Gettier Your War On

But Ignatieff’s saying our belief wasn’t justified, because it was based all and only on ideology. On his take, we merely had true belief.

Which, come to think of it, still ain’t nothing, ya’ know. In this case at least, I think I’d rather have been lucky and right.

I’m more interested (if that’s the word) in the fact that we’re repeating all the same stages of the buildup to war, this time with Iran, and nobody is doing a damn thing about it.

“You know that things are going better in Iraq when even the Democrats begin to acknowledge it. One senator said U.S. troops are routing out al-Qaida in parts of Iraq. Another insisted President Bush’s plan to increase troops has caused tactical momentum. One even went so far on Wednesday as to say the argument could be made that U.S. troops are winning.

These are not Bush-backing GOP die-hards, but Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin, Bob Casey and Jack Reed. Even Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee, said progress was being made by soldiers.”

Sk

SK, what you say would be reasonable, if it weren’t for the fact that we’ve heard such happy happy talk all the way down. BTW, Democratic politicians have frequently been willing to, ah, orally service the administration.

IIRC, surge supporters are claiming as good news that some (recorded) levels of violence are only at last year’s level.

To evaluate the meaningfulness of the happy talk, just ask the happy-talkers to describe in any kind of detail the situation on the ground which would, in their minds, constitute the “victory” or “stabilization” or whatever which would finally enable us to get out. Then be prepared for either an outpouring of purest fantasy, or a lot of stuttering and stammering (or most likely some combination of the above.)

When Ignatieff says ‘it was not just about oil’ I guess that he means ‘it was also justified on human rights grounds’ and was, therefore, ‘a bit like a humanitarian intervention.’ I think, though, that he is wrong even within his own terms of reference.

According to Ignatieff, approval of the UN security council is not always necessary, to legitimate the use of force because he thinks that this body should not have the final say on humanitarian interventions. Attempts to devise an alternative to UN authorisation for such interventions revolve around issues such as ‘just cause’, ‘correct authority’, ‘right intentions’, ‘necessity’, ‘likely outcome’ and ‘proportionality’.

However, the US actually argued the invasion was justified on grounds of ‘self-defence’ and the main argument that most people had against it was about this proposition (WMD, links to Al-Qaeda, etc.).

Some people may have opposed it on other grounds (claiming that it was ‘all about oil, for example) while others may have supported it on ‘human rights’ grounds (either at the time or subsequently).

However, that was not the main issue being debated and for the latter argument to be taken seriously, its proponents have to explain how the intervention clears the bars mentioned above.

Presumably, he is saying that if it had ‘just been about oil’ he would not have supported it, but that is no defence against the charge of ‘likely outcome’.

“yes, they had justified, true belief that the war was a bad idea, but it didn’t amount to knowledge”

Or as I like to put it: I’m wrong, but I’m still right!

“As for the claim that some people on the anti-war side believed stupid things, they may have done but unlike Ignatieff they made the right decision, which is the important thing from a moral point of view. Ignatieff is like a guy who got arrested for drunk driving complaining that the only reason the driver in front wasn’t over the limit too was that he hadn’t realised he was drinking low alchohol beer.”

Why can’t we stick to good reasons for condemning this essay? If by “right decision” you mean what Ignatieff means — correct necessarily only in its prediction — it’s hard to believe that’s the important thing from a moral point of view.

As to the analogy, Ignatieff *thinks* he’s like the guy who was arrested for drunk driving after believing (mistakenly) he was drinking low alcohol beer, while the guy in front got off scot-free because he actually drank low alcohol beer (but tried to drink Jagermeister).

Sorry for being troll-like.

Isn’t it funny that only two or three years ago this thread would have immediately filled up with Decents insisting that the invasion of Iraq was clearly a triumphant success and that anyone who doubted this was obviously in the pay of Saddam Hussein (or possibly Osama Bin Laden), and yet now these people are conspicuous by their absence? But if, as Ignatieff seems to imply his decision to support the war was based on Socratic logical analysis (as opposed to his opponents, who ‘indulged in ideology’) then surely these arguments should hold up regardless of the empirical data?

After all Ignatieff’s recantation couldn’t possibly be explained by anything as simple as his desire to be on the winning side, could it?

Clyde – I am sorry but your objection to my comment does not make much sense to me. If you can recast it in a more comprehensible way, please feel free to do so, but I would request that you leave out inane rhetorical questions like “Why can’t we stick to good reasons for condemning this essay?” which do not add anything to the content of your post but merely suggest that you think that the person with whom you are conversing must be stupid and/or dishonest. Thanks.

Sure, our opposition was maybe based on ideology — but then doesn’t the fact that we were right say something about the usefulness of our ideology?

In other words, “America is always and in every situation wrong” when launching unprovoked wars strikes me as a very good guiding principle. Much better and more reliable than evaluating each unprovoked war “on the merits”.

Conor Foley and others: wouldn’t the world be a much better place if the US had stayed out of both Iraq and Kosovo, than as it is?

Also,

Starting an aggressive was is not something you do on the balance of probabilities. Lack of knowledge about the consequences of the Iraq project was a good enough reason to oppose it.

is exactly right. A very strong presumption against aggressive war may be ideologically, but it’s also the substantively correct view to hold.

And yes, that means we “miss” some “good” interventions. So what? The people for who this is a concern, I’m willing to say ad hominemly, are much more interested in their chance to support a war than in whatever good it’s supposed to produce.

There is a very, very long lists of ways to improve the state of the world that don’t involve cruise missiles.

Conor – If that’s directed at me, I think that the use of force can be justified (I am not a pacifist) and I am a supporter of the principle of humanitarian intervention. The point I was trying to make is that part of the mission of the “decent left” (in the broadest sense which would include people I have a lot of respect for) as I see it, was to attack the “reflexive”, “ideological” pacifism of the traditional left, which they believed (perhaps rightly) to lead to inertia on occasions when intervention was called for. I think this may have been a mistake, or at least that they may have gone too far. As I said, leftwing politics is a mass movement which by its nature contains irrational (or less than fully rational) elements, simplifications, sloganeering, “ideology”, and so on. Some people did oppose the war for reasons which do not bear academic analysis. However, this institutional bias of the popular left against war imo on the whole a good thing, in part because acts as a counterweight to militaristic forces which always exist in a modern state. I do think the experience of the last few years ought to be a chastening one for anyone who had set himself the task of “enlightening” the traditional left by attacking their anti-war prejudices, which is one of the things I felt the “decent left” (like I said, in a broad, non-pejorative sense) were trying to do.

I think that Ignatieff is continuuing that project, and in a rather crude way, in his piece, when he accuses the opposition to the war of being ideologically driven and therefore, it seems, unworthy of being credited for having been in the right on this occasion.

Engels at 26 is about 97.6 percent right about the opposition Left… the 2.4 percent wrong (not attributing, btw, to you Engels) is epitomized in Lemuel Pitkin’s ridiculously over-simplified outrage at 25. To sum up “our” or “the West’s” involvement or lack of involvement in the Rwandan genocide by saying, simply, that the French intervened in support of the Hutu genocide is just. plain. silly. It’s true that the French trained and supported the FAR, but I’m not sure it’s true, beyond brokering a late transport of weapons into the country, that they supported the FAR all the way through the genocide–and to leave out the attempts of the U.N. forces on the ground to intervene (or the shame–especially relevant in this context–of the U.S. veto on intervention), attempts that cost the lives of U.N. forces, is cherry-picking at it’s very best (or: worst).

To put it another way: I suppose if you are a Decent (in the broad sense) then I imagine it must really get on your nerves when you hear people saying stuff like “War, what is it good for?”, “No blood for oil!”, etc, etc, as this seems like a gross simplification of an issue which calls for detailed, academic, cost-benefit analysis and an appreciation that these issues are never black and white, etc. Well, it doesn’t irritate me. I’m very grateful we have those people. and their anti-war “prejudices”. This isn’t to say that I think they are right to claim that war is always wrong, just that I don’t think that publically ridiculing them will make the world a better place.

The anti-war culture of the left is to my mind a very valuable thing and I would think very carefully before attacking it, and I would never do so with the messianic certainty with which some of the “decent left” brought to the task.

As for decency, I’m still going for the original from Walzer:

“[a] way of escaping the politics of guilt and resentment”

No guilt about the dead, no resentment about power politics, war and empire. That is decency.

The UN does support the use of force, but has strict rules about it. Following strict rules instead of trusting the decency of some has many advantages. Even if those rules can sometimes be overly restrictive.

And now that it has been shown that following the rules would have led to a better outcome, it’s even sadder to see the UN pushed further into the mud by using hypotheticals about Rwanda and Bosnia.

So, Conor Foley – if you are really a humanitarian interventionist, surely now is the time to agitate for grants in aid in the billions of pounds to those countries taking in Iraqis from our last “humanitarian intervention”, right? Those countries would be Syria, Iran and Jordan. Where’s the CIF column on this?

Three off the top of my head items on the list of humanitarian interventions that would do some good:
a. ending the attempt to enforce U.S. IP rights on third world countries via the World Bank and the IMF;
B. ending the seizure – since that is what it amounts to – of the atmospheric commons by the developed countries, whose production of CO2 is threatens a much greater human toll than ten Rwandas put together.
c. ending the cartel agricultural monopoly that allows companies like Monsanto to saturate, say, the Indian market with seeds for plants that don’t reseed – thus sending farmers into endless spirals of debt.

Now, in actuality, I don’t suppose you or any organization you belong to will seriously do anything about those items, because it would injure the comfort and affluence of the governing class in the developed countries. The U.S. and U.K. will continue, in big ways and small, to coddle the car driver. They will greedily bust any third world company that tries to manufacture cheaper drugs. And they will pursue foreign policy that is hand in glove with companies like Monsanto, inflicting, as always, immense misery on the rural areas of third world countries. Ho hum. But the exciting prospect of using weapons like little crusaders will, I imagine, make you jump up and down for joy.

Myself, I think that the liberal interventionists do someday have to come to terms with the fact that countries, especially powerful countries, aren’t moral entities, and that they have interests that will always get in the way of any longterm occupation for the good of the occupied. A world order in which the US can casually possess and produce any so called WMDs it wants to, or defy treaties on nuclear arms (as it is doing right now with India), while calling for rigorous adherence to such treaties when it suits its purposes (as it is doing with Iran), is a world in which the moral good guys double as mafia like heavies. And I’m very unsympathetic to letting mafia like heavies decide about ‘humanitarian interventions’.

Roger: have you actually read any of my columns from Brazil?

Engels: my point was exactly that. It is difficult ins’t it?

…which isn’t to say that such an argument can not be made, just that you haven’t made it, and that I’m not going to fill in the gaps for you.

engels, re. #20:

As to my “inane rhetorical question,” it was not rhetorical — I can’t figure out why the wrong formalist arguments are made against this essay, when there are other grounds. So I don’t think it implies that anyone is stupid or dishonest. As to the lecture about focusing on content and minding my manners, well, see “inane”; it’s also a little rich to single out my comment, given the penchant around here for totally non-substantive snark, as in the BBC post. But I never intended to be rude.

To explain: You concede for the sake of discussion that some on the anti-war side may have believed stupid things but at least they were right in the end, which is the important thing from a moral point of view. My answer was that that if you’re talking about Ignatieff’s claim (as you explicitly were), I think he addressed the subset of people who were (supposedly) wrong on just about everything except that Iraq would be a disaster. I am resisting the notion that their “decision” (oppose the war) was “right,” and morally superior, regardless of its reasoning. (However, I do not agree with Ignatieff that one had to be able to explain the war’s motives accurately in order to be exercising good judgment.)

I think the attempted correction to your analogy is clear enough, and again focuses on Ignatieff’s claim, as I thought you were: he thinks both drivers may have made mistakes, but one (him) just happened to be unlucky on the facts.

Clyde – “Why can’t we stick to good reasons for condemning this essay?” is a rhetorical question. It suggests that it is obvious that the reasons people are giving here are not good ones and that the interesting question is “why” they should be behaving in such a patently irrational way. That kind of “argument” is indeed inane.

I am resisting the notion that their “decision” (oppose the war) was “right,” and morally superior, regardless of its reasoning.

Well, I think you are wrong about this. Intentions count for a lot but actions count for a lot more. Despite what you say, the example I gave does suggest this: the second driver was not guilty of drunk driving but the first one was.

There were large protests in Europe over the invasion of Afghanistan, and they weren’t right about that. Which is why it is difficult to credit the same arguments when used about Iraq. There were additional arguments re: Iraq that were more correct, and people should be given credit for those.

In VERY broad brush, the following arguments were crap:

Opposition based on ‘war for oil’

Opposition based on the idea that the sanctions were working by the same people who complained about how mean the sanctions were in 1996,1997,1998,1999, 2000, and 2001. (Note I am NOT saying that everyone who used a ‘sanctions are working’ argument falls in this catagory).

Opposition based on a lack of nuclear programs by people who were not willing to force inspections. (Again this isn’t everyone, but if you look closely it is a lot of people. The UN Security Council was NOT willing to force inspections until Bush forced their hand by making it clear he was going to invade).

Opposition based on the difficulty of defeating Saddam. (This was a surprising number of people)

Opposition based on the likelyhood of getting a broader based coalition to use against Saddam (The wishful thinking d-squared argument).

In very broad brush, this argument had some merit:

Opposition based on the idea that letting Saddam murder and rape people at whim with small scale genocide every eight years or so was better for Iraq and no more dangerous for the rest of the world than the likely civil war after you got rid of him.

Conor: I agree with what you said in #12. I didn’t understand the significance of your twice pointing out to me that it is difficult to agree on what a (justified) humanitarian intervention is, a point which I accept. I had assumed that you meant this point to be an objection to something I had written; fair enough if that wasn’t the intention, but then I can’t really see what you were getting at.

engels,

I intended to show, not simply ask, why the reasons you proffered were not especially good — that’s what followed. So your umbrage is mystifying to me — particularly, again, compared to others. The question wasn’t itself an argument; you may go ahead and condemn it as an “inane argument” if you wish, and I would agree.

If I could rephrase to make it less offensive: Why can’t we stick with the many reasons why Ignatieff’s claim is wrong on its facts, instead of making [debatable] protests against its logic? I fear the answer is because of the ivory tower tendencies Ignatieff addresses, which are true in the main, but just don’t happen to redeem him on Iraq.

Roger, you forgot to add (in the definition of “tool”): “their reflexive respect for opinions emanating from the mouths of their “leaders”, who after all, have the noblest of intentions, unlike “their” leaders who are all crooks and cannot be trusted.” Examples include the ability to keep a straight face (and not die laughing) when “our” leaders make statements such as “iraq is a grave security threat to the U.S.”, “we are bringing democracy to Iraq”, or “Nicaragua is only about two nights driving distance from Harlingen, Texas’ so they can take us over”, “Contras are the equivalent of our founding fathers”, or better still, “Cuba is a grave threat to the security of the world” (to which the Mexican ambassador replied that forty million Mexicans would die laughing if they heard that).

Roger: I only implied that you were an idiot. Your latest post makes me think that you are a liitle bit mad.

lemuel @ 51: very level-headed of you–and I almost unequivocally agree with you. Except…

A slight revision of your history lesson is in order: FDR signed the Montevideo accords, accords which set the basis for non-intervention, in 1933. The U.S. didn’t pull out of Central America and the Caribbean (or grant, a couple years later, the Filipinos their independence charter) for wholly altruistic reasons–but it was a big precedent.

Joel @ 54: Correction accepted. “Following World War II” was loose shorthand.

…also: the date shift is not entirely inconsequential to this discussion, as the pre-WWII history of the CP (and broader isolationist left) is, let’s just say, not exactly uncomplicatedly glorious in its record (however much, in an equally torturous phrase, it was complicatedly right in the basis for a lot of its ideals and activism).

Now, must go treat migraine headache for being reminded of the manuscript staring me in the face…

“Conor, I don’t think it “begs” that question”.
You’re darn right it doesn’t, it “raises” that question.

Oh Conor, you Irish rebel you! I’m so sorry. I must abase myself. I forgot how your scorching reports have revolutionized the Labour government, not to speak of the U.S., so that the entire structure of the IP system changed. No wonder you have such absolute confidence in them as humanitarian powers, and confidence, too, that when their soldiers come marching in to some suitably oppressed country, they will only and always work for the good of the oppressed, no matter where it leads them!

But, snark aside, agitate doesn’t mean write, and the argument is – I’ll spell it out for you in plain english using the ever popular power point bullets method so that even you can understand it- the following:
a. military force for liberal interventions is garnered from the most powerful Western nations.
b. those nations have interests, some of which violently conflict with the interests of third world countries.
c. those nations have also enforced a system of world wide ‘justice’ in which they maintain a double standard, deciding who gets WMD and who does not, who gets the quiet approval about dictatorship (say, Libya and Saudi Arabia) and who is spotlighted as an oppressor (Iran).
d. given the characters of these countries, one can’t expect their military interventions to be independent of those characters.
e. and given the character of the societies they intervene in, often the changes they enforce – especially economically – end up causing more and not less misery and violence.
f. the policies urged by the liberal interveners make this problem more and not less likely to happen. The liberal interveners have a curious fondness for the monarchical executive, who will use a nation’s army as a humanitarian mercenary force. Unfortunately, this also separates the army from democratic feedbacks. It makes possible executive level corruption of all types – from minor intellectual ones, such as using the military interventions as a patriotic issue to silence critics to sheer cronyism, as in the growth of private military forces. Plus, the intervenors are irresitably tempted to enforce neo-liberal norm on the countries they intervene in. Thus, you get a twofer – the degredation of democratic institutions at home, and the running roughshod over the popular will abroad.

So, wild Irish rose, do you get it now? Huh? Do you have, like, an argument about these things, or is it more a matter of feelings – your tearful and no doubt angelic feelings? Or is it hidden in your fabulous collected works, for instance the travel piece about Recife in 2005 that is a must read? Otherwise, I’ll just have to refer you to my own collected works: A Idiot’s Guide to Tools.

Roger: I do not support liberal interventionism and have frequently written articles opposing it. Perhaps you are simply confusing me with someone else, given that you have now managed to get my name, nationality and political opinions wrong.

The point that I have quite specifically argued about on Darfur is that any intervening force should be African-led and should be deployed with the consent of the Sudanese Government. I am not quite sure of the relevance of the rest of your bullet points once the first one goes.

by “that way” I mean this way:

“‘yes, they had justified, true belief that the war was a bad idea, but it didn’t amount to knowledge’ line, is … well…”

many of the people at these rallies did not have reliable epistemic habits.

And you think people such as Ignatieff do? By the way Ig(noble)atieff is setting up a straw argument. True, there are people who have unhealthy epistemic habits (9-11 truth etc.), but shouldn’t he be engaging those who argued, reasonably (if you consider evidence based on over two hundred years of international politics/history, reasonable) that states are not generally moral agents and hence always have ulterior (i.e. power based, however you define “power”) motives and that such motives lead to actions that are not normally moral or desirable from the perspective of general human welfare (assuming universality and certain other Kantian imperatives)?
Look Ign(oble)atieff might be a passable scholar, but should he be using his freedom as an intellectual to justify state action? Even the best of the best seem to fall for this (witness John Stewart Mills’s disgraceful articles justifying British imperialism when he was in the payroll of the British East India company; he had to violate his own philosophical strictures and somehow explain why Indians did not deserve equal consideration, i.e. were not equally as “human” as other Europeans)

Opposition based on the idea that letting Saddam murder and rape people at whim with small scale genocide every eight years or so was better for Iraq and no more dangerous for the rest of the world than the likely civil war after you got rid of him.

Allying with Islam Karimov in order to go after Saddam Hussein on a humanitarian pretext is a self-refuting proposition.

That’s another one I wasn’t stupid enough to fall for.
.

(that’s the generic “you” btw, not any particular poster on this thread)

dsquared – There is a common meme that police use force, sometime deadly force, to affect positive change in an area. The idea that a military, under military rules of engagement, might be used for a similar purpose is generally accepted as a valid position based in reality.

Conor, #73: Maybe the answer is that there were no alternatives that were both moral and practically achievable. Dsquared’s been arguing that the more specific we get about the possibilities of intervention, the worse they look, and that generalizations and wishes don’t make things feasible no matter how strongly we hope for it. I find this repugnant as a concept, just because I hate it whenever the world’s message is “you can’t get there from here”, but the world isn’t obligated to go anywhere just because you or I or anyone else want it to.

Understandbly, this is a prospect that a lot of folks don’t want to put much time in. But it seems worth taking up. Suppose that we establish that there isn’t any option that is feasible and will provide lasting relief and won’t have more ongoing bad consequences than good. What do we do then? Shouldn’t we at least be considering it as a possibility? If by some miracle it’s never happened yet, it’s going to sooner or later, after all.

The implicit assumption that there must be something we can do seems to me to lead very directly to settling for all kinds of awful things done to people who don’t deserve them simply because it’s the best that we could do if we insist on intervening.

Barry,

No, I mean in addition to the Kurdish-area activity. However, I have to run now — I’ll try to post some links tomorrow.

The Srebrenica case is an odd one to ask for.

The decision to commit genocide was only taken after the fall of the enclave. So to prevent genocide in the knowledge that you’d had prevented genocide is to ask for the impossible in that specific case.

The fall itself could have been prevented by air strikes (according to what I still remember), but the whole safe haven policy without actual military protection has been shown to be a bad policy.

But there’s lot’s of things that could have been done to improve that policy. Lots of things that these days is being done better in UN operations.

So the Srebrenica case has already led to important changes. If you think that under current (UN) policies an exact copy of Srebrenica could still happen, then I’m not with you.

So
(1) a better plan of action for Srebrenica would never have known that it could or would have prevented a genocide.
(2) The UN (and its members) already have learned their lessons, so the exact failure of Srebrenica won’t happen again. Other failures will.
(But then the leading member of the fantasy football UN alternatives just committed the error of Iraq, so to suggest that the “Concert” would be an improvement… No way.)

I’d have to agree with Luc in wanting to define Decency as a psychological rather than an ideological tendency. In my view, its narrow meaning would be

Decent leftie n. somebody who believes that he and his (rather limited) circle of mates in the Anglo-American media, academy or elsewhere (who may or may not all be ageing Trots, Blairites and/or closet Tories) are the only true inheritors of the great leftist mantle of centuries past, and the rest of us are nothing but a bunch of stupid, irresponsible, morally deficient, Guardian-reading, anti-American, Bush-hating, BBC-watching, puppet-making, ‘No Blood for Oil’-chanting, pro-Milosevic, pro-Saddam, oil-pipeline-obsessed, Counterpunch/ZMag/London Review of Books reading, moral relativist, Michael Moore worshipping, Fidel Castro and Jacques Chirac loving, post-modernist, objectively pro-Islamofascist, Chomsky, Fisk and abb1 influenced, dirty fucking hippies who need to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century by the force of the aforementioned Decent leftie’s superior intelligence, knowledge of history, international affairs and the collected works of George Orwell, and above all moral seriousness

I have also sometimes, as above, used the term in a wider, non-pejorative sense as

2. someone whom I respect, and with whom I have some points of agreement, who has mounted a serious and interesting moral critique of the ideological pacifism/anti-imperialism of the traditional anti-war left (but who may have had his or her moments of coming across, in my entirely subjective opinion, in however small and forgivable a way, like the above).

The above is not to dispute Daniel’s definition of Decency, of course, but just to enable people to make sense of my earlier comments, which don’t really make sense if one understands “Decent” to mean “Liberal Interventionist”.

Some of us first learned of the impending assault upon Iraq in July 2002. There were just hints then, and the famous comment that you don’t roll out a new product in August. At the time it seemed like a purely political push to boost the Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections, and to that extent it was certainly successful.

Thus a fourth-generation Democrat like me could oppose it reflexively without even considering questions like, should we invade a country which hasn’t attacked us, which doesn’t threaten us, whose invasion would plunk us in a quagmire, which aren’t that hard to answer by themselves.

Bad Jim, I’ve been thinking those same questions as #87 for a while now, and it seems to me a huge blind spot in essentially all public Democratic discourse about future uses of American power. Who in their right mind would let American force near anything of value to them for any reason except inability to keep it away? And I’m not being flippant about that. Now that we’ve established a bipartisan consensus against compliance with any standard of conduct at all the moment it inconveniences any authority’s personal whims, and now that we have thoroughly broken our ability to meet any reliable standard of readiness, rest, and repair, we have a long, long road ahead of us to restore trustworthiness. And the way things are going, I don’t have high confidence that a Democratic president in 2009 will be all that serious about it, because of of the nuisance of it all.

The US’ day in the sun is over for a long time, not just as leader of any grand coalition but as partner other nations will want to be near at all.

Actually, this argument is really between ideologues and pragmatists. There’s a lot of ideologues who claim to be pragmatists—a few are evident here—but for the most part, that’s what this is about.

As a pragmatist leftist, I don’t see any reason to privilege “no unprovoked military intervention” above all other considerations. Ideologues will assert universal rules, such as dsquared does.

The claim that there’s not a large left unthinking and reflexive contingent that takes an antiwar position on the basis of something less than considered evaluation is just as silly as the claim that this isn’t true of the right. A lot of righties will support the use of military force no matter what or when. A lot of lefties will oppose it, no matter what or when. In both cases, a favorable outcome will be used as proof of sagaciousness.

It’s no less off-putting to me when leftists do this than when rightists to it. More, really, because I hold the people on my side of the aisle to higher standards.

As I promised earlier, some supporting links regarding connections between Iraq and al Qaeda. Note that I specifically said I’d seen no evidence “they were high-level or persistent”.

the 9/11 Commission:
“Were there contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq? Yes,” Thomas H. Kean (R), the panel’s chairman, said at a news conference. “What our staff statement found is there is no credible evidence that we can discover, after a long investigation, that Iraq and Saddam Hussein in any way were part of the attack on the United States.”
link

In a frankly skeptical article, Time Magazine noted these (as well as the now-abandoned claim about a Prague meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi spy) as the main bases for possible Iraq-al Qaeda links:
The fact that “bin Laden associate” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who runs the Islamist terror network suspected of killing a U.S. diplomat in Jordan, had taken shelter in Baghdad after being wounded in Afghanistan;
The fact that the Kurdish Islamist group attacking mainstream pro-U.S. Kurdish groups in northeastern Iraq had received cash and training from al-Qaeda; and
Iraqi records show that an Iraqi emissary had held a meeting or meetings with bin Laden representatives in Afghanistan sometime after 1998.
link

The second of the Time items of course refers to the Kurdish-area operation outside Saddam’s control.

I’m omitting various arguments made by administration officials who refer to, e.g., supposed Iraqi emissaries to al Qaeda in connection with poison-making and forgery, because I haven’t seen evidence of supporting documentation. I’m also leaving out the claim that the Al-Shifa chemical factory in Sudan was linked to bin Laden and Iraq, and that it manufactured chemical weapons, because those claims have been substantially undermined (though still hotly contested).

“Unthinking” and “reflexive” are not the same thing, though. I personally never said anyone was “unthinking”. What I do think is that most people on the left have a very strong prejudice against going to war, and that this is salutary.

This is not just a point about politics but about rationality. If Keith thinks that being a pragmatist enables him to dispense with “universal rules” altogether then he hasn’t reflected very carefully on his decision making in general and his moral decision making in particular.

Oh yeah and what Donald said about anyone who thumps on the rhetorical drum of his self-proclaimed “pragmatism”. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that a conviction that your own unexamined assumptions are merely down-to-earth “pragmatism”, in contrast to the insidious “ideology” of your political opponents, is the reigning ideology of the US.

And the way things are going, I don’t have high confidence that a Democratic president in 2009 will be all that serious about it, because of of the nuisance of it all.

I’d even go a bit further than that- I think that Hillary Clinton, the most likely nominee, is the sort of person who will quietly relish the new power and new invulnerability to scrutiny that BushCo has brought to the Executive Branch, and be fairly indifferent to the resulting negative effects on the restoration of US credibility.

Also, humanitarian intervention should not even be considered as an acceptable policy until the state in question has already taken all the obvious non-military humanitarian actions available to them — funding for clean water, eradication of contagious disease, IP rules that favor imports of life-saving drugs by poor countries, generous admission policies for refugees, etc. Until all these much more reliable and lower-cost steps have been taken, there is a very strong — overwhelming, really — presumption that the “humanitarian” intervention is not in fact motivated by humanitarian goals.

Lemuel,

I’m a bit perplexed how your advocated “non-military humanitarian actions” apply in several recent and current scenarios — ex-Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sudan come to mind. I don’t mean to say gosh, we should use more bombs; I’m just not sure how anyone is supposed to get clean water into Darfur in the current conditions. Can you explain?

Shelby,

My point is precisely that if your humanitarian impulse is limited to cases where military intervention is necessary, it probably is not a humanitarian impulse at all.

I’m surprised that Holbo hasn’t corrected his blatant misreading, after being corrected as early as comment 2, but also in 65 and 66.

Anyway, 90 makes a great point: Both sides tend to have reflexive and unthinking biases. Then when a decision turns out in hindsight to have been lucky, they pat themselves on the back for their sagaciousness.

Functional – it’s not question of how “sagacious” you were. This wasn’t a harmless betting game, like predicting who won the Superbowl. It’s a question of whether you took a decision which has helped to bring catastrophe on hundreds of thousands and dishonour on your country for years to come. Does the concept of moral responsibility mean nothing to you?

To restate a point that’s been made many times before, opponents of the war pointed to all sorts of things that might go badly wrong. They only had to be right once. Supporters made claims that all sorts of things would go well. They had to be right every time.

Joel,

Isn’t the whole point of this post and commentary to set a stringent requirement? The real argument is whether it’s imposed on one’s ideological opponents when convenient, or universally applied to proponents of armed action (outside of immediate self-defense) (or possibly, as some would have it, to proponents of armed humanitarian intervention).

Shelby: on a charitable reading, I’m sure I agree 100% with what John said. But surely you can think of a very large number of models of the argument (I think) John made that just, well: they would be hard to support.

Q: Is Ignatieff’s reply that you’re drawing a Gettier rabbit and you’re drawing a Gettier duck?

#117: “The problem with bringing this up, re: Ignatieff is that it’s irrelevant. Because you can’t excuse yourself for being dumb and wrong on the grounds that some people on the other side were dumb and wrong in an opposite sort of way.”

I didn’t read him to be “excusing himself” in the sense of exculpation (by this route) at all. I thought he was doing any of several things — (a) saying that some people crowing about the situation were unjustified in doing so, and so weren’t that much superior to him; (b) claiming in mitigation the excuse that there’s lots of room for error in these sorts of things; (c) claiming in mitigation the excuse that he was thinking like an academic, and maybe especially so because he was ensconced at Harvard; (d) other things, probably.

As to (a), by the way, I thought he was explicit in saying that there were those “people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq” who avoided mistakes he’d made, and that he’d made additional ones as well. So at worst he’s saying that some were as dumb and wrong as he was, but others made fewer mistakes than he had.

I don’t buy his arguments, and I found pages 2-3 on the web version so meandering and stodgy my head almost exploded. But I can’t see why there’s this insistence on finding logical flaws based on strained readings of the essay.

comment 90: As a pragmatist leftist, I don’t see any reason to privilege “no unprovoked military intervention” above all other considerations. Ideologues will assert universal rules, such as dsquared does.

But surely it’s not just some arbitrary universal rule pulled out of dsquared’s ass. It’s an uncontroversial, commonly accepted principle and a matter a law. It’s like murder or rape – yes, maybe it’s not above all other considerations, but you’ll certainly have a hard time explaining why “other considerations” should allow you to commit a rape or murder.

Barry,

Not sure whether you intended to be opposing what I said or not. As I said, I don’t buy the argument; I was simply trying to express what he was saying, rather than contorting him into a logical error (as opposed to something unconvincing on other grounds).

So now we have blaming the error of side A on side B. I don’t know what the “word for that” — that being attributing his mistakes to the wrong cause, — but I would tend to say it’s closer to “making lame excuses” than “lying.” To again perform the painful task of stating an argument to which I don’t subscribe, he seems to be saying that academic detachment from reality and more apt processes of judgment would lead them to results which might be right or wrong in outcome, but for the wrong reasons. I think he overstates this, and it’s an insignificant factor in this situation. But to say that “thinking like an academic,” by his own reasoning, “would have lead him to oppose the war” because the overwhelming majority of academics did, is to mistake fundamentally what he’s saying — FWIW, his reasoning would have them follow their models, not arrive at the same place, and I don’t think he’d say boo about any academic who wasn’t focused on politics, IR, or area studies. He may think they scatter, or clump, but he doesn’t seem to be saying that all academics following the academic mode of poor judgment wind up in the same place. Other hawks would argue that the reason academics overwhelmingly opposed the war is because of their ideology — wrongly, I think — but Ig isn’t making an academic cattle argument.

As if to channel Ignatieff, wholly unwillingly: you and many other commentators are right to say that the essay is a POS, but you’ve got the wrong reasons.

Donald Johnson has done a pretty good job, but let me clarify a bit. Obviously it depends on how fine-grained the predictions are, but here are a few of the things that antiwar people said might happen
* the US forces might fail militarily (don’t know if anyone actually said this, but I’ll put it in for completeness
* Resistance in Baghdad could be equivalent to a new Stalingrad
* Civilian casualties could be in the tens or hundreds of thousands
* Civil war between Sunni and Shia or between Arabs Kurds could break out
* Saddam could be replaced by an equally bad dictator
* Al Qaeda could gain greatly from hostility to the US

As it’s turned out, some of these things have happened but some have not. My point is that any one of them would be enough to make the war a bad, or at least very dubious idea.

The logical and substantive problem with the article is that he is pretending that different beliefs about the world are a conflict between ideology and pragmatism and doing so for dishonest reasons. The belief that America went to war for the oil is no more ideological than the one that it did it to spread democracy or prevent terrorism. All are assertions of fact, although in the realm of intentions where proof is always very difficult. Frequently wedded to the notion of an oil motive of course, is the notion that such a motive is illegitimate, which could be considered ideological in a very loose sense – it is, at least, normative. But on the other side, the notion that America was spreading democracy is frequently accompanied by the notion that this is morally commendable – an equally normative notion, and one ideological in the narrower sense that it explicitly valorizes a specific political ideology, whereas objections to wars of choice to steal oil can be made under any number of ideologies.

What Ignatieff is trying to do is draw a line and say that, although Iraq war opponents turned out to be right about their factual beliefs about a) the likely outcome of the war, this should not validate the factual beliefs of some of them about b) why the war was undertaken. While it is true that being right about a does not prove b – though it is certainly not evidence against it – and Ignatieff can concede that he was wrong on a while still holding he was right on b, he needs to actually argue this and instead treats us to rhetorical sleight of hand. Nowhere does he give us actual reason to believe that Bush was acting in good faith or that America’s motives were noble. He does not even forthrightly assert these things. He rather attempts to smuggle them in as the definition of “judgment” or a reasonable view and hold the opposite view as by definition dogmatism. But if the rightness of America’s motives can be, indeed must be, taken for granted without being supported, how is that not dogmatic?

The matter is complicated by the spectrum of opinion among war opponents. There were those who agreed with Ignatieff on b but not a, and those are the ones he currently wants to legitimize at the expense of the others. Of those suspicious of America’s motives or honesty, some held these suspicions only for the Bush administration and some more generally. But anyone who wants to say which position follows the dictates of reason has to actually apply reason fairly to the question.

How do we determine whether we should believe the claims of the US government as to why it wants to enter a war and its assertions of fact regarding the situation? With incomplete information, there seems no absolute rule. A common rule of thumb would be to judge on track record. But the government lied us into Vietnam, Grenada, Gulf War I, and Kosovo. Judged by track record, one should be highly skeptical, and this is not limited to Bush or to Republicans (Bush has given additional reason for skepticism, but most of this was just “paranoid” speculation at the onset of the war). Looking further back in American history provides more examples. So the actual historical record of America supports suspicion.

On the other hand, one might look at why wars are generally fought in history. Certainly, there is nothing odd about wars to control a vital resource or appropriate wealth. Wars for humanitarian reasons? Such are claimed all the time; Hitler even called the invasion of Poland a humanitarian intervention. It is clear that most claimed humanitarian inventions were not such, and debatable whether any truly were. For example, one could argue that Kosovo achieved humanitarian ends, but NATO has predictably also gotten a huge and strategic military base out of it; the motives were not *purely* humanitarian in the best case. And the dominant school of foreign policy political thought in the United States for the last several decades – Realism – is expressly skeptical of idealistic wars.

What Ignatieff is demanding but unwilling to actually argue for is that all commenters on the War must double-down on the very prior that largely led to the error in judgment that he made; accepting at face value the claims made by the US government without requiring independent evidence.

“But he is hinting that every justification for the war – every good reason to think it would go badly – was, at some point in the chain, tainted with irrationality.”

Why do you believe his remarks suggest anything of the kind?

Ben, that’s an awful lot of freight on the word “only”, especially given that Ignatieff doesn’t seem to be quoting anyone specifically but only giving a shorthand paraphrase. If the objection is really to the word “only”, that would seem to characterize only a small percentage of war opponents. War opponents skeptical of Bush’s motives had a variety of reasons they advocated: the usefulness of war for certain domestic American interests, protection of Israeli interests presented as American ones, a personal vendetta because of Hussein’s apparent attempt on Bush senior life, wanting to succeed where his father had failed, etc., indeed, one of the common indictments of the more cynical war opponents is that the very multiplicity of alternative reasons they provided showed that they were simply grasping for cynical appraisals. Now, we see that sticking to one cynical explanation or having many can each be cited as evidence of dogmatism.

And of course Ignatieff’s own position is also filtered through values in this sense, so this does not provide a distinction between his position and the one he is attacking.

Martin,

I don’t understand how there is any burden at all on the “only” claim. Quite the opposite. Once he says it, he has insured himself against the ‘covert sniping against all critics’ accusation by limiting his grumpiness to a certain (perhaps imaginary) fringe. And if one ignores the “only”, it’s not giving him a fair reading. Unless you subscribe to a nasty interpretation of the principle of charity which selectively excludes “what-has-been-said” in favor of “what-we-decide-the-person-really-meant (because-we-know-his-kind-so-well)”.

If there is a burden upon anything, I think we’d agree (in our tongue-in-cheek analysis) that it is upon the word “many”. Does the use of the word “many” indicate that Ignatieff is genuinely disconnected with the left? Does it indicate that he’s overblowing his estimates? How many people really do have such a black-and-white view of national affairs? And of that group, how many can we say are being rhetorical to get a point across? Of course these are decent questions which aren’t even raised in the places that matter. Zealotry of significant leftists is just assumed without being proven.

I won’t comment much on the sort of anti-intellectual fool that would decide that “multiple arguments equals a foregone conclusion”. Except to say that, at least on the basis of the scant comments that Ignatieff made here, we haven’t any reason to think he is this sort of fool. Sure, the “You think America is always wrong” allegation is sometimes used against those who give multiple reasons for a considered conclusion, because it happens to be effective at unfairly shutting up your opponent William-F-Buckley-style. Nevertheless, the one statement cannot be drawn from the other unless more has been said.

I don’t think Ignatieff is saying that all cynical appraisals of America’s motives are false. He’s saying that it is unreasonable to suggest that one person or nation is always wrong. Again, his strategy is to attack a position that is so bold that one would have be braindead (or unserious) to hold it.

So he’s fending against feeble arguments. But it isn’t true that his arguments are obviously against no-one. Activists do not always speak truth to power. By necessity, an activist (like any advertiser) needs to get attention in order for their message to be received. Bold exaggerated statements certainly have a way of getting an audience. For all their boldness, they’re also not always a literal reflection of the activist’s considered opinion. But it’s not entirely the audience’s (i.e., Ignatieff’s) fault if they take the exaggerated statements of the activist literally. It just shows a lack of worldly wisdom on his part.

…or so I presume. But of course he didn’t even bother to mention activists. He just produced his premises and let them dangle.