joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth

I used to read the Indybladet before settling on the Intergalactic Scrapbook-Tribune, and I always used to wonder what the point of Johann Hari was supposed to be. Is/was there one? (I never quite managed to read any of his columns, despite my best efforts.)

I’ve written to the poor guy to ask him to stop beating himself up. The notion that the war happened “because of the arguments of people like me” is sillier by far than supporting the war. The people who made the decisions weren’t especially concerned with the views of British leftists, decent or indecent.

The comments section on that article are worth reading. They comments are quite funny: mostly on the theme of “I always knew that Hari was a wrong ‘un.”

The rest of the HP article, incidentally, consists of highly selected ‘highlights’ of an Iraqi opinion poll. Instead of reporting the key finding (that 70% of Iraqis want their govt. to set a timetable for withdrawal of coalition forces), they instead concentrate on the ‘fact’ that ‘a majority’ of Iraqis reject attacks on the coalition. Yes, a stonking majority of 53%, with a sampling error of plus OR MINUS 3%.

Brendan — the comments section is classic sectarian leftism: as soon as someone deviates their whole history comes under scrutiny for signs of the the deviation-to-come. Reminds me of the least appealing Trotskyist groups I used to watch (and not, I hasten to add, of the much more appealing not-quite-Trotskyist group I was in). Nice to know that these folks retained not only the immunity to self doubt, but also the sectarian nastiness, when they went over into the “decent” left. I’d like to think that those of us who have remained “indecent” have improved a bit on those scores!

“The Americans say they told civilians to leave the city [Fallujah], so anybody left behind was a suspected jihadi – an evacuation procedure so successful they later used it in New Orleans.”

Don’t know why, but it had never occured to me to, nor that people were making the link.

The funniest thing about the Harry’s comments is the fetishism of the polls. That, for instance, the ORI poll predicted that Allawi would win the last election in a landslide tells you, pretty much, where the pollsters went — middle class areas where they would be safe from being wounded or kidnapped for polling, for one. But of course, they still cling to that, as to every other sponsored poll. If a gallup poll predicted that Kerry would win with 60 percent, I imagine that poll would be roundly laughed at — but in the bubble in Iraq — at least for the war supporters – where one report exists in perfect isolation from the next, we can cherrypick our news and even continue to support the Cheney line, that Saddam Hussein and Mohammed Atta were secret lovers.

The fun-ness of going to Harry’s has diminished over time. Even two years ago there was a certain amusement in it. But now it seems rather like the old 18th century sport of visiting Bedlam — after watching mad people knee and nail each other for a while, the whole thing gets tedious. As one of their fellow belligerant sites, the Poppinjays said of them a while back, they are still fightin’ like its 2003.

…as soon as someone deviates their whole history comes under scrutiny for signs of the the deviation-to-come.

Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!

Too bad he hasn’t learned his lesson.

Johann Hari, raise your right hand and repeat after me, I Johann Hari, having applied my knowledge of human nature to the circumstances, and concluded that an invasion of Iraq would be beneficial to the people of Iraq, and in hindsight having concluded that my judgement was spectacularly wrong, will now shut the F up, and not offer any more unquestionable opinions.

Still, I guess it is an improvement over most.

Luis, how do you judge polls, then? Let’s go back to the ORI poll. Now, it is possible that the election just held in Iraq was so totally corrupt that we cannot trust it — in which case, I don’t really know what the pro-war position is. But let’s say it was honest. If it was, it is almost impossible to fit the election results with the ORI poll in November, 2006, which ranked Allawi as the most trustworthy politician, ahead of Jaafari and anybody else. As you know, Allawi actually did suprisingly poorly in the January election.

Now, of course, that is only one indicator, but it is a telling one that the ranking of trustworthiness among politicians would predict an election result that would have seen, for instance, the party supported by Muqtada al Sadr (who received 1.5% on the trustworthiness ranking) do as badly as Chalabi (who received 1.1 percent). Instead, the parties connected with Sadr, again, did really well in the elections, whereas Chalabi’s party, notoriously, didn’t even make the legislative cut.

The ORI poll, like almost all I’ve seen, simply divides up its responders into region and religion — not class or income. I think it is reasonable to assume that foreign polling companies skew far too much to those respondents that are the least dangerous to reach — and that, for instance, polling in the poorer parts of Baghdad and Basra, for example, is much lighter than in more secure and richer areas. Since Iraq has experienced an incredible economic collapse, among the poor, and an economic boom, among the middle class, and since the poor are much more numerous, I think it is pretty easy to account for the polls from that perspective — at least, it would be consonant with their consistent failure to predict electin results.

Fair enough, Luis. But if we can’t even conclude, that trustworthy is equivalent to worthy of voting for on the eve of an election, than I have to say that the polls are pretty shaky as evidence. Especially when you get seemingly contradictory overlaps — for instance, the numbers for who thinks the invasion was a bad or a somewhat bad thing contrasting with the numbers for whether it was a good thing to overthrow Saddam. Polling a population under attack is a rather peculiar thing to do, but if it is done, you have to bring some critical sense to reading the polls from what you know about the composition of the population.

Roger, I’m surprised Iraq even still has a middle class – I’d thought they’d mostly fled to Jordan to escape the kidnappings and murders.

Those figures generally moved in synch with political events, so I doubt it was just sample error.

One thing that is clear if you delve into the details of any poll is the degree to which Iraqis treat ‘the toppling of saddam’ and ‘the occupation’ as distinct, almost unrelated, issues. The mainstream position (consistently 70 to 90% over the whole post-invasion period) is that the first was good, and the second bad. When you merge the two issues as ‘the invasion’, you get a more finely balanced result, that swings either way based on the last month’s developments.

Considering those issues independantly is not the way the debate is usually framed in the west, but actually, when you think about it, makes a lot of sense. There is nothing inherently contradictory about the idea of toppling saddam, arranging elections as soon as possible, and then sailing off.

By all accounts, that was the original plan. A specific decision was made, presumably by Bush personally, to override those plans in favour of a 5 year occupation that would restructure Iraqi society at a fairly fundamental level, using the post-WWII occupation of Japan as a model. Unlike the decision to wage war in the first place, that decision was made with virtually no public debate.

B. Dave, if Americans were bombing americans on a daily basis, yeah, I’d say polling is peculiar — which doesn’t mean it is wrong. But if, after the 9/11 attack, the Taliban had hired a polling company to poll americans, would you find that a bit strange?

Barry, well, because there is a war on in Iraq doesn’t mean that the laws of economics are annulled. Just like Argentina or Mexico or Indonesia, when a neo-liberal regime moves in, two things happen: there’s an influx of credit that allows the middle class and upper middle to buy and take on the trappings of prosperity, and there are stories in the American papers about the success of the economy, based upon the fact that American reporters recognize middle and upper class people as fellow subjects, while considering the poor as objects upon which, at best, we can bestow a charitable and heartrending story or two. The World Bank shows an upturn in Iraq’s GDP, and to quote reporter Patrick Cockburn:

“Some Iraqis are living better than before 2003. Teachers and government officials are earning $200 a month where they used to earn $10.”

Much of the good news/bad news dichotomy in Iraq, if you bracket the war for a second, if you ask me, falls into the pattern of reports you get from any newly “globalized” economy.

But it is true, too, that the war is a factor that is definitely accelerating the second phase of the neo-liberal cycle — the collapse, with capital flight being, in Iraq’s case, doubled by real human flight. Since Iraq is a oil exporter, it should be able to avoid that phase — this is one of the richest periods for the Gulf economies since 79. There is a bit of a cause and effect quandry here — oil prices are good partly because the oil output from Iraq is so bad.

My impression from reading an article in the New York Review of Books and one or two others by journalists that I semi-trusted back in early 2003 was that a great many Iraqis on the eve of the war probably did favor the invasion, but on the condition that the US just move in fast, not kill too many civilians, topple Saddam, and then leave. Of course these articles were based on what could be learned from Iraqi exiles in Jordan and other places, for the most part, but it sounded plausible.

Of course if that’s what a large number of Iraqis wanted, it still wouldn’t justify the war, especially since we in the West (and most probably most of the Iraqis) knew that there was no way we’d just walk in there, topple Saddam, and politely head out the door.

Marc, so if anyone doesn’t support, say, an immediate attack on North Korea it’s ‘Kissingerite realism’? doesn’t wash with me, Iran’s a bigger country, and more importantly one with a real chance of making it to democracy with much less, if any, external intervention. I hope they don’t get nuclear weapons, but are you suggesting that because I think this the only option to support is an immediate strike?

“Hari’s ‘apostasy’ was always predictable because his arguments were consistently balanced and observant of proportionality and reality”

I don’t agree. Hari continually maintained that his support for the war remained contingent upon the views of the Iraqi people. He seems to have abandoned this principle.

February’s Globescan poll revealed that 74% of Iraqis thought the invasion was the “right decision”

Poll results released a month earlier showed that 77% of Iraqis, despite the hardships they had suffered, still felt the invasion was right.

The interesting part of this survey was that Iraqis were divided into religious groups. 91% of Kurds approved of the war. 98% of Shiites agreed. The Sunnis (understandably, considering their status under Saddam) held the opposite view, thus affecting the overall figure.

What is clear is that the anti-war crowd, whatever the merits of their arguments, simply cannot claim to be representing the views of Iraqis. This charge, unfortunately, can now be levelled at Mr Hari.

Journalists – and others – do worse things for money