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 Persian Gulf?", and "Should someone be there to restrain the civil war before it begins (pre-empt it) rather than after?", and "Is it in our interests to be that someone?".
Of course, you can't sell a war to anyone on that pragmatic basis.
Posted by: lrC on January 16, 2007 12:26 PMSo the rationale for war that I see recurring here is: "these are bad governments with potential access to bad weapons, and it behooves us to invade to liberate folks from tyranny and create geopolitical stability". Or something like that.
Why is it only us that gets to do this? What if France sees tyranny in governments that have less socialistic tendencies that its own? What if Russia "needs" to invade Ukraine because it sees a geopolitical threat? I'm leery of a double standard here, where the US gets to ramble around the world freeing people as it sees fit on dubious moral and political grounds, but anyone else who tries it is out of line. Since when do we own the moral and political high ground in the world? What gives us the right? Who made us the world's cop? Having the most powerful military and biggest economy isn't the full answer to that question.
If there are true -global- threats from instability and tyranny, then by all means, let's have a -global- solution to it. Surely these are problems that other countries have an interest in. Why is there no consensus around action? Probably because there is a more nuanced and pragmatic view of how international relations, such as the idea that the consequences of instability can be far worse than tolerating bad governments.
9/11 was a lashing out against perceived US imperialism. The response? Invade an Arab country basically unilaterally. Well, that has acted to simply confirm a lot of the world's opinion (right or wrong) of us as aggressive and colonial.
I'm rambling. But I think the "mistake" was not over whether we were right or wrong about WMD. The mistake was the entire premise that military invasion is the best or only option, that it is OUR choice to make, when there's foreign governments we don't like who might do bad things in the future. The mistake was believing that the use of military power would create peace and tranquility. The mistake is the assumption that the economic and political freedom we enjoy here is so objectively desirable that those in other nations that are unfortunate enough not to enjoy these systems are simply prevented from creating them because of tyranny, and that once that tyranny is removed, the grateful denizens of these lands would put aside all other interests and collectively come together to create that system in their own country. The mistake is assuming that we can go forward and create the world in our image simply because we are powerful.
The mistake is arrogance, plain and simple.
Posted by: g-man on January 16, 2007 12:35 PMG-Man, I do believe the rest of the world should be involved. However, the environment I see being created is that is becoming harder and harder for the large state organizations to accomplish what needs to be done. The future seems to be converging into a power struggle between individuals and smaller, more nimble groups. Overly large organizations like the UN have the most difficult time fighting this war. In some respects, Iraq may have been the US's last major "gasp" before it falls into political incompetence due to infighting between empowered individuals within the US and without. The war against the "angry young man with nukes" has started and I am not sure how it will be ultimately won. Regardless, a war is on and Iraq was a traditionalist response in a war which the "non-traditional" way of war has barely been outlined.
Posted by: Nicole Tedesco on January 16, 2007 1:25 PMBut 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.
that's simply not true.
as far as building a shiny democracy in Iraq, we had a perfectly good way of predicting the way Bush would handle the aftermath of the war: Afghanistan.
the WMD evidence was unconvincing to many (no matter what Yancey Ward says). i must've asked this question a dozen times, in Fall 2002: "If we know where the WMDs are, why haven't we told the UN inspectors where to find them ?" i never once got a convincing answer, and i doubt i'll get one now; fact is, there's no good reason, so i assume we were giving the inspectors every good lead we thought we had. and they never turned-up anything. the WMD angle was played-out before the first shots were fired. in fact, it was played-out as soon as Powell did his slide show.
and once we knew BushCo was lying about the WMDs, we had strong reason to doubt their sincerity w/r/t any of the other claims they were making. add that to their failure to follow-through in Afghanistan, and it was clear that they were going to fnck-up Iraq.
i'll admit to getting one thing wrong - for a long time i thought they messed-up Afghanistan simply because they didn't want to bother making it work. now i see that's only partially true; in addition to their callous disinterest in "nation building", they're also monumentally incompetent.
so, no, i was not accidentally right. i was right because i looked at what they had done before and what they were doing at the time, and concluded that they were lying and that they weren't going to make a great Democracy out of Iraq, let alone start a reverse-domino effect that would turn the whole region into our bestest pals evah.
i was right. you guys weren't.
Posted by: cleek on January 16, 2007 1:34 PMShorter Jane Galt: I was wrong, I still refuse to listen to those that got it right, time after time, for they were dirty f*g hippies and I have Manolo Blaniks on my toes.
Posted by: jerry on January 16, 2007 1:54 PMShorter Jane Galt: It's objectivism, just without having to be objective silly.
Posted by: jerry on January 16, 2007 1:55 PMAlready knowing a fair amound about George Bush on the evening of 9/11, I emailed my family from Los Angeles: "Now we will see the treasury looted, the Constitution used for toilet paper, and atrocities committed in our name."
I see that I was exactly right, and continue to be so. It didn't take genius, it just took paying attention and not letting a big wet-on for authority figures get me delusional.
Cleek, it is easy to say "Bush was incompetent" when one is playing the role of an Armchair President. How would you have done better? Whatever your decisions would have been, do you think you were in full knowledge of the situation at hand? Do you think Bush & Co. had all of the requisite knowledge to be successful? Is there a way to have been more successful without simply nuking all of Iraq and Afghanistan into oblivion? Iraq is an obvious power nexus, and has been since the Ottomans, the vacuum of which was bound to implode into a very loud "pop" (see Churchill's response after WWI). How could a gentler landing have been created, given the power influence that was bound to come from within and without? Would any better solution to Iraq have come without dealing first with Iran and Syria? Really, has Bush been any more "incompetent" than, let's say, Churchill was to have said to have been in his handling of Iraq? (Heck, why did some consider Saddam such a "hero" in the beginning?)
Posted by: Nicole Tedesco on January 16, 2007 1:59 PMHow would you have done better?
elect me, i'll show you.
Posted by: cleek on January 16, 2007 2:01 PMThere is an interesting corallary to your argument (which is self-serving and bogus, by the way). I remember that the Bush administration would provide the media with multiple rationale for any action they made, especially for the invasion so that they could always claim that they had "said this, after all, since the beginning" WMD, Regime change, Al-Queda connection, danger to Israel and US, pilotless drones with poison gas or biologicals that would spray the East coast. The tried to define such a wide net that it would catch all and still they turned out wrong.
The "doves" that I spoke with, including myself, had it right from the beginning. Shi'a dominance of the government, chaos on the streets, The Shi'a Crescent developing, quagmire, etc. The only thing that I didn't claim with certitude is the lack of WMD although I knew that the aluminum tube argument and the yellow-cake was bogus because I read the foreign press.
As well as getting it right about Iraq, we also got it right about Bush admin. lies, distortions and true aims in the region. We have yet to see what happens when the Iraq government allows private involvement in their oilfields. When that legislation is signed we will finally see the true culmination of the master plan.
via Tbogg:
You see, the devil is in the details. Galt (McArdle) was wrong about well, everything. On the other hand, you and I were right about where this was headed but we failed to dot our i's and cross our t's meaning that we were just as wrong as Megan even though we were right.
It's the New Moral Relativism. Catch it!
Posted by: Judson on January 16, 2007 2:09 PMBTW, I did take all of this into consideration in the run-up to the war yet I still considered it a worthwhile endeavor. Perhaps I am just a war monger troglodyte that deserves to be silenced.
Posted by: Nicole Tedesco on January 16, 2007 2:09 PMCleek, "Elect me, and I'll show you" is, and always has been, a very bad answer. You dishonor yourself in a very big way with statements like that. I am beginning to doubt if I should continue to take you seriously. (I do take this stuff, all very seriously.)
Posted by: Nicole Tedesco on January 16, 2007 2:12 PM"How would you have done better?"
Uh, not invaded. That's the whole point.
And now to say, "well you can't figure out how to get us out of this mess, so you have no opinion" is pretty damn cheeky.
"Doves" have to have predicted the outcome with Swiss watch accuracy and have a 35 point manifesto for ensuring victory, otherwise they are barking mad lib-left milquetoast naysayers with no credibel arguments. Seems a double standard to me. But, I'm just a barking mad, lib left...etc.
Posted by: g-man on January 16, 2007 2:34 PMGee thanks Jane...
Now I have an excuse for my bookie.
Posted by: trumad on January 16, 2007 2:38 PM"Doves"? What? There were quite a few experts who predicted that this would go badly. Not "doves", which I interpret to mean "anti-war all the time", but those (such as myself) who strongly feared that this war would go badly in ways unanticipated by us, and did so for reasons informed by history and well, reading a damn book about the Middle East. Now that it's gone much, much worse than even the most dire predictors among us predicted, you want some kind of credit for "learning from your decisions"? Yeah well if this were an after-school special, you'd learn a valuable lesson from your mistake and everyone would live happily ever after. But this is the real world, where people who really screw up ought to bother to learn some humility along with whatever "lessons" they may learn from their flawed decision-making process.
Posted by: Xanthippas on January 16, 2007 2:47 PMHow would you have done better?
elect me, i'll show you.
Cleek, "Elect me, and I'll show you" is, and always has been, a very bad answer. You dishonor yourself in a very big way with statements like that.
I don't know, it was pretty damn funny. In any case, all he has to say is "not invade," and you have your answer.
I don't claim to know much of anything about foreign policy, so it's beyond me to say one way or another that "The Iraq War was bad" or "The Iraq War was scrump-tastic!" I will say that it's a little disconcerting that the U.S. now has to play the primary check to Iran's ambitions with Saddam gone. Say what you will about that murdering bastard tyrant, at least he was a buffer between Iran and other Mid-East countries. Now it seems we're the buffer. Hooray!
Posted by: Immoralist on January 16, 2007 2:48 PMCleek, "Elect me, and I'll show you" is, and always has been, a very bad answer.
actually, it's a much better answer than giving you a hypothetical. whatever i would've done as president is completely irrelevant to the topic of what Bush actually did, and to how i knew he'd make a mess of things. and, frankly, it's completely to irrelevant to what Bush will do in the future, since there's no way anything i say, ever, is going to influence him at all.
in other words, i don't play Armchair President.
Posted by: cleek on January 16, 2007 2:54 PMGee, you mean objecting to pre-emptively invading a country rife with sectarian strife that sits on major energy resources at a strategic nexus because of the fear of mass chaos, death and destruction... requires you to specify exactly what chaos will happen before you can be considered "correct"?
Everyone has known for years that invading a country like Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan is easy. The hard part is dealing with the mess afterwards.
Posted by: Dan on January 16, 2007 2:56 PMG-Man, one of the problems everyone on the left and right face in any political situation is that each can easily see the Other has "barking mad." I posit that all "political" situations are such because issues of high importance/high impact meet a high degree of uncertainty. If uncertainty were high and impact low, no one would care and the issue might simply be ignored. If impact were high but certainty assured, then the issue could be acted upon in an unceremoniously "administrative" way. Tracking back to the spirit of Jane's original post, in these times of political uncertainty it is easy for human biases to take control of our normal logical thinking process. One way to deal with this is to measure ourselves against our past predictions/past performance and make corrections to our hypotheses, and so forth. Either one of us could claim to have "all the answers" to the current problem, but that claim would be probably be false. In the situations we face, I would suggest that any feeling we have of certainty--especially of "righteous indignation" or other related emotions--may be a sign that bias has kicked in rather than logic. I posit that we should feel more frustrated over our lack of knowledge of this very large scale problem, and frustrated over our lack of ability to replicate "experiments in history," and frustrated over our lack of ability to foretell the future.
I get your point, we should not have invaded. I believe that has been, and still is, a valid argument to make. I, on the other hand, tend to think that we should have invaded. To me, actually, the decision to invade or not invade was (and still is) actually a close one. I actually don't fault anyone for falling on either side of the debate because of the uncertainties involved. What I am truly frightened by is "righteous indignation" and group-think dynamics. I am also offended by anyone who thinks they have had all of the answers on this topic. Given the uncertainties of the situation, I agree with Jane that the outcomes have been somewhat of a random walk for us all. I believe it is hubris to think we can manage this war in a way we could manage, let's say, the construction of a bridge. Even then, who at the time knew that the elegant first Tacoma Narrows Bridge would collapse from secondary aerodynamic effects? If we were to consider the implementation of this war (or any war) an engineering-like exercise, what makes us think we would have any improved abilities to predict the project's outcome as, let's say, the engineers of other large scale projects have had? (Did you follow the trials and tribulations of the "Chunnel" construction or Boston's "Big Dig?")
My great wish is that we all get off of our high horses and start thinking practically. Then again, there may be some utility in "righteous indignation" since it provides motivation to elevate opinion, trains of thought, and isolated bits of information into larger forums.
Then again, I could be wrong.
Posted by: Nicole Tedesco on January 16, 2007 3:01 PMI agree with Dan. The problem of Afghanistan and Iraq have been hard ones to tackle. This does not mean, however, that we have had the luxury of not tackling them, as well as future problems that will lie in our way (such as North Korea which, like Iraq, is in many ways an old problem which just got a whole lot worse).
Posted by: Nicole Tedesco on January 16, 2007 3:05 PM"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
Yes, those 'Doves'. And James Fallows (who wrote an excellent pre-war article in the Atlantic, except that it was too optimistic).
Add in Colin Powell, who wrote in the 1990's the reasons not to have gone on to Baghdad in 1991; reasons which were eerily prescient.
And Shinseki, who publicly contradicted the administration's estimate of adequate forces (anybody who's not stupid would understand that going to war with insufficient forces is begging for a world of hurt).
And all of the various officers who pointed out the problems beforehand.
In short, people who did not oppose the invasion of Afghanistan, and who supported the first Gulf War.
Those doves; they merely got lucky this time, due to their unwavering opposition to all US wars.
Posted by: Barry on January 16, 2007 3:17 PMIt was difficult to travel to the moon the first time. Should we have not done so because the project was a difficult one to complete? What about curing polio? What about curing AIDS? What about reversing global warming? The argument that, "it is hard," does not mean that the decision to execute a project is not a correct one.
Posted by: Nicole Tedesco on January 16, 2007 3:24 PMThe argument that, "it is hard," does not mean that the decision to execute a project is not a correct one.
sometimes "it is hard" means "it is too hard given current circumstances". the people in charge of implementing your preferred policy are not competent enough to make it work. maybe a different president could've assembled an administration competent enough to invade and restore Iraq - but this one isn't, and didn't. but this is the one who you guys encouraged to try. you went to war with the administration you had.
you shouldn't have.
Posted by: cleek on January 16, 2007 3:35 PMEven in hindsight, invasion is the best option. Consider the alternatives. Not invading would have been dumb. How would waiting have made anything better? There is better argument for going in earlier than we did and there is for going in later.
We are much better off, Iraq is better of. We are in a better sitution to deal with Iran. The only people not better off seem to be Bush and Co.
Posted by: aaron on January 16, 2007 3:44 PMOkay. Walk me through this.
The LLL-MSM-France Axis of BDS predicted a catastrophe starting with cronyism and poor planning and ending with civil war. We got... wait... who's wrong here, again?
Posted by: scarshapedstar on January 16, 2007 3:56 PMScarshapedstar, there is nothing wrong with that assessment. Many of us pro-war types saw, and still see, no better alternative. We have what we have because we had no choice. We have the least of what I see had been the choice between several evils, each potentially worse than the current situation.
Posted by: Nicole Tedesco on January 16, 2007 4:04 PMThe LLL-MSM-France Axis of BDS predicted a catastrophe starting with cronyism and poor planning and ending with civil war. We got... wait... who's wrong here, again?
But we didn't predict the exact number of US and Iraqi casualties, neither did we predict the exact moment when Iraq would descend into sectarian civil war, therefore our general prediction that a US invasion would be a total fuck up doesn't count! It's like a lottery where you only win the jackpot if you get both the right numbers and the right order said numbers were drawn in.
Posted by: Nick J. on January 16, 2007 4:30 PMFor being right about this war, people like me have been--for years now--called traitors and appeasers (and that's when our accusers were being polite). I'll settle for being called smug now that there is at last a wider understanding of how great a folly this war was, and of how mendacious and incompetent our leaders were in their promotion of and execution of the war.
Posted by: RWB on January 16, 2007 5:09 PMIn intelligence there are always two questions.
One, what is the capacity of the enemy?
Two, what is the will of the enemy?
The invasion was based on the premise that he had the capacity to have WMDs.
I had no problems with this conclusion.
But there was no assesment of his will to use the WMDs.
From day one the conclusion that he would turn
WMDs over to terrorists that he could not control was completely without any foundation.
There was not one single argument made about Saddam's will to use WMDs against the US because
there was no reason to think he would. He had WMDs to influence his ability to be a regional player, not to use against the US.
Posted by: scarshapedstar:
"Okay. Walk me through this.
The LLL-MSM-France Axis of BDS predicted a catastrophe starting with cronyism and poor planning and ending with civil war. We got... wait... who's wrong here, again?"
That's the heart of it, isn't it? We were right, they were wrong. All else is justification.
Posted by: Barry on January 16, 2007 5:21 PMCan we please remember that WMD is a term designed to mislead, and avoid it unless we mean to lie with it? It intentionally conflates three types of weapons (chemical, biological, and nuclear) that, while each horrific, have very different magnitudes of threats. Chemical weapons might kill dozens; biological weapons, hundreds; nuclear weapons, hundreds of thousands. Use of the term WMD allowed people to argue for the war by saying that we knew for a fact that Saddam had had WMDs (chemical gas) and had been willing to use them, while raising the specter of a mushroom cloud over Manhattan, something he never had the means, motive, or opportunity for.
I might readily have supported the invasion had I thought there was a reasonable likelihood that Saddam was close to developing a fission weapon; I, and many others, would certainly not support an invasion to take mustard gas out of Saddam's hands. The arguments of the Bush administration and its supporters, leading up to the war and to this day, were designed to elide the very substantial difference between nuclear weapons and chemical weapons in a substantially successful effort to mislead at least the American people.
Posted by: Grant on January 16, 2007 5:43 PMSpender, you are right in hindsight. After the invasion, it was discovered that Saddam was actually far more concerned about Iran and did not see us as a credible threat. Everyone, it seemed, was wrong about something.
At the heart of it, I don't see the Iraq war as a preventative measure as much as a forcefully transformative one. The malignancies in the Middle East created a situation in which 9/11 terrorism was encouraged and allowed to breed. Their behavior, and our negligence, made all of the Middle East's problems our problem. Once that became the case, the only solution continues to seem to be to transform the conditions on the ground in the Middle East in order to stop the malignant behavioral dynamics in the long run. Call it "imperial," because that is what it is and I have no shame in admitting it if this is what it takes to fix these problems.
In many respects, we are still fighting aspects of WWI and dealing with the results of the Ottoman collapse. I don't know if there are real solutions to the current set of problems. After all, humankind has been trying to deal with this issue for well over 100 years now. My assumption has been that, with the potential of (if not actual) weapons of mass destruction in play, the Middle East malignancies can no longer be allowed to stand. It is better now to rip the band aid off the wound than to let the cancers fester until the entire body is put into jeopardy.
Yes, this seems to be the "neocon" vision, but I see no better alternatives than to have done what we have done. There are also arguments that the Iraqi war has been a more humane event than letting millions of innocents live under his tyrannical rule. I know if I were living under someone like Saddam, I too would appreciate the help of the outsider to help me shed him from my back. Even if my future would be uncertain for it, I would rather have the chance for a better future than to have the certainty of constant dread. Call this a case where I am implementing the Golden Rule by doing unto others what I would have wanted to have done to me if I were Iraqi.
Posted by: Nicole Tedesco on January 16, 2007 5:48 PMThe lesson that we taught every little country with our invasion of Iraq, and failure to invade North Korea, is that there are 2 possibilities:
1 - The US will only invade countries possessing oil.
2 - The most successful method to prevent the US from attacking is to possess nuclear weapons.
The result of which is that there will be a nuclear arms race, which we provoked them into racing. Iran isn't backing down from US demands, so they must know something we don't know, or they must be absolutely certain that while the pain they can inflict on the US may not "destroy" the US, but will instead permanently cripple us. Only the Soviet Union had enough nukes to "destroy" the US, and I'm not all that sure that Russia has enough working missiles to do the same. Iran certainly lacks the missiles to reach the US, even if they had the warheads.
Are we the "world's policeman?" No. We aren't. We refuse to act that way. If we were, we'd have dealt with NK. Why not invade NK? They have NO OIL.
Here is my prediction for the results of an invasion of/attack on Iran:
A - Musharref will be deposed in a coup,
B - The replacement government of Pakistan will be hostile towards the US.
C - As the rhetoric ratchets up, the new Pakistani regime will fire off their 50+ nuclear missiles westwards to knock out US bases in the middle east, Diego Garcia and probably cities in Israel.
Spencer, BTW, I do allow for the idea that we may have tried to make the "transformation of the Middle East" happen far too soon by taking out Saddam Hussein the way we did. This is a distinct possibility in my mind. However I balance this out with the future risk that an inability to decisively deal with a 10 year old military problem (Saddam) may not go unnoticed by future WMD holstering thugs (e.g., Kim Jong Il--which is a 50 year old, festering military problem). I don't believe that "indecisive, festering, military problems" are situations we can no longer tolerate since 9/11. (We will meet force with decisive military force--the stalemates of the Koreas and Iraq I must no longer be something which a dictator or group of ideologues can hope to achieve.)
Posted by: Nicole Tedesco on January 16, 2007 5:58 PMI don't remember anyone - before the invasion - saying that Saddam did not have WMD.
That said, I never felt, and I don't think President Bush ever said that WMD were the main or only reason for invasion of Iraq - which fits with your revisionism remarks. That was the angle on which the media primarily focused, but whether he had them or not, he was not complying with the UN resolutions about inspections.
I believe the invasion worked in much the way that at least a few people predicted - Steven Den Beste - for one. I certainly didn't expect it to be over in a matter of months. You don't build a democracy in the Middle East without a great deal of resistance from your neighbors. That should have been fairly obvious. I suspect the President and his people knew that very well even if they couldn't neccessarily say so.
Here's what I think:
1) the people of Iraq are MUCH better off now than they were with Saddam.
2) leaving Iraq before the new government is secure would be a disaster. The Jihadists would be rejuvinated and would likely follow us home.
3) if either Gore or Kerry had been elected ... it would have been a bad thing.
I'm not actually a huge fan of President Bush, but I think he has more integrity than most (vast majority) of politicians. At least in the sense that I think he means what he says and makes every effort to live up to his word.
The greatest danger we face is that we here at home lack the will to see the war through to an end.
Posted by: tom clements on January 16, 2007 6:25 PMThe peaceniks were right - the chickenhawks were wrong.
Deal with it.
Posted by: dave™© on January 16, 2007 6:41 PMJane, I applaud your efforts to help the doves get over themselves... but really, do you have to beat your breast quite so much?
"Not invade" is a crappy answer to the old "What would you have done?"; it fails to provide an alternative, just criticizes the path taken. "Not invade" doesn't say what to do about our "allies'" duplicity with regard to Saddam, the rank failure of Oil For Food to bring about its stated aim, the continuous need for and continual testing of the no-fly zone, and perhaps most importantly the general aura of helpless permissiveness surrounding us. And yes, the U.S. is the world's shining light; yes, it is the greatest force for good around; yes, it is the redoubt of the Enlightenment (which is a fearful way for me to express my thought, but I think an accurate one); we are, we were at the time, and we were and are castigated for being, the only remaining superpower. If not we, then who? If not now, then - well, because we're not actually Godlike, we do have to pick our battles, acknowledging that we can't be everywhere and do everything. Therefore, acting in our national self-interest (all together now: BLOOD FOR OIL!!?!) is the responsible thing to do.
(Note to blood-for-oil-ers: would you rather have us spend blood for nothing? Passing over the up-thread comment that if we'd just wanted Iraq's oil, there were cheaper and easier ways to get it, wars are fought for strategic national advantage. Come on. You think we ought to spend lives and dollars only in service of humanity? If so, why the objection to staying in Iraq to provide that nascent democracy with breathing space?)
In short: OK, you, Jane (and all of us hawks), naturally failed to predict a varying amount of what is currently happening in Iraq, though the present and future direness of the situation is far from a foregone conclusion. But all of you doves: what were you predicting about Iraq's elections? Constitution? Ability to come together sufficiently to form a coalition government? General prosperity relative to conditions under Saddam, aside from the "hot" areas where the Sunnis are relatively strong and trying desperately to hang onto what they have just long enough to see us go?
"The peaceniks were right - the chickenhawks were wrong. Deal with it." - the never-to-be-infringed Dave...
Dave, what were you right about? That, less than four years after the forceful removal of a bloody dictator and the end of his regime, Iraq is not Los Angeles? What do you people do, play a lot of video games? I (and our forces on the ground) don't despair of our ability to complete what we've begun; I only despair of the attention span of those who may (God forbid) determine whether we'll be allowed to.
Posted by: Jamie on January 16, 2007 7:05 PMIn some way, they got it just as wrong as I did: nothing that they predicted came to pass.
This is plain false - so Ms McArdle was/is either completely ignorant of a significant part of the Iraq debate or simply disingenuous.
Note to blood-for-oil-ers: would you rather have us spend blood for nothing?
I'm guessing they'd rather not spend any blood at all, what with valluing human life and whatnot. Generally, war should be a tactic of last resort, not something rushed into by use of scare tactics, such as the current administration did.
Posted by: Nick J. on January 16, 2007 7:52 PMThere are no hairs to split here. The anti-war crowd was 100% right. Smug? a few perhaps, most look at what's happened as a tragedy for all involved.
There was no 9/11 connection. There were no WMDs to sprout mushroom clouds. No drones to cross the Atlantic. We were not greeted as liberators. It was not a cakewalk. Iraqi oil has not paid for it. Our military is vastly weaker. Iran is stronger and the region less stable. And there's no end to war in sight.
Posted by: Jon G on January 16, 2007 8:27 PMNick, 9/11 was not a scare tactic--it happened. That event signaled that "business as usual" was over with. The rules had changed for our enemies, which meant the rules we worked by had to change as well. The "no war" risk was, and still is, losing our ability to fight the long, hard war of Transparency ahead of us. (This may be a semi-permanent war, just given the nature of future history.)
Posted by: Nicole Tedesco on January 16, 2007 8:31 PMBy the way, we were greeted as liberators by most people in Iraq. The "what happened next" is a whole different story, as can be seen now in the power struggle that ensues (which, in some respects, can now be seen as a 100% Iraqi problem now that they have been liberated).
Yes, Iran is stronger. Take one enemy out, and the others gain in relative strength. Does that mean we don't continue to fight them?
Our military is not vastly weaker, just deployed. Our enemies know that. Any one regime, including Iran, would be decimated if we simply changed our priorities. That is a much, much different equation than dealing with a "weak" military.
I agree, there is no end of war in sight. I don't blame Bush, as the nature of the problem we are in does not lend itself to easy solutions. For that reason, it is quite possible that the invasion of Iraq may provide little "return on our investment" when considered over all related events to come.
Posted by: Nicole Tedesco on January 16, 2007 8:38 PMyeah...i'm gloating...i was right...NYAH-NYAH!...
"dove" is a soap...shows you retro-stupid and "VietNam"-minded you morons are...
the so-called "thinking" on this site is the most pathetic showcase of "bad faith" i've ever seen...any of you dumbasses ever take a logic class?...what you're really saying -- as was said of Hooter in "Animal House"...you fucked up, you trusted Bush...and you trusted the CIA, BOO-HOO! Cheney, BOO-FUCKING-HOO! the selective cherry-picked "intelligence" (sic, in quotes) the constantly shifting "rationales" and "goals"
and chimerical "justifications..."
seriously...blow me...
please...it's so easy and you folks are so wearying...it was all for control of oil revenues and they THOUGHT it would be easy because they really knew there were no WMD's and Hussein's Gulf War I Army was a sick joke...what you REALLY didn't count on was Bush's incompetence...now THAT's a true WMD....
BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA...!
yours in christ,
billofwrites
There are some things which people might be excused feeling smug or even gloating about - the murder and mayhem of a day like today in Iraq is not one of them. Confessing that one feels smug about events like today pretty much precludes any future expression of moral indignation from being treated as anything other than a profoundly cynical pose.
I also find it difficult to accept the whole premise of the incompetency argument - which is that the US has unlimited agency, or ever did. Whilst I think a number of things could have been done differently or better I am not at all certain that even with many fewer mistakes that success or failure really rested with the US. The aphorism about the enemy having a vote maybe a cliche, but is worth remembering now. There are claims that this or that action fueled or created the insurgency, as if it was an entirely reactive , and more to the point, predictable process. It was neither simply reactive or all that predictable. And the idea that War opponents had a good handle on what Iraq would look like today, or the region for that matter - is simply crap - vague mutterings about instability are as prescient nominating the risk of Hurricanes on the Gulf Coast. Any action or inaction can always be cited as a policy failure that has led to increased instability in the ME - but the truth is that the belief that it is outsiders whose clumsy interference is the difference between placid regional stability and the roiling dangers that confront the region - and have done for a very long time is itself one of the primary reasons why the region is in semi permanent crisis.
I would really like to hear from those who throw the word "incompetent" around with such gay abandon just what they think could have been done differently that would have persuaded the likes of Al Dourri and Al Zarqawi to call off or never launch the insurgency. Or for that matter perhaps someone could explain what else could have been done to scotch it in the bud. Pretty much everything that is wrong in Iraq today is connected with the insurgency that was started by the alliance of remnant Baathists and Al QUeada - from the pace of reconstruction to the lack of security to the difficulty in maintaining basic utilities.
Fighting a viscious insurgency usually (pretty much invariably) has required a mixture of conciliation as well as extreme ruthlessness. It strikes me that far too many who feel fit now to call themselves smug, as well as those who blather vaguely about "incompetency" have been at the very forefront in ensuring that ruthlessness had to be taken off the table as a counter insurgent tactic.
Now whilst perhaps this could have led to a risky experiment as to just how far conciliation would get the effort I think the self righteous have a real case to answer as well as considerable blood on their hands for then turning around and undermining even the best efforts to fight an utterly merciless insurgency in the most high minded manner through their role in what may come to be seen as the wars turning point - Abu Ghraib. That something like the abuses at Abu Ghraib happened is an absolute inevitability of a counter insurgent war - even with the best of disciplinary measures , in fact abuses of one kind or another are a pretty much ineradicable feature of prison systems everywhere. The scale and frequency however can be significantly affected by how serious and strict the response is to such abuses - and the American Military's response to Abu Ghraib was exemplary - as well as highly unusual, perhaps unprecedented, in CI warfare.
The Military and the Iraq effort was severely punished for doing the right thing about Abu Ghraib by terrorist propagandists. So were tens of thousands of Iraqis blown to bits at markets and schools and mosques and recruiting lines by the mostly foreign suicide bombers successfully recruited through the propaganda efforts which had Abu Ghraib as the centerpiece. But where I think that those who profess to feeling a little smug today at the way in which events have panned out are simply unconscionable is in the fact that they have not not been for the most part simple by-standers waiting to say "I told you so" at an eagerly anticipated tragedy (bad enough as that is) - the most vociferous and loudest of them have in fact been active protaganists in bringing about the tragedy they profess to be merely observing. There is of course the simple point that, like Heisenberg discovered, there is no privileged position from where the observer does not affect what is being observed, but more to the point is the fact that this type of war is pretty much a 100% psychological contest of will. Militarily the insurgency has absolutely zero chance of evicting the US from Iraq or Afghanistan - they have not managed to overun so much as a single fire base no matter how small, and they have not been able to hold so much as a village when challenged. They have no strategy for victory - solely a strategy to produce a US defeat - and that strategy rests entirely upon the success of the information war and war of narratives being fought on the home front of the coalition countries. Now in that war the smug gloaters as well as most of the antiwar movement and Bush oppositionists have been de-facto allies of the terrorist insurgency. They have openly signalled that far from strengthening their resolve to defeat the sort of forces who could carry out todays murderous rampage in Baghdad such actions will only help in the shared project of handing the terrorists the defeat they desire. This is why Abu Ghraib - where a small number of suspected terrorists suffered abuses at the hands of guards who were tried and punished for their actions - becomes a mortal blow to US credibility - but blowing up students leaving classes in large numbers is not a mortal blow against he "Minutemen" of the insurgency - but you guessed it another blow to the credibility of the US.
Lets just face it - the sort of moral tapeworms who can gloat over the state of Iraq today would be pointing fingers over the children's corpses produced by sanctions if they had been kept in place , or if they had been lifted they would be sounding indignant because the US is backing either Iraq, Iran or both in the inevitable subsequent grinding of the tectonic plate on that border. No-one should fool themselves into thinking that much of the anti-war movement either had any other bright ideas or would not have been just as critical of any other policy or lack of policy that might have been undertaken.
Posted by: Johan W on January 16, 2007 9:48 PMYou know, if after all this time you STILL ignore 99% of the rational, cogent, and valid arguments made by those who were opposed to the Iraqi invasion from the beginning, and instead assemble yet another straw man showing war opponents as as knee-jerk pacifists who merely guessed lucky, it's no wonder a few of them respond in a less than academic tone.
I doubt that there are any "moral tapeworms" gloating over the hell that is daily life in Bagdad. For the few who are being less than generous in allowing the pro-war crowd to save face, then my read is (and if you're honest about it, so is yours) that the source of their oh-so-intemperate remarks isn't the suffering in Iraq but the sight of their long-time critics squirming.
Remember that it's being done by people who were called terrorist-lovers and TRAITORS. Being told by the mainstream press, by officials of the Republican party, by elected people in power that they "want to see America fail." Being called defeatists, appeasers, knee-jerk haters, losers, weak, soft, morally confused, cowardly, unAmerican, unserious, racist, selfish, deranged, "DemoRats", responsible for ever bad thing in US history since its founding, brainwashed by the "liberal" media, blind to the "facts", opposed to family values, and smelly.
Not to mention the (still ongoing) calls for their disenfranchizement, deportation, detention, castration, and/or outright elimination.
And oh, yeah, and a lot of those insults were coming from the Republican leaders of Congress and from the White House. Which when it wasn't patronizingly explaining things over and over again as if repetition made something true, was openly treating entire US cities and states as though somehow tainted and not really part of America.
Funny, how people who are subjected to that kind of abuse for years can become a little bitter.
...
Bottom line: The pro-war side was WRONG. Instead of looking at your decision making processes and trying to figure out how to get it right next time, you are bending over backward to denigrate (once again!) the people who got it right.
Tens of thousands of human beings have DIED, and you're whining about a a few people letting out some verbal frustration after having been insulted for years. As a result of this war our country's international reputation is in tatters, our treasury is being bankrupted, our Constitution is regularly spit on by the so-called Unitary Executive, and you're spending your energy concocting dishonest arguments against the one group that got things right from the beginning and had the moral courage to stand up to years of public demonization?
It's pretty obvious this isn't about self-correction or lessons learned or avoiding future catastrophes like the one we're in - it's about maintaining your status points in Punditland. Congratulations on keeping your priorities in the right place.
Posted by: SV on January 17, 2007 1:31 AMNick, 9/11 was not a scare tactic--it happened.
And that has what to do with invading Iraq, pray tell? Last time I checked, it wasn't Saddam who sent a bunch of pissed off Saudis to fly planes into some of our buildings. It was that other guy. You know, the one Bush Junior never got around to catching, since he was busy with his pet war and such like.
Posted by: Nick J. on January 17, 2007 2:59 AMWhat 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"
This "dove" would prefer that you atoned in a meaningul way for your complicity in the war crimes that have been committed against the people of Iraq.
Posted by: Robert McClelland on January 17, 2007 3:08 AMIf you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky?
I predicted this invasion and occupation would become a royal clusterfuck, as a direct result of Bush's clearly manifested mendacity and cluelessness.
You may still be in denial about the actual "mechanism" responsible, but the facts have proven my expectation to be a dead-on bulls-eye.
Posted by: melior on January 17, 2007 3:31 AMSV:
You can doubt that there are gloaters all you like - but doing it in a thread where anyone capable of reading just has to scroll up to read people who openly say "yeah I'm gloating" , or happy to be called smug does sort of weaken the case a bit - don't you think?
Likewise talking about straw men when you go on to talk about the pro-war side as wishing:
"Not to mention the (still ongoing) calls for their disenfranchizement, deportation, detention, castration, and/or outright elimination." is simply to introduce the pot to the kettle. And just to be clear I think that you are perfectly correct that the hawks have frequently labelled doves as little better than traitors - but my case is that there really is a case to answer for in that respect.
The 99% of rational, cogent arguments that you say made up the antiwar case are not so much the real straw man as the invisible man. Other than Stability fetishists and diplomatic conservatives who argued for an indefinite maintenance of the status quo perhasp you could mention just one of these rational cogent arguments - becasue I and just about everyone else missed them - drowned out as they were by the likes of Micheal Moore, 9/11 Truthers, the Stalinist STWC, Moveon and the like.
I could probably help you out because there were some people who genuinely opposed the war, though very reluctantly, and with full aknowledgment that leaving Saddam in situ was both risky and morally repugnant but that the risks of removing him made it the lesser of two evils. These opponents however also thought that once the war was a fait accompli the only honourable course was to do whatever possible to support the reconstruction and the nascent democratisation in Iraq. These are not the sort of people to gloat at suffering in Iraq. But no-one in their right mind really thinks that the Antiwar movement was directed or dominated by these people both before and after the invasion. It was and continues to be dominated by the Kos types, or DU - acolytes of Chomsky, Micheal Moore, Cindy Sheehan, the people who cheered Goerge Galloway or are prepared to hail Chavez. People who can scream that others are liars with a completely straight face whilst shouting slogans about Halliburton, Blood for Oil, Plastic Turkeys, Iraqi Minutemen, the wisdom and probity of Chirac or Annan. I don't think that it is at all much of a stretch to call such people traitors. It is one thing to have opposed the invasion - it is quite another to in the aftermath to have become the de-facto propogandists for an insurgency as cruel and nihilistic that mounted by the rejectionists in Iraq.
Posted by: Johan W on January 17, 2007 4:19 AMJohan W, thank you. Very well stated.
I reappear from time to time on various forums when I start to have my own doubts about whatever position I am taking on whatever subject I may care about on any day. I usually look for real discussion, intelligent response, and (if I am lucky) new information to help me out. In the case of emotionally-charged situations like the war, the amazing thing which happens is that, instead of changing my mind I often have been finding myself "reverting" back to the solid pro-war camp mostly because of people like SV. I am a person who takes emotion as a sign that logic may be broken somewhere, and it leaves me with doubts about the speaker's opinions. Don't get me wrong, I have sympathy for the emotions that the insults levied against the anti-war side may have caused bad feelings over the last couple of years. Emotion, however, has been a big part of the entire debate from the hours following 9/11 and onwards and we all must learn to deal with that aspect of the debate. With issues of such importance, we must learn to control these emotions--on both sides of the fence--because they help no one and only help to increase uncertainty, not decrease it.
Posted by: Nicole Tedesco on January 17, 2007 7:18 AMMan, you are a pack of bloviating losers.
You should spend the rest of your lives contemplating the hell that was unleashed in so many facets - by your ideological rigidity, cultural and historical ignorance, and the incompetence of your heroic wise men and leaders.
Your attempts to rewrite your participation in this blood soaked fiasco indicate, at least, your awareness that true history will (and is already) goddamning you and your beliefs and your actions.
Have a nice life - more than 600,000 Iraqis, 3,000 U.S. troops will do.
That's funny because everyone I spoke with prior to the war wasn't against the war because of some comical, cartoonish anti-war hippie stance. It was because:
1. Hans Blix and his team were on the ground looking for WMD and weren't finding any.
2. There didn't appear to be any danger in letting him continue to do his work. Iraq had made no threats, and was being forthright.
3. It was obvious this administration would create any excuse to invade out of whole cloth. For example, when given 13,000 pages of documents on the Iraq weapons programs, the administration dismissed it out of hand in less than 2 days.
4. Anyone with even a slight curiosity in history could see that a prolonged occupation in Iraq would be a colossal failure (and many said so).
Some earlier commenters talked about Saddam’s invasion of Iran and Kuwait as a reason for war? Hello? Those were 10 and 20 years ago. If you want to do something about a problem try doing it in the same decade. Saddam and Iraq were clearly weak to the point of collapse and couldn't invade itself if needed. Please stop looking for lame excuses and just admit you were wrong about Iraq, you're wrong about Iran and the collective bunch of you should do A LOT more studying, reading, and maybe even traveling before proffering your insights on foreign policy. You didn't listen then (hence your belief that nobody could have predicted what's happening), you're not listening now (hence our soon to be involvement in starting WWIII) and you* refuse to responsibility for the bloodshed and destruction you've caused people.
*'You' refers to a wider group than just Jane Galt. You know who you are.
Posted by: SV on January 17, 2007 1:31 AM
Well said SV, and just to prove your point, Nicole Tedesco shows up to state that her pro-war stance was proven CORRECT because she didn't like the tone of your statement!
Is it any wonder why we're in this fiasco?
Posted by: Zoroastrian on January 17, 2007 8:14 AMshorter megan mcardle : i was wrong about the war. but i do not want to admit the liberals were right about the war. so i will create a liberal strawman with whom I will claim to have argued, hell, I can make him have whatever views I want since he is made of straw. then, I will generalize all liberals based upon this strawman and thus prove that liberals were not right about the war.
what a sad sad blog.
Posted by: g on January 17, 2007 8:42 AMIf I were gloating, I'd say "Stop rationalising and I'll stop gloating". But predicting this slow motion train wreck is way too tragic to gloat about.
No ideology was needed to predict what would happen to the artificial English construct of Sunni, Shia & Kurd that is Iraq when Saddam's iron reign ended.
No ideology was needed for the observation that France lost Algeria, USSR lost Afghanistan, US lost Vietnam.
No ideology was needed to know that "they hate us for our freedoms" was not a sane take on 9/11 and a "crusade" was not the appropriate response.
No ideology was needed to notice that the US administration was top heavy with oil men, likudniks and practioners of a peculiarly American distortion of Christianity.
No ideology was needed to perceive that the case Powell made to the UN was unconvincing.
No ideology was needed to give Blix, Al Baradei and Ritter - none of them ideologues - a fair hearing.
No ideology was needed to know that English speaking grunts trying to keep the peace post-invasion would not amount to a functional police force, even in the numbers that Shinseki said were needed.
No ideology was needed to notice that among mature prosperous democracies, only the UK and Australia went along with along with the US.
No ideology was needed to know that Bin Laden and Saddam would not be sympatico.
No ideology was needed to know that democracies develop from within and are not imposable from without, especially when preconditions for their development are markedly absent.
No ideology was needed to perceive that the PNAC were dangerous ideological fantasists.
No ideology was needed to observe that Bush's conservatism was not the skeptical pragmatic conservatism of Eisenhower (whose parting warning was about the US's emerging military-industrial complex).
No ideology was needed to have appreciated why Bush snr did not "finish the job".
I did not predict, but was not surprised, that -
- the oil ministry was safeguarded but the museum was not
- de-Baathification went way to deep
- the Iraqi army was disbanded (and its arms were gifted to the insurgency)
- Abu Ghraib & Fallujah happened
- the USMC website happily depicted one of its tanks patrolling Iraq with "New Testament" painted on it
- the US did Iran a favour by putting the Shia majority into power
Posted by: AlanDownunder on January 17, 2007 9:22 AMMy support for the war was not coupled with nations-building. Like Daniel Pipes, I suggest we slap in another dictator and move out quickly. However, this view wasn’t considered because, like Gresham’s Law, bad criticism crowded out valid criticism. The leftist chorus of “don’t go it alone,” “rely on the UN,” “no war for oil,” “Bush is doing it for daddy,” left my friends on the right with the impression that the reasons for opposing the whole project were bogus.
Few people pointed out the limitations of Arab and Islamic cultures. It was considered “racist” to do so. Both sides said they must be like us. Pro-democracy advocates said there was an innate desire for liberty. Anti-war advocates ask “what would you feel if invaded?” even thought the “insurgents” were fighting their fellow Iraqis first and foremost. The idea that this was a savage enemy wasn't considered. It still isn't considered.
Sadly, constructive criticism was drowned out.
Hey, guess what? I'm a liberal. Not only that, I opposed the Iraq war from the get.
I opposed it because the arguments for invading were laughably thin. Aluminum tubes, yellowcake, all BS. Al-Qaeda link, BS. Airborne drones, BS. All utter BS. Anyone could have done 10 minutes of homework and figured this out. Hussein was zero threat to the US.
I also opposed it because we were in the middle of a military action in Afghanistan, where there was an actual threat to the US. As it turns out, that effort has, predictably, suffered by our involvement in Iraq.
I was right. You were wrong.
Now, does that make me feel smug and self-satisfied? No. On the contrary, it depresses the hell out of me. Why? Because now we are stuck. We are stuck with the ungodly mess that we have made of Iraq.
If we want to make a good outcome there, we need to put a half million troops in country, and plan on keeping them there for 5 to 10 years. In fact, that's what we needed to do in 2003, and that's what guys like Shinseki asked for then.
I have yet to hear a single conservative "supporter" of the war in Iraq call for that level of commitment. I didn't hear it in '03, and I don't hear it now. The conclusion I draw is that none of you are serious about Iraq, about the so-called GWOT, or about the security of this nation.
This is your blog, so I guess you can write whatever you like, but it just sounds like a bunch of childish whining and self-justification to me.
You were wrong. The information needed to be, actually, right was available. Don't know why you didn't avail yourself of it, but you didn't, and so you were wrong.
Your mistakes, and the mistakes of people like you, have materially and significantly harmed this nation. You, and folks like you, own that, lock stock and barrel. I, personally, will never forget it.
Thanks -
Posted by: russell on January 17, 2007 9:56 AMZoro, your point 4 is completely valid and very considered by me (a strong supporter of the war). However, your first two points are flat out wrong. The third, I have no clue about. I imagine 13000 amount to nothing more than political stunt and stall tactic by someone. 13000 could never contian a cogent agrument, especially in governmentese.
Posted by: aaron on January 17, 2007 10:10 AMMy country seems on the verge of making an historic mistake…. My government is making a case for war against Iraq that is built upon fear and ignorance, as opposed to the reality of truth and fact.As someone who counts himself as a fervent patriot and a good citizen of the United States of America, I feel I cannot stand by idly, while my country behaves in such a fashion...
We, the people of the United States, are told repeatedly that we face a grave and imminent risk to our national security from a combination of past irresponsible behaviour on the part of Iraq and ongoing efforts by Iraq to re-acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic weapons ... which have been banned since 1991 by a Security Council resolution.
The truth of the matter is that Iraq is not a sponsor of the kind of terror perpetrated against the United States on 11 September, and in fact is active in suppressing the sort of fundamentalist extremism that characterises those who attacked the United States on that horrible day.
- Scott Ritter, Fall 2002
Posted by: Sarcastro on January 17, 2007 10:21 AMWhat Russell and Sarcastro said. This is the new defense among hawks. "Maybe we were wrong, but you were too, although you somehow wound up right." Eat your crow and shut the hell up.
Posted by: Gus on January 17, 2007 11:12 AMAaron, blog comments lead to simplifications so it may be too simple to say they didn't find any WMD. They did find some anciliary evidence of weapons programs, however, the fact remains that the weapons inspections revealed nothing significant, and that during previous inspection periods (i.e. 91-98) more weapons were destroyed than could ever be during war time. During the more recent inspection process, Blix's team had even greater access and was even more effective.
With the choice between Blix's work and an all out war, it was clear to us which was more effective. We didn't figure this out by luck, but by paying attention to broad current and historical evidence to make an informed, not rabid, decision.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/01/27/sprj.irq.transcript.blix/
There is an old saying of (I think) Paul Tudor Jones' that is apropos here:
"Being wrong is inevitable - staying wrong is unforgivable".
There have been plenty of chances over the last three and a half years to realise that something was going wrong. Many "hawks" like Yglesias, Drum etc took them. If I were Jane, I would not be concentrating on the "decision process" that caused her to make the mistake in the first place, or on her status vis-a-vis the "doves". I'd be looking at what it was that made her keep on carrying water for this war right up until quite recently, and looking at her status vis-a-vis other "hawks" who woke up and smelt the coffee much earlier.
Posted by: dsquared on January 17, 2007 12:03 PMAll you need to know about the hawks is encapsulated in Steven Den Beste, formerly one of the loudest and most arrogant of the bunch. Go to his blog. Note his complete loss of interest in Iraq in favor of anime panty shots.
Posted by: purple on January 17, 2007 12:10 PMGuess the comments software strips out hyperlinks. Deb Beste's URL is http://www.denbeste.nu/
Posted by: purple on January 17, 2007 12:12 PMI admit, even I did not anticipate how badly the war would be botched. I expected the Shia to ally with Iran against American troops but I didn't anticipate US troops torturing Iraq citizens at Abu Ghraib. I didn't think there were enough troops to secure Iraq but I didn't expect the Pentagon to allow, even encourage, wide spread looting. The level of corruption by the Coalition Provisional Authority was far beyond anything I could have imagined.
I didn't believe Saddam had nuclear weapons but I was surprised there were not at least a few mustard gas cannisters. I didn't trust the intelligence community but I didn't think they were Looney Tunes incompetent.
So, yes, I was wrong about Iraq. I underestimated how badly things would go. Next time, I promise to be more pessimistic when it comes to Neo-Conservative war plans.
Posted by: KnightErrant on January 17, 2007 12:41 PMThis post was more entertaining when the Simpsons did it:
Homer: (to Bart) I know you're mad at me right now, and I'm kinda mad too...I mean, we could sit here and try to figure out 'who forgot to pick up who' until the cows come home. But let's just say we're both wrong and that'll be that.
Posted by: ManOnBlog on January 17, 2007 12:47 PMSaddam was behaving exactly as I would have behaved if I had WMD, so I concluded that he had them.
Hahahahahahaha. Is this for real?
There were of course numerous liberal and left-wing critics of the war who pegged the reasons why this occupation would fail. You could start with Wesley Clark's pre-war Senate testimony, in which he predicts the Sunni / Shiite conflict and the benefits Iran would gain from this. The opinion that Iraq's conventional military would be defeated quickly but the occupation would be long and bloody was a common one -- Noam Chomsky and others referred to this.
But of course the propagandists for this disaster, such as Megan McArdle, don't care about actually informing themselves on this topic. What they care about is finding yet another dishonest propaganda line to justify themselves for their own support for an obviously disastrous policy.
I might add that the most fundamental and common reasons to oppose this invasion -- that Saddam Hussein had no connection to 9/11 and posed no threat to the United States -- had nothing to do with the post-war occupation but are as correct as they ever were.
Posted by: MQ on January 17, 2007 1:07 PM>nothing that they predicted came to pass.
You're either a liar or a lazy moron because that is simply not true.
>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"?
Yeah, all those "doves" who said that the invasion of Iraq was going to lead to the moon exploding blotting out the sun and ending all life on Earth are looking pretty retarded right now! Or that killing Saddam would make him more powerful than anyone could imagine.
The ones who said that the invasion would turn up no WMD, destabilize the region and create more terrorists than kill were on the other hand correct.
But ya know what? They’re not jumping up and down laughing going “See? See?”. They’re depressed and worried because the mess made by Bush (cheered on by gibbering fools like you) isn’t anywhere close to done. There is still so much death and destruction to get through that I doubt at this point anyone could predict what’s going to happen next; only that it will likely suck.
You were wrong, horrifically wrong, you mocked and scorned those who were right, these pedantic word games to try and salve your ego just tells us how truly fragile it is and how pathetic you are.
Again grow up.
Posted by: salvage on January 17, 2007 1:09 PMInspections were said to be better-- and not good enough. Read Kay. Much more relevant.
The intent and the means were present and ready to be put to use. Any amount of weapons found would not contribute in any significant way to reducing the threat (it could delay the growth of the threat to an active level at best). The inspectors could not stop the intent or the means recreate production. And Iraq did not make an effort work with inspectors. They just weren't quite as obstructionist as usual. Anyway, WMD was pretty much irrelevent. It was just the scariest casius belli. Pure propaganda.
Posted by: aaron on January 17, 2007 1:13 PM"SEN. CLELAND: General Hugh Shelton told me about a week ago, in his great North Carolina accent, which I understand—that if Saddam Hussein were removed and the Ba’ath Party ousted, that the Kurds, the Shi’ites and the Sunnis would go at each other like banshee chickens."
From the pre-war hearing where Wesley Clark opposed the war. Off the top of my head, a few other major liberal critics who are on record as predicting in 2002 that there would be a breakdown of civil order in Iraq post-invasion: Al Gore, James Fallows.
This one of the most outrageously sophistical and silly arguments Ms. McArdle has ever made, which for her is saying something.
Posted by: MQ on January 17, 2007 1:16 PMI don't remember anyone - before the invasion - saying that Saddam did not have WMD.
Hans Blix and Mohammed El Baradei.
Thanks -
Posted by: russell on January 17, 2007 1:55 PMRecently a satirical maestropiece appeared in The Onion on the current theme. Note the eerie tone of this pluperfect parody of warblogger groupthink, analagous to what psychiatrists call la belle indifferance, the creepy detachment from their situation (aka "reality") that hysterical patients exhibit in response to intolerable crises. Especially amusing are the ironic quotes arond the word "mess," lest any of us think the author believes the Iraq situation is really, unqualifiedly, unironically, a, you know. . .mess. (I detected a faint homage to General "Buck" Turgidsons's "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops" line.) Equally hilarious is the phrase "as smoothly as it has" and the obligatory rightie capper, "fight them over there so we don't have to"...oh, hell, you already know the rest by heart, don't you?
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.
Ooops, hold up: that wasn't The Onion after all. 'Twas instead one of Jane's groupies on the thread here. My bad. Satire definitely has its work cut out for it these days, huh?
The math quiz analogy one offered above shows the mentality level of most of the posters here. Most people think that this war is a game, and what is important is not the outcome, but how convincingly you can spin your decision. Listen: in real life you don't get "points" for being right about some things and lose them for being wrong about some things. The notion that the hypothetical straw man "leftists" shouldn't be listened to because they predicted a nuclear strike by Sadaam or didn't predict something else is total CYA nonsense. OK, let's make a deal: there were plenty of people who did not believe Sadaam had WMD, and/or predicted correctly the chaos to follow (in the comments alone you can find mentions to Wesley Clark, Scott Ritter, Hans Blix, Mohammed Al-Baradei), so if those are the only people you want to listen to now, fine. Then just STFU.
Posted by: Derek Jeter on January 17, 2007 2:19 PMI do hope this latest Mesopotamian caper was about "blood for oil" after all. After all the others were since post WW1.
No other reason stands up to examination any more.
I want my cheap gas! Where is it!
Posted by: Nabakov on January 17, 2007 2:34 PMOr, think about it this way, your dinner companion KNEW something terrible was going to happen if you went out, and they told you this. And heavens to betsy, something awful did happen, but they got their specifications wrong. That friend had tried to warn you nontheless. And you probably called them an unpatriotic commie hippie.
Posted by: Suzanne Geneste on January 17, 2007 3:55 PMOh, poor Nabakov. It's not about cheaper oil for you. It's about cheaper oil for your aristocratic betters. Now shine my shoes, peasant.
Posted by: grendelkhan on January 17, 2007 5:25 PMFortunately, or unfortunately for me, I wrote my predictions down, so I know that I was an unabashed hawk, 100% convinced that Saddam had WMD.
In other words, you weren't paying attention.
You've taken a real beating on this thread, and rightly so.
Posted by: Righteous Bubba on January 17, 2007 7:57 PMI remember when I told a friend not to have a rock fight because someone might get hurt, and specifically someone might get hit in the eye.
Well, a bunch of kids ended up really banged up, and one ended up with a broken nose, and another broke his arm, and then my friend got hit in the eye. But I was no more right than he was, because I didn't predict what would happen and the exact order in which it happened.
Posted by: MDtoMN on January 17, 2007 8:23 PMfeh.
'doves'. you use that as slander. your warmongering ways disgust me.
you think you can dismiss us with a high-minded sniff - 'you doves predicted all of this exactly, we warmongers were completely wrong, but somehow I can still find a way in my little brain to still say something wrong about those who were completely correct'.
face it. you were wrong. we 'peacemongers' were right - we knew it was a bad idea, based on lies that everyone knew were lies at the time (you just moved on to other lies as more proof that your earlier lies didn't mean anything), we knew the war would go badly and that the occupation would be a complete shambles. It was fought by the wrong people at the wrong time based on the wrong lies.
try to accept that. can you? I doubt it. you trogloditic bushlicking sycophants can't bring yourselves to admit any wrong in this regard. you view war to be a good thing, and mock those who know it is a terrible thing.
your lord, Jesus, was quoted as saying 'blessed be the peacemakers, for they shall inherit the earth'.
I can promise you he wasn't talking about guns when he said the word 'peacemakers'.
but go ahead and live in your little violent world, where the scary terrists are hiding under your bed and only king george can save you with his mighty war machine.
trust me, we 'doves' aren't sitting around resting on our laurels, happy that you were wrong, smug that we were right.
no. we were right, but that doesn't make us happy. The sadness and hopelessness I feel as a result of this complete nightmare, this utter fiasco, are not in any way related to smugness. We saw you were fools for wanting to attempt such an asinine plan (spreading democracy with guns? please.), we knew your leader was lying, we tried to stop it, and now we have to sit back powerlessly and watch in horror as the utterly incompetent fools you elected botch every single action they enact, including the execution of a mass murderer.
you feckless fools make me sick, because you not only do not see the error of your ways, but you are unable to accept the vacuous nature of your world-view. your warmongering, jingoistic little ways are unable to change course, continuing down the self-destructive path of your idiocy, endlessly ramming your lance in an infinite loop of don quixote-esque blind rage.
blessed be the peacemakers!
damned be the warmongers.
Posted by: prozacula on January 17, 2007 10:30 PMThe whole justification for the war on the basis of WMD was a dishonest exercise to persuade the American population and its allies of the merits of invading Iraq. I didn't support the war because of this dishonesty. Do I support the withdrawal? No because the alterative is too dire to contemplate.
Bush and the hawks have squandered much of the political capital and international goodwill which arose post 9/11 on a project to refashion the Middle East. If the neo-cons had been more honest in the reasons for the invasion, namely, the redrawing of the political map of the Middle East by removing a destabilising and brutal dictator, then this could have generated more sympathy for and assistance in the post-war reconstruction phase.
I am an Australian. Most Australians supported the war but now there is a high level of distrust of America amongst the community. This is a direct result of the invasion of Iraq. And other than the UK, Australia has been America's staunchest ally.
Posted by: thehitman123 on January 18, 2007 12:17 AMHitman, you slander our nation. We decidedly did not support Australian involvement in Iraq
NEWSPOLL 3 February 2003
via http://www.newspoll.com.au/
Support involvement if UN does: Y57/N39
Support involvement if UN doesn't: Y18/N76
In favour of sending troops at this stage: Y35/N60
But you're right about what many of us have come to think about Americans - especially those who supported or couldn't see through Bush as late in the game as Nov 04.
Posted by: AlanDownunder on January 18, 2007 5:55 AMOK, doves, you want credit for your prescience. Cool.
Tell us right now, in detail, every weapon the North Koreans have and what they will do with them.
Same with Iran.
Nukes, no nukes? If they have them, how powerful are they? What are the odds they will be used? What are the odds they will fail to work?
Chemical weapons? Ability to set off dirty bombs?
If you think they don't have them, and you turn out to be wrong, hundreds of thousands or millions die, maybe including yourselves.
Publish your answers in a blog and arrange for them to exist permanently.
Give us your answers.
Posted by: Chester White on January 18, 2007 6:46 AMMr. White:
First, I find it really funny that you're invoking North Korea. This administration blustered (for domestic political consumption) and then had their bluff called by NK. Is this a success of Republican policy? One of the less important arguments against invading Iraq was that it drew attention and pressure away from NK. This was never my primary argument, but I certainly made it. Seems to have come true.
Second, the default should NOT be war. It's not incumbent on doves to outline a series of predictions that never involve death. That's silly. The reason Peace is the default is simple to explain - Wars usually have 2 losers (2 Nations that are worse off than they could have been through negotiation). Wars almost always have 1 loser (1 Nation that could have been better off through negotiation). And Wars almost always involve a lot of death and end less well than the pro-war movement expects (WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Iraq, etc). Finally, exhausting other options is almost always less costly.
Third, your arguments would be much more compelling if we did not have the last 60 years of successful deterrence of the USSR/Russia and China. Any nation that attacks us knows that we will wipe them off the face of the Earth. Their leaders get to the top by being intensely self-interested. They do not want to get wiped off the face of the Earth. So, we can deter them. Are NK and Iran as threatening as the Soviets? I don't think so.
As for exact predictions - recent reports suggest that NK may have nuclear weapons, it's unclear how powerful they are, and it's unclear how likely they are to use them. It seems likely they will not use them, since they could (at most) kill several million Americans while America could (easily) completely obliterate them. Iran probably does not have nuclear weapons, and they are developing them.
This technology is 50 years old. It is very hard to stop its spread, and military action is rarely the way to do it, because military action often goes wrong. Are you really suggesting that we should attack NK, get at least 30,000 American troops killed and several million South Koreans killed? Are you really suggesting that we try to occupy Iran? All because you don't have the patience and courage to handle the risks that are much lower than those faced by the two prior generations of Americans who managed to handle the standoff with Soviet Russia?
Finally - the question is not - justify every decision to not go to war. The question is - whose foreign policy makes us safer? And who is willing to put their money where their mouth is? Until the pro-war movement argues for mandatory service (something I support but recognize most do not), we simply cannot solve all our problems through these selective wars. But the pro-war movement has always been more about domestic politics than actually achieving security.
Posted by: MDtoMN on January 18, 2007 7:28 AMRussell:
I don't remember anyone - before the invasion - saying that Saddam did not have WMD.
Hans Blix and Mohammed El Baradei.
Except that was NOT what Hans Blix said. He said he hadn't found the WMD yet. He also said that much of the WMD Saddam was known to have in 1992 had not been accounted for, and he wanted to keep on looking for it - apparently while we kept a large part of our army poised at Saddam's borders for years, because that's the only way Saddam ever let the UN inspectors work freely.
I'd call this the doves rewriting history, except that I recall them misreading Blix's carefully nuanced statements just after he made them...
Posted by: markm on January 18, 2007 8:12 AMMDtoMN:
I appreciate the reasoned tone of your comments.
Perhaps the leader of NK is sane. Perhaps he isn't. I sure don't know. Same with the leader of Iran. They both sound pretty whacked to me, though, surely a lot more than Saddam Hussein was.
You say the leaders threatening us are into self-preservation. Well, maybe, but I am not persuaded. Saddam presumably didn't want to get "wiped off the face of the earth," either, but it happened, didn't it? I think it's clear that he could have made a few more concessions to us and maintained his grip on power.
How can you possibly claim to predict the actions of someone who is more whacked than Saddam?
You admit that nuke technology is 50 years old and hard to contain. It is avidly sought by people who are arguably whacked, have enough resources to develop it, and who in at least one case have repeatedly pledged to use it. What are we going to do to stop these people? Betting our lives that deterrence of the type we used with the Soviet Union will work with these new foes seems naive to me.
NK and Iran are not as threatening to us as the USSR was, sure, but what of it? Losing part or all of New York City or DC or Chicago would still be a pretty fearsome blow.
What then do we do? Jaw-sanction-jaw-sanction-jaw-sanction-jaw until the Big One hits? Send in Hans Freakin' Blix and his Inspector Clouseaus? How are you going to stop Iran? I don't care if they are a week away or 10 years away from having a nuke (that argument has always seemed weak to me: "Well, they are several years away so we don't have to worry much."). At some point they have to be STOPPED. Have they shown any signs whatever to you since 1979 of coming around and becoming reasonable?
All through the 1930s Hitler kept getting stronger and stronger and stronger and we did not have the will to act to get rid of him. And so tens of millions died.
Clearly there are many lunatics running around looking for ever-more-powerful weapons and I see no alternative to exterminating them. I know it's ungodly costly, it's morally enervating, it's risky, we get some (or many) of our people killed, and the world hates our guts. I don't like it. War sucks. I agree. But I think the alternative is worse.
I am utterly convinced that we are going to lose a big chunk of an American city within the next 30 years through some sort of inattention to wiping out the guys bent on it. Nuclear, bio, I don't know which, doesn't much matter.
What are we going to do then? Is any President going to be able to resist the pressure to turn a chunk of somewhere into a glowing radioactive pane of glass?
There are no good answers here; it's all depressing as hell.
Had there been widespread TV and Internet coverage of WWII, we never would have followed through on it. Can you imagine the screams about the losses at Iwo over a rock in the Pacific?
And as a result, this country is done for, sometime in the next 50 years. We will not have the will to defend ourselves when the time comes, and it will all be over fast.
Posted by: Chester White on January 18, 2007 8:29 AMExcept that was NOT what Hans Blix said. He said he hadn't found the WMD yet. He also said that much of the WMD Saddam was known to have in 1992 had not been accounted for, and he wanted to keep on looking for it - apparently while we kept a large part of our army poised at Saddam's borders for years, because that's the only way Saddam ever let the UN inspectors work freely.
Yeah that would be way worse than what we have now.
Posted by: Zoroastrian on January 18, 2007 8:39 AMIt looks like the Emotion Trolls are taking over this discussion. My parting words then are to lay it out for the record: I have decided that, ultimately I am a damned war monger since my reasons to go to Iraq have been--all along--OFFENSIVE in nature. A war was started on 9/11, not by us, but by a system of society and politics in the Middle East that is turning more and more malignant every day. Finishing the first Iraqi War, as we did in 2003, was a way to give us a "vote" (however tenuous) in Middle East affairs. Yes, pacifying Iraq was always going to be, by any historical standard (e.g., Churchill), very difficult indeed. Removing Saddam removed the status quo and has given us the opportunity to reshape Middle East politics. By historical standards, by the way, Iraq is actually going quite well. Years will need to pass, perhaps decades, for us to know whether or not the overall Iraq strategy is succeeding or failing.
I guess I will burn in Hell at the right hand of Bush. He is not my favorite President, by any means. I mean, after all, a President's job is to lead, and while he can make critical decisions in the midst of perhaps incredible stress--not everyone can do that--he is not a very good leader in general (to understate things a bit). For initiating an offensive strategy in this war (which may never end, not thanks to Bush but thanks to the enemy) he will be punished I guess since Western nations can no longer bare to think of themselves capable of anything but purely defensive actions.
By the way, just because I didn't like SV's tone it doesn't mean I have been correct all long. If any of you had actually read anything I had to say you would realize that I freely admit that I have a good chance of being wrong. (Back in 2003, I gave myself almost an even chance of being wrong since I felt the decision to go was a "toss up.") I was just saying that SV's tone should not be allowed in discussions where emotions could easily rule more than logic. However, since the trolls have taken over I guess emotion is all that is left. I will leave you youngsters alone with these thoughts which you can bat around like some ball in a grand game. Have fun.
Posted by: Nicole Tedesco on January 18, 2007 11:10 AM"I will leave you youngsters alone with these thoughts which you can bat around like some ball in a grand game. Have fun.".
Help! Nicole left me home alone with her thoughts! And they're big and scary!
Nope, no elitists here.
Posted by: ManOnBlog on January 18, 2007 11:22 AMI disagree that the mistake was about the lack of WMDs. In actuality the fact that there were no WMDs in Iraq was a *positive* for the war effort. Let me explain.
During the invasion weapons depots were encountered. Normally such depots would be destroyed to deny their use to the enemy. Because it was believed that these depots might contain nerve gas, they were not destroyed. They were not guarded either because of insufficient troops. As a consequence, the depots were looted and the weapons fell into insurgent hands.
Now suppose the hawks were right and Saddan had stockpiles of WMDs, that is there were chemical munitions in those depots and the decision not to blow them up was wise. In this case chemical WMDs would have fallen into insurgent hands. Suppose the foreign jidadists then send some of these chemical munitions (ones clearly marked as Iraqi in origin) to Osama for use in a terror attack in the US.
Such an attack would not have to be spectacularly successful like 911 to be devasting psychologically. Suppose al Qaeda set off nerve gas in a Detroit school, killing a dozen schoolchildren and sickening more than a hundred. Surely this would score a massive propaganda victory for the terrorists. Especially when Bin Laden could follow up with a video thanking President Bush for his help in the jihad by making it possible to obtain WMDs--and warning the American people to convert to Islam or face more devasting attacks.
What stopped this nightmare scenario from happening was the fact that there were no WMDs in those depots or anywhere else in Iraq.
Thus, even if the hawks were right about the WMDs they would be even more wrong about the wisdom of the war.
Posted by: Mike Alexander on January 18, 2007 1:40 PMMr. White,
You say something has to be done. No offense, but your arguments would have lead someone in 1947 to insist that the US attack the Soviets and fight until we had concurred Russia. This would have been a horrible decision.
Have the Courage of your convictions! The Courage of our Nation! We have democracy, freedom, liberty, equality, fairness, and law on our side. The reactionary forces abroad are living on borrowed time. They will pass from this Earth, and eventually be replaced with something new. If we wait them out, they will fall and be replaced by their own people. If we attack, we stoke the flames of nationalism and give them more time to live.
And I don't say this flippantly, but here goes - they blow up Washington DC (where I usually live and where some of my family lives). We die. It's horrible. And then their nation suffers massive retaliation. The US recovers, and it moves on. We stretch across a continent! We have major cities and population centers everywhere. We won't fold if that day should come. The US will not fade from the Earth.
But, if we insist on fighting endless preventive war, stretching our forces and expending our resources in some futile attempt to run all these Nations, THEN we can fail. Then we will exhaust our resources, and we will have gained only a short reprieve.
Finally, I would say that the leaders of both NK and Iran may seem whacked out to you, but I suspect they are highly pragmatic, corrupt men who will save their necks. As for Hussein, he did let the inspectors in, in the end. We would have invaded regardless of what he did (except possible step down from power, which would amount to a death sentence).
Posted by: MDtoMN on January 18, 2007 2:20 PMI opposed the war despite believing at the time that Saddam probably had non-nuclear WMD.
Even if he had maintained some WMD capability, the idea that he would turn his hard-won weapons over to Al-Quaida is a fantasy. He was a megalomaniac focused on regime survival, and shared none of the religious fanaticism that motivates Bin Laden.
If he had given away anything short of a nuclear weapon, it's unlikely that AQ could actually have turned it into a successful attack. Remember that the Aum Shinryku cult had sarin, but managed to kill fewer people than the 7/7 Tube attackers did using conventional explosives.
Saddam's strategy was to bluff. Even his own generals thought he had WMD until shortly before the invasion, according to the US 'Iraqi perspectives' document. So yes, he was acting like he had WMD. Even if he had, that wouldn't have made the invasion a good idea.
Guessing right on Iraqi WMD may have been very hard, but it doesn't mean that the decision to invade was 50/50, let alone the decision to force the Army to invade with a much smaller force than required.
And by getting bogged down in Iraq, the West has actually weakened its hand in intervening with Iran, not to mention North Korea. If we weren't tied down in Iraq, maybe we could actually have responded credibly to the recent North Korean nuclear test. Do you advocate an invasion of North Korea now, Jane Galt?
The war has essentially turned out exactly as I predicted in general terms.
My basic argument in 2002:
1. We would have no trouble with defeating Saddams forces, unless they actually had chemical or biological WMD. If they did, we would find out soon they had WMD within the first 90 hours, and we then would still win very easily. Why: Iraq would have no real response to our airpower, as we had destroyed any effective Iraqi air-response in the decade prior. I still recall the "Turkey Shoot" from the first Gulf War, and as we had severely degraded Saddams military power in GWI and in the next decade, it would be even easier to win the shooting war part of this war.
2. The occupation would take far more manpower than we were committing. Why: Generals were fired for suggesting this, and Bosnia was taking more men for much longer than anticipated. Iraq would be at least as bad.
The most telling moment of this entire war (as opposed to the subsequent occupation) was the toppling of Saddams statue. There were at most a few hundreds of people there. For something like this, even during a war, you could expect 10s of thousands. However, they didn't show up. It was hugely clear to me, and I said this to everyone who would listen, that we needed to win the hearts and minds of the people. We clearly didn't have a plan to do this.
But who cares what I think
the most important thing is:
A war was started on 9/11
Again, last time I checked, it was Bin Laden and a bunch of pissed off Saudis who were responsible for slamming planes into our buildings, not Saddam. Perhaps all Arab people look the same to you, but that does not make it so.
Posted by: Nick J. on January 18, 2007 4:38 PMNicole says:
In the case of emotionally-charged situations like the war, the amazing thing which happens is that, instead of changing my mind I often have been finding myself "reverting" back to the solid pro-war camp mostly because of people like SV. I am a person who takes emotion as a sign that logic may be broken somewhere, and it leaves me with doubts about the speaker's opinions.
Being pro-war, Nicole, I imagine that you were never a target of the threats spewed forth practically non-stop from the right. It has been incredibly oppressive up until lately - but I guess you wouldn't know anything about that, being on the wrong side of seemingly everything for quite some time now.
In that light, SV's argument was practically a case study in emotional restraint (and a very good one, I might add). So I guess anyone that employs emotion in any argument is "non-serious" and can be ignored? We shouldn't feel passionately about things that profoundly influence us and others, things like invasion, murder, rape? What kind of logic is that?
If nothing else, you pundits (and pundit wanna-bes) certainly have a powerful sense of entitlement.
Posted by: ManOnBlog on January 18, 2007 6:16 PMSorry Jane, yours is the childish drivel of self satisfaction. The first part is that those who opposed this war were right. That you can shop for examples where perhaps some of them had some reasons that were not to your liking is besides the point. I can, for example point to several, like Al Gore, who got it right for the right reasons. I can point to several like Colin Powell, George Bush and Dick Cheney who not only got the big thing wrong, but all the reasons.
Your WMD argument is good evidence you should grind your keyboard down to dust and retire. WMD comes in three flavors, chemical, biological and nuclear. Only the latter is existential. The first, chemical, is not a very serious mass destruction threat. It was part of the strategy of the war hawks to confuse the three. You continue the great tradition.
BTW, North Korea did not have nuclear weapons until Georgie decided to play tough guy. In many respects their breakout was a response to this (they had a low level effort to produce enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. This would have taken many years. When Georgie decided to play tough guy, they opened up their power reactors and took out the plutonium which had been under UN seal...bang).
I'm no genius and don't claim to be one. I opposed the war mostly because I sensed Bush wasn't being on the level when he was evasive about the costs of the war and occupation to the point of firing Larry Lindsey and very clearly downplaying the costs. I'm no military expert, but I expected an occupation to last in the ballpark of seven years from the examples of Japan and Germany, but they were talking about being out in two years -- without explaining why. Downplaying costs is a very bad idea if you want to maintain public support over the long term. You ought to be up-front about that stuff just in principle anyway, but it's an extra bad idea when it comes to military occupations.
Furthermore, it seemed evident off the bat Bush just didn't seem to care too much about the actual real-world consequences of policy actions. For example, passing a supply-side tax cut to fight a cap-ex recession (caused by too much supply), yet arguing in favor of said tax cut using Keynesian arguments (anathema to most conservatives). WTF? Sure seemed like he merely wanted the tax cut to reward political allies and didn't particularly care what its larger impact would be. And to get it, he used whatever arguments sounded good, regardless of whether he actually believed them. Sound familiar?
I have to admit that this distrust of Bush wasn't based on a lot of hard evidence. It was mostly a bad feeling. One that was reinforced by Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke (and the administrations resorting to smear tactics in response), but that was much later. Still, I would figure most libertarians and conservatives ought to be operating from the assumption that they cannot trust governments to be competent nor honest (let alone objective) unless proven otherwise. Especially when it comes to war, because there are powerful special interests that profit from it.
Posted by: fling93 on January 18, 2007 9:55 PM"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."
This simply provides evidence that your dovish conversational partners were as stupid as you.
Plenty of those who opposed the invasion of Iraq opposed the invasion for reasons that have been proven on the ground. And these voices were prominent on the most widely trafficked blogs in the world. Have you ever heard of a guy named Billmon? Digby? Hell, have you ever heard of Paul Craig Roberts?
I tangled with you, personally, a few times about how great the war was going once it got started. And then I gave up on coming to this blog because you seemed willfully ignorant about the fact that things were not going well in Iraq. You were grasping at straws, and apparently you still are.
The sectarian violence was perfectly predictable. It should have been planned for but wasn't. Didn't Shinseki lose his job over insisting on more troops? Remember the opposition complaining about that? The opportunity cost of pulling troops from Afghanistan was perfectly predictable. Remember the Where's Osama game on Daily Kos? The exploding cost was perfectly predictable, but was covered up and lied about. Didn't Larry Lindsey lose his job over this? What did he say 100 million?
The one mistake most of those who were opposed to the war made was to believe that Saddam would have at least some chemical weapons and use them as Paul Van Riper attempted to in pre-war gaming.
So in other words, our big mistake was to make an exception to the rule that Bush lies about everything. Point taken. I certainly won't repeat that mistake.
Shorter Jane Galt: I am a disingenuous, dishonest twit.
Posted by: Jody on January 19, 2007 12:17 PMI was conversing with someone else about the subject of the war (which had not happened yet, it being October, 2002; the Iraq war started in March, 2003). Here are some quotes from our discussions. These list many of my reasons for opposing the war.
There have been no shocking revelations about Hussein's motives,
character, or program to build and brandish weapons of mass destruction.
Why all of a sudden this interest in Hussein, who is the same old Hussein
that we all remember from the invasion of Kuwait a decade ago?
What I seem to see is this: President Bush starts talking about how
dangrous Hussein is, and then everyone else starts talking about how
dangerous Hussein is. This discussion would have been a little more
convincing if I had heard a bit more of it over the past ten years.
[...]
If it really were
sensible to panic about Hussein, then it would have been sensible to
panic at any point in the past ten years. People didn't. Were we all mad?
[...]
Why have you decided that it's high - and why all of a sudden? Hussein
has been Hussein for ten years, so why did you wait until now to decide
that Hussein is probably going to blow us up?
[...]
Right, I estimate the probability of Hussein bombing us, assuming we
leave him alone, at about 1 in 1000 through Hussein's lifetime. As a
rough ballpark figure. I recall that the USSR never bombed us, and the
USSR always seemed to me to be quite hostile to the US.
I also estimate that the probability of either Hussein or someone else
bombing us to go up, the more violence we visit on other lands, including
Iraq. So my assessment of absolute probability is actually not that
important. I have argued throughout this discussion that it is "insane"
to adopt such an offensive defense, and the practical reason is that I
think it is likely to come back to haunt us.
[...]
think there is a low probability of Hussein causing a nuclear
explosion, but that is not especially important. What matters is how our
actions will adjust the probability of someone attacking the US at some
point. It stands to reason that, ceteris paribus, the more we attack
others, the more likely it is that others will attack us. Or more
generally: the more we become politically and militarily entangled in the
world, the more the world's problems will become our problems.
[...]
I have not blamed the rise of islamicist violence on
the power of the US. What I did was to blame the power of the US for the
contemplation of a war against Saddam which does not have a very good
justification. And I compared it - correctly, in my opinion - to the
problem of what happens when one person has too much power and can get away
with stuff.
[...]
You don't need 911 to teach you that. The world did not begin yesterday.
You are treating this as a revelation that we didn't have until 911, and
that this revelation overturns all previous ideas about when it is a
good idea to go to war. But the existene of dire threats of which we are
blissfully unaware until the last moment, when it is too late, is no
secret.
Given that you could die at any moment, should you attack people who
have not attacked you? Common sense tells me, "no". And no, it's not
common sense that somehow has managed to ignore the fact that I could
die at any moment.
911 is not a new thing. Death that comes as a copmlete surprise to the
victims is not a new thing, by a very long shot.
[...]
MAD worked because the power-hungry leaders of the USSR understood that
if they dropped bombs on the US, that would not serve their hunger for
power. Your only argument, which you have not presented, is not that
Saddam is power-hungry, but that he is incompetent, that he is literally
insane, so out of his mind that he cannot understand the effect that
dropping a bomb on the US would have on his lifespan, let alone his
power.
[...]
Let's suppose that Hussein is insane, that
he cannot even reason to the point where he can see that dropping the
bomb on the US would be suicide. Explain, then, how it is that this
drooling idiot is able to hold onto power.
I'm guessing that Hussein the man is not stupid or insane.
[...]
http://www.cato.org/dailys/10-14-02.html
It starts as follows: "The CIA's newly declassified judgments on the
likelihood of Iraq's use of weapons of mass destruction severely undercut
the Bush administration's case for attacking Iraq. The CIA noted that Iraq
now appears to be deterred from initiating terrorist attacks against the
United States with conventional, biological or chemical weapons. But if the
United States invades Iraq and attempts to depose Hussein, the CIA
concluded that he would be more likely to conduct such attacks."
As I said at the beginning, the burden of proof is strongly on those who
advocate war, because war is so terrible that it is only justifiable as a
last resort and a desperate measure. You have some plausible reasons for
believing that war would make things better, and at the same time it seems
to me that war is very likely to make things worse. You may be right and I
may be wrong because who knows, Saddam may have some dire plan in the works
that neither of us knows about and that plan might be foiled if we hit him
now. But I don't see that you are so clearly right that war is justified. I
think the reasons for it have to be clearer than they are now.
"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...."
And that plan is working really well, eh?
Posted by: David Sucher on January 20, 2007 12:07 AMThere seems to be an air of desperation among those who supported this clearly ill-advised misadventure and have since been exposed as fools. They want to go back and pretend the waters were murkier than they were. Well, they weren't. There's no spinning it. What these folks should be focusing on is "Why did I deny the obvious?"
Obvious #1: The average person doesn't know diddly squat about how to determine if a given county has secret nukes. BUT, the weapons inspectors do. And they were pleading to be allowed to finish their inspections. They seemed to have some confidence in their ability to find nukes. They were right.
Obvious #2: Whatever Clinton believed or didn't believe about Saddam, that knowledge didn't compel him to attack Iraq. Bush used the same knowledge (no one is claiming that circumstances changed between admins) and decided to attack. Clinton was right. Bush was wrong.
Obvious #3: Saddam was not a threat. There was nothing Saddam was doing that could have reasonably led anyone to believe that the United States was in any danger from Saddam.
There were other arguments circulating at the time; but these were the ones I used in my letter to my Senator pleading with her to vote against the war. Yes, I know the vote wasn't technically to go to war; but, again, to anyone who didn't have their head up their ass, it was clear that it was precisely a vote to go to war.
It was clear and obvious at the time that we shouldn't go to war with Iraq. Anyone who's now trying to pretend otherwise is a liar and/or a fool.
"I am a person who takes emotion as a sign that logic may be broken somewhere, and it leaves me with doubts about the speaker's opinions."
I am a person who believes that where emotion and logic intersect there lies wisdom. "logic" without emotion is sociopathy.
Posted by: sarah on January 20, 2007 5:24 PMFirst, I do not understand how anybody who listened to Powell's UN speech could have been 100% sure that there were WMD in Iraq. There just wasn't any evidence there and presumably it was the best proof we had to offer. Also, given that it was used by Bush&Co. as just about the only reason to go to war, one had to wonder if going to war was a good idea. Second, wars are inherently unpredictable and are usually extremely costly to both sides. Therefore, this is a typical situation where the null should be not to go to war, implying that one has to be darn sure that war is a good idea. So, even if some of the people who were against the war did not know how Bush&Co. would mess it up, the burden of proof is on the people who are for the war. And that burden certainly was not met.
Posted by: Michael Alexeev on January 20, 2007 6:32 PM"I am a person who takes emotion as a sign that logic may be broken somewhere, and it leaves me with doubts about the speaker's opinions."
I am also a person who takes starting an argument about Iraq with the phrase "9/11 changed everything" as a sign that logic may be broken somewhere, and it leaves me with complete disrespect about the speaker's opinions.
Posted by: sarah on January 20, 2007 8:20 PMI just posted this on Dan Drezner's blog post about the same topic, so let me offer it here. I say this as someone who didn't think that the war was a good idea to start with, but would rather give it a chance to play out before passing judgment:
The biggest disaster to come out of this project might be the belief that if the Bush Administration was at all competent the war would have worked. Hyper-competence exists only in academia. Let me offer an alternative hypothesis:
75% of the decisions that the formerly pro-war Bush Administration critics currently think were wrong, were actually right and the critics would have realized that had they actually been responsible for making them.
15% of the decisions that the critics currently think were wrong were, in fact, wrong, but would have made the same way anyway, had the critics been in charge.
10% of the poor decisions would actually have been improved by the current war critics.
But the current war critics would have screwed up an equal number of decisions that the Bush Administration actually got right.
This is the nature of the world.
As for the main pre-war war critics:
You would gain more traction with me had you not declared the war a disaster from about year 1 onward (from day 1 onward if you listened to the BBC). To me this was always at least a 5 year project, about which we would not have been able to make any sensible judgment before at least year 3. We are in a position to make prelimminary assessments now, and they look damn bleak. But the process still isn't over yet.
Posted by: Scott Wood on January 20, 2007 9:45 PMI am not a dove, but I predicted and wrote down why I believed Iraq would be a disaster. The problem, as I saw it, was that the neo-con fantasy for the Iraq war ("democracy dominoes") relied on too many events, too far into the unpredictable future, going exactly right. The odds are stacked against this ever happening. So if a plan can withstand some serious setbacks, then it may be worth pursuing, especially if it is directly in our national interest. That's how the military
I fully supported the Afghan war because it had a short-term goal in our national interest: destroy al Qaeda and the Taliban. It didn't rely on too many external events, it was pretty much up to sheer American might. I'm disappointed that Bush will ultimately screw this up, too.
Finally, it's kind of lame to pick on the people who guessed correctly. I know you need to protect your ego by picking on the loony anti-war doves, or claiming you must "call your shots" or it doesn't count (like 8-ball). I just wish the pro-war faction wasn't so snotty and condescending on the path to war. That was frustrating. Don't do that again, please.
Posted by: projectshave on January 20, 2007 10:03 PMScott Wood: do you actually think that anyone takes you seriously, when you pile your post with statistics you clearly pulled out of your ass?
Posted by: justdrivingby on January 21, 2007 3:35 AMjustdrivingby:
Would you have been happier had I said "most", "most of the rest", and "the remainder"? You can replace "75%", "15%" and "10%" with those words if you like.
Posted by: Scott Wood on January 21, 2007 10:42 AMI don't think the problem with the Bush administration is that they failed to achieve hypercompetence.
Posted by: fling93 on January 21, 2007 2:30 PMWell, Jane, no matter how things work out, no matter how you incorporate lessons learned into your worldview (assuming there are lessons for you to learn), at least you can proud of how you acquitted yourself throughout this episode. You, for instance, never advocated violence against people attending rallies.
Oh, wait. You did.
Well, sure... if you had included any reasoning to back up your arguments. As it stands, your slinging around a bunch of assertions is not the same as actually making a persuasive argument, whether or not you use actual numbers. That was my point.
Sheesh.