Media Blitz

by John Holbo on March 22, 2008

Henley:

So many publications have expressed such overwhelming interest in the perspectives of those of us who opposed the Iraq War when it had a chance of doing good that I have had to permit multiple publication of this article in most of the nation’s elite media venues – collecting, I am almost embarrassed to admit, a separate fee from each. Everyone recognizes that the opinions of those of us who were right about Iraq then are crucial to formulating sane, just policy now. It’s a lot of pressure, so please forgive anything glib or short you read herein: between articles, interviews, think-tank panels and presentations before government agencies and policy organs I’m not permitted to mention, I’m a little frazzled …

Sometimes I think the other question is almost more interesting: What the fuck were those other people thinking? Alas, answers to that one are hard to come by, since understandable shame has closed many mouths. So my own side of the story will have to suffice.

{ 105 comments }

1

bryan 03.22.08 at 11:27 am

actually funny enough I thought the Iraq war was good cause it would get America bogged down in the Middle East, destroy their international reputation and power, drain their military and finances, and so forth.

But then I’m not an American. I guess actually I’m more like the European Dick Cheney. Now pass me the baby, goddammit, I’m hungry.

2

Bob B 03.22.08 at 12:56 pm

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.

3

Steve LaBonne 03.22.08 at 1:12 pm

It’s easy to make fun of this phenomenon, but it is both truly bizarre and deeply frustrating. I seem to remember that after public opinion turned sour on Vietnam, the views of those who had been right about the war along along were by no means (to the lasting consternation of the hawks!) totally buried by the media in this way. WTF? Have the hawks learned from that example and developed more effective ways of suppressing dissent?

4

John Emerson 03.22.08 at 1:35 pm

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.

5

P O'Neill 03.22.08 at 1:55 pm

Among the possibilities he discusses is one that needs more attention: that the warmongers are just plain stupid. McCain 5th from bottom in a class of around 900 at the Naval Academy. Bush’s record speaks for itself. 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.

6

Righteous Bubba 03.22.08 at 2:15 pm

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

7

John Emerson 03.22.08 at 2:15 pm

Cheney’s bureaucratic skills are in bare-knuckles bureaucratic infighting and establishing networks of loyalists everywhere, not in any functional bureaucratic task like keeping a budget or setting priorities or anything.

8

Kevin Donoghue 03.22.08 at 2:29 pm

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.

9

Henry (not the famous one) 03.22.08 at 2:35 pm

Cheney has his narrow bureaucratic skills but everything he has touched in this administration has turned to shite.

His skills in the private sector were likewise limited to feathering his own nest. Buying Dresser Industries without taking account of the fact that it carried with it billions of dollars of asbestos-related liability? Not so smart. But keeping the bad news from the shareholders until after he cashed out? Brilliant.

But let’s get back to analyzing this article. Why kick a homeless man, even if he is Kenneth Pollack?

10

Dan Simon 03.22.08 at 2:39 pm

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”.

11

bernarda 03.22.08 at 3:20 pm

The powers that be didn’t listen to people opposed to the war as diverse as Senator Lincoln Chafee and French President Chirac. Both said the same thing, there was no evidence.

Chirac spoke to CBS News on the March 16th and gave a speech on March 18th against going to war. In the CBS interview:

“AMANPOUR: Do you believe that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction; for instance, chemical or biological weapons?

PRESIDENT CHIRAC: Well, I don’t know. I have no evidence to support that… It seems that there are no nuclear weapons – no nuclear weapons program. That is something that the inspectors seem to be sure of.

As for weapons of mass destruction, bacteriological, biological, chemical, we don’t know. And that is precisely what the inspectors’ mandate is all about. But rushing into war, rushing into battle today is clearly a disproportionate response.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/16/60minutes/main544161.shtml

If you speak French, here is part of his speech.

http://tinyurl.com/ywmphe

12

Righteous Bubba 03.22.08 at 3:27 pm

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.

13

Jared 03.22.08 at 3:42 pm

Not to mention the fact that 49% < 50%.

14

John Emerson 03.22.08 at 4:00 pm

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.

15

Righteous Bubba 03.22.08 at 4:17 pm

Bush is setting a booby trap

Too much credit alert. It’s awfully close to anthropomorphism.

16

John Emerson 03.22.08 at 4:34 pm

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

17

grackle 03.22.08 at 4:35 pm

I suppose Dan Simon’s 49% omits the 10% of the Iraqi population that had fled Iraq by the end of January

18

MattD 03.22.08 at 5:49 pm

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.

19

abb1 03.22.08 at 6:03 pm

Not to mention that, presumably, 20% of the respondents live in the Kurdish part and haven’t seen any invasion. Assuming the vast majority of them feel that “invasion was right”, that leaves about 19% of the people who actually were invaded feeling that way. Count the dead and the refugees and it’s probably more like 10%.

20

Son ilanlar 03.22.08 at 6:03 pm

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.

21

Barry 03.22.08 at 6:18 pm

And what’s the latest figure on ‘attacks on US troops are justified’? Last I heard, it was well over the majority of Iraqis. Applying the Kurdish correction factor (as pointed out by abb1), this means that, if you’re a US soldier not in Kurdistan, somewhere around 80% of the locals feel that attacking you is justifiable.

22

dsquared 03.22.08 at 6:30 pm

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

23

Dave 03.22.08 at 7:04 pm

Major strategic victory = slightly less than half the population think you’re better than the other guy, and slightly fewer than that think it’s OK to try to kill you.

Woo-hoo! Bring it on, Tehran!

[N.B. quoting that article, “Asked whether the “invasion was right,” 49 percent said it was. The previous high had been 48 percent in the first poll of the series, by ABC News in February 2004, a virtual tie with the current level due to the poll’s 2.5 percent error margin.” Four years to get back to where you started…]

24

Scott Hughes 03.22.08 at 7:27 pm

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?

25

Joel Dubow 03.22.08 at 7:45 pm

The war was justified and justifiable up until it got to the UN in 2003. At that point all justification came to mean that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in order to keep British support and to follow-up on the tease of French support.
Prior to that the justification was to take out an key link in the axis of terror (Egypt to Pakistan). All countries were on explored as targets, Iraq seemed most advantageous. The other justification was to avoid an all-out war or nuclear exchange. Should there have been another attack of the scale of 9/11 the odds of the population turning liberal and accomodative were smaller than the odds of a turn right and a demand to stop it nomatter what. The Islamists certainly wouldn’t stop it and the balance of power in the US would shift from the (relatively)moderate Republicans to militant right wing forces. The outcomes could likely be extreme, thus taking out Iraq and having US troops interdict key parts of the matrix-managed terrorist organizations seemed like the best way to do something substantive but not apocalyptic.

It is surprising that this debate has vanished from the media or from academia. That is a key problem (common blindspots) with a monoculture in both.

26

Bob B 03.22.08 at 8:56 pm

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/

27

nick s 03.22.08 at 8:56 pm

Next week, I have the opportunity to see a ‘Red-Blue debate’ between Jonah Goldberg (war supporter) and Peter Beinart (war supporter).

That’s your spectrum of respectable opinion on this fifth anniversary.

28

joseph duemer 03.22.08 at 10:05 pm

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

29

MDHinton 03.22.08 at 11:01 pm

The reason no-one is interested in the opinions of those who were against the war is that everyone was against the war and therefore being against it does not confer any special respect. Only very stupid people supported the war and the opinions of very stupid people are always more interesting to the only fairly stupid people who work in the ‘media’.

however, the smug intellectuality of contributors to this thread makes one begin to understand their point.

30

Dan Simon 03.23.08 at 1:16 am

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.

31

John Emerson 03.23.08 at 1:41 am

Also included among those yes votes are former enemies who are being bought off, and will vote yes as long as the money comes in, in sufficient quantities.

32

John Emerson 03.23.08 at 1:43 am

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?

33

Walt 03.23.08 at 2:05 am

Dan, the point is obviously that while at least 51% of Iraqis think the invasion is a mistake, somehow the media attention granted to people who predicted that the war was a mistake get something well below 51% of market share of media punditry.

34

luci 03.23.08 at 2:10 am

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.

35

Dan S. 03.23.08 at 2:21 am

posted by dan simon · march 23rd, 2008 at 1:16 am

I’d comment, but I imagine there are less futile ways to waste my time, like trying to convince Amy Sullivan that the Democratic Party doesn’t actually hate religion/religious people. The important battle is in the coming years, in making certain that the Dan Simons of the world are objects of mockery, derision, and disgusted pity, lest they get the chance to send more young men and women to their deaths – if not directly than by creating and supporting the mythologies, rationales, forgettings and false histories that allow such things.

36

roger 03.23.08 at 2:32 am

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.

37

luci 03.23.08 at 2:40 am

“If roughly half of Iraqis consider the opponents of the war to be wrong […] 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.”

If 80% of Iraqis, 10 years after the invasion, claim that the war was a good thing, personally I would reevaluate my beliefs. (But I guess that I would still hold the default position to oppose wars except under very high standards of evidence of threat or harm).

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.

Or, even when only considering outcomes, you might think a general decision-rule should still stand, even in light of contradictory evidence (of a war’s ex-ante success), because it’s not enough evidence to overturn a previous standard.

38

Dan S. 03.23.08 at 4:25 am

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 . . .

39

Doctor Slack 03.23.08 at 4:51 am

“Simple” and “wicked,” for the most part, if in some cases only temporarily so. The bulk of those who could in any sense be considered “wise” have long since turned against and denounced the war. Whether those still gamely attempting to spin this or that temporary lull in the fighting as vindication of a war that has largely destroyed Iraq and is now tanking the American economy to boot are “simple” or “wicked” is a complex but, to be honest, not particularly interesting question. The current lull, created by temporarily buying off the militias, isn’t likely to last long either, since the dynamics that turned the place into a free-fire zone in the first place are still in effect and not going anywhere. The simple and the wicked, of course, will contrive not to notice this.

40

Johnny Pez 03.23.08 at 5:04 am

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.

41

Dan S. 03.23.08 at 5:06 am

The bulk of those who could in any sense be considered “wise” have long since turned against and denounced the war.

Oh, agreed, that’s what I meant – John Cole, a certain Belle, etc.

42

Righteous Bubba 03.23.08 at 5:20 am

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.

43

nick s 03.23.08 at 5:23 am

The powers that be didn’t listen to people opposed to the war as diverse as Senator Lincoln Chafee and French President Chirac.

I think it’s worth remembering that the British and US governments both grotesquely misrepresented what Chirac said in those final days before the war. Chirac’s “ce soir” was never translated, and he became the face of obstructionism, giving Blair and Bush the space to call in the bombs.

But, ultimately, no-one ever went hungry calling for more and more war from a position within the higher tiers of the US media.

44

Roy Belmont 03.23.08 at 5:31 am

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.

45

Righteous Bubba 03.23.08 at 5:53 am

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.

I remember turning to a fellow skeptical friend and being so baffled that the war was going to happen despite the obvious cooking of the books that I sincerely said “Maybe it’ll all work out great.”

As far as stupid goes it’s hard to imagine Iraq being a brilliant and devious plan given how stupid so much of the activity surrounding the war was and the rest of the administration’s stupid policies. The brilliant plan would have had the main actors saying things that didn’t look idiotic in retrospect.

46

Bruce Baugh 03.23.08 at 6:04 am

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.

47

Bruce Baugh 03.23.08 at 6:08 am

(Always with the proviso, of course, that I will not tell you anything true about the justifications or real aims of any of these conflicts except by accident.)

48

Roy Belmont 03.23.08 at 7:16 am

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

49

abb1 03.23.08 at 10:27 am

Also included among those yes votes are former enemies who are being bought off, and will vote yes as long as the money comes in, in sufficient quantities.

Though the value of those dollars evaporates before they manage to spend them. And you say the Bushies had no plan? They did and it’s brilliant!

50

John Emerson 03.23.08 at 12:36 pm

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.

51

dsquared 03.23.08 at 12:55 pm

does anyone want to hear a hilarious fact about the proportion of people in opinion polls in China who think that the Great Leap Forward was, on balance, a good idea? Or for that matter the exceptionally high levels of support enjoyed by Vietnamese communism? Oooh, even better, let’s check out some of Fidel Castro’s opinion poll ratings! Monkey.

52

Alex 03.23.08 at 2:05 pm

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.

53

John Emerson 03.23.08 at 2:28 pm

52: I think that attempts to scientize or philosophize political choice do, and have done, more harm than good. And bracketing out concrete reality, which is usually the first step in the development of a theory, is a fatal error. As is bracketing out normativity.

Theory cannot dominate practice. Practice is particulars. Practice or application is like experimentation — it’s the necessary empirical part. And application is normative. Theory might be descriptive and neutral, but application is of necessity goal-oriented. (The biologists trying to preserve a forest and the biologists trying to maximize its timber production do not disagree about the theory or the description of the forest.)

54

Flying Rodent 03.23.08 at 2:48 pm

…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.

55

Dan Simon 03.23.08 at 2:56 pm

Dan Simon seems to have left

No, I just hadn’t seen anything worth bothering to respond to.

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.

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. (The subsequent occupation’s goals have certainly been far less clear, and its success therefore much more questionable.)

Of course, the real debate has been over the question of whether that original goal–the removal of Saddam Hussein from power–was a worthy one. Part of the problem is that the answer depends greatly on whose criteria determine that worthiness. Americans’? Iraqis? Europeans’? Bloggers’?

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. That this positive assessment has been somewhat delayed shouldn’t be surprising–a nation’s recovery following the end of a brutal totalitarian regime is rarely smooth and instantaneous. (Consider the tribulations of the former Soviet Union, for instance.) But in the long run, the overthrow of monstrous tyrannies tends to be better for their subjects than their perpetuation. That this is a matter of serious debate, in fact, is a testament to the corrosive effect of narrow partisan politics on serious thinking about international affairs.

56

Bruce Baugh 03.23.08 at 3:23 pm

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.

57

rea 03.23.08 at 3:28 pm

One of the annoying things war supporters like Dan Simon do is refuse to engage in cost/beenfit analysis. Was removal of Saddam, that vicious tyrant, a good thing in the abstract? Yes, of course. Was it worth $3 trillion and a million dead? Of course not.

58

John Emerson 03.23.08 at 3:31 pm

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.

59

Bruce Baugh 03.23.08 at 3:41 pm

Less sarcastically, this gets at one of the things Jim Henley has been most right about: emphasizing that it is, basically, a “red state” world, full of people who love and wish to protect what’s theirs because it’s theirs, and who feel about outsiders demanding change and coming in to shoot things up exactly the same as war supporters would about outsiders doing it to them. War supporters seem to have an absolute chasm between (for instance) their own thoughts on Chirac or whoever criticizing their choices, and what they propose to do to others.

60

Bruce Baugh 03.23.08 at 3:45 pm

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.

61

Righteous Bubba 03.23.08 at 3:50 pm

The purpose of the war was clear: to end the rule of Saddam Hussein.

There’s a missing “because X” following this assertion.

62

dsquared 03.23.08 at 3:51 pm

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?

63

Dave 03.23.08 at 4:13 pm

I think we’d covered that, round about #13… Some people will argue, of course, that even a small minority can be a Moral Majority, if all *right-thinking people* are in it…….

64

Questioner 03.23.08 at 4:58 pm

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.

65

Bruce Baugh 03.23.08 at 5:35 pm

Questioner, that sounds like a good assessment. It always sucks to have to say “I blew it”, but your reflections make it sound like you wouldn’t make those kinds of mistakes again. That seems to me the crucial thing at this point, whether people are behaving in ways that make a repeat disaster possible and likely.

66

Bruce Baugh 03.23.08 at 5:41 pm

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.

67

abb1 03.23.08 at 5:46 pm

The purpose of the war was clear: to end the rule of Saddam Hussein.

Yes. Because one named ‘Saddam Hussein’ mustn’t rule. That’s in The Bible.

68

Dan Simon 03.23.08 at 7:38 pm

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.

69

Righteous Bubba 03.23.08 at 7:43 pm

As I mentioned, the invasion of Iraq had a very straightforward goal—the toppling of Saddam Hussein

This is just trolling at this point. My goal might be the occupation of Timmy’s treehouse, but nobody’s going to let me off the hook until I explain why.

70

Barry 03.23.08 at 8:14 pm

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.

71

Dan S. 03.23.08 at 8:15 pm

posted by dan simon · march 23rd, 2008 at 7:38 pm

Do you hear something? It’s like there’s a noise, but if one was saying words, I’d expect them to make a kind of sense, to have some relation to the real world. If you don’t listen too hard, it almost sounds like the ocean . . .

My goal might be the occupation of Timmy’s treehouse, but nobody’s going to let me off the hook until I explain why.

Obviously, Timmy was going to attack the house with WMDs carried by paper airplanes . . .

72

Will 03.23.08 at 8:19 pm

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

73

Dan S. 03.23.08 at 8:21 pm

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.

You’re up past your bedtime, and obviously over-tired. Go back to your room and build your little teetering towers of blocks and smash them down, in your imaginary world where no one real gets hurt or dies when the little plastic figures and stuffed animals fall over, and stop bothering the adults when they’re trying to talk.
Hey, maybe you’ll understand when you’re older.

74

abb1 03.23.08 at 8:55 pm

…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.

75

abb1 03.23.08 at 9:19 pm

I can’t speak for leftist internationalists (never met any), but just going by the reputation – I imagine they would be as happy American-liberated Iraq as they were about German-liberated Repubblica Sociale Italiana.

76

Nick Valvo 03.23.08 at 9:37 pm

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.

77

Nick Valvo 03.23.08 at 9:41 pm

@68: Except insofar as it would have been entirely impractical, I can see a case for intervention in the breakup of the USSR. The West clearly should have intervened in Yugoslavia much earlier, etc.

The problem is that these are not simply ethical questions; there is a real world with real practical exigencies. This is actually the same reason you can’t just “topple Saddam Hussein.” Because _what the fuck do you do next?_

78

Roy Belmont 03.23.08 at 10:14 pm

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.

79

John Emerson 03.24.08 at 12:27 am

Just to ask again, Dan. If the Iraqi polls dip down to 28%, like Bush’s approval ratings, will you change your mind? Or will you just reach down into your barrel and find a new justification? When did Iraqi polls start being important to you, and how long will that last?

Invasion vs. occupation.

Biggest fucking self-serving quibble since [some other great big fucking self-serving quibbler’s quibble, probably in some Monty Python sketch]. What you mean is that the invasion plan was defective, and ended up quite predictably involving us in a messy occupation to which no thought at all had been given.

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.

Well, the planners did, to the extent that they thought about it at all. Or in any case, it was sold to us us on that basis.

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

What trend? One 49% poll? There has been no improvement in freedom or security.

How many of you would argue that in retrospect the US should have thrown its weight behind the 1991 coup against Gorbachev? Since few of us are as optimistic as you are about the possibilities of liberal imperialism, probably none. This question is close to asking “Well, if you wouldn’t have attacked Saddam, who would you have attacked?”, because it assumes liberal imperialism as a constant principle.

s 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. As I mentioned before, you’re full of shit. Opposition to the Iraq War has not been led by the Democratic Party, which has always lagged behind public opinion.

If no one’s paying you to say this stuff, Dan, just give it up. Change your name, relocate, and start an honest life as a humble working man. You put your money on the wrong horse.

80

THR 03.24.08 at 1:16 am

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.

81

joseph duemer 03.24.08 at 2:21 am

It should therefore come as no surprise that progress towards these goals has been mixed, to put it mildly, and the cost enormous.

The rhetoric and diction of this sentence make me want to puke. Dan Simon, why don’t you poll today’s dead? Progress has been mixed & the costs enormous. The smug intellectual dishonesty of your argument as revealed by your language is utterly vile.

82

josefina welch 03.24.08 at 2:41 am

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.

83

Randy McDonald 03.24.08 at 3:05 am

[G]iven 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?

I wouldn’t. 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.

What’s more, Russia isn’t an ancien régime state. It would be more accurate to describe it as a Bonapartist state, with charismatic leaders backed quietly by state and media powers in the context of a relatively pluralistic public sphere and a prosperous economy. If anything were to happen to this fragile structure, then Russia could as easily segue into the Third Republic as not. Medvedev’s Russia isn’t what a lot of people might like it to be, but it certainly isn’t the Soviet Union. It’s a decided improvement over it. Again, this marks Russia off from Iraq–10% of the Russian population wasn’t forced to leave the country by 1996.

84

John Emerson 03.24.08 at 3:37 am

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.

85

roger 03.24.08 at 5:04 am

Actually, I like Dan S.’s extension of American foreign policy to include its victims. I wonder if he believes that the Americans should have asked the Iraqis before putting in place the sanction regime whether they wanted it – and polled every year to check the results. Immigration policy on the border should, of course, be controlled by polls in Mexico. Trading policy by polls in China and Europe.

This is something I think I could get behind!

Of course, the Iraqis were asked about the invasion – it is Dan who claims that the invasion and getting rid of Saddam Hussein are the same thing, conflating definitions of the question. I can’t imagine that the idea of getting rid of Saddam Hussein isn’t, and will continue to be, enormously popular. For one thing, having Saddam Hussein led to the invasion! Hard to like somebody whose leadership leads to the near breakup of the nation, 400 to 600 thousand dead, and 3 million refugees.

A better question might be: would you prefer Saddam Hussein to have fallen with or without the invasion?

Now, if even 49 percent say, hey, we just loved us some invasion, I’d be astonished — that there are that many stupid Iraqis. Or actually, I’d suspect that the poll is screwed (funny how any figures from an Iraqi sample that the pro-war people like are not subjected to the wonderous scepticism of the Lancet sampling. But I digress).

And, of course, the much simpler policy that offered itself in 2002 – junking the double sanction, not indulging in the ridiculous axis of evil charade but pursuing detente with Iran, Saddam Hussein’s worst nightmare, and dumping comparatively large sums of money on Northern Iraq for development’s sake to put the carrot in place in a carrot and stick policy – would, it is pretty obvious now, have shaken the regime out. It was amazingly weak.

But of course, to do that, we would have had to bum out the hypersteroid Bush base, because… we wouldn’t be actin’ tough. If we aren’t tough, we look like wusses! They clutch the GI Joe doll at the very thought. Making friends with the Mullahs in Iran would make them cry bitter tears. It is the psychopathology of this small but influential group that helps maintain the liar/stupid divide.

86

joel hanes 03.24.08 at 5:54 am

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

87

Dan Simon 03.24.08 at 6:09 am

This is actually the same reason you can’t just “topple Saddam Hussein.” Because what the fuck do you do next?

Actually, there were a lot of options available–I myself, for example, was advocating a quick exit. We’ll never know, of course, whether America’s handling of the war’s aftermath was the best possible under the circumstances, the worst imaginable, or somewhere in between. But as I pointed out at the time, Saddam Hussein’s regime was bad enough that one might reasonably have expected his toppling to have better long-term consequences than allowing him to continue in power under just about any realistic scenario.

Who’s conspicuously missing from that list?

If you’re referring to the British, then yes, of course they’re entitled to judge the worth of their contribution to the Iraq war and subsequent occupation by their own standards. But I’d be surprised if the list of America’s postwar goals in Iraq that I outlined above would be objectionable even to today’s British government, let alone Tony Blair’s. (The goal of minimizing Iranian influence may be one exception. But given that Iran’s strategic goals amount to subversion of the other three American/British goals, I’d expect that goal to make it onto Britain’s list as well, by implication.)

If the Iraqi polls dip down to 28%, like Bush’s approval ratings, will you change your mind?

It’s tricky figuring out the right “term” for a “long-term” goal. But I’d say that if five years from now, the number of Iraqis pleased at the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has been consistently around the 28% level for a while, then the whole project of removing him can be judged in retrospect to have been a failure. But again, the baseline set by the Ba’ath regime was so low that it seems likely–especially considering the results of the recent poll–that most Iraqis will in five years judge their lives to have been improved by its removal.

What trend? One 49% poll? There has been no improvement in freedom or security.

There’s been a marked improvement in security over the last few months–or haven’t you heard? Presumably if that holds up, then the number of Iraqis who feel better about the current situation than about the Saddam Hussein era will rise still further.

Since few of us are as optimistic as you are about the possibilities of liberal imperialism, probably none. This question is close to asking “Well, if you wouldn’t have attacked Saddam, who would you have attacked?”, because it assumes liberal imperialism as a constant principle.

Who said anything about attacking? Immediate recognition of the coup plotters as the legitimate Soviet government, promises of aid and cooperation–lots could have been done to try to shore up the Soviet Union, if the alternative had been deemed worse. Is that what the first Bush administration should have done?

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 not a very apt analogy. If the Axis had won WWII, horrifically costly, marginally successful operations like D-Day would no doubt have taken at least some of the blame for the defeat. The invasion of Iraq, on the other hand, was by far the most smoothly successful element of the whole five-year Iraq “operation”.

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.

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

88

Bruce Baugh 03.24.08 at 6:38 am

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.

89

Righteous Bubba 03.24.08 at 6:44 am

Actually, there were a lot of options available—

…to those who were conned into the Iraq boondoggle in the first place. I’m sure those other options would have been swell.

90

Randy McDonald 03.24.08 at 8:27 am

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.

91

Randy McDonald 03.24.08 at 8:31 am

“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.”

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?

92

John Emerson 03.24.08 at 11:11 am

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.

93

Uncle Kvetch 03.24.08 at 12:40 pm

funny how any figures from an Iraqi sample that the pro-war people like are not subjected to the wonderous scepticism of the Lancet sampling

The New York Times explains it all for you. See, you should mistrust what you hear about Iraqi public opinion, because you can’t trust them to really speak freely, unless they’re telling you that they want the American occupation to continue, in which case they’re obviously speaking with “candor.”

94

abb1 03.24.08 at 3:05 pm

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.

95

rea 03.24.08 at 3:29 pm

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

You damned–and I mean that in the religious sense–idiot. What did you think was going to happen after Saddam was deposed? Did you think it wasn’t your problem?

Your plan to drive 90 miles an hour through a school zone was a spectacular and surprisingly inexpensive success. Your subsequent attempt to avoid killing school children by running them over, on the other hand, had multiple worthy but extremely difficult and completely open-ended goals, given the foreseeable results of driving 90 miles an hour through a school zone. Prosecuting you for multiple counts of manslaughter would be completely unfair . . .

96

Bruce Baugh 03.24.08 at 4:10 pm

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.

97

Kathleen 03.24.08 at 6:50 pm

Rea — you’re hilarious. Reminded me of Fafblog’s Drivin with Donald.

I read down the thread to see if anyone would respond to Roy Belmont’s query about whether, actually, the levelling of Iraq *was* in fact the neo-con / neo-imperialist plan all along and so despite their crocodile tears about how “badly” it’s all gone and how much they didn’t see it coming, if in fact they are laughing all the way to the bank / the crypts of the undead in which they sleep during the day / wherever. Because as satisfying as it would be to say that they are all morons, they aren’t — GWB is, sure, but lots of them aren’t. They might actually be wicked and they might actually be glad about the outcome. Are they hurting? Not at all. Who’s hurting: Iraqis, lower-class Americans. That’s it.

98

djw 03.25.08 at 1:15 am

rea: perfect.

99

Dan Simon 03.25.08 at 5:07 am

What did you think was going to happen after Saddam was deposed? Did you think it wasn’t your problem?

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

100

Righteous Bubba 03.25.08 at 6:14 am

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?

101

Uncle Kvetch 03.25.08 at 1:13 pm

What did you think was going to happen if Saddam wasn’t deposed? Did you think that wasn’t your problem?

So the horrific misery in Zimbabwe right now must be your problem too, Dan. And Myanmar. And North Korea. And on and on. Now, what are you doing to support the invasion and occupation of these countries by more enlightened forces? Or do you just shrug and say it’s not you problem?

Or maybe you think Iraq under Saddam was really in a league by itself, miles beyond Zimbabwe or Myanmar or North Korea on the hell-on-earth scale. Which would be utterly absurd, but not out of character.

102

John Emerson 03.25.08 at 1:34 pm

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.

103

abb1 03.25.08 at 3:17 pm

Judging by #99, Dan Simon has dropped the pretense and is now all 100% officially certified troll. Good.

104

Righteous Bubba 03.25.08 at 4:09 pm

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.

105

abb1 03.25.08 at 4:31 pm

Had these bastards been cruising around neighborhoods themselves that would’ve been a small and manageable problem.

Unfortunately they are smart enough to stay home and use other people’s money to send other people to kill and to die for their dopey fantasies. They really do deserve some serious punishment; if there is a case for death penalty – that must be it.

Comments on this entry are closed.