In other words, I’m not suggesting that it’s “OK” to kill anyone with fundamentalist tendencies—but it is OK to kill those who actively seek to kill liberals and impose tyranny through violence.

As regards your main claim, Sadr is in the same position now as he was before the fighting started in April, with the proximate cause being Bremer’s suppression of his newspaper and threat to arrest him.

He has effective control of Sadr city, he’s still denouncing the occupation, and his militia has almost certainly made good the losses of the fighting. Politically, he probably came out somewhat stronger on balance. All the Administration achieved in the two rounds of bloodshed was to restore the status quo ante

Your suggestion that it’s OK to kill people who favour fundamentalist domination of politics and oppose civil liberties and the separation of powers has some obvious ironies. More to the point, the idea that any country with enough power is entitled to invade any ohter country where people with ideas like Sadr’s are in power, and kill all who oppose them is a recipe for endless war.

So you’re criticizing the administration for claiming credit for outcomes it made happen. This doesn’t make much sense to me. Allawi pushed for reconciliation with Sadr, and the US and Bremer did not stand in his way—this is well documented. Allawi deserves credit. You’re mixing up the opinions of the administration with the opinions of the uber-hawks on the blog circuit, who wanted to crush Sadr.

As for the elections, Paul Bremer has a good piece where he rightly criticizes the “armchair experts” who “carp that we should have moved even faster.” I don’t take it as fact that elections one year ago would have turned out as well as elections a few months ago. Iraq was a different place then. (link to article is here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006631
)

Finally, Sadr was an opportunist who wanted a Shiite-dominated Iraq. He was willing to risk civil war, and tens of thousands of lives, for this cause. God knows what he would have done with the Kurds and the Sunnis. The US, at the same time, was trying to craft an interim constitution to protect civil liberties, ensure separation of powers, and give voice to the Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis. Does this gulf in motivation not enter into your judgement when blaming the US for another’s uprising? If you say the US is guilty for killing those civilians, you must also acknowledge it is “guilty” for pre-empting Sadr’s tyranny in Iraq, and that is a guilt I am proud to share.

At the time of the Najaf fighting I wrote

The only remotely feasible option is to make a place for Sadr and his supporters in the political process, and to hope that he is moderated by the attractions of office, as has happened in many cases before.

You complain that I feel the need to refer back to previous posts, but this is a fairly typical example of the reason I do it. In this case, as with the elections, the Administration and its supporters are now claiming credit for outcomes they vigorously resisted at the time. The result is that they continue to pursue wrong policies, most obviously with plans for an indefinite/permanent US presence, without any recognition of how wrong they have got things in the past.

To answer another point, the same post says of the bloodshed in the Najaf campaign “Sadr bears his share of the guilt for this crime. The US government is even more guilty.” and I’m happy to stand by this.

It is possible that had elections been held earlier things might have gone better but this is far easier to see now than then and many, including the UN, were arguing that it was too soon – not an unreasonable point of view even if wrong in hindsight.

JQ’s belief that the insurgency would end if the US announced a specific date for withdrawal shows a misunderstanding of the conflict. US troops will, and should, remain as long as it takes to ensure the nascent democracy is safe from those who don’t want it. Any sign of the US withdrawing beforehand would only incite more violence from anti-democratic forces.

Publius: Yes, the CPA screwed up all those things. But do keep in mind that Sadr’s army was successfully defused, and he was brought into the political sphere. Also it wouldn’t hurt to pass at least half the blame for the CPA’s problems on the likes of Sadr and the various jihadist instigators. It may be a lame argument to employ, but it isn’t easy getting a war-torn country back on its feet. I suppose what bothers me about the these arguments is the anti-war crowd militantly attacked (and attacks) the CPA at every corner without ever paying much attention to the other players on the ground, like Sadr. It’s a perspective commonly advocated by John Quiggin—I recall a post he wrote (perhaps a year ago) that placed nearly ALL the blame of the Sadr uprising on the United States! (correct me if I’m wrong). As for the other CPA failures you mentioned, a few are suspect. Disbanding the Iraqi army seemed like the correct thing to do at the time—after all, remember the left’s furor when a former Baathist was considered usable to retake Fallujah? Neither solution was ideal, disbanding or not. Both were condemnable. At least acknowledge this when criticizing the CPA.

These days war supporters will happily acknowledge that the CPA was flawed, Chalabi was corrupt, and so on. But they will not see this as a damnation of the war effort. Put it in a historical perspective like RY is doing. By any such standard Iraq is not a failure; unless, of course, you discount the great difficulty of supplanting a tyranny with something more open.

Also, the ‘balance sheet’? Anyone who cares to can look up a NY Times report from a bit back showing that the ‘Sunni Triangle’ wasn’t hokum, but fact. 80% of the country is stable(i.e. that the insurgency acts in only a small geographical area). So on a ‘balance sheet’ this is doing okay. Not spectacular. Not terrible. But okay.

Compare it to the reconstruction of the Balkans and Somalia. Way ahead of both in terms of reconstructed infrastructure and order(go to strategypage.com, globalsecurity.org, http://www.cfr.org, for the data to do the comparisons with. Or go the Geneva orgs that monitor conflict the world over if you want ‘authoritative’ data.).

Neither of these points speak to the justice/injustice of going to Iraq in the first place, but if you’re going to complain about it ,and use after the fact ‘I told you so’ reasoning, you should at least get the facts correct.

On the personal point, call me obsessed if you like, though posts on Iraq are a pretty small portion of what I write. I certainly spend a lot of time thinking about what’s happening in Iraq and about the general issue of when war is justified. The fact that so few of those who supported the war have subsequently admitted they were wrong to do so increases the likelihood that there will be another one.

I concur that the elections have been the only bright spot. Alas, they were a year too late.

The CPA’s incompetence is chronicled elsewhere. I suppose citations and links would be the proper way to document that. Off the top of my head, I remember disbanding the Iraqi military, hiring expensive American contractors instead of putting Iraqis back to work (idle hands are the insurgent’s workshop), failing to rebuild the electricity and water infrastructure, losing $9 billion of our tax dollars without any explanation or accounting, and… disbanding the Iraqi military.

Chalabi is a crook, a liar, and a spy for Iran. What more do you need? I’m not going to bother to turn up the links because Google should be able to do that for you.

Unmitigated disaster? There are always some small triumphs and good deeds done, no matter how bad any disaster gets. The human spirit will never allow a truly “unmitigated” disaster—even the “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo have managed to pray, to write, to find some joy. Back when it was still safe to do so, our soldiers tried to get out and do a few good Peace-Corps-style deeds here and there. But look at the overall balance sheet: Abu Ghraib, Falloojeh, the seige of Al-Sadr’s people in the south (hell, the closing of Al-Sadr’s newspaper, which was another stupid CPA move), the prohibition of Iraqi farmers from replanting their own seeds (a campaign contribution gift to Monsatan?), the alienation of moderate Muslims throughout the region, and in general the tone of extracting corporate profits from Iraq instead of getting the country back on its feet and on the path to self-determination and democracy. I know of no objective way to weigh all this, but subjectively I’ll call it a loss.

Personally attacking the blogger and questioning his motives is an ad-hominem attack, and therefore suspect. Why does he remain negative on this whole war of conquest? I don’t know. I can tell you why I do, however: it began with lies and opportunism, and remains driven by lies and opportunism.

1) “Almost unanimous” support for killing the early elections? There were numerous, numerous blogs that supported them. You had a thread yourself where you asked people to prove they were as prescient as you (perhaps the most arrogant post I’ve read yet on the blogosphere, by the way). And you got numerous responses.

2) The CPA a set of incompetent bunglers? John, this is low. The CPA was not perfect, and many of its policies were colored by an unfitting market ideology, but in making statements like yours you’re throwing out all nuance and analysis in favor of political hackery. If you want to criticize the CPA, do it on a point by point basis (I thought this was an academic blog—you don’t want it to become the left-wing version of LGF).

3) Your emphasis on Chalabi is unwarranted. In the scheme of things, and in the overall progression of Iraqi reconstruction, Chalabi has not played as big a role as you propose. Chalabi is one factor you can use to disparage the reconstruction effort, yes. But how is he in any way more worthy of mention than any of the positive developments out of Iraq? The left’s obsession with Chalabi is difficult to understand.

4) Your calling the last year a series of disaster mitigated only by the “bright spot” of elections proves one thing: you’ve either only been reading Juan Cole (which is about as productive as only reading the neo-conservative view on the matter), or you haven’t been following Iraq at all.

5) Finally, a personal question. Very few people on the blogosphere continue to re-hash the old arguments for the war the way you do. It seems as though you’ve become a bit obsessed with proving you were right about Iraq. You always quote yourself from the past, as though to prove to the world you were correct; and then you continue to write posts, like your opportunity costs post a while back, that simply update a argument we’ve all already heard six thousand times prior to the war’s inauguration. This is symptomatic of something John: you appear to be very insecure about your anti-war position.

Or a massive American uprising, but that’s far far less likely to happen.