Media Blitz

In the final reckoning, there are few just wars because the slaughter is apt to become indiscriminate in scale and direction. Even in the case of WW2, which many regard as a just war, including myself who lived through it in inner-London, the final death toll amounted to at least 40 millions. They weren’t all evil people who deserved their fate.

WHY FEW WOMEN ARE STRATEGIC PLANNERS

Most women don’t understand that when a bomb hits a wedding party and kills 15 people it’s unfortunate, of course, but sort of funny too. That’s why they don’t understand strategy.

Except Ms. Slaughter. When Anne Marie Flowergarden adopted a new last name, people in the biz knew that she had what it takes.

Reposted from the Henley coments and the Edge of the West comments too.

Well I’ll be. Libertarianism might be good for something.

Could CT create a print anthology of “How I Got It Right” posts? In particular Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101 deserves to be preserved, if only so that archeologists have an outside chance of discovering that there was intelligent life on the planet in the years before the Great Thermonuclear Rapture.

I must say that this seems like a rather odd time for longtime opponents of the war to gloat, given the results of the recent poll of Iraqis: “The poll’s findings on ‘views of the U.S. presence’ in Iraq were the highest since the invasion. Asked whether the ‘invasion was right,’ 49 percent said it was”.

Asked whether the ‘invasion was right,’ 49 percent said it was”.

Spinning that 49% for all it’s worth at best means the war has somehow been accidentally justified for those people. It certainly doesn’t have much to do with the reasons the war was launched.

The rest of the article is somewhat bleak.

There was an article about the Sunni militias who are allied to us at the moment. A major part of the surge, and a big reason why Iraq seems better now.

They’re all just being paid off, and everyone knows that at some point they’ll turn again. (Many were killing Americans not too long ago). It seems to me that the whole purpose of the surge was to postpone the disaster until after the November election. If the Democrats win, Bush can shell out a few billion to postpone the breakdown until the Democrats can be blamed for it. If McCain wins, a Republican will be President and that will be an enormous victory, and McCain will be able to stage-manage events to justify the escalation he already wants. He’ll have four years to patch things together, and he’ll probably have a mostly free hand during that time.

But my point is: are any of the Democrats talking about this? Bush is setting a booby trap, and they have to figure out now what they’re going to do about it. And one thing they could do is (I know this is counterintuitive if you’re a Democrat) say out loud that the worst President in American history has violated his oath of office for partisan reasons by setting a booby trap for the next American President.

I credit him only with the centipede’s poinsonous cunning, Bubba.

The 49% also omits all the dead Iraqis. I wonder what they think about the invasion?

So, excluding the people who have either died or fled, less than half of Iraqis think the invasion was a good idea. That’s some nice goalpost shifting.

Tommy Franks kidding around with Bush when he was getting his medal of freedom about how atrocious he was at school. Cheney has his narrow bureaucratic skills but everything he has touched in this administration has turned to shite. The challenge is then to explain the mechanism of adverse selection that saw these people collected together for this disaster.

“Attacks on US troops are justified” is down to 42% – although obviously this is going to vary geographically.

The Iraq war will cost U.S. taxpayers trillions of dollars. That’s a lot of revenue for a lot of people, who wouldn’t mind investing it in some PR campaigns for the war. I’d be surprised if expensive money-throwing like the Iraq war didn’t happen. What better excuse for spending money than war?

I wonder what did really happen with the missing billions?

“WASHINGTON (CNN) — Nearly $9 billion of money spent on Iraqi reconstruction is unaccounted for because of inefficiencies and bad management, according to a watchdog report published Sunday.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/01/30/iraq.audit/

@25: $9 billion is chump change. It’s what fell through the hole in Bush’s pocket.

Major strategic victory = slightly less than half the population think you’re better than the other guy

Certainly a legitimate claim can be made that the war in Iraq wasn’t a “major strategic victory”. My objection was to the smug condescension with which Holbo and Henley loudly hail early opponents of the war as self-evidently brilliant prognosticators, worthy of press attention as such. If roughly half of Iraqis consider the opponents of the war to be wrong–and that number has been rising–then one would expect fair-minded people to concede that the issue is at least not entirely and conclusively resolved in the anti-war side’s favor.

Then again, if the disagreement of a solid majority of Americans doesn’t prevent Crooked Timberites from considering the wisdom of their own policy prescriptions for America to be self-evident, then I suppose the disagreement of half of Iraqis wouldn’t prevent Crooked Timberites from considering the wisdom of their own policy prescriptions for Iraq to be self-evident.

Then again, if the disagreement of a solid majority of Americans doesn’t prevent Crooked Timberites from considering the wisdom of their own policy prescriptions for America to be self-evident

What year are you in, Dan?

I don’t know what “being right” about this war means – is it only people who predicted Shiite/Sunni clashes, no establishment of a government, 500,000-1,000,000 killed? Because I didn’t think it would go nearly that badly.

It could have turned out MUCH MUCH better, from a consequentialist POV (75% less dead, political compromise, peaceful) and I would still think it was a very bad idea. Wrong, immoral.

Since Iraq posed no significant threat to anybody except its own citizens, IMO nothing other than the humanitarian rationale was even close to justified. And regarding humanitarian interventions, since there was no ongoing genocide, nor one with a very high degree of certainty coming in the near future, you don’t invade.

I opposed the humanitarian rationale based on the “bird in the hand beats two in the bush” rule: you don’t kill one person to save two in the future. Future benefits and costs in such an environment should be so highly discounted as to make them near worthless, because of the overwhelming uncertainty involved in estimating outcomes of a war. Too many variables.

After working it out, I found the Catholic Just War doctrine figured it out a long time ago.

Dan’s right – to treat all war supporters as idiots is unfair. I divide them into liars and idiots, which is much more fair. Take Weisberg, who still has a job as an editor of Slate. In 2002, about the time of the Axis of Evil state of the Union address, he was worried that Bush wasn’t serious about attacking Iraq. The problem was, Weisberg gravely assured his readers, Saddam would have an atom bomb by 2005 – 2006 by the latest. Now, this could be simple lying on behalf of the bloodsuckers in the D.C. establishment. But it could be idiocy. In the later case, the honorable thing to do would be, resign from your editing job and find a nice job that you are competent to hold. There is an exciting career in cashiering at a Bowling Alley that I’m pretty sure Weisberg wouldn’t fuck up. I wouldn’t trust him too much on shoe size, but basically, I feel he is a man who could hold down that job. On the other hand, as a propagandist for a permanent war coalition in D.C., he’d feel no need to resign his job – he did his job, misleading as many people as he could. In his defense, people who actually believe Saddam a, posed a threat to the U.S., but b., was so weak that he couldn’t even defy the U.S. and retake Northern Iraq, which had been wrenched from him in 1996, were people who… well, who’d believe that the ARM resetting for 12 percent in six months was just the kind of deal they were looking for.

So, we do have to divide our analysis between, on the one hand, the tools and liars, and on the other hand, the idiots. Anti-war people should not confuse the two! Luckily, the tools and liars pretty much give the game away by continuing to hold the positions they hold, and continuing to lie for wars. Dishonorable, morally rotten, and with the expectation that their audience is cretinous – one bountifully satisfied over the last seven Fox filled years!

As a ps – Weisberg, summing up what he got wrong in his wonderfully sinister mea culpa this week, didn’t say, oh, I suck as a journalist and should be searching through bowling shoes for the size 7. He said the experience taught him to distrust analysts – for instance, those that claim Iran has not been working on nuclear weapons. Ta Da! Never get between the D.C. vampire and his next mass kill.

“Dan’s right – to treat all war supporters as idiots is unfair. I divide them into liars and idiots, which is much more fair. ”

I tend to think of them in terms of the Passover story of the four sons and their questions: that is, wise, wicked, simple, and too young to even ask (in this instance, I’m counting that as political and social, rather than chronological, immaturity). Although that’s still not fine-grained enough – for example, there’s no ‘son deeply traumatized by the recent Cossack-led pogrom who asks ‘why are we bothering with this Sedar thing, when we need to be attacking the neighboring village?! [which, despite being Eastern European, Christian, and probably unfriendly, had nothing to do with that instance of antisemitic terrorism]’ Although to be honest, he only got the idea ’cause the wicked son suggested it to him . . .

What Henley fails to take into account is the Wrongness Doctrine: among the punditocracy, the more often and more egregiously wrong you are, the more highly respected you are. That’s why people like Jonah Goldberg and William Kristol and Joe Klein and, well, pretty much everyone over at the WaPo have regular opinion columns in major periodicals.

If roughly half of Iraqis consider

I would still imagine that what Americans consider has something more to do with whether or not American policy had worked out well.

What if the main reason for the invasion of Iraq was what resulted? Dystopic helplessness, no viable military or economy. Dead country, pretty much.
Most of those on the safe left who opposed the invasion and occupation, what gets tarted up as a “war”, which it was not and is not, were equally opposed to the idea that it was begun with the intention to produce what it has produced.
Oil used to get thrown up as the second-level, real purpose, under all the little piles of b.s. about liberation and democracy. Not so much talk about the oil now, even as it hovers around $100bbl.
Much disdain for the idea of Saddam’s Iraq as ever having been any kind of real threat, with virtually no memory that during Gulf War I Saddam’s Iraq threw more than 80 missiles into Israel. Certainly that could be seen as a threat, to the Israelis if to no one else.
Still, the tacit assumption among the opposers seems to be the invasion and occupation of Iraq were undertaken because of stupid men getting their way, and then failing at what they tried to do. Leaving us with the obvious solution of getting rid of those stupid men. If that’s what happened.

Dan Simon, if you’re willing to take a satisfaction rate a bit under half the surviving population (therefore excluding both the dead and refugees, for starters) as justification, then I’ve got a list of other multi-trillion dollar projects that will substantially weaken the rule of law in America and kill hundreds of thousand of people abroad. I trust we can count on your support, given this standard.

r.bubba:
The brilliant plan would have had the virtual main actors take the fall for the real main actors.

Dan Simon seems to have left, but one of the things war supporters fail to do is specify what the purpose of the war was and is, and whether the war fulfilled / will fulfill that purpose. A number of goals have been declared and then discarded, and “Making 49% of Iraqis happy” is just the latest and probably the weakest.

I think that the real goal is a decades-long war ending with unitary Presidency and a monopolar world empire, and this is a goal I oppose.

But I think that even if a majority agree with something, it might still have been “wrong” – from a moral or “decision-rule” point of view – at the time of the decision.

A war could be wrong normatively, but then found acceptable, when evaluated consequentially.

Aaargh. Key cause of being wrong about Iraq; spending intellectual effort arguing about “liberal interventionism”, “decision rulesets”, “responsibility to protect” and the rest of the 2002-2003 Galenic version of political science, instead of, ah, Iraq.

…the proportion of people in opinion polls in China who think that the Great Leap Forward was, on balance, a good idea?

Good point – I also gather that there’s a lot of Iraqi support for an Iranian-style repressive Islamic Republic. That’s their choice, but I don’t recall “shoving the Iraqis into the arms of the Imams” as a war aim.

I’ve got a tenner that says there’s significant overlap between that lot and this 49%… And now, thanks to George W., those people have their opportunity.

I guess Rumsfeld was right after all – freedom’s messy.

Yeah, if you kill a million people (well, or set up the circumstances in which their neighbors and nearby strangers can kill them) and let things get so bad that two or three million more flee the country, those who remain can get some easy improvement just by looting what was left behind. I’ll bet, though, that Dan would complain if he were among a million Americans allowed to die a nasty death, even if the rest of us profit by picking up all his stuff.

The purpose of the war was clear: to end the rule of Saddam Hussein. It was spectacularly successful at this purpose, at amazingly little cost.

You’re saying that that’s the goal now, because it’s the only one that can be said to have been attained. But it’s not the kind of goal that motivates wars very often; it’s the kind of goal that powers war propaganda, because demonizing individuals is easy and effective. (Remember Noriega’s evil red underwear and ugly pockmarked face?)

Getting an individual out of power is not a strategic goal by any stretch of the imagination. It has to be a step on the way to some other, worthier goal. But it’s a good selling point.

Goals stated at one time or another have included helping the Iraqi people (humanitarian), helping the Iraqi people (by bringing democracy), ending Saddam’s support for al Qaeda, stopping Saddam’s WMD programs, stabilizing the Middle East, and reducing terrorism. For different reasons, all of these justifications have been discredited. And this war was not supposed to be long, expensive, and bloody — we were going to be welcomed as liberators.

The global imperialist goal (complete with a decades-long war against all and sundry) still remains on the table, and when Cheney says that things have been going very well, that must be what he’s talking about. This wasn’t what was sold to the American people, but the war is a fait accompli. I think that a lot of the war supporters knew that this was the goal, but they also knew that they shouldn’t talk about it.

Dan, if the Iraqi polling results go down to 25%, will you change your mind? Of course you won’t. You’ll just reach down into your barrel of reasons and fish out another one, one that hasn’t been discredited yet.

And yes, we need a serious debate on this issue, and we’re having one, and your side is losing badly. And it’s not a terribly partisan debate, because the Democrats are not very anti-war. “Partisanship” was a terribly stupid red herring for you to throw up, because American anti-war opinion (about 60% by now) has not had a voice in the presidential race since Kucinich and Dodd dropped out. The remaining Democrats want Bush out of there and are being cautious about their own Iraq plans.

Even among partisan Republicans, many agree that Bush botched the war, though I think that they’re fooling themselves because they still don’t realize what Bush’s goals were.

John also makes a good point, as one would expect. :) Nobody goes to war just to remove a bad leader. Whether it’s restoring the status quo ante or promoting some desired alternative (a chosen leader, a chosen political process, whatever), people go to war to remove a bad leader and replace them with something else.

The significance of the latest poll from Iraq is that it suggests that by one standard—Iraqis’—the original goal is increasingly looking like a worthy one.

could I just be mr pedantic numbers guy and point out that 49% is not, in fact, a majority?

Speaking as someone who supported the war at first, I can say that the goals I wanted the war to achieve were two: (1) to stop Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, which I assumed they were pursuing; and (2) to democratize Iraq, which would then act as a beacon for the rest of the middle east. If I had known that Iraq hadn’t had a nuclear weapons program, I hope I wouldn’t have still supported the war. If I had read more about Iraqi culture besides a little of Ken Pollack’s book, I hope I would have realized that (2) was an almost impossible goal (or maybe just straight out impossible).

In any event, it seems clear to me that the war didn’t achieve the goals I had originally wanted it to; and also, in response to dan simon, I don’t think removal of Saddam was the main goal; it was ending the WMD program/getting rid of the existing WMD, which (I and others thought) required eliminating Saddam.

Oh, as an illustration of why Dan and others are just plain wrong…

Our government denied a visa to an Iraqi man who worked as a translator for us for nearly four years, because he used to belong to a terrorist organization. The terrorist organization in question is the Kurdish Democratic Party, and it’s designated that way for having attempted to overthrow…Saddam Hussein.

Yes, we’re keeping one of our valued Iraqi allies – and I don’t mean that sarcastically, it sounds like he did good work, in dangerous circumstances – from emigrating to the US because he fought against Hussein.

And that’s this war in a nutshell.

There are a few rather important distinctions that need to be made here:

1. Invasion vs. occupation. As I mentioned, the invasion of Iraq had a very straightforward goal–the toppling of Saddam Hussein–and was a spectacular and surprisingly inexpensive success. The subsequent occupation, on the other hand, had multiple worthy but extremely difficult and completely open-ended goals: the establishment of a self-sustaining democratic government; improvement of Iraqis’ material conditions through infrastructure (re-)building; sectarian reconciliation and national identity-building; and minimization of the influence of foreign non-democratic countries, chiefly Iran. It should therefore come as no surprise that progress towards these goals has been mixed, to put it mildly, and the cost enormous. However, one should distinguish these results from the overwhelmingly positive outcome of the invasion itself.

2. Short-term vs. long-term success. As I mentioned before, the aftermath of the fall of most tyrants is quite chaotic, and nobody should have expected anything else of Saddam Hussein’s. What matters is that out of the chaos is born, not just another brutal tyranny (as, unfortunately, seems to be the result in Russia), but rather a genuine improvement in freedom and security. That’s why the trend in Iraq at the five-year mark is so heartening: the Russian experience–a decade and a half of decay, followed by what looks increasingly like a restoration of the ancien regime–has always been a very real possibility in Iraq, but it’s now looking less and less likely.

(By the way, I’ve asked this repeatedly of the war’s opponents, and never received a satisfactory response: given that the “excess deaths” in the former Soviet Union following the collapse of Communism have completely dwarfed those in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, how many of you would argue that in retrospect the US should have thrown its weight behind the 1991 coup against Gorbachev, in an attempt to preserve the Soviet regime?)

3. American vs. Iraqi goals. The recent poll results strengthen the argument that by Iraqi standards, the toppling of Saddam Hussein was a positive outcome. However, there remains the question of whether Americans should view this outcome as a success. For example, nativist, isolationist paleoconservatives of the Ron Paul variety understandably see nothing but wasted blood and treasure in an attempt to better the lives of millions of people–by their own standard–in a benighted tyranny halfway around the world. That leftist internationalists, on the other hand, should be so vehement in their opposition to the toppling of one of the clearest examples of a bona fide fascist regime in recent history, is considerably more incongruous. As I mentioned before, it appears to me to be a clear-cut case of narrow partisan politics corrupting foreign policy opinion in a rather ugly way.

One of my standard rules is that anybody who claims that ‘the war’ was a success, but that ‘the occupation’ was not, has forfeited the benefit of the doubt on either their honesty, or basic competancy.

I saw from the word go that the Iraq adventure was a give away to the war and oil industries. I also saw that 9-11 had frightened Americans, and that opposing the war was a waste of time. Likewise, those industries know they can’t get another puppet into the presidency, so a naive poser will be the next best thing, which is why they support Obama. They have lined up an uneducated coalition of red State folk and young people to turn the trick. And again, resistance is futile.
http://a-civilife.blogspot.com

…how many of you would argue that in retrospect the US should have thrown its weight behind the 1991 coup against Gorbachev, in an attempt to preserve the Soviet regime?

Not many, I hope. Why would anyone argue that the US should throw its weight behind anything having to do with internal affairs of any foreign country? That’s the whole point, Dan, and you’re missing it again. Get involved in your Canadian politics and let the Russians and the Iraqis take care of themselves.

What I think gets glossed over in these discussions is the pathological desires involved in believing the cases for the war. It was, as has been frequently remarked, a classic Freudian kettle, a war with proliferating justifications, each of which subtracted more than they added.

You had to be naïve to believe the humanitarian justifications (liberating Iraqi women, etc. — ’cause they sure are better off now…). But man, you had to be *stupid* to believe the WMD justifications. Aluminum tubes for uranium centrifuges, which, because stored outside in the open air (and therefore covered in aluminum oxide), were no longer usable for the purpose, because of, you know, chemistry — this was the stuff of the Bush case for war.

I noted on my weblog a few days ago that I heard that Hussein was going to make anthrax with all the unicorns he was stockpiling.

dansimon:
…the answer depends greatly on whose criteria determine that worthiness. Americans’? Iraqis? Europeans’? Bloggers’?
Who’s conspicuously missing from that list? Would it be Canadians? Fijians? Venezelans? Malagasis? Romanians? Okinawans?
Scattered members of the Rapa Nui diaspora?
Oh, right.

I never bought the stupidity argument when it comes to Bush and co. invading Iraq. They managed, at a time when history was purportedly at its ‘end’, and in the face of mass protests around the world, to launch a foray into bare-knuckle imperialism. Having done this, they used their think-tanks and media doyens to attack any meaningful opposition to the war, and to rebaptise a brutal shock and awe campaign and occupation as ‘humanitarian intervention’, thus laying the ideological foundations for future such ‘interventions’ into ‘failed states’.
Surely this is more indicative of ruthlessness than stupidity.

There are a few rather important distinctions that need to be made here:

Dan, darling, those very important distinctions of yours are important—no, meaningful only in your counterfactual universe, the one in which we value the success of an “invasion” separately from the success of the subsequent “occupation.” Not to go all Godwinny, but if the Axis had won WWII, do you think that D-Day would be considered a success?

That’s what’s so unforgivable—the stupidity* of the war planners (sic), who assumed that the invasion was all we needed to plan for.

You, dearest Dan, are clinging to the wreckage of a ship that the rats abandoned long, long ago.

Also, just as a reminder: in the long run, we’re all dead.

*Whether it was stupidity or infernal cupidity—let’s talk about that elsewhere.

I’ve always been doubtful of the argument that the steep decline of Russia during the decade following the fall of Communism was absolute proof of how horrible Communism had been. It’s not impossible that something like that is true, but the burden of proof has to be on the person making the claim.

From George W. Bush’s viewpoint, the war has been a nearly-complete success:

– it gave him a club with which to belabor his political opponents until they were cowed
– it vastly enriched many of his cronies in the oil and defense industries, including the Vice President
– no one made him stop
– he got to take out the bad man that tried to kill his Daddy
– he got to believe that he was a manlier man than his Daddy
– he got to wear that flightsuit
– as a “War President”, he could seize the prerogative to simply ignore laws he didn’t like
– he didn’t have to attend even one funeral
– or think

Some of what went wrong in post-Soviet Russia was the uncovering of problems that had been there but officially denied. Much of the rest comes from the imposition of a brutally kleptocratic regime enthusiastically supported by Western powers, with the obvious-at-the-time sufferings of the people dismissed by head-in-the-clouds designers only interested in aggregate statistics and the personal fortunes of their favored social circle.

That does remind me of Iraq, come to think of it.

I’d written:

“Those excess deaths marked the culmination of deteriorating health and economic metrics that was traceable to at least the 1970s. The declining male life expectancy, the ethnic conflict, the worsening living standards—all of those things began long before Gorbachev’s regime, and few if any of them would have been improved by a Brezhnev-nostalgic military dictatorship or by, say, an exile-heavy diaspora nationalist/Orthodox Church-heavily coalition government that for all of its foreign aid still couldn’t keep the peripheries from being ethnically cleansed.”

Mr. Simon wrote:

“I hope the parallels with Iraq aren’t entirely lost on you…”

The paralells are oblique, at best. More below. First, to try to tackle your three points.

1. The invasion destroyed the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein. Congratulations; everyone was so surprised that the most powerful military in the world, driven by nationalist rage, was able to crush a Third World military vitiated by a decade’s worth of sanctions and the occasional massed airstrike on top of a badly lost war. I’ll grant you that success, ill-founded as it was on the specific premise that Iraq’s government was involved in September 11th, and badly seated on the general principle that the military destruction of reactionary regimes is a good way to encourage positive social change (oh, Trotsky, where did you go?).

As for the occupation end of things, most people were under the impession that international law required occupying powers to maintain a modicum of peace and stability in the interim before the establishment of an occupation regime, especially after said regime was established. It would have been very nice if the United States government had tasked some people who were at least orderline competent to do what needed to be done, instead of handing it over to political hacks. The occupation was the United States’ to lose and the Iraqis to suffer.

2. Five years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation was about to bottom out on its long economic decline, was blundering towards a peaceful end to the first Chechen war, and was poised to hold highly contested parliamentary elections the next year. The Russian state functioned, if erratically; ethnic peace outside of Chechnya and adjacent areas was maintained, quite successfully as in the case of Tatarstan; foreign policy was conducted on sensible lines.

Clearly 1996 wasn’t the best time to be a post-Soviet Russian, but our 1996 wasn’t the worst outcome. To name a single example, whatever the many sins of the oligarchs they could at least run functioning capitalist enterprises, likely more than could be said for anyone in the August 1991 could-have-been-junta. Better outcomes would clearly have been desirable, but no one seems to have made the expected planning–a much quicker transition was expected.

If the Iraq 2008-Russia 1996 parallel was to hold firm, then a broad but impuissant coalition government based in Moscow would be ruling the country while regional governors, ethnic leaders, oligarchs and the occasional foreign proxy fought a low-to-mid intensity civil war against each other and the government with occasional national and international interventions, puncutated by the steady satelitization by China of most of Russian Eurasia and the desperate flight of, oh, 10-15M Russians to various points in Europe ahead of the various mafioso who were promising to blow up their husbands and cut off their children’s fingers because they lived in a Red part of town.

3. Finally, taking a secular fascist ruling over a single territory and replacing him with a congerie of religious fascists ruling over a multitude of separate territories (and, in Iraqi Kurdistan, some liberal-sounding ethnic nationalists who only occasionally talking about sending Arabs back to where they come from) isn’t much of an improvement at all. If one judges a democratic society to be one where people can move from one territory to another, admittedly, the intensity of Iraq’s population movements would seem to indicate that Iraq is just that democratic a society.

There’s been a marked improvement in security over the last few months—or haven’t you heard?

Something like 10% of Iraqis are in exile. More are in internal exile. Large areas have been ethnically cleansed, or are ruled by religious militias. Many normal functions of life (education, medicine, electricity) are less-fulfilled than under Saddam, too a large degree because of poor security (e.g. MDs in exile).

Security is worse than under Saddam. But if you compete against your own worst performance, you always win.

92: Security is worse than under Saddam. But if you compete against your own worst performance, you always win.

One thing you need to understand here is that the bad guys are not to be judged on the utilitarian grounds; the Baath party, the Cuban government, the Soviets, the Hamas, you name it – their utilitarian achievements are to be immediately dismissed with scorn and ridicule. They are to be judged by their crimes and moral failing.

It’s the goods guys of this world – the Pinochets, the Chiang Kai-sheks, the Sharons, the Bushies – their crimes and moral failing are completely irrelevant in view of their (allegedly) tremendous utilitarian achievements.

Randy @91: The obvious question would be whether anyone knew what was about to happen and had a plan to avoid this that—we all can now suspect—might have worked. Anyone? Sure, in both cases. The “shock treatment” policy applied to Russia was hotly contested at the time, and a far more sensible and cautious liberalization would almost certainly have done fine. For Iraq, a much more tightly focused set of sanctions would have dealt with whatever peril Hussein actually presented without handing him the gift of subjects’ pain and death clearly the fault of Western intervention.

All of which was discussed at the time.

rea: perfect.

What did you think was going to happen if Saddam wasn’t deposed?

Less death.

Did you think that wasn’t your problem? How many more years of Ba’athist rule—followed most likely by the same chaos that we’ve seen accompanying its end, if not much worse—would it take for you to consider that cutting it short by force might just be the lesser of two evils?

Maybe this, maybe that. How’s Osama doing?

Did you think that wasn’t your problem?

Basically, yes. I do not feel responsible for the existence of every bad government and bad situation on the face of the earth. You don’t have to be a bloody-minded Kissinger realist to understand that you can’t do everything everywhere.

How many more years of Ba’athist rule—followed most likely by the same chaos that we’ve seen accompanying its end, if not much worse—would it take for you to consider that cutting it short by force might just be the lesser of two evils?

Cutting Saddam’s rule short might indeed have been the lesser of two evils, but we had to take George Bush into consideration. Nobody trusted him to do anything right, and we also suspected him of having unsavory motives, and we were amply vindicated on both counts. Whereas you took the other gamble, and are going to have to spend a decade or two living that down.

A lot of the stuff you’ve been saying may have made sense at some earlier period in the progress of the war, as I hinted in #32, but you need to take events into consideration. You’re coming pretty close to turning the Iraq War, a concrete complex of real events, into a philosophical hypothetical like the runaway trolley car and the fat man.

Did you think that wasn’t your problem?

Here’s where we imagine Dan slowly cruising around his neighbourhood in a hunt for bylaw infractions.