January 15, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:20/20 bias
Mark Thoma is telling the hawks they've squandered their credibility for a mess of pottage:
Sorry Jonathan, maybe we don't drum you out of the profession -- there aren't simply two extremes where we listen fully or don't listen at all -- but we are going to pay less attention to what you have to say. That's how it to goes when you are wrong about important things. And unlike the parade of polar extremes presented to us in your argument, there are people who have been generally correct all along and I prefer to give more weight to their views than to those who have been so spectacularly wrong.
Now, of course, I supported the war, so I can be expected to say something like what I am about to say. My only excuse is that I have been thinking hard about this, trying to pick out what went wrong, and I think that I am willing to admit where I was wrong. I was wrong to impute too much confidence to my ability to interpret Saddam Hussein's actions; I was wrong to not foresee how humiliating Iraqis would find being liberated by the westerners who have been tramping around their country, breaking things for their own reasons and with little regard for the Iraqi people, for several hundred years. I was wrong to impute excessive competence to the government--and not just the Bush administration, but to any government occupation.
However.
This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did. If you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky? In some way, they got it just as wrong as I did: nothing that they predicted came to pass. It's just that independantly, things they didn't predict made the invasion not work. If I say we shouldn't go to dinner downtown because we're going to be robbed, and we don't get robbed but we do get food poisoning, was I "right"? Only in some trivial sense. Food poisoning and robbery are completely unrelated, so my belief that we would regret going to dinner was validated only by random chance. Yet, the incident will probably increase my confidence in my prediction abilities, even though my prediction was 100% wrong.
I'm trying to assess my decisionmaking process without developing a massive case of hindsight bias. Hindsight bias is a familiar phenomenon to most of us--that's why it has its own proverb--but most people don't realise just how bad it is. The CIA explains:
Analysts interested in improving their own performance need to evaluate their past estimates in the light of subsequent developments. To do this, analysts must either remember (or be able to refer to) their past estimates or must reconstruct their past estimates on the basis of what they remember having known about the situation at the time the estimates were made. The effectiveness of the evaluation process, and of the learning process to which it gives impetus, depends in part upon the accuracy of these remembered or reconstructed estimates.Experimental evidence suggests a systematic tendency toward faulty memory of past estimates.150 That is, when events occur, people tend to overestimate the extent to which they had previously expected them to occur. And conversely, when events do not occur, people tend to underestimate the probability they had previously assigned to their occurrence. In short, events generally seem less surprising than they should on the basis of past estimates. This experimental evidence accords with analysts' intuitive experience. Analysts rarely appear--or allow themselves to appear--very surprised by the course of events they are following.
In experiments to test the bias in memory of past estimates, 119 subjects were asked to estimate the probability that a number of events would or would not occur during President Nixon's trips to Peking and Moscow in 1972. Fifteen possible outcomes were identified for each trip, and each subject assigned a probability to each of these outcomes. The outcomes were selected to cover the range of possible developments and to elicit a wide range of probability values.
At varying time periods after the trips, the same subjects were asked to remember or reconstruct their own predictions as accurately as possible. (No mention was made of the memory task at the time of the original prediction.) Then the subjects were asked to indicate whether they thought each event had or had not occurred during these trips.
When three to six months were allowed to elapse between the subjects' estimates and their recollection of these estimates, 84 percent of the subjects exhibited the bias when dealing with events they believed actually did happen. That is, the probabilities they remembered having estimated were higher than their actual estimates of events they believed actually did occur. Similarly, for events they believed did not occur, the probabilities they remembered having estimated were lower than their actual estimates, although here the bias was not as great. For both kinds of events, the bias was more pronounced after three to six months had elapsed than when subjects were asked to recall estimates they had given only two weeks earlier.
In summary, knowledge of the outcomes somehow affected most test subjects' memory of their previous estimates of these outcomes, and the more time that was allowed for memories to fade, the greater the effect of the bias. The developments during the President's trips were perceived as less surprising than they would have been if actual estimates were compared with actual outcomes. For the 84 percent of subjects who showed the anticipated bias, their retrospective evaluation of their estimative performance was clearly more favorable than warranted by the facts.
Many of the doves seem to be reconstructing their memory of why they objected to the war, crediting themselves with having predicted that the invasion would fail in this way. Many hawks are also reconstructing their memories to make themselves less hawkish. Fortunately, or unfortunately for me, I wrote my predictions down, so I know that I was an unabashed hawk, 100% convinced that Saddam had WMD.
The lesson that I can unequivocally take out of this is: do not be so confident in your ability to read other people and situations. Saddam was behaving exactly as I would have behaved if I had WMD, so I concluded that he had them. I will never again be so confident in the future.
At the same time, though, in a similar situation this shouldn't necessarily make me listen to the hawks next time. North Korea was behaving exactly like a country that had WMD, and it turned out that this was because they had them. What the doves would like to see the hawk's do--"I was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong about everything, I am a stupid idiot, you are a brilliant figure with god-like omniscience"--is no better a guide to future decisionmaking than ignoring the fact that you were seriously wrong about the Iraq invasion. They are both ways of being completely stupid, not that this has stopped anyone.
When I look back at the decision I made, and I try to imagine making it without what I know now, which is that Saddam didn't have WMD, could I change it? I'm not sure. I don't see any way that I could have known, without actually checking, that he didn't have at least an advanced programme. And even with the chaos now, had we found an advanced nuclear programme, most of the doves would be finding it much harder to argue that the invasion was a disastrous mistake. Perhaps even if he had had them we should have left him alone, but that's a difficult argument. And given the number of Democrats, including President Clinton, who clearly believed that we would find an advanced weapons programme, I have to conclude that without benefit of hindsight, the information painted at least a 50% chance that he had them.
As I see it, doves have, in effect, benefitted from winning a random game. Not that the result was random--obviously, there was only one true state of the world. But at the time of making the decision, the game was random to the observer, with no way to know the true state until you open the box and poke the cat. Having won a random game, they are now crediting themselves with brilliant foresight. And yet, if the hawks had won the game, they would be preening themselves on their analytical ability, and demanding that the doves prostrate themselves in an extensive grovel.
That doesn't mean that my decisionmaking wasn't faulty. It was, in all sorts of ways, and I am trying to learn from them with proper humility. But I think the doves are crediting themselves with way too much analytical brilliance, which is fine to a point, but not so very fine that I am willing to turn over my decisionmaking to their allegedly more capable hands. World War II, after all, came in part out of learning lessons from World War I that weren't actually there. And the sight of doves saying, in effect, "I don't have to listen to you any more" does not make me sanguine that they are doing much better.
Posted by Jane Galt at January 15, 2007 12:20 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>WMD were never a good argument for invading Iraq. The good argument was that we could depose a hated dictator and establish a functioning Arab democracy. I realized that Bush & Co. were not the best crew to carry out this task. But I figured they could not possibly be so incompetent as to produce an outcome worse than Hussein.
And that was my fatal error. Bush & Co. really are that incompetent. I finaly accepted this when I learned that over 3 years of deteriorating conditions we have continued to use a troop-to-population ratio less than half of what our own occupation strategy handbook recommends.
Posted by: David Wright on January 15, 2007 1:12 PMit wasnt just having the bomb that mattered, it was the "means, motive and opportunity" that mattered.
FDR created an billion dollar project on the well established belief that hitler was sure to be developing an atomic bomb. Every scientist in the world beleived this to be the case. FDR gave priority to the Manahttan project over many other projects that may have ended the war earlier.
No one says FDR was an idiot for getting it so wrong about the Nazi Atomic bomb project. Everyone - and I mean everyone - assumed that based on the evidence that was available that he was certaqinly doing just that.
The Mahattan project, and the science it created was based on intelligence that was false. Intelligence that was provided from the worlds experts in that matter, yet it was still very much wrong.
But sit in FDR's chair for a moment and you get an idea of why that decision was made. Its Hitler were talking about. "stop at nothing-unspeakable atrocities every where you look", was he supposed to give him the benefit of the doubt? certainly not.
President Bush was faced with a similar dilemma.
What middle eastern despot had the 'means, motive and opportunity' to create vast sums of WMD's? Saddam.
Who had shown a willingness to use them in the past?
Saddam.
Who actually used them on more than one occasion?
Saddam.(Sidenote - Iraq is the only country to have actually used nerve gas on the battlefield. it was used against Iran - a war that resulted in over 3 million deaths -and it was used against the civilian populace of Halabja. )
Who, despite every good reason to do otherwise, continued to act exactly like he had something to hide when pressed by UN inspectors to reveal the nature of his programs as to avoid the very thing that happened?
Saddam.
Personally, I never gave a damn about WMD's. I wouldve invaded Iraq just because it had a nice long border with Iran.
In my opinion people who obsess about WMD's are same people who said tat the time that we shouldnt invade because he would use those weapons that they now say they knew he never had, against our troops. They are also the same people who castigated President H.W. Bush for "not finishing the job".
The invasion and occupation put an end to the fiction that the sanctions were a humane alternative to full out war. The responsibility what went on in iraq during the 10 years between the two Iraq war, the genocide, large scale state sponsored murder, becoming a base of support for world wide terrorism, lies squarely on the shoulders of those who hold the UN in such high esteem. No one cared about abu ghirab until it was Americans who were involved,but understand that what went on under the eyes of the world at abu ghirab under Saddam has never been in doubt, and is catalogued in great detail and yet it has never been denounced by the left.
Our crime in Iraq wasnt the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it was waiting 10 years to do it.
I'm in the same boat as you Jane. Any number of liberals are aglow with the smug warmth of their correct prediction that Bush would be completely incomptent about this war.
And this one correct prediction leads them all into "we're correct about everything" mode.
In my own mind, I believe my support of the war was based on two things: The assumption that the CIA would have a better ability to predict the presence of WMD than I would, and the belief that the Iraqis would value freedom.
Both of those are clearly wrong. The latter, tragically so. Primarily, it's clear to me that: a) many people who don't earn their freedom themselves don't value it.
b) If a country's citizens don't value their freedom enough to try to rebel against their tyrants, they aren't worthy of our aid.
I'm impressed with the way that you are seriously trying to improve your own decision-making processes.
However, I think there's one aspect of the situation you're missing. Many of the doves argued against the war primarily for ideological reasons--they believed a priori that preemptive war was wrong, and they constructed more specific arguments supporting that view only for the purpose of convincing others.
So, now it seems we agree the war was a bad idea. Is their correct anticipation of that result devalued by the fact that their specific arguments turned out to be wrong? I would argue no: the decision process they actually used was ideological, and as such can't be objectively "wrong".
My attitude is also shaped by my background in machine learning, where the dangers of changing the performance metric post facto (in this case, to examine the internals of the decision process) are pretty well understood, much as they are among stock traders.
For the record, I supported the war, at least during the last stages of the military build-up before the invasion when I felt U.S. credibility was on the line. Of course, that seems like an embarrassingly unimportant consideration with the benefit of hindsight. Ah, well.
And unlike the parade of polar extremes presented to us in your argument, there are people who have been generally correct all along and I prefer to give more weight to their views than to those who have been so spectacularly wrong.
Thoma's devotion to this principle may be gauged by the heed he continues to pay to Paul "The budget deficit is going to stay above $400 billion for the rest of this decade" Krugman.
Posted by: Paul Zrimsek on January 15, 2007 2:10 PM"And yet, if the hawks had won the game, they would be preening themselves on their analytical ability, and demanding that the doves prostrate themselves in an extensive grovel."
I supported the war, but don't you think its a good thing that the hawks aren't preening. War is a bad thing and if getting a bloody nose on Iraq makes us that much more thoughtful the next time, I'm happy.
Posted by: Will on January 15, 2007 2:20 PMThoughtful or paralized by inaction, like as we let thousands (millions?) of people die in south east asia to pacify some spoiled college kids?
At least in the 60s/70s kids were fighting against being drafted, they didn't want to go to war. Now they're fighting against war in general, which is good to be opposed to war, but dangerous to do so if the war will ultimatley come home to you.
I don't want to see our troops in the middle of a sectarian war. But then again, I don't want our troops in rowanda or bosnia either...in the middle of a sectarian war. I do want to see our nation fighting terrorists who will gladly kill americans. If Iran is helping, they need to understand what happens when you poke the tiger.
Posted by: maybe on January 15, 2007 2:34 PMIt is always amazing to me that everyone (but probably the military and WH) neglects the fact that we had been in a hot/cold war in the Persian Gulf since the Reagan presidency and with Iraq since the first Gulf War. There were three options available:
1) Walk away. Saddam emerges with new tough guy credibility, cash (from new deals with French/Russians), and restarts his WMD programs.
2) Maintain Sanctions to slow him down: Problem is French/Russians/Chinese were undermining sanctions as were Western Leftists. Could not be maintained for long, so a delaying action.
3) Take Him out and reduce level of risk of war with global consequences.
A null decision always has consequences, often no different than the worse case of the alternatives.
This was a regime that had started several horrific wars (Iran and Kuwait) as well as brutal internal repression. Did we really need to find a specific piece of weaponry to see this had to be changed? I find this type of decisionmaking in business. The most sucessful guys know where the world is going and what they have to do without knowing all the details yet. FDR knew both the Japanese militarists and the Nazis had to be dealt with, perhaps they could be slowed down, but eventually dealt with.
Almost none of the doves expected not to find WMDs. There has been a lot history rewriting by the left in this regard- and many expected far higher casulties on the US side.
For myself, I am someone who voted twice for Bush, but did not think the invasion of Iraq was a good idea, and the present situation is more or less what I expected. The only things that have happened that I did not anticipate were the low number of US casulties (I expected about five times as many by now), and that no WMDs were found (I always assumed you would find chemical agents at the very least). I did not support the invasion because the plan of installing democracy in multi-ethnic Iraq seemed silly on its face.
Posted by: Yancey Ward on January 15, 2007 2:42 PMI'm impressed with your thinking. The inability to change one's mind is a crippling handicap. I have had to do it with embarrassing frequency over the last several years.
Two points:
First, this reassessment/reversal of policy is a beginning, not an end, of a process. Like it or not, what the US has begat in Mesopotamia is a creature of our own making. Looking ahead and trying to agree on what positive steps should be taken (or avoided) next is more critical than ever.
Second, I sense a real, if unintentional effort on the part of a growing crowd of formerly pro-war voices now trying to shift the burden of what was a long string of official policy misjudgements to the feet of critics instead of those who stubbornly, blindly, ignorantly advanced those policies.
Those of us who opposed the Vietnam War had to listen to that kind of crap for all the decades since and I for one don't want to see it happen again. Such thinking is not only wrong but counterproductive. The time is NOW, not later, for critics and former advocates to close ranks and get down to the business of agreeing on what should happen NEXT.
Posted by: Hootsbuddy on January 15, 2007 2:43 PMJust before the war (March 2003) I set down the reasons why I supported the war in a letter to my local paper (in Scotland). Looking back, its not perfect, but I think my reasons hold up pretty well.
What I got wrong: I assume, without comment, that Saddam had a program to develop WMD; I totally ignore the possibility of a long term insurgency in Iraq - although I do mention "a long term occupation of Iraq"; I ignore the difficulty of "installing a democratic regime" in Iraq - although my memory is that at the time I though discussing this would distract from the core of my argument.
But I think the central point of my argument is sound: "We must suppose that Saddam's main foreign policy aim is to get his hands on nuclear weapons." Given Saddam's history and behaviour I think this was a reasonable assumption to make, and nothing that has happened since has caused me to reconsider. From this assumption (more or less) the rest of my argument and the conclusion follows.
What struck me at the time (this is in Europe) was that most people were adopting a legalistic attitude to the problem; they were looking at the evidence and, adopting a legal attitude, were asking themselves what they could reasonably prove about Saddam's intentions given the evidence. They concluded from this (correctly) that as we could not prove that Saddam had a WMD program, or even the intention to develop WMD, we would therefore not be justified in attacking Iraq. I think this was the wrong way to approach the problem.
In my opinion the correct way to approach the problem is to ask yourself: given the evidence we have, what is the most reasonable assumption we can make about Saddam's intentions. Taking this view it is clear that the most reasonable assumption was that Saddam had the intention of getting nuclear weapons, and that we were justified in attacking Iraq.
I still think that attacking Iraq was the right thing to do but I really did not expect the US and UK governments to take such a casual attitude to the problems of Iraq after a successful conquest. I think that this was my biggest mistake - I trusted in governmental competence too much - and given that I'm a swivel-eyed libertarian its probably entirely predictable that I would draw that lesson. I believe (although obviously I have no way of proving) that had the immediate aftermath of the conquest of Iraq been handled even remotely competently things in Iraq would be much much better today than they are.
Finally, I remember that when you support a view you are really motivated to find problems with evidence that contradicts that view - and maybe thats all this comment is :(
While I too was "tricked" about WMDs, that was not my key mistake. My key mistake was to think that if we could lead a regime change in a country as messed-up as Haiti without touching off a civil war, that we could do the same in Iraq. These power transitions seemed to have worked OK numerous times in the past (though Haiti hasn't gotten better it would have gotten worse), but of course it didn't go very well this time.
Posted by: Tyler Cowen on January 15, 2007 2:48 PMI am amazed at how often I read a blog comment that I agree with and when I get to the end, it says the same thing: "Frank Martin." This is one of those times.
On another note, it is conveniently forgotten that pre-war there was increasing pressure from the "international community" to end the sanctions and let Saddam go back to ruling without restraint. The told-you-so's have the advantage of not having to answer for what Iraq would look like now (or in 20 years under Uday or Qusay) if the invasion had not occurred, because we really can't know that. However, the argument about whether we should have let things alone in Iraq too often starts with the false premise that the likely alternative to war would have been for Iraq to remain much as it was in June 2002.
Posted by: denise on January 15, 2007 2:49 PMI was a supporter of the war and am still unapologetically so. The facts regarding Saddam's evil record are not in dispute: nor was the universally-held belief, ex ante, that he had WMD.
But the WMD issue is in any event a red herring. There were lots of reasons to knock over Saddam, not the least of which was to put the fear of God and the United States of America into all the other would-be Saddams of this world.
In 1936, Hitler was a blip: when he remilitarized the Rhineland, the French could have knocked him over with pretty much any show of resistance. But they didn't: too risky, too much chance of casualties and quagmires.
By 1938, Hitler was recognizably a threat, and--had the West chosen to resist rather than roll over at Munich--it would have gone badly for him: among other things, he would likely have been overthrown by his own generals. Nope: too risky, not enough domestic support for war.
In 1939--despite their best efforts to avoid confrontation--the West found itself compelled to go to war, at a much greater disadvantage than was the case in 1936 or 1938. Fifty MILLION people would die before the shooting stopped.
Never again.
Posted by: David Hecht on January 15, 2007 2:53 PMJane, the crux of the problem is that the doves are using the lack of WMDs as their excuse. If Saddam had WMDs, heck, if he used them again, the doves would still be doves. I don't think there's an intellectually honest person in the world who feels truly fooled over WMDs. Now, if "we can't trust our government and we can't predict the future" are one's reasons for being dovish, then that's fine so long as one is a big-L and little-L libertarian. But we know that's like 2% of the population. In the immortal words of Sammy Hagar (1987-ish):
Watching these politicians
Swim in a sea of sharks
One of 'em's got blood on his hands
Everyone scrambles
Just to save his own ass
The opposition moves in and makes demands
A full investigation
Maybe a resignation
No matter what the cost
It's not for the country, no
Two terms in a row
The democrats have lost
It has always been easy to oppose what's going on in Iraq. Hell, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld have made it easy. By contrast, it was never at all easy to support the war or to prosecute it or to stand firm when the politics of it were a losing proposition. Which either makes the proponents frigging nuts or very aware of the ramifications of not confronting the problem. I believe that latter.
Posted by: Brad Hutchings on January 15, 2007 3:21 PMI applaud you for your hard look at past decision-making. However, I would take issue with the idea that war opponents were completely wrong about the outcome, and thus not "right" in their analysis at the time. This paints with a pretty broad brush. I initially supported the war on the WMD basis, and it's true that most people on all sides believed there were WMD. But I also remember asking myself, 'do these guys - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld - really know what they're doing?' At the time, they were painting wildly optimistic scenarios about early troop drawdowns, being greeted with flowers. It was clear they had no intention of engaging in serious nation-building activities, and that (given what was going on at the time in Afghanistan) were hostile to the very notion of nation-building. Even at the time, such an approach seemed naive and ideologically-based, if not absolutely guaranteed to fail. This gave me serious pause at the time, as it did many war opponents. Who were, on that count, correct then, and so I think they deserve to crow a litte.
Posted by: JM on January 15, 2007 3:26 PMAfter 9/11, President Bush said that fighting terrorism was going to be a long fight. I immediately turned to my wife and said, "We are so screwed." Our current batch of politicians do not have the stomach for anything that is hard or drawn out. Once the public shows the slightest hint of subject fatigue, the politicians are going to jump all over it, regardless of whether their reaction is good for the country or not.
(Lest anyone think this is solely a liberal thing, check out the way the conservatives have been b@tch-slapping Tony Blair in England since the start of the war. Eventually, your own party will leave you as well. Just like it has happened here in the US.)
Yes, mistakes were made. What war is perfect? Yes, the administration did not react/anticipate/plan well enough. Who would? Your guys would have done better? Maybe. Maybe not. But they all would have made mistakes, and when they did, the opposition would have jumped on any and every mistake that that administration made.
Defeating terrorism is a long, hard, drawn out fight. Sadly, America does not have the guts or the leadership for such a fight. Our men and women in the armed forces are the greatest force for good in the world. They are the only hope for the millions of citizens in Iraq who want freedom and they are the last hope of anyone in the world who yearns for liberty.
Meanwhile, our "leaders" in Washington are either incompetent or power hungry. They are not looking for solutions or even what to do now that we are where we are. They are looking for political opportunity. The new Congress will sell out America to embarrass Bush.
Some have said that Iraq is another Vietnam. Its not. It is the beginning of World War III.
In my opinion people who obsess about WMD's are same people who said tat the time that we shouldnt invade because he would use those weapons that they now say they knew he never had, against our troops. They are also the same people who castigated President H.W. Bush for "not finishing the job".Would those be the same people who said we didn’t have enough troops but opposed efforts to include more troops?
Good point about the “use those weapons that they now say they knew he never had, against our troops.” I seem to recall predictions of American causalities upwards of 50,000 (maybe it was one of those phony large round numbers that Lancet likes to invent right before an election) being thrown about before we went into Iraq. I was willing to accept that as a reasonable number because (like many who opposed the war), I believed that they would use chemical or biological weapons against our troops (as did the French government who opposed the war and said that if Iraq did, they might be willing to contribute troops to help with the liberation).
As far as the post-liberation reconstruction, I expected it to be long and expensive and frankly surprised that it’s run as smoothly as it has. I expected the Iraqi military to fight a concerted guerilla action against the United States and for much higher casualties then we’ve (thankfully) had to date. That it took us nearly four years to have the same number dead that were killed in on day’s terrorist attack on US soil only strengthens the argument that’s it’s better to fight them over there than over here.
Also I would rather deal with whatever “mess” we think we have in Iraq today (which includes Saddam and his likely successors serving as compost) while trying to deal with Iran than I would the most likely alternative of having to continue trying to contain Saddam Hussein with sanctions all be eroded, his military relatively intact, and dealing with Iran on top of that..
Well said, Brad. (I should have refreshed the comments while I was writing my response.)
When I said it was the beginning of WW III, I meant it was the beginning of our response. Radical Islam has been at war with us since 1979.
Posted by: Reagan Fan on January 15, 2007 3:42 PMYou are certainly correct to highlight the issue of hindsight bias, which is indeed problematic. However, while you are correct in saying that many war opponents had inaccurate predictions, it is not correct to say that nobody understood what could go wrong. To give an example, here in an article from the Atlantic written by James fallows in 2002, he mentions that most serious people with knowledge of Iraq that he interviewed worried about the risk of civil war (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200211/fallows)
Also interesting to recall is the fact that there were those who were aware that Saddam likely had no WMD's, such as Scott Ritter of UNSCOM. He is profiled in this article which addresses the very issue of prediction that you are discussing:
http://www.radaronline.com/features/2007/01/betting_on_iraq_1.php
Lastly, I'm sure I don't have to remind you of the potential for unforseen, harmful consequences that is inherent to any large government activity. We needn't know exactly how something can go horribly awry to know that it probably won't work
Posted by: graeme blake on January 15, 2007 3:46 PM
Megan,
I know that I was an unabashed hawk, 100% convinced that Saddam had WMD.Don't be too hard on yourself. Sadaam may not have had stockpiles of CB weapons in militarily-useful quantities, but he certainly had programs and personnel ready and waiting for the moment sanctions collapsed. I'll give you an 75% right on this one, because the the only consequence you were wrong about was that the time frame when he would have had militarily-useful weapons was later than if he had actual stockpiles.
Furthermore, it's perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that your decisionmaking was faulty, and look for ways to improve it in the future--provided you don't fall into the trap of thinking it could ever become perfectly accurate. That's simply a recipe for inaction.
Posted by: Kirk Parker on January 15, 2007 3:55 PMIt is great that you are revising your decision making process. I urge you to consider Darfur, especially, though Zimbabwe, Cuba, and Chile are all also relevant.
Is Darfur, w/o the US, really better than Iraq's struggling democracy?
Bush's successful Liberation can be seen in the 20% Kurdish area. The 30-years war kind of Shia-Sunni murder is evidence of Arab / Muslim irrationality, not Bush incompetence.
I have yet to read any Dove account of how a "better than Bush" invasion would have likely gone. Usually it starts with Shinseki's 300 000 troops (more than we had) and moves on into magically keeping the Iraqi Army together -- that group which decided not to fight in the first couple of weeks but instead disappeared out of their uniforms.
Contrast the alternative actions -- and their likely outcomes. Any giving of freedom to Sunnis & Shia was likely, though not necessarily, to lead to Sunni murders and Shia reprisals.
Where were the Doves who claimed, before 2003, that the invasion would be a failure with less than 5000 casualties? Or any specific number?
I have long graded Bush:
Where are the Doves who claimed that a competent occupation would result in peaceful democracy in less than 3 years? Please ask your liberal friends if they wrote anything about such. I doubt it -- it was always highly unlikely.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that Bush critics are so happy to blame Bush when some crazy/cunning Sunni murders some Shia; and also blame Bush when Shia death squads take punitive action and murder many Sunnis. "Everything is God's, er, Bush's, er, Great Satan's fault".
Hogwash. The murders are the fault of the murderers, mostly. Until we treat the Iraqis like adults -- responsible for the murders they commit, it's unlikely their culture will grow up.
Posted by: Tom Grey on January 15, 2007 4:07 PMJane, you and the commenters to date have ignored the position of many of the "doves" in the lead-up to the war. The picture you paint is of a pre-war world where the only two choices were whether to believe the CIA and the Bush administration regarding Saddam's WMD program, or not to. But a great many "doves" argued at the time that there was a better way: that the way to find out for sure whether Iraq had WMDs was to insist on resuming and maintaining invasive weapons inspections in Iraq.
Recall that the Bush administration made a show of supporting this approach, but prematurely recalled weapons inspectors and condemned Iraq for concealment because of the inspectors' negative results. In the aftermath of the invasion, the inspection teams' leaders have repeatedly complained that their work was ignored, attacked or undermined by a US administration that had already made up its mind, when in fact the inspectors' work was yielding information we now know was exactly correct.
In the many demonstrations held during the lead-up to the war, "Let Inspections Work" was a frequently seen placard. Those who advocated a careful and multilateral effort to verify the administration's claims of a dire threat before taking so extreme an action as the invasion of a soverign country now deserve credit for their calls. Had we more seriously supported the inspection program and waited for its orderly completion, decisions could have been made with the benefit of the knowledge that there were not, in fact, WMDs in Iraq.
Plenty of people got the basics of what would happen right. You may want to start with Tom Rick's book. Graeme blake above mentions others. Claiming it's due to luck may make you and other war supporters feel better but doesn't really accomplish much more than that.
Alternatively you may remember that the latest available intelligence at the time of the invasion, that of the inspectors on the ground, was clearly showing no WMDs were to be found.
Posted by: GT on January 15, 2007 4:18 PMwesterners who have been tramping around their country, breaking things for their own reasons and with little regard for the Iraqi people, for several hundred years
Does 'westerners' mean 'Ottoman Turks', or does 'several hundred years' mean 'the 1920s and the past 20 years'?
Before the invasion, was Saddam giving the inspectors unlimited access or not? Frankly, I don't remember.
The untold story is just how pathetic the West's
intelligence services were in ferreting out the truth. Apparently, "we" believed whatever a few exiles told us because "we" had few assets, if any, on the ground and in a position to know what was going on in Saddam's inner circle.
Jane,
I went over for the war right after 9/11. Spent 4 months on a little island in the Indian Ocean bombing Afghanistan. By Dec 01 it was obvious that 20 bombers, 300 SOF, and our Afghan allies had routed the Taliban. I fully expected, as did all the other senior officers, to not go home but to swing immediately into Iraq in Late February or early March. We waited another year.
I would have supported the invasion of Iraq (and still do) even if it was proven without any doubt that he didn’t have WMD. As for the WMD issue, everyone, our people, Clinton, the Russians and French et al, believed Saddam had WMD. Personally I bet Saddam thought he had WMD. We were all wrong. Who cares! That is not why we are there.
The war is NOT about killing/arresting OBL. If we killed every man in Al Queda from OBL to the lowliest waterboy on 9/12, that would not have changed a thing, nor made us any safer. The reason to invade Iraq was to start the change in the culture that Islam has spread throughout the area. (Drain the swamp)I have always stated that it was going to be a long struggle and we have actually (as many commenter’s have noted) suffered almost trivial losses. When people have asked me how the war was going, I have always answered with ask me in 2013. My benchmark would then be 1963 South Korea. I would expect us to have 50-60K troops in Iraq for at least 25-30 years. Yet we are ready to throw in the towel and surrender in Iraq.
Islam, as currently practiced in the ME, as a way of life must change. The least loss of life (not cheap or easy), by far, will be to set up a secular democracy in Iraq. It’s also the hardest, longest, and most prone to risk of failure. (The easiest involves a few bombers and bottled sunshine – BTW we can take on the 1.5B Muslims in the world).
Now we can argue all day about how we should have approached this problem. Maybe started with Iran vs. Iraq (3x the pop and 3x the land), or maybe Saudi. But the idea that the left has that the invasion of Iraq is not part of the war on terror and an isolated entity is false on its face. If we leave (not just draw down to a permanent garrison of 50-60K like Germany, Japan, Korea etc), then the Islamic fascist will have won and won big. It will have ripples around the world as the defeat of both world superpowers by Islam. We (the west in general and the US in particular) will have been correctly shown not to have the stomach for a fight and no persistence. Radical Islam will be on the rise
If we are defeated in Iraq, expect Afghanistan to become and arbitor and we will leave there shortly as casualties mount giving another victory to the terrorists. Killing/capturing OBL is not a victory condition and never has been. Yet I hear no words of victory from the democrats now or from Kerry in ’04. Where are our Truman’s and Roosevelt’s?
From my inerviews with patients from the First Gulf War, I believe that Saddam used them, chemical weapons, against our troops to a limited extent (or with limited penetrance). Lets assume he still had them. He had a decison to make. The issue before the U.N. was, 'Is war justified by his possession of WMD?' If he attacks our troops with them, then that justifies our aggression. This is only really useful for him if it determines the outcome of the war. Another alternative is to ship them to Syria, which a senior Iraqi Air Force officer has reports in a book. The information about a planned chemical attack on Amman is consistent with that. Also WMD not being found can be a justification for his allies or right minded thinkers to attack the integrity of those who attacked Iraq. The third alternative, simply leaving them in Iraq, can be easily eliminated from his multiple choice answer because that is as bad as using them and without benefit. His stalling and giving incomplete reports leads credence to his having this multiple choice.
Posted by: michael on January 15, 2007 5:39 PMJane writes "I am trying to learn from them with proper humility."
An admirable but difficult venture. For example, she writes: "As I see it, doves have, in effect, benefitted from winning a random game." So nothing to learn from the people who disagreed with me and turned out to be right
I am actually in Jane's position of having supported the war and now regreting it. I even mocked an acquaintance who believed there were no WMD in Iraq.
I strongly agree with her lesson about confidence in reading people. But I think she misses several other mistakes we made. The two that leap to mind are:
1) As noted above in several comments, we failed to think through the failure of UN inspectors to find WMD immediately prior to the war. My takeaway is the need to stop rethink a project even after largescale initial commitments (i.e. the preparations for war) have been made.
2) Not considering scale. Like Tyler above, I drew false confidence from recent American successes in other countries - Bosnia, Kosovo .. I did not consider how much larger Iraq was than our previous occupations.
As a side note, I actually do remember hearing concerns about sectarian tensions in Iraq before the war. Tom Friedman, a war supporter, had a column before the war acknowledging the uncertainty of what might happed to Iraqi society released from the chokehold of a police state.
Tom G.
Posted by: Tom G. on January 15, 2007 5:43 PMBefore the invasion, was Saddam giving the inspectors unlimited access or not? Frankly, I don't remember.
There were lots of issues: objections to inspectors entering palaces and private homes, scuffles over removing scientists and government officials from the country for interviews, etc. The administration pointed to these issues as evidence that the inspections could not succeed, although if you look at the inspectors' comments, I think it's fair to conclude that they were not significantly impeded in their work. I found this quote from Hans Blix's presentation to the UN in March 2003, days before the invasion:
In matters relating to process, notably prompt access to sites, we have faced relatively few difficulties, and certainly much less than those that were faced by UNSCOM [U.N. Special Commission] in the period 1991 to 1998.
[...]
This is not to say that the operation of inspections is free from frictions, but at this juncture we are able to perform professional, no-notice inspections all over Iraq and to increase aerial surveillance.
It's important to remember that the UN inspectors were not given time to complete their mission; they had to leave Iraq precipitously when the US began its invasion. They served long enough to give a multilateral sheen to the effort, but not long enough to produce final results that may have undermined the rationale for the war.
A great many people opposed this at the time. Had we listened to them, things may have turned out very differently: the public rationale for the war would have been dismantled. It was not just a "random game" to decide whether or not there were WMDs in Iraq; those calling for time to learn the truth were pushed aside, and the decision to ignore them is a real and specific error that should be acknowledged.
David Wright: "WMD were never a good argument for invading Iraq. The good argument was that we could depose a hated dictator and establish a functioning Arab democracy."
And who give us (US) the right to do this? Who appointed us the sole guardian of the moral highground. I accept Joe Biden's assessment aired on Meet the Press (as I recall): It was always about oil.
And maybe a bit about the notion that Iraq was threatening to begin trading in something other than US dollars, and maybe about finishing a father's business, and maybe something about arrogance, and refusing to listen to those (including Colin Powell, James Baker....) who were suggesting that there was no good way to secure the peace after the cake-walk to depose Sadam. NeoCon hubris!
It's kind of like in math class when I would get the right answer, but lose a lot of points for not doing my work correctly. Doves get a couple points for coming to the correct answer, but nowhere near full credit.
Posted by: Sean on January 15, 2007 6:13 PMJane says,
"Saddam was behaving exactly as I would have behaved if I had WMD, so I concluded that he had them. I will never again be so confident in the future."
North Korea claims to have nukes. Iran claims to be very close to having them. Both have reasons to be lying.
Are you confident enough that they don't have nukes that you are willing to do nothing militarily to try and stop and/or contain them?
Are you confident enough to do nothing after 2,996 people are killed when a plane is crashed into one of your buildings?
Posted by: Reagan Fan on January 15, 2007 6:27 PMReagan Fan says, "North Korea claims to have nukes. Iran claims to be very close to having them. Both have reasons to be lying.
Are you confident enough that they don't have nukes that you are willing to do nothing militarily to try and stop and/or contain them?"
Perfect.. Now let's go after everybody. All at once?
We have to remember that we are not the world's police force. We are not the world's moral "shining light." We are a nation-state with about as many warts as other nation states, very big and growing debt, and with growing internal public dis-satisfaction against our self-proclaimed status of Empire (remember the Project for the New American Century?). Oh, and there is the little matter that we aren't all that well-regarded abroad either. Too bad we never headed president Dwight Eisenhower's warning about the military industrial complex's appetite for power.
Posted by: dave iverson on January 15, 2007 6:40 PMHere's a lesson to be learned -- much like the ultimately not threatening lack of WMDs in Iraq where Mark is right to point out that information gathering was the best strategy. Learning where you really stand on a threat is a perfectly legitimate action, and often the wisest investment of resources if one has the time other alternatives to act against the threat are very expensive. Satisfying to some, but not others.
Much other fear mongering is the same way -- for example climate change. People are easily captured and captivated by fear. Risks are far more easily identified than quantified. Once identified, adreneline and worry kicks in and the body demands action. Merely talking about a risk heightens the subjective feeling of threat, witness Jane's hypochondria. Better not to respond radically to faux urgency or suspicions of risk or a nascent threat if there seems to be time to act in a more limited way. If there's really no time, well, then you might be screwed and/or reduced to the crude heuristics of triage.
9/11 made it easier to inspire fear and lack of time, but I personally never understood the rush. I, for one, always felt like we were leaping awfully fast without looking very well in the Iraq WMD situation. [ And with climate, well, we're still very much learning how to look at all. ]
For what it's worth in terms of prognosticatory prowess, Yancey is absolutely right. For many years after Desert Storm, all the problems we're seeing now were raised as partial justification for its limited scope by military advisors. There was no plan for what to do after and all suggestions problematic and risky and people did expect many more US casualties. So, we just did the least we had to in order to disarm Saddam/eliminate the basic risk. And we did. A dozen years later, as a nation with shaken confidence about such things, we fooled ourselves (or someone fooled us) into thinking we failed and worried ourselves into a national tizzy for which we now and for a long time pay the price.
And make no mistake -- without that WMD worry the invasion would not have been sold. Regardless of its ranking in one's personal reasonings or even what we might like the justification to have been, as a rhetoric of persuasion question -- do any of us think Bush could have sold the war to other countries or Congress without WMD threats?
When pondering this selling question, keep in mind that, well, everyone is not you. WMDs were the threat compelling most attitudes and it's disingenuous to pretend otherwise, even if you think people were foolish to be so compelled. You probably still used the WMD threat yourself to convince people. The only reason more people don't remember all the red flags about the exact difficulties we are seeing now is because of the argumentative sledgehammer entailed by the nebulously arbitrarily perilous "weapons of MASS DESTRUCTION" and the recent memory of 9/11. Quite honestly, the way things went in Iraq have taken the "teeth" out of the phrase and desensitized us all to its scariness.
Personally, at the time, I found the vagueness of the WMD threat very suspect. A threat certain enough to justify a massive, extended operation and committment, yet uncertain enough in kind of weapon, location, scale, etc. that any more limited military action was off the table. A possible information scenario, to be sure, but given the long-term scrutiny/inspections/sanctions/etc...it just smelled funny. Didn't it?
The tone of this whole conversation has predictably spiralled into weird construals and bizarre hypotheticals that sound at a minimum prohibitively expensive in dollars, if they're even possible at all, like occupying North Korea or prohibitively expensive in the currencies of world opinion/self-respect like, oh, a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Kim Jong Il without any direct proof of a threat which sounds pretty close to the Reagan Fan. And many 3rd world dictators have "intent" or "desire" to get nukes and we don't go invading them unless it's a credible threat, and Saddam had the intent for decades anyway. The whole Iraq situation only even got started through MidEast-on-MidEast violence/imperial Iraq, not militant Islam against the US, though we surely sewed discontent with our long post Desert Storm containment of Saddam by punishment of the country (which I did think necessary). We might have been able to act unilaterally, but that strikes me as highly implausible. And come on...culture carving/scaring the arabs is even harder than nation building and unilateral extreme actions probably does as much damage as good in terms of calcifying Islamic opinion and encouraging underground aggression like 9/11.
Posted by: cb on January 15, 2007 7:24 PMWe are not fighting in an Iraqi civil war against Iraqis who don't want us here, we are fighting a proxy war against Iran and their client state, Syria. Most of the Iraqis are happy we deposed Saddam and want a life where they can go about their business in peace. The radicals who are being supplied by, encouraged by, and imported by Iran and Syria are fighting against us and trying to stir up trouble.
The old "it's all about the oil" thing is just stupid. If we'd wanted the oil, we could have bought it from Saddam much more cheaply than we would get it by invading. Not to mention the fact that we are not currently even making preparations for plundering Iraq's oil.
We need to figure out how to change Iran from an enemy to a non-enemy. Destroying it is one way, but not preferred. Having a presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, though, we are much better positioned to fight Iran, Syria, and terrorists who live in the region.
Oh, and one of our biggest mistakes was trying to appease the Doves and the international community by fighting a "compassionate war." If we'd been more willing to let our military kill bad guys in the beginning, we probably wouldn't be in the mess we're in now.
EI
Buffpilot,
How does the process work? How, exactly, does invading Iraq and unleashing a civil war "drain the swamp"?
Posted by: GT on January 15, 2007 7:34 PMWe are not the worlds police force, precisely because there is no international law on which to incorporate such a force.
We live in a world that is the equivalent of a neighborhood infested with crack houses and abandonded tenaments. So long as the law looks the other way on the existence of such things, law and therefore law abidence, cannot return.
We are not the worlds policemen and that is not our fault. Due to the failure of the world to provide a construct of law on which such things as the Saddam regime could be enforced out of existence we instead have with much regret fallen into the role of 'the worlds vigilante'.
We also live in this once proud neighborhood, yet it is by our inaction that we have learned to tolerate the horror about us. It is by our inaction that we in the West have created the conditions that allow the 'crack houses' to survive and to thrive.
It is only by our taking action to stop accepting the horror as normal that we take only the first step towards returning the neighborhood to a place a peace and freedom for its residents.
Saddam and the Tikriti Regime was wrong. Helping put the Iraqi Democracy in place was the right thing to do. It was the worlds tolerance and support of Saddam that was wrong.
This action in Iraq is based not so much the desire of the people of the United States to interfere in the sovereignty of others, but in the fact that the United Nations continues to fail to enforce its own charter against something as simple to understand and generally wholly understood as 'bad', such as genocide.
The United Nations was formed on the basis of stopping the very conditions that were allowed exist in Iraq. The fact they could not take action, or is more the case, refused to take action to stop it is what lead to our actions. Our actions were not those of policeman, they were, regrettably, those of a vigilante. It was done out of desperation.
Since the formation of the UN, Cambodia and Rwanda are but two places where the UN stood by and did nothing to stop genocide. Millions of people have died as a result, yet the UN says or does nothing, or whats worse, takes direct action to see that nothing is done.
Kurdistan was another place where millions died under the watchful tut-tuting of the UN.
Afghanistan under the Soviets was another. No vote taken to stop.
Halabja under Saddam was another. For the first time, nerve gas asa used to subdue a populace, the world - and yes, even the United States, stood by and did nothing.
Iran and Iraq stood and fought for 10 years, leading to deaths of millions. The UN never bothered to vote, even while human wave attacks were being repulsed by gas attacks by Saddam.
Hama under Syria was another. 25,000 people were massacred and plowed under their town. Not a word was spoken in protest.
This is lawlessness. Worse, This is lawlessness that is often sanctioned by the law. If you wish to end the need for a 'vigilate' you must replace him with a policeman who will lay down the law, and enforce it. If you want to stop the US from being a vigilante, you are going to have to require that the UN do what it was chartered to do.
Yet since its formation, the UN has stood by and sanctioned these millions of deaths by slow inaction. However, the US has chosen in this one case to take action to stop it, to give the people in the region a chance, not a guarantee mind you, but a chance.
The fault my friends is not in those of us who take action against genocide and for human liberty with the only effective means left at our disposal, but in the number of 'absentee landlords' who have allowed our once proud 'civilization of the west', to fall into decay.
We in the west have for far too long allowed the existence of States that have sanctioned genocide as their state policy, as well as driven out the concepts of human liberty from their lands, and yet we still allow them to sit at the same table as the rest of us, even when their hands are still bloody from the act.
When North Korea, which is by all accounts the worst sort of human concentration camp is given consideration in the world equal to the United States, when Syria sits in judgement of the west on human rights, this makes a mockery of the law.
The Worlds Policeman? Let us first agree that there is right and wrong in the law for the policeman to enforce.
Mark,
Some facets you have overlooked in your post about not giving the inspectors enough time to do their work.
The military build-up began in Kuwait and the gulf before the inspectors re-entered Iraq and began their work. Just as the train schedules are claimed for the inexorable march of the great powers to war in 1914, Bush pulled the trigger on the war before Thanksgiving in 2002, when he committed enough troops to the Persian Gulf that logistics, policy and procedures in place at that time mandated a troop drawdown within six months time.
At that point everything was ordained just like a Greek tragedy; Bush would need a significant unmistakable gesture for peace from Saddam to justify backing down, and Saddam could not make such a gesture as that would weaken him internally, which in his eyes was more likely to result in personal danger.
In November 2002, the inspectors were just beginning their work; perhaps yet another of the Bush administration's faults is that they were unable to clearly articulate to the inspectors that they had a hard deadline to document a real change in attitude had been demonstrated by Iraq. When the inspectors made their report, it was couched in diplomatic and bureacratic "maybes" and wasn't sufficient to provide the political cover needed for a troop withdrawal even if the Bush administration was "dovish" rather than "war-mongering"
The mistake of committing too many troops too soon in November 2002 forced most of the remaining choices, including the failure to stabilize post-invasion Iraq as the military's internal focus shifted to the six month troop rotation due in May/June 2003 ("Mission Accomplished") If it hasn't become obvious from our troop numbers in Iraq since; 150,000 or so is the upper limit the military can project into Iraq without making changes to long-standing policies on troop assignments and rotations or other structural changes that take years to bring to fruition. Note that the generals in 2002/2003 were asking for even larger amounts of troops to be committed than those that resulted in the wars timeline.
The other path not taken is if the administration had matched its rhetoric about the War on Terror with action and changed the policy on troop rotations to something closer to WWII, ie. multi-year or indefinate deployments. I don't think the administration had sufficient political capital to make this happen, and the effects on morale both within the military and the general public may have been too costly, but it would have allowed longer timeframes for inspections, post-invasion stabilization, more direct ties between American and Iraq units, etc. that would greatly alter what problems we face in Iraq now.
John
Posted by: John P. on January 15, 2007 8:29 PMThe hawks were correct about the war to remove Hussein and to resolve the question of Schroedinger's Cat...er...I mean, Hussein's WMD. It was necessary to look inside the box.
But the hawks were wrong about occupying Iraq with a view to changing it.
Posted by: lrC on January 15, 2007 8:29 PMLame.
This is the new theme of the newly contrite hawks: "Yes - we were wrong. But those who disagreed with us were JUST as wrong."
No offense, but that's BS. Many folks wrote before the war about the fact that a civil war would result, including Juan Cole. Many others wrote that disparate factions would resist American soldiers and American-backed political experts. Many others predicted a protracted insurgency.
If you're unaware of that, it's because you failed to consider all of the viewpoints in the run-up to the war, which makes your support for the war all the more blameworthy.
Posted by: Matt on January 15, 2007 8:35 PMMark,
Click your heels together, find out for sure. Must be pretty neat!
Meanwhile, back in the sad, real world that I inhabit, it turns out that Sadaam engaged in all kinds of obstruction of the inspections.
Posted by: Kirk Parker on January 15, 2007 8:48 PMAnd to Matt and John P., among others: Sadaam deserved absolutely no slack in the inspections department, because we actually have had experience with countries that really did divest themselves of WMD (South Africa, for one example, and of course Libya is another though post facto in relation to Iraq.) In every case, the countries went out of their way to help the inspection process, and the inspectors acted like auditors, not detectives.
Posted by: Kirk Parker on January 15, 2007 8:56 PMKirk says:
Meanwhile, back in the sad, real world that I inhabit, it turns out that Sadaam engaged in all kinds of obstruction of the inspections.
I too recall lots of objections to the inspectors' activities, but see Hans Blix's appraisal, upthread, that he could go wherever he wanted in Iraq unimpeded.
John P. says:
The military build-up began in Kuwait and the gulf before the inspectors re-entered Iraq and began their work
To me, that makes things even worse: the administration made a show of supporting the inspectors for a time, all the while knowing that their findings would be ignored.
That the invasion was undertaken before the inspection team was even able to turn in their final report is a matter of record. It's not credible to suggest that Saddam's threat was so imminent that waiting a few extra months for more definitive findings was an unacceptable risk. The inspectors' initial results, which indicated the truth, were ignored because the administration was simply unwilling to consider the possibility that they were wrong. In the end, the inspection team had to flee the country as the invasion began.
Posted by: Mark on January 15, 2007 9:07 PMMatt,
As cb posted above, the civil war, protracted insurgency and resistance were known to be the likely results of removing Saddam's regime back in 91 and were used as justification as to why the ceasefire was put in place. The military wargamed Iraq for the twelve years the ceasefire held, (Yes, including many exercises during the Clinton administration) yet we find ourselves facing the same problems discussed then.
Either the administration ignored these risks, or it viewed them as as smaller than the risk of Saddam's regime regaining a WMD capability and sharing WMDs with Palestinians whom Saddam was overtly funding to perform suicide attacks on Israel where many American citizens were dying or covertly funneling them to Al Quaeda or a similar independent terrorist group who shared Saddam's interest in "shaming" America.
The problem remains the same as it was in 1991, how do we maintain our national interests in preventing a regional war in the Middle East, protect American citizens living in the region, and promote American ideals such as tolerance, liberty and rule of law rather than rule of men?
Given the sectarian and tribal tensions, it appears that we cannot get the Iraqis to unite with us and we do not want them to unite against us. We are stuck between trying to contain the violence and drive the Shias and Sunnis to a diplomatic/political process that may take decades to end the bloodshed, or take a hand-off approach that will reduce the number of American casualties in the short-term but greatly increases the chance of a regional war.
John
Posted by: John P. on January 15, 2007 9:21 PMKirk,
I agree with your comments that the South African disarmament model is what Saddam's response should have been to avoid war. I believe that he was politically/culturally unable to take those steps.
For the record, I am a war supporter since December 02 when I came to the conclusion that the war was inevitable barring the Second Coming or other dramatic metaphysical change in human nature. I continue to support it as I have not seen any evidence of an alternative that protects America's interests or minimizes casualties better than the course we have taken given the resources available to us. As I stated before, I believe it requires long-term changes in our military to improve the situation in Iraq, changes which we would not see the benefits from for several years.
I also note that I slipped a post-facto reasoning change in my last post. The administration believed that Saddam had WMD and if the military pressure we had imposed on Iraq before the inspectors went in relented, Saddam could proliferate his WMDs. Preventing Saddam from restarting his WMD program was part of the UN resolutions before the war and was why the inspectors' report was insufficient; but it was not emphasized until after all the facts had been determined in late 03.
I do not believe the inspectors were sent in to be ignored; I think the administration gave Saddam one final time-limited chance to make a new beginning. It failed in explicitly stating a deadline for its goodwill, although there are valid military and diplomatic reasons for hiding the deadline publicly. There is evidence that the inspectors like the French downplayed the American commitment to war or a major gesture from the Iraqis by Spring.
As I recall, the inspectors were asked by the administration to depart Iraq two weeks before the war began. That they were still there when the bombs began to fall just emphasizes how much the world underestimated the seriousness with which the administration viewed their standoff with Saddam.
John
Posted by: John P. on January 15, 2007 9:53 PMPreventing Saddam from restarting his WMD program was part of the UN resolutions before the war and was why the inspectors' report was insufficient
Can you elaborate on this? I don't understand why the desire to make sure Saddam didn't restart his WMD program made inspections inadequate for determining whether he actually had any.
Inspections before the invasion were revealing, and would presumably have definitively concluded, that the sanctions against Iraq to date had been successful in preventing a WMD program restart. As it turned out, this was confirmed after the invasion.
Posted by: Mark on January 15, 2007 10:13 PMAssuming that Liberal opponents of the war "got lucky" on a random outcome of the war...
We have to ask ourselves if it would have been worthwhile to be unlucky on a guess of Saddam using WMD or providing them to terrorists that would.
In other words isn't it better to invade, topple a rogue regime and fail than to do nothing and possibly have a WMD go off in Manhattan?
The sad thing is...within my lifetime I'm sure we're going to find out the answer to that second alternative. And something tells me that when that happens, we're all going to be nostalgic for George W. Bush's era.
Posted by: Cro on January 15, 2007 10:38 PMDespite being called a "warbot" by antiwar.com, I only reluctantly supported the "war". And, if you look at my contemporaneous posts at the command-post.org, I think you'll see that the issues I pointed out turned out to be the precursors to the problems we're currently having.
Perhaps Jane Galt should take a look back at the posts by idiots like Insty and other Bush apologists who downplayed the looting and similar events.
Posted by: TLB on January 15, 2007 10:38 PMHans Blix stated in front the UN delegation before the invasion (but after the reintroduction of inspectors to Iraq) that Iraq was not in full compliance with the inspection regime as required of the Iraqi government by the UN and the treaty obligations of the end of the '91 gulf war. Blix et. al. have couched that statement a great deal then AND since, but the final answer at the time was that Saddam was still playing games and that the inspectors could not conduct their work.
Posted by: Deamon on January 15, 2007 10:58 PMI'm still not convinced the invasion has "failed". What seems to me to have happened is something that I in fact predicted (though I wrongly thought it was less than 100% likely) The chorus of media and academic harping finally reached some kind of critical mass and many people appeared to suddenly "jump" and try to get out in front of the new CW. This is without any identifiable turning of the tide in Iraq that I can identify.
Nonetheless I've decided that the US should never again attempt any kind of invasion and occupation. We can't stay focused and see it through. That, and not some notion that the Iranian-backed insurgents have somehow defeated us, is the reality we all need to learn and internalize.
Posted by: Stacy on January 15, 2007 11:01 PMAll you doves,
Do you respect this bunch for changing their minds?
Only quotes, sure, but taken together they look awfully, um, hawkish. Of course, this was largely before the fact. I suppose they deserve our respect for their astounding flexibility.
Deamon, I'm not sure how to reconcile the views you attribute to Blix with his actual words, in his last presentation to the UN before the war, quoted above. If you look at the team's reports, I don't think it's at all fair to say that the "inspectors could not conduct their work".
Posted by: Mark on January 15, 2007 11:12 PMMark,
The reports after the war state that although Saddam did not restart his WMD program and had no major stockpiles of completed WMDs, Iraq maintained their WMD program in stasis rather than dismantling them as required by the UN resolutions.
Saddam may have hoped that by demonstrating just enough compliance to get a good report by the inspectors he could get the sanctions, which were on the verge of collapse in 2001, lifted. He had made inquiries in Sudan, as documented by Plame, about acquiring uranium to support his nuclear program. The evidence points to a regime that tried and failed to skirt the line between legal and illegal behavior to acquire WMD despite the numerous UN resolutions specifically forbidding Iraq from possessing them.
What was needed from Iraq was a gesture like Libya's where the international inspectors were able to witness the destruction not just of the WMDs but of the infrastructure building them, including removing materials to one of the acknowledged nuclear powers under the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.
France or Russia could have helped here, a deal might have been made where significant materials such as research reactors were turned over in exchange for say a French-built and internationally monitored light-water reactor similar to what was attempted in North Korea by the Clinton administration. It would have been a very difficult deal to negotiate; there was zero trust of the Iraqis by the administration, which requires the Iraqis to make the first gesture towards real compliance with the UN resolutions or opening negotiations with the Americans.
Saddam maintained a tyranny based on his image as a strong man, including swimming across the Tigris or Euphrates river (I don't remember which) on his birthday to demonstrate to his people his continued good health and power. After 1991, he positioned his regime as oppposed to America to maintain the appearance of strength despite the sanctions. It would have taken time, even if Saddam was willing to cooperate, to change the public stance of his government before the gestures needed to avoid war could be made. The inspectors reported better compliance when they made their visits, so it is possible that the regime was beginning to make the changes but ran out of time.
The biggest problem continues to be the administration's ability to state clearly and unambiguously their intents when necessary. To some extent this is a result of the Mirandizing of our political culture since the early 90's when every unambiguous public statement made will be used against you by the other party and the distortion made by the media which summarizes or takes quotes out of context to alter the intent of politicians speeches from what is present in text to the press's interpretation of the speech's intent.
However, as the cliche goes, it takes two to tango and I have not seen any evidence of Iraq affirmatively working towards peace rather than passively cooperating with inspectors.
John
Posted by: John P. on January 15, 2007 11:16 PMThe pitch that was made to the US public and the world was that Saddam's regime posed an imminent threat to the United States, based specifically on the claim that Saddam actually posessed WMDs. Only this claim of self-defense against a specific danger was sufficient to justify the war, which most abroad nonetheless saw as illegitimate.
I understand that many here would have supported the invasion despite the fact that there was, as we now know, no imminent danger. I understand that to them, the complaints John P. lists about Saddam's regime would have been sufficient. I, too, agree that Saddam's history of skirting restrictions made him untrustworthy and dangerous, although I would not have supported invasion as the response.
Had the truth been known, however, it is clear that invasion would never have been politically feasible. A great many anti-war agitators counseled specifically that we learn the truth before acting. We now know that this would have made an enormous difference, and potentially averted the current catastrophe.
For that wisdom, I think more credit is due than what Jane has meted out here.
Running a war is like painting a beach in a hurricane. It's not easy to tell a competent painter from an incompetent one. A lot of people here don't get that.
700 people died in a training accident that was to ready the troops for D-Day. That's a major f888 up. It will never be as famous as Abu Graib, or George S Patton smacking a guy for cowardace. I prefer to hear about "incompetence" from people who know the difference.
I supported the war understanding that there'd be things like bombing the wrong target, or the wrong equiptment being issued. The worst war critics ask for infallibility without really wanting it.
Mark,
Do you think Saddam had WMD in 1998 when the inspectors left?
Posted by: Dave on January 16, 2007 12:14 AMDave, I haven't looked into the matter, so I don't know. As I understand it, though, the inspectors' unimpeded access in 2003 was in great contrast to their difficulties in the previous inspection regime.
Posted by: Mark on January 16, 2007 12:19 AMFIRST, On the 180th anniversary of Bastille Day, president Nixon's adviser Henry Kissinger was with Zhou Enlai, Mao Tsetung's long-time loyal deputy, making arangements for President Nixon's historic trip to China. Making conversation, Kissinger asked Zhou if he thought the French Revolution had been a success.
"It is too soon to tell," replied Zhou.
"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) http://www.bartleby.com/66/78/27678.html
SECOND, whether or not things have gone as we wished they would in Iraq, we have, by no stretch of the imagination, lost the war. In both blood and money this war has been very cheap. (Don't get hysterical on me, in comparison to the population of the US 300 million and its 13 trillion dollar GDP the costs are trivial.)
A war is lost when one side no longer has the ability to fight. What we have suffered in Iraq are mere mosquito bites. If we have the will to continue in Iraq until we achieve our objectives we can continue and no one can stop us. American troops could stay in Iraq permanently and there is not a blessed thing that anyone in the middle east could do about it.
THIRD, That said, I have thought for the past couple of years that anyone who believed the troops would be home for Christmas was kidding themselves. Perhaps the Administration was not as pointed as they should have been, but I thought, and still think that, the projects that we had to finish before we could leave Iraq are long term.
One, we need to end the insurgency. All experience in that type of warfare suggests that a decade is the minimum time that can be alloted for that project.
Two, we have to build an Iraqi army. In order to build an army we need corps of officers and of NCOs. The US Army thinks it takes 15 years to make an NCO. 2020 anyone.
Three, we need to create viable political institutions. Iraq is and was a shattered society. This is a very long term task. The best comparable that I can think of is South Korea. After harsh Japanese occupation, WWII and the Korean War, SoKo was pretty much of a basket case as well. It took almost 35 years to achieve a stable democratic government in SoKo.
62 years after the end of WWII, we still have troops in Japan and Germany, and 54 years after the end of the Korean War, we still have troops in Korea. Unless we decide to bug out of Iraq, we will have troops there for a generation at least, which is the amount of time that a stable republic will take to build.
FOURTH, The origins of the war are an interesting historical debate, but nothing more. We are here now, if we pull out there will be chaos of unprecedented proportion. We must see our tasks through. If we need to change personnel, strategies or tactics then we shall have to do so. "You are not required to complete the task, yet you are not free to withdraw from it."
That said, I still think we do not know what the real import of the WMD was. Did Saddam really go all in after the river, on a nothing hand? Did he think he had WMD? Was he deluded by his underlings who were afraid to tell him the truth? Did he send the WMD to Syria or hide them in the mountains?
Nonetheless, we had sufficient cause to go to war, and I was and still am satisfied that the US and its allies acted in good faith and on the basis of the best available information. Further, WMD were not the only reason to go to war and anyone who asserts that simply was not paying attention. Go read the numerous speeches that the President and PM Blair gave.
However, even those causes yield to the deeper geo-political reality. Iraq is the keystone of the middle east. The US has been at war with Iran since 1979. Saudi Arabia is a state sponsor of Jihadist ideology. Syria is a very bad actor that has allied itself with Iran, oppressed Lebanon, and sponsored a long running proxy war with Israel. Iraq is in the middle. All of which leads to my last major point.
FIFTH, the war in Iraq is being sponsored by, and would not continue without the efforts of, Iran and Syria. If we have made a mistake it is in not being sufficiently aggressive with those two states. A corollary to that is that we have tied our own hands by failing to double the size of our ground forces since 9/11. Te lack of those resources may be the root cause of the mistake. We still need to do it. In order to finance it we should impose a $2.00/gal tax on gasoline. That would send a powerful message to the world oil markets and divert money from the petro states to US treasury.
What "doves" are you talking about? The ones who supported the war in Afghanistan (As Howard Dean did), and thought that Bush moving on to Iraq was wrong-headed hubris that was not justified by the events of 9/11?
Those doves?
Posted by: phosphorious on January 16, 2007 1:35 AMTrue enough that many of today's doves are riding hindsight, or would have been anti-war no matter what and did not make predictions that came true - but not all of them. There are a few who correctly predicted many aspects of the war before it happened (there would be no WMDs, insurgency, civil war): the physicist/biologist Gregory Cochran, former generals William Odom and Anthony Zinni, Brent Scowcroft... As for improving your decisionmaking, that's something I've thought about a bit, and from looking at the few people who were genuinely prescient, I think there's simply no substitute for knowing a lot of stuff, specific and technical details, about the subject matter - which enables you to see things, make connections, that uninformed people simply cannot. For example, one person I am aware of who correctly predicted the state of Saddam's WMD programs did so based on in-depth technical knowledge of nuclear and biological technology, but also on knowledge of the money, resources, and technical talent available to Saddam (in short: he simply didn't have enough to work with, and that was knowable before the war).
Posted by: tc on January 16, 2007 1:43 AMMark,
Keep in mind that for most of 2002, the administration made it clear that the status quo in Iraq was unacceptable. Part of Al Quaeda's justification of their acts against us was that we had stationed troops in Saudi Arabia to enforce the UN resolutions including the Southern no-fly zone over the Shia.
The administration could not abandon its military obligations under the UN without weakening our defense treaty relationships with other countries; at the same time, Al Quaeda was gaining recruits and strength because of our stand-off with Iraq. Resolving the Iraqi compliance with the UN resolutions in a manner publicly seen to be favorable to the US and that would allow the American troops to be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia was necessary to avoid Al Quaeda recovering its Afghanistan losses with Saudis and others with religious objections to our presence on Saudi soil.
John
Posted by: John P. on January 16, 2007 1:50 AMJane, one appreciates your interest in reassessing your conclusions, but I find your reassessment process narrow and flawed. I say this as a general fan of your writing.
First of all, your reassessment is limited to a single item: I was wrong to be 100% certain that Saddamn had WMD. You state this as if this, by itself, represents a reason to regret supporting the invasion, but I find this a poor reason to change one's mind on the neccesity of the war. I have been anti-war from the beginning, but to an extent I agree with the pro-war hawks - if the possibility of Saddamn's active WMD program justifies a decision to invade, than a certainty is not neccesary.
But the presence of an active WMD program represents a bad, stupid criteria to justify an invasion of another country, all by itself. This is obviously true, as we have not invaded Israel, Britain, or India. Furthermore, the presence of an active WMD program by a state that does not always cooperate with the US is not a sufficient rationale for invasion, as we did not invade South Africa, Brazil, or Pakistan. Finally, the presence of an active WMD program by a state with a bad human rights record and whose leader is actively hostile to the United States is *still* insufficient grounds to justify an invasion, as we did not invade the Soviet Union, Communist China, nor have we invaded Syria nor Iran to this very day.
We did not invade Saddamn for reasons of WMD. WMD was never the issue, and intelligent experts on both sides discussed this.
The invasion of Iraq was meant to be a transformative first strike on the Middle-East in general, a gung-ho miracle cure to a politically sick region, a testosterone-filled show of force, and most of all a Punch and Judy show to the American People that would confer political benefits to those who initiated it.
The American people did not turn against the war when WMD's were found to not be present. They turned against the war when the Iraqi state experiment seemed to be deteriorating before the eyes of the American viewer, as did the promise of any sense of liberation and the evaporation of clear military or political-transformation benchmarks.
Your discussion of errors of your reasoning, therefore, is inadequate, when your sole evaluated premise is a belief in Saddamn's WMD programs that is ultimately irrelevant to the decision to invade Iraq. When the US's behavior is viewed in a larger statistical batch - responses to WMD programs by non-allied states - it becomes clear that the presence of WMD is irrelevant,
except in the context of an alledged new doctrine of pre-emptive war that is neither sustainable nor productive.
This is the grounds upon which you need to assess your support for the Iraq war. Until you do so, your ideally responsible self-evaluation process is so incomplete as to be genuinely unhelpful to you. You have no genuine basis for making a contrary decision when the next choice arrives. You haven't really learned what the results are trying to tell you.
I'm specifically requesting that you address other outcomes of the war beyond Saddamn not having WMD, and your re-evaluation of your thinking on these premises, as well as the general utility of systematically invading regimes with WMD programs - or, even more real-world relevant, of *not* systematically invading regimes with WMD programs, but of occasionally and randomly invading every fourth regime with *incomplete* WMD programs.
Thanks.
Posted by: glasnost on January 16, 2007 1:53 AM"What "doves" are you talking about?"
Straw doves.
Posted by: dovie doverson on January 16, 2007 2:07 AM
Charley Reese
Pat Buchanan
Eric Margolis
There's three 'doves' to get you started. If you do a little research into their archives, you'll find eerily prophetic and insightful assessments of the Iraq situation. Or you could persist in cultivating your garden of imaginary cliche characters, if you prefer.
Posted by: Chris Wren on January 16, 2007 2:22 AMMark,
The pitch that was made to the US public and the world was that Saddam's regime posed an imminent threatWell, sure, except for that little "State of the Union" talk, but who watches that, right???
And contrary to this claim:
Only this claim of self-defense against a specific danger was sufficient to justify the warin fact, Iraq's repeated violations of the terms of the 1991 cease fire were causus belli enough, except for those folks for whom there can be no such grounds.
Posted by: Kirk Parker on January 16, 2007 2:55 AM
Glasnost is right-on.
The WMD argument, as it was actually used, was never more than a propaganda tool. After successful wars, propaganda is forgotten. After failed wars, propaganda is ridiculed. But arguments about propaganda shouldn't be confused with arguments about the just-ness or unjust-ness of a war.
Competently executed, this could have been a just war. That makes the incompetence with which it was executed all the more tragic.
Posted by: David Wright on January 16, 2007 2:59 AMThis is the most hilarious post in this whole commentary, which has been excellent...
"But the presence of an active WMD program represents a bad, stupid criteria to justify an invasion of another country, all by itself. This is obviously true, as we have not invaded Israel, Britain, or India. Furthermore, the presence of an active WMD program by a state that does not always cooperate with the US is not a sufficient rationale for invasion, as we did not invade South Africa, Brazil, or Pakistan. Finally, the presence of an active WMD program by a state with a bad human rights record and whose leader is actively hostile to the United States is *still* insufficient grounds to justify an invasion, as we did not invade the Soviet Union, Communist China, nor have we invaded Syria nor Iran to this very day.
The very definition of acceptable "sufficient grounds" seems to ignore the struggles of modern libertarian civilization against the fascist dictatorships and various communist nightmares that have resulted in MILLIONS of people dying needlessly.
Should North Korea have as many ICBMS as they want? No.
Was bombing all of Hiroshima "reasonable" by the standards of human warfare? If the other option is a fascist Dictatorship or an Imperial imposition, of course.
Actually, the standards of human warfare would have dictated that Hiroshima be nuked and then whatever else was left along with it. Fortunately, we continue to refine the definition of liberty. Less people have had to die over the same stupid argument as civilization evolves.
So what bothers me is that Jane Galt falls on the WMD sword as if to ignore the geo-political factors involved with "ignoring" Saddam after 9/11.
I thought this was the smart place.
Thank Frank for keepin' it real cuz seriously Jane....
Posted by: Tman on January 16, 2007 4:33 AMI was in favor of the invasion of Iraq because it seemed obvious that the past policy of maintaining the status quo in the region was wrong. A "hands off" attitude when dealing with murderous despots and fanatical theocracies appeared to be a prime way to ensure that terrorist organizations can build up their strength to the point where they are a very real threat.
And let me say that I still believe this, just as I still believe that it is obvious.
So far as building a functional liberal democracy in Iraq is concerned, I figured that it would take about 50 years or so. After all, the culture there is oriented towards the clan and tribe than with any sort of national identity. It seems reasonable to think that it would take two generations of people who grew up with the idea to finally make significant changes.
So it might take 50 years, but the Iraqi government could probably fake it in 20 or so if we maintained a strong military presence. We have already reaped benefits from the invasion (Libya's sudden abandonment of their WMD program, for example), so it doesn't look like keeping some troops in country for that long would be going against our national interest.
The constant cries of "It's all going bad!" appear to me to be incredibly and profoundly naive. What exactly did you think was going to happen? That a country that had been under the heel of a brutal dictatorship, one which had been pouring anti-West propaganda down the throats of it's subjects for decades, would suddenly become America Lite in two or three years?
James
Posted by: James R. Rummel on January 16, 2007 6:00 AMFWIW, I think it was Josh Marshall who opposed the war with the "right war, wrong leader" argument - he admitted that dealing with Saddam was regrettably necessary (essentially following Ken Pollack, IIRC) but believed that if the occupation could be messed up, Bush was the guy to do it.
As a small government conservative myself I should have taken more seriously the idea that a government led by small-government conservatives might not excel at nation-building.
Posted by: Tom Maguire on January 16, 2007 6:20 AMThe only place I feel I was wrong was having to much confidence in the government. And I don't mean the leadership-- their failure has mostly be on the PR level, a fleeting perception that will fade with time and (though highly unlikely it is being taken advantage of) something that can be used to our advantage strategically.
My failure was in understanding of goverment in general. I already had negative opinion of how goverment functioned. Seeing the military support in action (or rather in-action) has left me feeling rather disgusted. Things that should take minutes or hours, take days. Industry politics and appearances are more important than doing good work, for those not in combat or working directly on ground doing specific reconstruction projects. The inefficiency was beyond anything I expected, and my expectations were low. The military isn't a whole lot different than the stereo-type of the post office--not the smooth, reliable post office today, the post office of 25 years ago (and the phone company). There are people who will spend hours of effort to avoid doing minutes of work. It is the ultimate bureaucracy.
If there was a mistake, I think was taking on too much responsibility for the reconstruction. We should have provided more training and made Iraqis a bigger part of reconstruction efforts. In fact, maybe we should have provided security for Iraqi workers and expert consultanting advice for project leaders, rather than doing much of the work on our own. We should have left Iraqi politics alone and focused our presence on insuring Iraq against outside threats (iran, syria, saudi...) We should have provided constructive criticism (like recommending a simple constitution and leaving out certain details to be addressed by future legislation), but not played a major role in the formation of goverment.
Our military functions best in crisis. Once major combat ops ended, we fell back on regulation and bureaucracy (or allowed them to catch up).
I also had more faith in the admin to remain hands-off during the formation of Iraq goverment. We should have focussed on what we are best at, removing regimes and providing quick military resonses.
All this is to say not that what we have done isn't effective. I believe our efforts will prove to have been quite successful overall. It is just much slower and more expensive than I expected.
I think that after major combat, we should have had a much smaller role. A large presence, but relatively inactive other than putting out the occassionaly fire. Let the Iraqis experiment, and then if we don't like what they build, knock it down and try again.
Posted by: aaron on January 16, 2007 8:24 AMbecause precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did.
Hysterical.
You were wrong, they were right.
Grow the hell up.
Posted by: salvage on January 16, 2007 9:01 AMAnd, though rare, I'm one of many hawks who was skeptical of Saddams WMD capabilities (even if he had dangerous programs, he'd have focused on JIT production and not have much actual munitions). I don't think a lot of the stuff has a long shelf life for one, and better to focus on developing processes & doing research than risk getting caught with a bunch of ineffective weapons you;re not supposed to have.
I was hopefully optimistic at times that we'd find a bunch of stuff at times, just to put the revisionist dove in their place, but I would cringe the few times officials suggested we would be finding bunches of the stuff. Did't make sense to me.
I also always heard the coveats "likely for", "can be used for/to", "unaccounted for". I remeber the WMD angle usually sold as being about not what we knew, but what we didn't know. A lot the quotes that hyped the WMD angle we short on context.
Posted by: aaron on January 16, 2007 9:52 AMI never bought Powell's WMD "evidence", but I advocated regime change because I saw sanctions collapsing and Saddam reemerging as a war-starting America-hater.
I don't apologize for what I couldn't have known, but I made numerous errors in my continuing support for the war. My mea culpas:
I didn't notice that we were unprepared for the unspeakably evil insurgency. In my defense, by 2003 we had seen no comparable insurgency in Afghanistan, a nation that was also ethnically divided, filled with more Islamic radicals.
I didn't notice the mismatch between Rumsfeld's "Afghanistan"-style small-footprint military model and Bremer's "Bosnian occupation"-style governance which required "Shinseki"-level troop deployments.
As the insurgency grew, I generally supported but didn't strongly enough advocate increasing the size of the available military.
I didn't sufficiently criticize the "Bernie Kerik" level of naivete of the green-zone abiding civilians who took part in the occupation, nor the ongoing failure of US institutions to build the infrastructure (e.g., Arab speakers and humint) we need to win the longer struggle.
All that said, I think we can win, and must find a way to do so. I hope Petraeus' new tactical approach can change the very bad trends we all observe. The return to the force levels of a year ago (the "surge") won't accomplish that on their own.
This is not the thread for criticizing the doves.
Posted by: Larry on January 16, 2007 10:17 AMSome here have gone so far as to suggest that WMDs were not the primary public rationale for the war. This is trivially disprovable by reading, say, the 2003 SotU and Powell's speech to the UN. Both stress the intolerable danger of Saddam posessing WMDs, and specific claims that he did, in fact, posess them. In the SotU, for example, Bush says "disarm" nine times.
Kirk points to the 2003 SotU to criticize my claim that an "imminent" threat was sold to the US public. He's right that Bush specifically refuses to wait until the "threat is imminent". I stand by my point that the war's justification rested on a specific, material threat that was thought to exist but didn't: Saddam's posession of WMDs. The latter third of the SotU discusses that threat in detail, and Powell's presentation is entirely devoted to it. I think it's obvious that invasion would have been politically unsalable if it had been known that Saddam's regime had no WMDs at all and no operating program to develop them.
This is not irrelevant nostalgia in a thread refusing to credit the doves with wisdom. There were specific calls not to rush to war and to let inspectors determine the truth. Those calls were ignored.
"The very definition of acceptable "sufficient grounds" seems to ignore the struggles of modern libertarian civilization against the fascist dictatorships and various communist nightmares that have resulted in MILLIONS of people dying needlessly."
You ignore the point of glasnost's paragraph to your peril.
There is not a two pole discussion where on one side we hate communists and fascists and invade and depose them and rebuild their states, and on the other side we encourage them and think they are wonderful.
There are methods of dealing with bad guys who have WMD other than invading.
As a dove, my biggest concern with Iraq was that we would not be able to be a credible example for the iraqi people. In the best of all possible worlds, taking down Saddam was a good thing, but I had a lot of concern over whether we would end up as a hated occupying force, rather than seen as a partner, and whether invasion was really the right idea, rather than an attempt at constructive engagement.
Constructive engagement has gotten pretty good results with unsavory regimes in Chile, Vietnam and China, and a complete lack of it hasn't worked very well in Cuba or Iran.
The biggest problem I had was what I saw as a rush to war, and a completely lack of understanding on the hawk side of just how bad and expensive war is and how much evidence ought to be required before engaging in it. Getting to Baghdad and deposing Saddam was the *easy* part, and everyone, dove and hawk alike knew that, although I admit that part turned out to be even easier than I (or most) expected. The hard part was going to be keeping the power vacuum from being by just another dictator, or a failed state. The Bush administration didn't have any real plan for this, and ignored the advice of their military leadership about what it would require.
That's the primary reason I opposed the war, because we were not willing to commit what was required in our central case estimates *before the war* to have a credible chance of ending up with a good result. Instead, we sold the war as was with fear. Fear of islamic terrorish, and fear of WMD. And I am convinced that we are less secure today than if we had continued on our previous course, *even if the claims about WMD had been correct*.
And the absolute foremost problem with the hawkish side in 2002, right through until the majority of americans turned against the war, and even still persisting amongst many pundits today, is the branding of any position short of full support for the war and the administration's plans as either peacenik fantasy or terrorist loving treason. That level of accusation was limited to the fringe on the dove side, but had mainstream credibility on the hawk side.
Hawks who engaged in or even failed to note and counter that rhetoric should be publically regretting and repenting that, or I can have no respect for their opinions whatsoever.
The decision to enter the war was, I believe, wrong. Lots of people are wrong, and the decisions are hard, and I respect anyone who, like you, is willing to at least not paper over what they said three years ago. I can even respect that you'd still make the same decision with the same information.
The decision to demonize or treat as completely unserious anyone who opposed that decision, was not just wrong, it was evil, fascist, anti-Republican, and anti-liberty, and I have a hard time taking seriously any claims to conservative, libertarian, or liberal philosophy on the part of those who engaged in it (and the liberal hawks were nearly as bad as right-wingers in this regard).
Note that I'm not accusing Jane of this, because I haven't been reading her long enough to know her record on that score, but it's been very prevalent in the blogosphere and the MSM, and most of the worst perpetrators have been far less forthcoming about admitting *any* of their errors than JG is in this post.
What I want to ask those who *still* consider any anti-war position "unserious" or "treasonous" is: what part of "War is Hell" do you fail to understand? When we start a war, we are bringing hell on earth to someplace. We need a *lot* of really solid justification before that becomes a good decision. "Just trust our glorious leader" is not solid justification, it's what passes for justification in tin-pot dictatorships.
Posted by: Michael Sullivan on January 16, 2007 11:39 AMI was a supporter of the war, and I still am. It was the correct decision at the time. In the spirit of the original post on this site, in light of how history has panned out since 2003, I feel the now-known evidence is leaving my original opinions generally intact about the War in general.
We are indeed in an existential war, and we need to win. The idea of leaving Arab dysfunction in place, allowing it to fester in a world of increasing access to high-impact weapons of all kinds, is no longer an option. We must transform that region (and other regions) on many fronts, including military. The result we must desire is for a "transparent" world to emerge, perhaps in a way similar to what David Brin ("The Transparent Society") has begun to stipulate. In one respect, the Iraqi War was one of many battles in the new "Transparency Wars" (heck, read Brin's fiction book from the early 1990s, "Earth"). If someone wants to play with nukes, it can no longer be excusable that the nuke-holstering someone act as an opaque dictator or skirt their responsibilities for the safety of their fellow humans in any way. The world must be allowed in, and should be allowed to judge you strictly--this includes Iran and North Korea with whom the world still has unfinished business. The problem we face is that the number of nuke-/bio-/nano-/computer-holstering dictators will simply rise over the coming years as the knowledge of making such weapons disperses and the supporting technologies become cheaper and more accessible. The barriers to entry into the nation- and species-threatening club continues to decline.
One tool we have to deal with these future super-empowered individuals (dictators), that is those who could one day hold the entire human species hostage for their own aims (and that scenario will likely happen one day), is a credible use of military force against them. Iraq is an example where the use of force against a potentially malignant opacity is shown to have been a real option. At some point, we are telling future dictators, someone (and it doesn't have to be the one-size-fits-all UN) will get pissed off enough to take you out and kill you should you try to walk in Saddam's shadow. Unfortunately, the calculus of dictators may not respond well to logic that since (I believe) most dictators probably talk themselves into believing in some kind of exceptionalism. That is, they probably believe that they are somehow immune to any sort of traditional response, like the use of military force of any kind. Although we will probably always have to be creative about how we handle empowered exceptionalism, we must be prepared to be "traditional" and use military force when necessary. In this respect, I see Iraq as one of many such efforts that may be needed in the coming age against the rise of the "angry young man with nukes," or the super-empowered individual who could leverage the powers of future history to become a state in their own right. I also see the build-up to Iraq as one in which the world's nations came dangerously close to destroying the credibility of the use of such force in the future.
Posted by: Nicole Tedesco on January 16, 2007 11:48 AMCivil war may very well have been predicted by hawks.
It surely didn't escape anyone's notice that not long after Tito ceased to hold them together, Yugoslavia's ethnic factions fell to fighting among each other and it was difficult to cap the fighting once it started. A forward-thinking person might have asked the general question, "Are there other multi-ethnic countries that are held together only by the grip of a dictator?", and then the specific questions: "When Hussein dies or is removed, will the ethnic factions in Iraq start a war which cripples not only Iraq's production but spills over into shipping in the Per