantiate it, preferably an actual person with a name and it would have been picked up.
Please try again.
The reference appears to come from this article, and Mr Krugman has done some rather neat editing. The official wasn't from the Bush administration, but from the State Department. Given that they are not described as a senior official, the source is almost certainly a career state deparment officer, not anyone connected to the Administration.
Thanks for the link Jane, I thought it seemed rather suspicious that Paul Krugman did not provide a citation for his claim nor any direct quotations.
Brittain33,
Do you have anything else to support your thesis or is the entire basis for your claim that supporters of the war believed we would be in and out of Iraq within two months predicated on a partial quote from an anonymous non-senior “official” in the State Department? And considering how difficult it was to find such an obscure quote from an anonymous source, how can anyone honestly think that this was at all influential in shaping the opinions of those who supported the war?
No answer from Britney33, er, Brittain
But, we've lost the thread here. And that's not surprising when one deals with the fundamentalist thinking of Bush haters.
Our host said, hey, I don't quite know what's up in Post-War Iraq, but BTW, let's realize that things weren't smooth after WWII. To the same effect was Vodka Pundit &, more in depth, The Weekly Standard. I noted the same about Post-WW I & Reconstruction & hey, for that matter I'd add now, the Whiskey rebellion.
But Liberals develop Alzheimer's when it comes to discussing actions of Republican Presidents & so Britney wants to just repeat in a vacuum what some of her gurus think is fundamentally wrong in Iraq & to discuss theories of other Liberals (some of whom quote third-hand alleged sources), instead of addressing whether there might be some precedent for this & whether such precedent might put the horrors in some perspective.
Not only that, but Britney tells the rest of us that we have to find her sources.
Not a worthwhile discourse, I'd say.
TomCom
Beautiful weekend, wasn't it?
"Do you have anything else to support your thesis or is the entire basis for your claim that supporters of the war believed we would be in and out of Iraq within two months predicated on a partial quote from an anonymous non-senior “official” in the State Department?"
No, no I don't. I thank Jane for tracking down the original source.
The question remains, was the war planned under unusually optimistic assumptions about the ability of Iraq to govern itself peacefully under new leadership, or did Bush know that we would be committing ourselves to a multi-year occupation of hundreds of thousands of troops? When Bush said that troops would stay there until the job is finished--and not a day longer--was he communicating the message that Americans would sweat through multiple summers in Iraq, or was he appealing to people's wishes for a short conflict like the first Gulf War?
American planned elections to be held--and they were postponed. America planned for most bureaucrats to stay in place and continue to govern and fix things--yet we've encountered problems providing basic services. Unlike Paul's strawman, I accept that these are real problems beyond immediate solution. The problem is that the administration planned around there not being these problems.
Do recent events in Iraq--the leadership changes and changing troop redeployment schedules--give you confidence that Washington planned for a long occupation?
Look, Presidents lie about the commitments they get American soldiers into. No American wants to hear that we will be fighting a long war of attrition that will cost American lives and money for years to come. Clinton pretended that troops would be in Yugoslavia for one year when everyone knew differently. Bush pretended that we could "decapitate" the regime and enable democracy to flourish as part of a temporary coalition, and we find ourselves nearly alone and holding the bag. We've had generals leave the government complaining that their negative scenarios were thrown out without consideration. Believe what you like--but at some point you'll have to learn that opinions other than your own will matter, too.
That's the difference between bloggers like Jane, who recognize that they are writing for a diverse audience and have to present their views coherently, and some of the commenters who have drifted here from the latest Ann Coulter Is Hot thread on Free Republic. You can engage people you disagree with or stick your head in the sand.
Sorry Britney33, Ann C. gets her sources right.
And even tho your third hand source was misquoting, you're still gonna fight the battle of "Are we winning?", ignoring the original point of the post: a comparison to post wars past to see how things were won (or muddled thru) then & there to give us some comparison. No one is denying you your opinion or the right to restate others' opinions, but you're opining in a vacuum & it's hard to "engage" you when you can't stay focused on the point of the post & take your head out of "the sand" & compare.
But you feel good stating your opinion & that's what it's all about, now isn't it?
TomCom
Ms. Galt:
Why am I not posting on Iraq, Niger, or associated topics? Mostly because I think it's too soon to tell.
That's one of the most intelligent things I've read about the whole situation.
Thanks.
By the way, I like your book reviews.
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