The Five Standard Excuses

To describe a project as failed, though, we need some idea of what its aims were in the first place. *If* the aim was to rid the world of some nonexistent WMDs then it certainly is a failure. Whether Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld actually had _that_ as their central goal is open to doubt. As for Blair, “David Marquand speculates on OpenDemocracy”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-92-1709.jsp about _his_ objectives (and has some interesting things to say about Hutton/Gilligan/Campbell as well).

Also worth noting — someone else will if I don’t — that a failed projected can have unintended though anticipated good consequences and that some of the war’s supporters (such as Anne Clwyd, Bernard Kouchner and the various liberal and left hawks) supported the war in anticipation of those very consequences. Despite the very great good that is the downfall of Saddam it looks premature to say that what eventually emerges from the mess will be sufficiently better to justify their perspective in their own terms.

I think the problem is that none of the cited reasons will really hold much water; given the various positions taken in the lead-up to the war. (1) was popular before the fighting started as the govts involved could do the old ‘we know more than you know but can’t tell you for National Security reasons so you will just have to trust us’ re the WMD threat but now that Iraq has been fallen and occupied there is no real reason to keep any of this knowledge all that classified or secret anymore as far as intelligence on Iraq goes. I know some people, who would have trusted Blair, on the grounds that he knows things not accessible to the general public, now feel kind of betrayed when this does not seem so much to be the case.

(2) is also kind of hard to put forward, as it involves some people admitting they were very wrong and that the approach to the war was not as well thought as it could have been. I seem to recall that some senior Pentagon generals were eased into early retirement when they objected to Rumsfeld’s projected manpower estimates for the operation and how many men/resources it would take to occupy and police the country. It also raises uncomfortable questions of why weren’t these preparations made beforehand when ministers assured the public that they were; the recent imbroglio over the whole bullet-proof jackets and Hoon is a case in point. Of course no one can prepare for a war perfectly with complete anticipation of events; but there does seem to have been some lack of planning as to what would happen after the successful prosecution of the campaign.

(4) is another hard one, as it means admitting that intelligence had large gaps or was flawed. To do this causes two problems: it will lead people to ask why were such strong positions taken on such shaky grounds and to make sure that it does not happen again, that some overhaul of the way intelligence is analysed and presented and the way that it is scrutinised by the govt to make sure that there is no repetition of this in the future. Not something that govts generally would like to embark on in the best of times and certainly not now. Especially since other ‘rogue’ regimes are being lined up for pressure.

(5) is a possibility but then there has to be the selection of who goes and who gets blamed for what. As the O’Neill case shows, there are limits as to how far up the blame can fall without some insecurity and backtracking. Those high up enough to have some inside knowledge might not go quietly without revealing some embarrassing things that no govt would like to come out and those who don’t have this kind of knowledge are most likely too junior or low down the political-bureaucratic hierarchy to realistically be held responsible for such major decision making processes.

Which leaves only (3), given that Iraq obviously wasn’t sold as a job-creation or wealth-generation programme; only the aspect of unintended or secondary positive beneficial moral and political consequences comes forth as an ex post justification. This is a tenable, if somewhat uncertain point to argue, it depends much on what happens to Iraq and how the transition to any democracy is handled. If it lapses into some sort of civil war then the results are not going to be so positive; even relative improvements can be quite depressing. One only has to look at Afghanistan to see how things may fare here; if there is a cycle of weak/failed states acting as a breeding ground for extremist internationally-orientated terrorist movements then patchwork solutions are not going to be of much help beyond the short-term. The record of imposing democracy from above or top-down reform is not really a reassuring one either; not to mention the fact that there is meant to be a broader War on Terrorism going on and if the sole benefit of the Iraq campaign is the overthrow of a repressive regime with an improvement of some of the political and civil freedoms for its citizens (setting aside the nationalist backlash and anti-occupations insurgency) then this is still quite a serious failure. As elected govts, the US/UK need to serve the interests of their citizens first, as the pro-war argument rested within this framework of Iraq either posing some sort of credible threat or having links to the group targeted in the WoT look increasingly weak now if not actually completely unfounded; it is possible to say that there are few if any direct positive results from this policy which has cost the respective countries not an inconsiderable amount of money and lives lost. Not a good record for any govt.

Not clear if you’re taking issue with me here or not Barry. Anyway, what I meant to convey in the sentence you quoted was just this: that people like Anne Clwyd supported the use of force to remove Saddam on human rights grounds quite independently of the WMD arguments. From their perpective, so far so good (since Saddam has gone). But, as you say, a nasty civil war followed by repressive dictatorship would suggest that those who backed the war on those grounds were mistaken to have done so.

As for the Bushites and neocons: mendacious liars all. They’ll go on to say whatever suits them.

Good to see you’ve spotted that the state bEUrocracy is a terrible way to organise a society!

Go Timber Libertarians!

Chris, I’m not going after you. I’m pointing out that the neo-cons who advocated this only switched to human rights concerns after the WMD excuse fell through. And that they’ll have no compunction about switching excuses again and again, as needed.

Conrad Barwa:

“(5) is a possibility but then there has to be the selection of who goes and who gets blamed for what. As the O’Neill case shows, there are limits as to how far up the blame can fall without some insecurity and backtracking. Those high up enough to have some inside knowledge might not go quietly without revealing some embarrassing things that no govt would like to come out and those who don’t have this kind of knowledge are most likely too junior or low down the political-bureaucratic hierarchy to realistically be held responsible for such major decision making processes.”

It would be fun to watch the administration try to dump somebody like Rumsfield or Wolfowitz (Powell they could sh*t on; that’s his job in this administration). They’ve both got to have extensive, detailed and utterly damning files. In multiple locations.

And as Brad DeLong has pointed out, the only people fired from/eased out of this administration are those who told embarrassing truths.
Non-embarrassing lies, massive incompetancy, and corruption are not reasons to get rid of something.

des has kindly provided the money-shot, supra.

These people are Lysenkoists, so good luck breaking their loop. The American aristocracy has spent a generation developing a pet intelligencia whereby they can be comforted in whatever they need to believe this week (the masses being along for the ride, mostly) . Bypassing the CIA (again!) has brought this Ph.D. as spokesmodel model into the decision making process, even the war room. American military might is reduced to a strap-on for the pnac. It’s an ourobouros of self-deception, a nauseating display of autofellatio, a hermetically sealed solipsism.

In Texas, they now have to preach superstition to women seeking an abortion. Science matters not; that which does not flatter the metaphysics of the customer is “liberal,” “revisionist,” a “conspiracy theory.”

See? Impervious. Unassailable.

But these weak excuses are not the American way.

The American way is to deny there was any failure, and to accuse all those who talk of failure of being unpatriotic if not treasonous, and lambast those who raise these painful questions for giving comfort to our enemies.

This discussion raises an important linguistic question, the kind of question that analytic philosophers specialize in. If you set out to get rid of something, say a unicorn, and it never existed, did you succeed or fail? Brian, any insight?

“If you set out to get rid of something, say a unicorn, and it never existed, did you succeed or fail?“—walt

Phrased that way, the answer is “fail”. You didn’t “get rid” of it. Imagine the converse: that you set out to “make” something. Just because it exists somewhere in the universe doesn’t mean that you were successful in “making” it.

If the question is phrased as something like “ensure that something doesn’t exist”, then the answer is different.