Teh evil bastards who advocated what, er, seems to have been the right thing

This should remain on their conscience just as the murderous consequences of the invasion are on the conscience of those who supported the war

presumably the ommission of the words “ie, not at all” is the fault of subeditors?

(furthermore, ex hypothesi, the consequences of the invasion were worse than the consequences of Saddam remaining in power, so why would someone’s conscience be troubled by having supported the lesser of two evils, apart from by regret that their point of view did not carry the day?)

dsquared, you are missing the point. Back in 2002, when Saddam was in power, he supported the invasion, so he doesn’t have to feel guilty about supporting Saddam.

In 2009, he doesn’t support the invasion, so he doesn’t have to feel guilty about that either, because he clearly states it was a mistake.

Well, Daniel, that’s all hunky dory then. Another account might look like this: in 2003, we confronted a genuninely tragic dilemma, and no talk about lesser evils now will defuse the tragedy of the dilemma, except for a crass post-hoc consequentialist. As things turned out, the opponents of the war in 2003 were right, and Martin Bright was wrong. Nonetheless, opponents of the war in 2003 were advocating a course of action that, under one description; ‘leaving the Baathists in power’ was an appalling one, and this should remain on their (our) consciences. Of course, the consequences of the war should also prick the consciences of those who supported it.

It’s a fairly penetrating account, especially if you understand the structure of a tragic dilemma. It’s of course easy to dismiss, if A) you want to sneer at people, and treat their reflections in bad faith and B) you don’t think there are tragic dilemmas, or you think that the situation in 2003 was certainly not one of them. But if those two are the case, perhaps your conscience could be a little bit troubled about those things, if nothing else.

Surely ‘not wanting to intervene’ does not necessarily equal ‘maintaining / supporting the status quo’. If I have it on good suspicion that my neighbour is doing horrible things to his family, my choosing to not break down his door, destroy his house, ransack his antique collection etc. does not mean that I am therefore giving him my approval, ‘leaving’ him in power as though it were always at my prerogative whether he is or isn’t in power. There are other channels for intervention, ones that don’t involve e.g. war, lying.

#6 — the problem, of course, is that you can invent a TRAGIC DILEMMUH! any time you like, simply by proposing a magic war against any unpleasant ruler on Earth, and then telling everyone who doesn’t want to sign up to your magic war that the consequences of not doing it (ie the probable continuance of bad things happening now in that country) must weigh on their conscience for ever more.

Henri, no, and it does not follow from anything I said. I do, though, think that moral agents have a general low level responsibility to assist those who are in immediate and serious danger, and that those who see themselves on the left had a duty of international solidarity, including with the Iraqi people under Saddam. That responsibility can be mitigated, but not eliminated, by the sense that there are no effective courses of action available to discharge it. The existence of that undischarged though mitigated responsibility ought to trouble those of us who opposed the invasion of Iraq, and it did trouble me.

It would be easy to dissolve the tragic dilemma faced in 2003 by abandoning either of those views, either the general one or the leftist one, perhaps by caricaturing them by suggesting that anyone who holds them ‘fancies themselves as …..executioner.’

Like I say, if that’s what you think then it’s all hunky dory.

Chris – Spectator, not Statesman.

Jon – why should the unknowable consequences of any of a number of possible courses of action not taken be on anyone’s conscience? I believe in nuclear disarmament – should I feel guilty about the nuclear holocaust which might have ensued if Britain had unilaterally scrapped its nuclear arsenal in 1997?

As things turned out, the opponents of the war in 2003 were right, and Martin Bright was wrong.

Well, OK. “You were right and I was wrong, but you should appreciate that I had good reasons for believing you were wrong, and if things had gone your way the consequences might have been so bad that we would now believe that I was right and you were wrong.” Fair enough – if a bit weaselly – but what’s most striking about Bright’s piece is that he doesn’t say that he was wrong or that the opponents of the war were right. On the contrary, he maintains that the opponents of the war were wrong – they were “arguing for the murderous Baathist regime to stay in power”, and the Decents were right to denounce them along those lines. (Given that “some of the key advocates” of Decency didn’t support the war, presumably this involved some intra-Decent mutual denunciation, although he’s not clear on this point.)

As for Bright himself, his conscience is as clear as it ever was. Granted, “the murderous consequences of the invasion are on the conscience of those who supported the war”, but that group doesn’t include Bright – “My position on the Iraq War was that of a classic woolly liberal: hedging my bets, not sticking my neck out, worried about what people would think. To this day I remain uncertain about the rights and wrongs of liberal interventionism”. Did he support the war? Well, yes and no. Was he right? Well, maybe. Was he wrong? Well, maybe not. It’s all very complicated.

We were wrong, although what we were actually saying has turned out to be right. That is what he’s saying.

Chris,

You are quite right: I’ll withdraw the ‘post-hoc.’ However, one mark of crass consequentialism is to ignore the possibility of tragic dilemmas, yes? And one mark of ignoring a tragic dilemma is to say, as Daniel says – ‘why should I be concerned about the lesser evil?’ And, (which mislead me) one disposition that is conducive to this is a kind of overconfidence that characteristically arises post hoc.

Steven, since I didn’t advocate a war, but ,rather, opposed one, it’s difficult for me to see how I am ‘constructing’ a tragic dilemma in the way you suggest. The situation confronting lots of people in 2003 and not created by them, was felt by them to have the structure of a tragic dilemma. I think that they were right to feel this, and I’m interested in the various ways that other people try to escape from this conclusion, by downplaying or dissolving one horn of the dilemma. They do this by repudiating things that the Left has traditionally argued.

However, one mark of crass consequentialism is to ignore the possibility of tragic dilemmas, yes?

A “tragic dilemma”, as I understand it, is a situation in which consequentialism gives a clear answer about which alternative is better, but the answer in question is unpalatable. I don’t see why, in such a situation, consequentialism should be described as “crass” rather than, say, “jolly sensible”.

It is not as if “invasion of a foreign country will not turn out well” is a difficult prediction to make.

The situation confronting lots of people in 2003 and not created by them, was felt by them to have the structure of a tragic dilemma.

“Lots of people”? Some government ministers had choices to make; so did top-level military personnel, MPs and some permanent civil servants in the MoD. For the rest of us it was a job (if employed in the armed forces) or a spectator sport (if not). For anyone not directly involved, emoting about tragic dilemmas was pretty suspect at the time (not that anyone actually did, as far as I remember) – and doing so six years on is very suspect indeed.

Besides, I’d be very wary of going too far with people’s feelings about politics. The situation confronting a lot of American right-wingers at the moment, and not created by them, is felt by them to have the structure of a covert Communist takeover. I don’t take that as a cue to ponder whether it might in certain situations be correct for the American Right to prepare for civil disobedience against an illegitimate socialist government. They’re wrong and their feelings are wrong.

My exact words were: “so why would someone’s conscience be troubled by having supported the lesser of two evils, apart from by regret that their point of view did not carry the day?”. Obviously one would be concerned about the lesser evil, hence its description as “an evil”. But if you’ve made the right choice, then surely it’s not up to someone who made the wrong choice to scold you for not having a sufficiently troubled conscience over having been right.

Jon, your use of quotation marks appears to be a tic that poker players would describe as a ‘tell.’

As I understand it, the amount of third-world debt is less than the cost of the Iraq war. Why was the dilemma not “Keep murderous Baathists in power — or keep developing countries burdened with crushing debt?”

Jon:

Firstly, I still maintain that “tragic dilemma” is exactly as I describe it, and consequentialism is correct here; psychological feelings of regret don’t actually indicate any important underlying moral reality, and as far as I can see, your argument here consists of the epithet “crass” and nothing else. The only purpose of “tragic dilemma” appears to be to, by saying that both choices were terribly wrong, elide the clear fact that one of them was much worse than the other, and so there was therefore a correct choice to make and an incorrect one. That is, in fact, moral relativism – it is, specifically, the attempt to assert a “moral equivalence” between two outcomes when one is definitely worse than the other.

Second, this wasn’t a borderline case. The “serious obligation” you’re talking about is a very nebulous “solidarity” which isn’t even inconsistent with opposing the war. It wasn’t difficult to see that there was one right choice and one wrong one. There is no reason to identify this as a “tragic dilemma” except that a lot of people, ex post, found themselves on the wrong side of it.

As it happened, there were some rather interesting proposals for ways of constraining Ba’athist mis-behaviour from people like Mary Kaldor (if memory serves) – as well as the weapons inspectors, there could have been a Helsinki-like human rights monitoring group, we could have funded and assisted political opposition groups in Iraq (rather than in Washington). If you can have a hypothetical pile of corpses to counterbalance the real pile of corpses, I can have a hypothetical pony to balance the hypothetical pony you’re still going about.

But nobody took any notice because you were too busy howling that anyone who didn’t want WAR! was pro-Ba’athist, anti-Semitic, anti-American, insufficiently folksy, unpatriotic, a hippy, etc etc etc.

“Tragic dilemma” my hairy ass. Try “having it both ways after the fact, while shitting on the people who were ACTUALLY both right and moral in opposing the invasion”.

I too was wrong, dead wrong, because I bought the phony WMD hype. But at least I admit I was a complete dumbass about that, instead of trying to retrospectively justify my stupidity. And I learned from my mistake, which it appears the likes of Jon Pike will never do.

In 2003 what the war enthusiasts didn’t have was a tragic dilemma: they had a farcical one. A tragic dilemma is taking a course of action you consider to be necessary, knowing how serious the likely negative consequences are. It’s what every sane leader of a popular revolution against a dictator has to consider, for example: ‘do I encourage people to stand up and protest even though they might get shot?’

A farcical dilemma, on the other hand, is when you think ‘my intentions are good, so what could possibly go wrong?’ just before you slip on a banana skin that someone has already repeatedly pointed out to you was there. If you show me any prominent supporter of the war who in 2003 was seriously saying: ‘how can we deal with the damaged country that the removal of a dictator will leave behind’ then I might change my mind. But otherwise, the only tragedy in the whole things is for the Iraqis.

Oh yeah Martin!? Well if I’m still objectively pro-Saddam then you’re still objectively pro Mullah Omar and Osama bin-Laden (and Karimov and Bashir and Kim and Than Swe and Malaria and Third World Debt and…) so there!

Amidst all the brokenness in the above passage Martin Bright seems to have forgotten where the goalposts started. Wasn’t the invasion was to get the nuclear weapons and not to free the Iraqis from the Ba’athist yoke?

“a crass post-hoc consequentialist”; because talking about the deaths of all those Iraqis is so crass and No One Could Have Predicted this would end badly.

I didn’t don a suit of spandex today and go out and fight crime. Today, I allowed several people to be murdered, a handful of rapes, and several thefts.

I am deeply, deeply ashamed because I refused to act.

This is quite frustrating, and I’ve tried to be discreet about it, and to back away, but that didn’t work. I post under my real name, and people have attributed to me views that I don’t hold.

I opposed the invasion and subsequent war in Iraq and in 2002 and 2003. I marched against it, resgined from the Labour Party over it, and so on. I don’t claim, particularly, that any prominent advocates of the war (or ‘war enthusiasts’) said that they faced a tragic dilemma, or that they presented the choice as such. The people who faced a tragic dilemma, whether they understood things that way or not, were me and my friends on the left who marched against the war but were troubled then, and still are, by the truth in liberal interventionist arguments, even whilst thinking that, in this concrete situation the outcome of a liberal interventionist stance was likely to be disastrous. This was the right position then and now.

Let me try again. In marching against the war, in 2002-3, the left was right in protesting a probably (now, certainly) disastrous and under-justified intervention, but it also failed to discharge its responsibility towards those Iraqi leftists and trade unionists, and the Iraqi people more generally, by affecting indifference or worse to the continuation of the Ba’athist regime and its (nice word!) ‘misbehaviour.’ There were a very few honourable exceptions, but the failure to oppose the Ba’athist regime was bound up in the logic of the situation.The Left faced a tragic dilemma, since what it advocated (opposition to the war) was also, under another description, leaving the Ba’athist regime in power.

My disagreement with Dsquared, apart from questions of polemical style, is that, amongst other things, Dsquared characterises obligations to the Iraqis in 2002-3 as ‘a very nebulous “solidarity”’ whereas I characterise those obligations as defining obligations of an internationalist left. Since I characterise them in that way, I think of them as one horn of a dilemma, that confronts an internationalist left, and I regard the failure to discharge that obligation as a wrong. Since, moreover, Dsquared doesn’t buy the idea of tragic dilemmas tout court, and I don’t buy his reductive description of them, we’re unlikely to agree about the description of a tragic dilemma facing the left.

There’s plenty more to say, but it’s about the fit of competing moral theories with the constitutive values of the left. To my mind, consequentialism is a very poor fit, not only with the left, but also with ordinary moral reflection about dilemmas. Nothing here or above, is inconsistent with, or in tension with, opposing the war in 2003 and after, and nothing here or above gives any excuse for characterising my view in that way.

I have to say, with a degree of regret, try reading a little more carefully, please?

Let me try again. In marching against the war, in 2002-3, the left was right in protesting a probably (now, certainly) disastrous and under-justified intervention, but it also failed to discharge its responsibility towards those Iraqi leftists and trade unionists, and the Iraqi people more generally, by affecting indifference or worse to the continuation of the Ba’athist regime and its (nice word!) ‘misbehaviour.’

Not risking blowing Iraqi leftists to bits seems responsible.

I am not a consequentialist and I opposed the Iraq war, and I also opposed (or would have, if given the opportunity) the terrorist bombings of the London underground. But I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to feel remorse over either of these decisions of mine. In both cases, there was a serious ongoing injustice: large-scale human rights violations in Saddam’s Iraq on the one hand and an illegal British war with consequent widespread suffering on the other (just to be clear, I’m not making make any comparison of the seriousness of the two). But the proposed course of action was not a reasonable means of addressing this injustice: it was both morally impermissible in itself and expected to be counterproductive in its consequences. So why should I feel any remorse over my decision not to support it?

Martin Bright:

‘I am not a signatory of the Euston Manifesto, the defining document of the “decent left”, though I did lobby hard for it to be published in the New Statesman when I was Political Editor as I was convinced it was a significant intellectual intervention.’

Since the dictionary definition of the word ‘intervention’ is now ‘an action whereby incoherent pseudo-liberal bullshit is used to cover up cynical realpolitik’ then I would certainly agree that the Euston Manifesto qualifies.

‘Well, Daniel, that’s all hunky dory then. Another account might look like this: in 2003, we confronted a genuninely tragic dilemma, and no talk about lesser evils now will defuse the tragedy of the dilemma, except for a crass post-hoc consequentialist. As things turned out, the opponents of the war in 2003 were right, and Martin Bright was wrong. Nonetheless, opponents of the war in 2003 were advocating a course of action that, under one description; ‘leaving the Baathists in power’ was an appalling one, and this should remain on their (our) consciences. Of course, the consequences of the war should also prick the consciences of those who supported it.’

Of course, Jon, by your arguments then we are all therefore currently ‘responsible’ for every act of political repression currently going on in China, North Korea, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt etc. simply by virtue of the fact that none of us* wants the United States to invade and occupy these countries. And this ‘non-invasion’ idea will clearly leave the ‘murderous’ leaders of these dictatorships in power, at least for the time being.

*Unless, like so many Decents, you accept the right that the Americans have the right to invade anywhere they wish but that this might not always be possible for ‘practical’ reasons?

That responsibility can be mitigated, but not eliminated, by the sense that there are no effective courses of action available to discharge it

“Ought implies can” is “crass” these days?

Also, if the invasion of Iraq had merely been an ineffective way of assisting the Iraqi people, I for one would probably not have bothered to oppose it in 2003 (I didn’t know at the time how expensive it would turn out). It was, in fact, a massively and horribly counterproductive way of assisting them. I don’t see why anyone should feel trouble or remorse at not having wanted to make things a lot worse. It’s rather like having escaped from a burning building and regretting ever after that you didn’t take the opportunity to kick an old man in the groin, on the way out.

It could be, of course, that the Iraq war was a rather ineffective/counterproductive way of assisting the Iraqi people because it was not conceived or conducted as a way of assisting them.

Thomas Paine is quite clear that you can not force democracy on a people’s who don’t want it. Declaring the failure to spread democracy as a moral failure is akin to declaring my failure to float 4 inches above my chair while I type this as a moral failure.

Dunno ’bout you lot, but I organised a demonstration vs the Iraq war with about 2000 people on it, and I made sure that the rally at the end had a speaker from the WCPI at it. Just for the record.

those who opposed intervention in 2002/3 were arguing for the murderous Baathist regime to stay in power. This should remain on their conscience just as the murderous consequences of the invasion are on the conscience of those who supported the war.

From straw man to false equivalence in one forgettable dishonesty.

Yeah, I remember those guys.

My answer is that the lesser evil may involve the failure to discharge an important obligation or responsibility, and this constitutes a wrong, about which it is proper to feel remorse, whilst at the same time holding the true belief that one acted rightly.

This is a failure or refusal to engage with consequentialism on its own terms. In particular the idea that “failure to discharge an obligation” that you actually, under the circumstances, CAN’T discharge is somehow still “a wrong” is necessarily deontological. Under consequentialism, force majeure is an unanswerable argument, because consequentialism is only concerned with the actual consequences of possible actions; an obligation to do the impossible is nonsensical. (So is an obligation to attempt the impossible, because the result of trying is the same as the result of not trying.)

Personally, I’m a noncognitivist because I think consequentialism still fails to produce an adequate basis for preferring one set of consequences to another that doesn’t boil down to personal preference or the socially encoded gestalt of preferences of society members. But since I, personally, am against needlessly destroying sentient life, I also opposed the Iraq war because I didn’t like the consequences. I just refuse to attribute this preference to something bigger than myself.

If you philosophically disagree with either my or dsquared’s way of deciding what is right and wrong, fine, but it would help if you were more above-board about the actual basis of your disagreement.

PS. Also for the record, I’ll like to point out that Jon is an honest man who was indeed against the war then (I was in at least one antiwar organising meeting with him), and generally fails to fulfil one of the main criteria of decency, usefully summarised as BACAI.

I suspect that the man who lives next door to me is beating his wife and resolve to burn their house down. Martin (not so) Bright thinks that this is a bad plan. In burning down their house, I manage to leave the family homeless and kill one of their children. I have that on my conscience. But at least I didn’t beat his wife, like Martin (not so) Bright retroactively had been doing, for so many years, by opposing my arson plan on one occasion.

So, I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.

Incidentally I’d be more impressed with the case for Jon Pike if he wasn’t an enthusiast for the Euston Manifesto, whose theme might be usefully summarised as “some of us were against the war but we denounce most of the bastards who were”. Still, y’know, let’s not pick over the rubble, eh?

(Which I take to be consistent with Steven’s original point, which was that facts about Bush’s intentions were relevant to assessing the likelihood of these consequences coming about.)

To flog the dead horse a bit: If you are opposed to a particular war as a means to a certain end because you think an actually desirable end cannot be accomplished by war, then in what sense are you opposed to the end in the abstract? A main concern was that U.S. war with Iraq would likely fail to lead to a longterm stable democracy and might also lead to an ongoing much more bloody civil war. I don’ t see how this indicates any desire to have the Baath regime to stay in power, any complacency about the evils of the Baath regime, etc. The desirable aim was to better the lives of people in Iraq but there was a lot of evidence this could not be achieved. Otherwise you are just engaging in the ‘destroy the village in order to save it’ logic. Save it for whom? And why? I think there is a genuine confusion here about what it means to intend something. This little mistake not just name calling or holier than thou rhetoric.

Of course it does distort the facts since the humanitarian goal was just thrown in as some extra sweetener. It was not even presented as the main goal in the primary arguments. The argument was about security. This is why it was so easy to overlook the likelihood that what did happen was what would happen: Because it didn’t matter that much to the architects of the war. I guess what gets me more is how confused it is.

Related, I don’t necessarily fail to desire a goal if I am unwilling to do something horrific or inhumane to accomplish that goal.

This is similar to the ‘unless you want to bomb Iran you must not care about the Iranian people’ meme (when the opposition to bombing is that it is pointless as well as incredibly risky for Iranian civilians and will destabilize the region). This has to be a kind of informal fallacy, or it should be. What is it/should it be called? It’s the ‘unless you do something pointless and crazy that would cause problems for X [Ahmadinajad, whoever] while also creating myriad other unforeseeable problems for many more people you must be some kinda X-lover.’

A similar kind of reasoning: I was talking to a person involved in enforcing the war on drugs who admitted the war had failed. He would say whenever I suggested there might be some other strategy: ‘But you don’t know how BAD these people [drug mafia] are.’ While also admitting that much of what they did on the WODs strengthens the mafia. To fail to engage in this pointless policy that accomplished nothing was to fail to ‘fight the bad guys’ even if the bad guys ultimately paid no price for the fight.

dsquared had it right in his first two posts and everything subsequent should have been unnecessary. Call me sneering if you will, but I call bullshit on Mr. Bright. He tells me — and quite a few others — that we should have troubled consciences just like the war proponents and apologists and enablers such as himself supposedly have. Again, bullshit. There is not the slightest evidence that any of these people have ever had or ever will have their beautiful minds the least bit troubled by anything they did. Go have another drink with Tom Friedman, Mr. Martin.

I have a theory that setting off a nuclear warhead in Jerusalem in six months time will bend the space-time continuum causing Hitler to pop out of existence, averting the Holocaust. (Obviously there will be some collateral damage, and quite incidentally I will become very rich, but that is completely by the by)
Clearly anyone who does not support me in my plan is objectively pro-fascist. Quite frankly, I don’t know how you sleep at night.

His claim is: “so why would someone’s conscience be troubled by having supported the lesser of two evils, apart from by regret that their point of view did not carry the day?”.
My answer is that the lesser evil may involve the failure to discharge an important obligation or responsibility, and this constitutes a wrong, about which it is proper to feel remorse..

Only if you (the Coalition of the Willing, or the US, or the UK) have such immense tickets on yourself that you think it OK to appoint yourself the world’s policemen.

“Tragic dilemma” was certainly a red flag, and so inept a choice of words that it’s hard to regret the clobbering that poor, well-meaning Jon has gotten. I think he might better have said: “Well, I opposed the war too, and probably for the same reasons as many of you, but didn’t you feel just a little bit tempted to support it just because Saddam was so horrible and a quick, relatively bloodless American victory, followed by an occupation carried out under the international klieg lights, might have been possible, after all, and would have been the best thing for the Iraqi population”? That wouldn’t have been such an offensive thing to say, I don’t think.

I congratulate all of you who foresaw that the invasion was bound to be followed by protracted and bloody civil conflict. I didn’t, myself — I really couldn’t believe, even then, that the Bush administration was so utterly incompetent, and I didn’t know much about Iraqi society and politics. I still opposed the war, though, and without the regret Jon felt, because the invasion was illegal. For me, the overriding goal is a stable, humane, law-abiding world order, in which the use of force without UN sanction is universally considered illegitimate and simply doesn’t happen. This was very explicitly the goal of the people who founded the UN, and one main reason — not the only reason, of course — we haven’t arrived at that happy condition is that the world’s most powerful state has regularly undermined the authority of international law and the UN Charter. If it keeps happening, international law will be a dead letter, making it all the more likely that the species will be vaporized and then poisoned by radiation, even before the environment completely collapses. I notice that most people on this thread have emphasized the prudential rather than the legal reasons for opposing the war. Is that because the argument in this paragraph seems a little abstract and doctrinaire?

Unseen @76. Mr. Bright may well have opposed the war from the start and continue to do so today. It matters little, however, if he hoped that once begun it might have some net positive outcome. That was and remains extraordinarily unjustifiable wishful thinking on his part. It smacks of the intellectually and morally bankrupt right-war-wrong-prosecutors argument that Hillary Clinton tried for so long. In any case, Bright does himself no credit by telling us that we should feel guilty, too. And compounding that insult with the preposterous claim that any of the war promoters feel the slightest bit of guilt. It is simply not so. I do not see how I am misapprehending his position in the least.

I’m told by a magic fairy that Russia is planning a full scale nuclear assault on the USA tomorrow evening.

We must nuke Russia pre-emptively.

What? You disagree? Well I guess you’re just sympathizing with authoritarian states. I’m more moral than you, you Stalin-admirers!

(Eight years later…)

Well in retrospect, it probably wasn’t a good idea to start global thermonuclear war. But that doesn’t change the tragic dilemma we all faced, and just as those of us who supported the war must bear that guilt, you guys also need to feel guilty about supporting authoritarian oppression.

PS I’m still more sympathetic and humane than all of you. That said, we need to bomb Iran to save it from its warmongering oppressive government!

“But he was still hopeful it would have a net positive outcome once it started.”

I too was hopeful that the war would have a net positive outcome, rather than the giant horrible mess which I predicted. I can top that, in fact; I am hopeful that _everything_ will have a net positive outcome, perhaps involving ponies. There – by uttering this near-truism, I have now rendered myself immune to Decent abuse. Strangely, this rendering has come about not because of things that I’ve actually _done_ but because of something that I’ve said. How peculiar.

On the other hand, this whole decent-kicking exercise is getting a bit boring (just as the Galloway-kicking exercise did, back in the day). What I’d like to see is more effort being paid to investigating the existence or otherwise of links between the decents and any putative Atlanticist backers. For starters, can anyone give me a ballpark guess about the likely out-of-pocket costs for running ‘Harry’s Place’, circa 2002? Is that a sum low enough to have been credibly covered by the kindness of ‘Steele’s heart alone?

“…more effort being paid to investigating the existence or otherwise of links between the decents and any putative Atlanticist backers….”

I have absolutely no horse in this race, but even so I can see that that is so small-mindedly pathetically conspiratorial that even to be able to express it ought to disqualify you from public discourse. The US govt and its cronies were financing some website for UK leftists that nobody reads? Get a life.

Incidentally I’d be more impressed with the case for Jon Pike if he wasn’t an enthusiast for the Euston Manifesto, whose theme might be usefully summarised as “some of us were against the war but we denounce most of the bastards who were”. Still, y’know, let’s not pick over the rubble, eh?

Yes, it always gets me how the Decents who claim to have opposed the war (I’m not including Jon Pike in this) seem to believe that their opposition was uniquely principled whereas the rest of us were at best deluded and at worst unprincipled, particularly those who actually marched against it who were obviously motivated only by self-aggrandisement. In fact in virtually any argument about issues surrounding the war they will take the side of those who supported it against those who opposed it and are just as quick to start throwing “stopper” type insults around.

didn’t you feel just a little bit tempted to support it just because Saddam was so horrible and a quick, relatively bloodless American victory, followed by an occupation carried out under the international klieg lights, might have been possible, after all, and would have been the best thing for the Iraqi population

No, because policy decisions should not be based on over-optimistic rainbows-and-unicorns scenarios. Has there ever been a bloodless invasion by a traditionally hostile country with a markedly different culture and religion than the invadee? I can’t think of one. (Actually, I can’t think of any bloodless invasions at all; even deposed rightful kings were frequently and wisely advised not to return at the head of foreign armies lest it undermine their legitimacy.)

Additionally, the potential for an outside attack to rally a country around its leader, *including people who had despised him before*, should really, really not have been underestimated by the U.S. ca. 2002-3.

Chris Bertram writes:

Your remarks about “crass post-hoc consequentialism” are ill-directed at dsquared, since he predicted that things would turn out badly beforehand.

Prior to March 2003, dsquared predicted that the war would turn out badly? Alas, the Crooked Timber archives don’t seem to allow an easy check of this claim. But, if memory serves, dsquared was reluctantly in favor of the war at the start, but then rapidly turned against it. Corrections welcome!

I stand corrected. See here for the “the official foreign policy of D-squared Digest” as of 2002/2003.

The official policy of D-Squared Digest with respect to Iraq is now that we support a policy of containment until after the 2004 Presidential elections, and after that, we will support immediate war with Iraq if and only if someone other than George W Bush is elected.

So, if the war had not started in 2003 and Kerry had beaten Bush, dsquare would have been in favor of the invasion/occupation of Iraq in 2005. I am certain that that would have turned out really swell . . .

Additionally, the potential for an outside attack to rally a country around its leader, including people who had despised him before, should really, really not have been underestimated by the U.S. ca. 2002-3.

…that’s a very good point. Which I should have made myself, in frequent enough circumstances, earlier in life. How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.

I think it remains open to question as to whether the war really was fucked up: it depends what you think its aims were. (Obviously it was fucked up in the sense of “evil”.)

hang on, Kane, aren’t you rather famous for arguing that the Iraq War did, in fact, turn out really swell?

No. Care to provide a citation?

To the extent of once having presented a mathematical argument to the effect that we couldn’t rule out that it had literally raised the dead? When did you come over to the belief that it had been a horrible disaster causing hundreds of thousands of needless deaths?

Happy to dive into that argument again, perhaps in a new thread?

In order to figure out the number of deaths caused by the Iraq War, you need to have an estimate of the number of deaths that would have occurred in the absence of the war. How many Iraqi citizens would have died if Saddam had been in power over the last 6 years? I don’t have a good estimate for that. Do you?

By the way, for readers new to this dispute, I am “rather famous” at Crooked Timber for being the first to float the fraud balloon about the accuracy of the Lancet estimates of Iraqi mortality. Since that time (was it only three years ago?), lead author Gilbert Burnham has been sanctioned by Johns Hopkins for research misconduct and is no longer allowed to conduct similar surveys. But feel free to blame this news on my zombie army.

In order to figure out the number of deaths caused by the Iraq War, you need to have an estimate of the number of deaths that would have occurred in the absence of the war.

In order to figure out the number of deaths caused by a car crash, you need to have an estimate of the number of deaths that would have occurred in the absence of the car crash. But we can’t be sure what would have happened if the car crash hadn’t occurred! Another car might have crashed, or a coachload of tourists; or a serial killer might have gone on a killing spree in the immediate vicinity; or an asteroid might have flattened 20 square kilometres of the nearest dense conurbation. Therefore, it is impossible for us to say that the car crash really killed anyone, despite the bloody corpses in the smoking wreckage.

. How many Iraqi citizens would have died if Saddam had been in power over the last 6 years?

Tasteless though this is, I wonder – do we have a reasonable estimate for the previous six? (Possibly divided into victims of repression and victims of sanctions, if people so wish and if such a division can reasonably be made.)

All this ‘I wouldn’t have supported the invasion if I had known what I know now’ stuff would be a bit more convincing if the same people had not then gone on to write a ‘manifesto’ calling for a reform of international law based on a total lack of understanding of its basic concepts; blithely insisted up until about a year ago that everything was hunkydory in Afghanistan; and never let an international humanitarian crisis go by without raising the cry of ‘send in western troops’ no matter how utterly implausible this was as a realistic possibility (and not matter how much damage it did to the actual delivery of aid). There is surely some requirement in a political discussion that people should have some idea of what they are talking about before they shoot their mouths off.

If the argument is that, despite getting every single prediction about the likely causes of their proposed actions wrong over the last few years, the ‘decents’ should be considered morally superior (in a nice but dim sort of way) then that would only be sustainable if there was some evidence of ‘decent’ practice (ie not relying on ad hominem attacks, not consistently misrepresenting and lying about what their opponents are saying, not indulging in McCarthyite witch hunts, not cosying up to right wingers while attacking human rights and humanitarian organisations, not regularly allowing racist comments on their websites, etc. etc.)

I think, to give them what due they’re due, that some people are arguing that, well, at least their instincts were right even if in this instance the policy and the choices were not the right ones.

OK, perhaps, but I think if that’s the argument then the antiwar instinct was also right, even if not always the right policy. For that matter I think the instinct to not trust the White House is right and I think the instinct to find Israel’s actions and justifications intolerable is also right. But on none of these issues have the people now pleading “my instincts were right” extended much generosity to those they criticise.

This is really what angers me about them: it’s that they’re denouncers. This is what they do. It’s a really unpleasant exercise and it doesn’t invite much sympathy from the people they’ve seen fit to denounce.

Decent says “Let’s call it a draw!”

Or are we at the “I’ll bite your legs off!” stage?

David K. as far as I can see Burnham has been found in some cases to have gathered more personal data than Johns Hopkins had given permission for. How do you think that casts doubt on the Lancet study? On the face of it that means he had better information than suspected.

I guess that your argument would be that it is an example of dishonesty and makes his work unreliable. Under the best circumstances I think that would require corroboration beyond an unexpected result. However the surveys are hard work at the best of times and this one was carried out under extremely difficult circumstances. Mistake, oversight or shortcut (what is the turnaround time for approval of changes in survey design?) are all plausible explanations that you seem unwilling to entertain. Can you explain why?

How do you think that casts doubt on the Lancet study?

Forget about Iraq for a moment. Imagine another study that comes to controversial conclusion X. You read it and then, based upon the quality of the study, other information, and whatnot, you have a Y% faith in that result.

Now, after that, it turns out that the lead author is guilty of misconduct and has been censured by his university. Do you still have Y% faith in the results?

I don’t. Anytime that a researcher is censured by his university, my faith in his results drops to near zero. Needless to say, if other researchers have independently come to conclusion X, then X might still be true. But I have trouble coming up with a single example in which a reasonable person should still have faith in a study after such an unusual censuring.

Now, of course, the vast majority of people (like me and dsquared) believe that there are hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who are now dead but who would still be alive in the counterfactual world of no US invasion. But the Lancet surveys are still one of the most important scientific frauds of a decade.

If you think that Burnham’s censure was the last shoe to drop in this controversy, thing again.

Kane: _after such an unusual censuring_ ‘Unusual’ here is obviously being used in the sense of ‘obviously trivial in relation to the soundness of the research conclusions’.

Come on, Kane, how stupid do you really think we are? Perhaps you’ve been lulled into a false sense of security by hanging round with too many teabaggers?

For someone that professes to be really keen on getting to the “truth”, David Kane seems surprisingly happy to lie and mislead, even when the deception is very easy to expose.

Funny how Burnham’s taking too much private information is reason to discard everything he has done, but his own deliberate deceptions are presumably perfectly acceptable and we should still take him seriously.

Tim Lambert, not ‘Tim Lamber’.

The D-Squared Digest post linked 95 is amusingly Tom-Friedmanesque.

Now, after that, it turns out that the lead author is guilty of misconduct and has been censured by his university. Do you still have Y% faith in the results?

It depends on the type of misconduct and whether or not it affected the results of the study. In other words, relevance. The blanket term “misconduct” is simply too vague to be useful.

What Burnham was actually sanctioned for was no more relevant to his research results than if he had been sleeping with his secretary or snorting coke. So your attempt to paint him as the second coming of Cyril Burt is rather pathetic.

 
As far as the question of how many people Hussein would have killed if he had remained in power, I agree with ejh at 107 that his previous record should be used as a baseline — except I thought the Lancet study had already done this and reported the *excess* deaths, i.e. the extent to which the invasion was *worse* than mere brutal repressive tyranny.

Historical precedent could have predicted (and did predict) that this would be the case. War advocates were choosing the greater of two evils, in the presence of plenty of information demonstrating that that was what they were doing. When you burn down someone’s house, you don’t get to take credit for getting rid of their termite infestation — let alone denounce the anti-arson faction as objectively pro-termite. (How pro-Hussein can I be if I’m comparing him to a termite, anyway?)

Because no one opposed the war because they thought Wars shouldn’t be frivolous, because the Bush administration had a history of lying, and because their lies were insufficient as justification for anything other than folly.

Martin Bright is a massive idiot.

Oh dear, like one of his Zombies David Kane is back from beyond the grave.

David, if you think Burnham can’t be trusted because he was censured for something which the committee found “did not affect the results of the study”, does this mean nobody should trust you because you were censured by your colleagues for allegations of fraud?

Not that it matters, since your inability to understand (or calculate!) relative risks is probably reason enough not to trust your “results”.

Also, that link you give to the NEJM “takedown” of the lancet study seems not to go to the NEJM. It goes to some other conspiracy theory website. Perhaps you should check your link-fu?

Oh come on David, you were given a stern telling off by that bloggy thing where you occasionally fiddled around. They’re your colleagues aren’t they? Your peers, anyway.

I suppose to a big man like you, with his Mighty Relative Risk calculating skills, being disagreed with by a grad student would be a minor matter. But I wonder, could she calculate basic epidemiological measures? Maybe her assessment of your judgement was better than you give her credit for…

‘The interviewers failed to follow the survey instructions (don’t record names). What makes you think that they followed other aspects of the instructions (choose starting house randomly)?’

Ooh, wait … I know this one. Is it, ‘because Hopkins did an investigation and found no evidence that they hadn’t’?

In order to figure out the number of deaths caused by the Iraq War, you need to have an estimate of the number of deaths that would have occurred in the absence of the war.

Wait a minute, that’s a sneaky use of vocabulary. How about, in order to figure out the number of deaths for which the perpetrators of the Iraq War can be held responsible and can be held to account, you don’t need to know a thing about how many deaths would have occurred in the absence of the war.

* If someone is about to die from illness, and you shoot them, you are just as guilty of murder as if they were healthy.

* If someone is choking and looks to be asphyxiating, and you don’t intervene, you are not automatically accountable.

* However, if someone looks to be asphyxiating and you shoot them, you are absolutely responsible for that death and definitely can be held to account for it.

Note that “held to account” in the third bullet point might not result in negative consequences, like censure, jail, etc — for example, one might consider your expressed intentions and determine you innocent of wrongdoing — but you are responsible for the person’s death in a causal sense, even if the person would have otherwise died.

The alternative is absurd. After all, we all die eventually, so any killing is just a hastening of death. No ethical system I’m familiar with would penalize murderers differentially according to the expected life horizon of their victims.

Likewise, if persons A_1_ through A_n_ are very likely about to be killed in a facility, and you bomb that facility, you are responsible for the deaths of persons A_1_ through A_n_. If you knew of those persons’ existence in that facility, or had compelling reason to believe of their existence, you are likewise responsible.

Generalizing this, if you have a compelling reason to believe Dictator S is going to kill 900,000 people in the next year, and you take action which results in the deaths of 655,000 people, you are responsible for those deaths and can be held to account for them. The lives are not worth any less because someone else was threatening them.

first to float the fraud balloon

Burnham went in the field and researched. He took the risks. You did…what exactly? Would you have even read the study if it had agreed with your ideological priors?

You seem to be proud of damaging his career. I hope your father is very proud.

Andrew, I read the thread as well as I could given my time constraints. I evidently missed something as I understood your position to having been pro-invasion and that you were currently among the straw-in-the-wind grasping “moral dilemma” throng. I have set to rereading the thread. Please accept this qualified apology, but I can’t advise you to continue to show-off your superior sample creating technique. It just iritates those of us who have to go out and actually collect a sample with a survey instrument (shudder.)

It is good to see the econometricians chime in with some amazingly moot contributions. Please, continue to attack each other, it is the best evidence I can find that, for me, business was a better choice than academia. Good job guys, arguing over who killed who, and who would have killed more. Your point isn’t relevant. This war was marketed just like shampoo or dog food and it had the exact same “moral” content as the marketing of shampoo or dog food. Any moral considerations were merely product features (bugs?) of no real import to the manufacturer.

David Kane is unbelievable.

David Kane:
Lying neocons like Kane

“Not that it matters, but I voted for, and donated money to, Obama. My main current concern with regard to US policy in Iraq is that we are not pulling our troops out fast enough.”

Well yeah, of course, now that what you wanted to have happen to Iraq has happened, time to redeploy.
And wonderful noise about Obama, like that negates any accusations of duplicity and covert partisanship, or much worse, the traitorous conduct that produced and prosecuted the Iraq invasion and occupation.
What you and yours wanted done in Iraq was done.
It’s still all-crazy-all-the-time about this stuff isn’t it?
Iran.
#139:
The difference is shampoo and dog food can be marketed without harm to people who would otherwise buy them. The invasion of Iraq has been a damaging lie, from inception to tomorrow’s casualty reports.

I voted for, and donated money to, Obama.

Oh my, it looks like somebody has a black friend.

As if Obama were somehow not proposing the largest military budget in this planet’s history, overseeing repeated illegal offensives into Pakistan, committing US troops to Iraq for another decade, and trying to “surge” the IRA.

Obama: Change you can feel comfortable with, even if you were W’s toady a three years ago.

A 20-kiloton nuke dropped on Hiroshima killed ~140k people. A comparably armed cruise missile lobbed at Baghdad might have taken out Saddam Hussein and, regrettably, another 139,999 less culpable folks. It seems uncontroversial that such an attack would have been less destructive than the invasion which actually took place; it’s arguable that it would have been more compassionate than a continuation of sanctions.

So who’s up for a fresh round of decent nukes, incontestably preferable to conventional methods? It doesn’t seem that making an example of one bloodthirsty dictator has discouraged the others yet. If this was the right thing to do, shouldn’t we do it again?

Just for the record, God hates David Kane.

Martin Bright’s assertion that those who argued against the war were arguing for preservation of the Baathist regime is simply idiotic. False logic, false dichotomy.

First, it is patently obvious that the intent of the two sides was different, and the difference is essential. The pro-war brigade intended that the ‘coalition’ go to war. (I’m tempted to say they wanted a war. That might be unfair, though not in the case of the Dick Cheneys. It both fair and accurate that a significant portion of them wanted to see Arabs killed. Whether Martin Bright is among those genocidal racists I do not know. Daniel Pipes, Ann Coulter and their ilk certainly are.)

The anti-war activists expressly (1) advocated other techniques for achieving ‘regime change (if that really was the goal of war’s advocates — it wasn’t), or (2) argued against war on the grounds that the consequences of war would be disastrous (which has proven true), or (3) argued that Bush & Co had not only failed to make their case but had likely misrepresented the facts (at best) or lied outright (which has also proven true). This is by no means an exhaustive list of the arguments against the war. The second argument is unambiguously one of accepting the lesser of two evils — by no stretch of the imagination an argument for the continuation of the lesser evil.

Let’s take an example from ethics and popular entertainment. A person is threatened with the murder of her child if she does not surrender secret X — the nuclear launch codes that will enable terrorists to kill vast numbers. Any of us can easily imagine the person herself desperately arguing that she cannot surrender the codes. I do not imagine many, if any, saying that she is arguing for the murder of her child even though a consequence of her following the line of her own argument will be the child’s death. You might as well suggest that, because she won’t surrender the codes, she is killing her child. And of course, the weak-minded right-wing did indeed take this line of un-reasoning from 2001 on — that those not “with us” were “against us,” those against the war were for terrorists. Utter nonsense, bordering on actionable libel.

I walked away from it in a CT post that I can’t currently find.

https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/15/anti-which-war-when/

[aeiou] Chris Williams: Thanks! Some authors (Henry, dsquared) at CT do, alas have a tendency for banning views that they disagree with even (especially?) when they come from named opponents with academic credentials. But I like to think that a site-wide ban is unlikely since other CT authors (I think especially of John Quiggin) would be unlikely to go along with it. But perhaps I have too much faith! [For the record, I believe that I am currently banned only from the threads of Henry and dsquared.]

Chris: My first two comments had nothing to do with numbers. I only got into the Lancet stuff after dsquared brought it up first.

Bunbury: You seem like a reasonable fellow but there are a lot of details that you seem to be unaware of. “The IFHS survey was conducted with more resources and in less dangerous times” is incorrect. The IFHS had more resources (which is one of the reasons that it is a much more trustworthy result) but was conducted at almost exactly the same time as L2.

Donald Johnson: When you compare results from survey 1 and survey 2, you don’t just get to “exclude” an outlier and conclude that they are the same. The outlier itself makes them different.

The fact that most Lancet critics never mention the agreement between Lancet1 and IFHS is evidence of bad faith. If they were honest, they’d present the varying claims in a more honest way, but they never do.

The reason we don’t mention the “agreement” is because there isn’t won. Mike Spagat, and co-authors, have done a ton of work on comparing various mortality surveys. Have you read it? Do you not think that this work (much published and to-be-published in academic journals) is “honest?” What about it is dishonest? Why do you think that the peer-reviewers missed the dishonesty?

See here (pdf for extensive discussions, including an explanation of why Lancet1 and IFHS do not really match up. Many people don’t understand the details of IFHS, especially the adjustments that were made.

“When you compare results from survey 1 and survey 2, you don’t just get to “exclude” an outlier and conclude that they are the same. The outlier itself makes them different.”

More obfuscation.

Lancet1 calculated results with and without the outlier for a reason–they weren’t sure the outlier meant anything. Again, a person interested in presenting the varying results accurately would make note of this.

Also, critics of Lancet1 never said that 100,000 excess dead (a mixture of violent and nonviolent dead) , which is the number without the Fallujah outlier, was a reasonable result. They said that this far exceeded Iraq Body Count’s number (which was 15,000 at the time and was later upgraded to 19,000 with further info) and was ridiculous. I’d like to know where a Lancet1 critic ever said “Well, there might in fact be 100 violent deaths per day, and so the Lancet1 analysis without Fallujah is entirely reasonable,but if you include Fallujah it gives numbers that are much too high.” I never saw a critic say that and still haven’t–you’re dancing around it now. From IFHS it now turns out that 60,000 dead from violence (the number implied by Lancet1 without Fallujah) in the first 18 months is almost exactly the same as their midrange estimate.

A good general should not be cavalier about sending 10,ooo men to their deaths even if its the logical thing to do

I just don’t agree, stripped of the aesthetic terms like “cavalier”. We judge generals on what they achieve, and at what cost, not on how they felt about it at the time.

There’s a line I can’t remember about people wishing they were judged on how they felt, because when they’re judged on what they actually did they don’t like the results.

But anyway – it is not really relevant to judge the Decents on how deeply they felt the tragedy of the situation, really, at home with a glass of wine. They were not passive observers, they acted. They mocked and slandered those who tried to stop the war, and they encouraged those that wanted to make war. The Decents are the last people who should complain about their moral feelings not being treated in good faith.

I don’t know why everyone is so down on David Kane. His remix of Club Sound is bangin’! I take it that’s him sitting in the chair?

“Liberals tend to think in terms of rules and laws rather than obligations,” as opposed to whom? You can have the rule of law or the rule of men, as the saying goes. Anyone here really putting their hand up for the latter?

Maybe a good Vulcan general would be different, but a good human general should feel badly about his men’s casualties even when they are unavoidable.

A good Nazi general felt deeply, painfully bad about his men’s casualties, but gloried in his ability to overcome that weakness for the greater good of the cause. The problem with this, of course, is that more pain = more glory; you’d be better off with the Vulcan. (Something similar has been suggested wrt Bernard Montgomery.)

Yes, if there is one thing that G.A. Cohen is famous for it’s the belief that as long as the right rules are in place, individuals have no further obligations to promote justice. “It’s fine that I’m greedy, the rules keep me in check!”

Oh wait …

IIRC at Gettysburg itself, some placque claimed the general whose men suffered the most was Lee.

Sure, but Grant wasn’t anywhere near Gettysburg at the time. He was besieging Vicksburg (which surrendered the day after Gettysburg ended). The Union Army (under George C. Meade) was mostly standing on the defensive, so one would expect Confederate casualties to be higher.

Cold Harbor is generally considered the big blot on Grant’s record, as mentioned above by someone: A longshot frontal attack on a strong position. Comparable to Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.

My impression was that Montgomery’s approach in both Alamein and Normandy tended to valorise grinding attrition as a militarily worthy as well as appropriate tactic, when it wasn’t necessarily either. But IANAMH.

alex – I didn’t mention Arnhem.

People who opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq have no sort of theoretical guilt to bear about not simultaneously being able to find another definite and quick route to helping the Iraqis rid themselves of Saddam Hussein.

After posting no. 175, I looked to see what Wikipedia says about Montgomery — on the assumption that Wiki represents mainstream opinion more often than not — and it says pretty much what I said there, and what Alex said in 181.

The only thing worse than winning a war is losing a war, so the duty of a commander to win is paramount. Given a large and irreversible advantage in resources, such as Montgomery had in northwest Europe and Grant had in Virginia, grinding attrition is pretty much a sure winner if you are careful and keep your mistakes to a minimum. Imaginative tactics can save lives if they work, but if they don’t work they throw away lives without moving the ball. Arnhem is an instructive example.

(Incidentally, the Wiki article says the Arnhem plan was so uncharacteristic of BLM that it left his staff in a state of shock.)

What a fun thread. I get the impression that we’ve agreeded that getting it right for the wrong reason isn’t really right. Seem fairly standard for the academic world. Some seem to think that you couldn’t get it right for the right reason ’cause there was no right reason for not getting it wrong. Nice. Now it is a discussion of military history. In that vein, “which is sort of a white man’s view of the American civil war” in contrast to the view we normally get? The old rub about the winners getting to write the history seems off in this case.