I’ve put up a post on my other weblog on the general subject of anti-war leftishness. I’ve put it over there rather than on CT because it’s fair to say that there are a number of different schools of thought among CT contributors on the general subject of war, and it seems unfair to use the CT brand for views that not everyone might stand behind. Cheers.
Update: And now I’m going to hang it on the reasonably topical peg of this Christopher Hitchens interview.
{ 15 comments }
Brian Weatherson 12.10.03 at 5:37 pm
Well I agree with Daniel’s post, so only 10 other Timberites to go before it’s a consensus. And I don’t think it should be CT policy that we can only post things everyone will ‘stand behind’. I’d be vaguely disappointed if none of the crew thought my cloning posts were completely off the mark, but that wasn’t going to stop me posting them.
dsquared 12.10.03 at 5:40 pm
Yeh in general, but the war really is a quite divisive issue and I’m trying to err on the side of caution.
Chris Bertram 12.10.03 at 5:44 pm
Just emailed on this, but since it has gone to comments: I think it is a fine post (not that I necessarily agree with it all) and, anyway, we don’t have a party line. I certainly hope the post appears on CT after all.
dsquared 12.10.03 at 5:51 pm
Thinking about it, the other reason that I wasn’t going to sully the front page of CT with that post was that I was planning to use it to advance a rather scurrilous theory about Tony Blair (basically, the guy’s never seen a war he didn’t like, and his last son was born about ten months after British troops went into Kosovo; I was going to advance the theory that Blair has the condition, not at all rare among military leaders, of being sexually excited by war). But I forgot to put it in there. Damn. Now I’ll have to do another one …
Tom 12.10.03 at 6:05 pm
On the FrontPage interview: remarkable how they keep trying to veer Hitchens off into “Bash the left some more,! It’s what the punters want!”
Also remarkable that Hitchens didn’t grasp the point that Daniel made.
Conrad Barwa 12.10.03 at 6:54 pm
anyway, we don’t have a party line.
What no party line; appalling!
Russell L. Carter 12.10.03 at 7:12 pm
“Also remarkable that Hitchens didn’t grasp the point that Daniel made.”
Seems he thinks the Iraq problem solving effort was completed back in May, now on to the next thing. Whereas a lot of us on the antiwar left thought then that given the actors the Iraq problem solving thing might not have a short term civilized solution, and still don’t. Leading to exceptionally poor and even possibly negative ROI.
These two snippets are choice:
“The anti-war and neutralist forces share the blame here, because there was nothing to stop them saying, very well Mr. President, let us commonly design a plan for a new Iraq and think about what will be needed. Instead, all energy had to be spent on convincing people that Iraq should no longer be run by a psychotic crime family – which if the other side had had its way, it still would be.”
and:
“The job of citizens is to make sure that this American power really is self-determined, and not left either to professionals or to amateurs. We are not watching for the outcome of this war: we are participants in it and had better comport ourselves as such.”
I wrote a bunch of words, but really, you could write books on these two bits. Not nice ones either. Essentially, the poor guy is completely blind to the basic incompetence of the people in charge and shifts blame to everybody else. So what else is new?
I’m also curious who those people are that should be lending a hand and aren’t professionals or amateurs. Oh, that’s right. That would be the incompetents. But they’re already in charge!
bob mcmanus 12.10.03 at 7:26 pm
“and it seems unfair to use the CT brand for views that not everyone might stand behind.”
Interesting. This seems to imply that each CT member stands behind every other members posts.
Roughly? In their entirety? This is a thematic and Ideologically consistent groupblog?
Keith M Ellis 12.10.03 at 7:37 pm
Hitchens is best ignored.
The necons and the other strong supporters of the Iraq war are simply inconsistent when the focus shifts to North Korea. First, they would likely protest that their reluctance to fight a war against North Korea certainly does not indicate either a lack of patriotism, or that they favor Kim Chong-Il. Second, if they don’t want a war, what is their concrete plan to remove Chong-Il from power? Answer: they don’t have one.
Daniel is 100% correct on this. Getting rid of Hussein was and is a “good thing”. But so? All that ever really mattered was “when” and “how”. And extremely good arguments can be made for “not then, not now”.
msw 12.10.03 at 9:36 pm
What war would the ideal Iraqi regime-change be modelled on? Let’s limit ourselves to the last 50 years. I think you have two choices:
1. China’s invasion of Tibet
2. Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus
It doesn’t matter who was running the show, this thing was doomed from the start.
msw
Shane 12.11.03 at 3:24 am
Christopher Hitchens wrote:
> We are not watching for the outcome of this war: we are
> participants in it and had better comport ourselves as such.
And elsewhere Hitchens quibbed that Bush had come to his secular battle against theocracy by way of Sept. 11, not that Hitchens had signed on for the Crusade of a fundi-friendly administration. So God told Bush to go to war, and Hitch can take credit? This is a snarky way of saying there’s a severe chasm between the war Hitchens is penning, and the really existing War on Terrorism. Gen. Boykin and all.
That’s what frustrated me most about the humanitarian publicists for the war. Some denounce opposition to the war as support for Saddam, when it’s usually a rejection of the accuracy of their copy. No argument that Saddam was a tyrant. No real doubt that the US could beat his forces militarily. But the flourishing of democracy always struck me as a non-sequitor. And there was plenty to screw up after toppling the regime. Winning the war, loosing the peace, as the cliche goes. This administration has always appeared determined do both.
Yet for Hitchens, the incompetence of the administration post-war is, at least in part, the blame of the anti-war crowd, and punishing Bush for this with an ouster come Nov. ’04 would be immoral. Of all the things for a proponent of this war to fault the anti-war left for, surely the last is a desire to depose Bush & Co.
Keith Johnson 12.11.03 at 11:44 am
MSW-
>What war would the ideal Iraqi regime-change be >modelled on? Let’s limit ourselves to the last >50 years. I think you have two choices:
>1. China’s invasion of Tibet
>2. Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus
>It doesn’t matter who was running the show, this >thing was doomed from the start.
Why the limits? How about, oh I don’t know, the regime change in Germany or France following WWII?
But leave that. How can you say ‘this thing’ was doomed from the start when it is succeeding?
Keith Johnson
Matthew 12.11.03 at 12:19 pm
I think it’s the Poor Man who has correctly labelled Hitchens great fight, as ‘The War Against Straw’
rea 12.11.03 at 9:14 pm
“Why the limits? How about, oh I don’t know, the regime change in Germany or France following WWII?”
Not France–there was no equivalent of the army of free French to be the first into Baghdad and start running the country after the regime change.
And not Germany–there was no equivalent of the Soviet Union to grab half the country and leave the other half terrorized about what might happen if the Allied reconstruction was unsuccessful.
Mark 12.12.03 at 1:40 pm
The problem with this arguement that has not been mentioned is that there was no way France, Russia and probably Germany would have supported regime change at a different time. They were pushing hard to lift the sanctions, remember? A Security Council resolution to go to war was an impossibility from the start. Certainly a different president would have fared better with our European allies and probably planned better for postwar rebuilding but, like Kosovo, we would have done it without UN sanction or not done it at all.
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