The Rhetoric of Having Been Wrong

Seems like common sense, but your presentation suggests a point to me. If it’s simple (and I agree about that), why do I get the feeling the choice presented is not just a binary? It looks like a 2×2 matrix (or maybe n x n), filled out with right/wrong in the appropriate places, but then there’s more – then we have to find some highly contextual method to air the laundry appropriately (well, it’s not ad-hoc, though; I’m aware people have tried to develop a polite way to own and move past errors as a part of the methodology of philosophical discourse).

Yes, I’m not advocating against transparency, and clearly people are emotional and confuse correlation of failure in a history of argument with evidence that the current arguments are wrong. But this seems at the edge of just coddling people, and possibly self-flagellation good only for the gotcha crowd, i.e., the people who don’t care about your reasons and don’t want your true reasons to have memetic power, only the distortions of it. Aren’t we all supposed to have microsecond memories these days, anyway? The number of people who are likely this deep into the argument should know better than to discount your argument just on account of having been wrong. If / when they do, you have the bonus of being able to call them slovenly idiots.

I also have to say I’m wanting more context here. I tried to search it out but I’m not sure I’ve found the right stuff.

I was wrong about Iraq. I don’t think we should try to do much of anything there now. I hope that my being wrong on the pro war side isn’t making me over cautious about the present situation, but considering the ratio of good outcome wars to bad outcome wars possible over caution is likely the better bet.

Kenneth Pollack! There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.

@ John Holbo #3:

What I mean by memetic power, which may or may not be a carelessly cooked-up ugly bastard of a phrase, is that ability to have some meme propagate – and lies (or distortions) often burn much brighter than the truth. In this case, I think that the major meme you’d like to introduce is “here’s what I think now and why.” The “and here’s why you should listen this time” is intended to be the minor theme.

It seems to me that anybody who considers themselves seriously in the business of judging such arguments (which should include the group of people who would know you had made a prior judgment, which you now reject) should not have to be told not to view the facts and value of your current statements as predetermined in a game theory-like manner. If there is a predetermined way they view your arguments, it seems likely based on more fundamental sources of partisanship / respect, and it’s a coin toss as to whether they presuppose your arguments true or false.

I realize that of course even serious people have only so much time on their hands with which to change their opinions about anybody they happen to read (even in their own field), and it’s not emotionally realistic to expect people not to play the game to some degree – so I’ll have to rest with saying that I think there is still a danger of providing ammunition with this kind of plea, even though I see your point. I’m not sure how I would try to determine the difference.

Another observation. It seems to me that stature and power also enhance our tendency to be judgmental, as I was about Rumsfeld (and by extension Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al) above. It seems justifiable: Their ability to use the bully pulpit, or screw up peoples’ lives. From them, a “I was wrong, and I have learned” would have proportionally increased impact.

A philosopher saying he was wrong? Not unprecedented or shocking – and also you tried your best and probably didn’t make the world a worse place in doing so. It’s hard to get out of shape about that. Maybe I’m just not seeing that part of the reason I’m more inclined to be favorable here is this particular form of showing respect for our opinions that you show here – and in that, I think that careful readers will be more attracted to the care you show in presenting your changed opinion and contrasting it with what came before, than in any kind of meta-arguments with game-theory-like overtones.

We all get things wrong John, In 2003, most people did not have enough reliable information to have a valid opinion, and therefore too many decided to trust their elected leaders. However, It is incredible that those leaders making the decision to invade did not consider the possibility that intervention might things worse. “First do no harm” is a sound principle, and examples like Cambodia and Afghanistan should have served as an object lesson. But even then, one had the impression that Blair and Bush knew nothing about the complex history of Mesopotamia, and were even less interested in finding out. George Joffe’s recent description of his meeting with Blair confirms this in Blair’s case.

Also, the MPs who voted on the invasion might have taken the trouble to spend a couple of days looking up the history of the the region in, say, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and other sources. The complexities and dangers would have been obvious: they might at least have asked better questions.

My own knowledge at the time was serendipitous. As it happened, a quarter of a century ago, an interest in the history of mathematics had led me to the history of Islam. In particular, I read Glubb Pasha’s* “Life and Times of Muhammad” and his acclaimed four part history of the great Arab empires – the books just happened to be in my local public library in a small seaside town in West Wales. (I later bought second hand copies online.) His descriptions of the Sunni-Shia split and its consequences should be compulsory reading for any westerner wishing to understand the historical context of current conflicts.

Glubb, also a Britannica contributor, also wrote personal memoirs about his own life as a soldier, which included first-hand experience in the newly created (by the British) state of Iraq in the early 1920s. Anyone reading his accounts of the post WWI tribal conflicts in the Arabia, should have at least some doubts about stirring that volatile pot again (and again and again!)

*Sir John Bagot Glubb

John @ 14

“But only if ….

So that’s a “no” then?

Those drink-soaked Trots– who unlike Hitch and Norm haven’t had the decency to die–are already wearing khaki and blaming past failure in Iraq on local military inferiority:
http://hurryupharry.org/2014/06/17/iraqs-implosion/#comments#disqus_thread

The obvious answer is Lizard Cheney. What was the question again?
~

I know you have no reason to trust me, given how wrong I was before in a case that looked an awful lot like this one. I am so sorry for the damage I have done, but I will be even sorrier if the fact that you can’t trust me means even more damage is done.

That might sound quite reasonable, but the underlying hubris and narcissism is still striking and at the heart of the matter.

OK, let’s say I forgive you for your past errors of judgement, but please tell me why should I listen to you anyway? Do you have any privileged knowledge of the situation or the history that led to it? Do you know anything above and beyond googling up some factoids and evaluating them according to your prejudices and political agenda? Why is there always the question about what “we” – the US/UK – should or shouldn’t do? Why is nobody ever questioning the “we” itself and its status as a worldwide hegemon? What if China or Russsia were that hegemon?

I think the Economist has taken a pretty similar stance to you – “we know we were wrong about Iraq last time, but this time you have to trust us!”

@13

“However, It is incredible that those leaders making the decision to invade did not consider the possibility that intervention might things worse. “First do no harm” is a sound principle, and examples like Cambodia and Afghanistan should have served as an object lesson.”

How can you know that things wouldn’t have been worse sooner without the war? Or it would have been no worse but Iraq would have fallen apart sooner and the chaos would have spread earlier. But I agree that the leaders didn’t know. They were being dishonest and lied to everyone when they said they could do it on the cheap and that Iraq would be in great shape in a short time. George Bush was right that history would judge and it will judge they did a horrible, horrible job.

There are really two different components of the Iraq adventure of 2003. One is its immorality, the other is its stupidity. These components can be further analyzed into different levels of sophistication.

In the case of the morality, imperial adventures simply extend the logic of the State, so I can understand them as a particular branching of the Will to Power. What I don’t understand about Iraq 2003 is the stupidity. At the highest level, I understand that those who lust greatly for power may be overcome by their emotions, and at the lowest, by the brute instincts of tribalism; but what about the rest of us? How could reasonable people, after all that had happened in the immediately preceding decades, have faith in anything emitted by the U.S. government or the New York Times? A mea culpa should include some explanation. Unless ‘we’ understand where ‘we’ went wrong, how will ‘we’ avoid further repetitions of the disastrous error?

Jim Buck 06.19.14 at 12:00 pm

” Those drink-soaked Trots– who unlike Hitch and Norm haven’t had the decency to die–are already wearing khaki and blaming past failure in Iraq on local military inferiority:
http://hurryupharry.org/2014/06/17/iraqs-implosion/#comments#disqus_thread”

Those guys are scum. It’s a cesspool of racism over there.

From the OP: “No, you will say something reasonable, like: ‘I know you have no reason to trust me, given how wrong I was before in a case that looked an awful lot like this one. I am so sorry for the damage I have done…”

First of all, I don’t know where JH stood on Iraq back in 2003. For me, the idea that we were preemptively striking Iraq to avoid the mushroom cloud of their nuclear arms, as we were simultaneously at war in Afghanistan, a nation notorious for sucking dry many superpowers who waged war within its borders, was a ghastly idea at best.

I don’t know how Bush/Cheney/Rummy sold it to themselves – I don’t know what strange mental gyrations were needed to convince themselves that invading Iraq was somehow a good idea – they deliberately lied to the American public – and to the global public as well – about the reasons to invade. They KNEW they didn’t have a valid case, so they cooked one up – and when that proved to be a figment of their imagination, they cooked up the whole “democracy in Iraq” nation-building scheme -and apparently democracy in Iraq requires US troops on the ground in Iraq forever. That’s a strange picture of “democracy.”

To expect THESE people – these manipulative and grotesque monsters to humbly admit they were wrong in 2003 is beyond rational. These are not rational people. They are corrupt in ways that we simply cannot imagine – we do not have the imaginations required to understand and picture their world view. That’s how extreme these people are.

Dick Cheney is a vocal advocate for torture – a loud, deliberate voice explaining to the world why the US must torture – he knows he cannot say “torture” – so like a corrupt used car salesman, he fiddles with the language and comes up with “enhanced interrogation.” This is a man who pulled every string he could to get out of serving his country when he had that opportunity – really, if a novelist made up Dick Cheney’s character in a story, it would appear one-dimensional and fake. And here he is, loudly proclaiming the blindness of the current president to the impact of his policies. It boggles the mind, the blindness of the WarHawks.

How much did Halliburton make on all those no-bid Iraqi contracts? Follow the money, as Deep Throat once said. There you’ll find your motivation.

And with Bush – who the hell knows what deep-seated Oedipal thing he’s got going on with his father that caused him to head over to Iraq. The cost we’ve born for the failures of the Bush administration are unbelievably enormous and horrifyingly tragic. “Mission Accomplished!” And what a mission it was… an epic failure from the get-go.

“…and the US military claimed we were doing a pretty good job of keeping a lid on the violence. ”

Which means precisely nothing. I’m sure that a very large number of people were killed during those times, and that the US government deliberately lied about it.

Peter K @ 24

“How can you know that things wouldn’t have been worse sooner without the war?”

This is simply a restatement of the Bush Doctrine, a morally repugnant basis for international relations. To illustrate: How can I know you won’t harm me? Of course I can’t know, so I must preemptively harm you. I don’t want to Godwin the thread, but if you’ll take a look at the basis of some historical conflicts erupting in the late 30’s and early 40’s, you’ll find similar justifications cited.

Invading Iraq was a crime. That’s the problem, not that we executed the crime poorly.

Barry, you could be right. But how else can we intervene? Isn’t that what intervention *is*?

Our intention would be to go to Iraq and kill bad guys until the bad guys get tired of dying and accept the government we want to impose on them.

So I’m asking, how many years would it take for us to kill enough bad guys that the survivors are ready to surrender and live under the control of their enemies? How long should we estimate it will take, and how much money? (And also how many US lives, though we can predict that number will be small.)

I’ve heard the argument that the current situation is unacceptable so we must do whatever it takes to change it. That argument is worn out.

So OK, if the plan is to kill bad guys until they get tired of killing good guys, we need to think about how hard it will be to achieve that victory.

@24
I agree that we can’t know what Iraq would be like without the war; that (perhaps) it is unlikely to have stayed stable over the past decade, that it could still have sunk into sectarianism or that Saddam could (would) have used even greater levels of brutality to put down any emerging opposition over the past decade.
But, one of the main (strategic) problems is that the war cut off a lot of the alternative options for dealing with these counterfactuals (and dealing what is happening in the Middle East now) and that the war failed on every level (that is important to the US foreign policy commentariat) ; it replaced non sectarian authoritarianism with sectarian authoritarianism, aggravated the Iranian/Saudi rivalry, disrupted the regional alliance system away from US interests .. so on and so forth.
I agree that these situations are undoubtedly always incredibly complicated (morally, strategically, politically) with no easy answers. But the problem, as I see it, was that these people (who cultivated a persona of clear eyed, politically neutral expertise) ignored that complexity and behaved with foolish, intellectually unserious emotionally charged recklessness.
The heroes of these stories, imo, are the people building things slowly from the bottom up (the Iraqi spending hours compiling data on the dead for little pay, the local nurse dealing with institutional corruption and hostility in post conflict societies, the person organising workers in the face of management violence etc) rather than the big ideas people.
That’s cliched of course, but it’s the way it is.

I wd note that from at least the mid-90s, it was the Clinton admin’s official position and Congress’s that Saddam should not only be ‘contained’ but, ideally, ousted via the application of sanctions (which killed a lot of Iraqi civilians) and support for the Iraqi opposition in exile; also, there were no-fly zones, ostensibly to protect Kurds and Shia from Saddam but also to put pressure on the regime. The ’03 invasion was an escalation from a dubious policy (on various grounds) to a catastrophically stupid one.

Ronan:
But, one of the main (strategic) problems is that the war cut off a lot of the alternative options for dealing with these counterfactuals (and dealing [with] what is happening in the Middle East now) and that the war failed on every level (that is important to the US foreign policy commentariat) ; it replaced non sectarian authoritarianism with sectarian authoritarianism, aggravated the Iranian/Saudi rivalry, disrupted the regional alliance system away from US interests

I wd note re the phrase “US foreign policy commentariat”: what you mean, istm, is one fairly narrow slice of the US foreign policy commentariat, i.e., the slice that publishes in places like The Nat’l Interest and For Aff. The “US foreign policy commentariat” is not synonymous w “the US foreign policy establishment and its hangers-on in the punditry” but rather, on a properly broad reading of the phrase, encompasses everyone who writes or speaks publicly (incl. online in blogs etc) about US foreign policy. On that broad definition, “the US foreign policy commentariat” is quite large and v. diverse in viewpoint, and contains people who, e.g., explicitly take normative considerations into acct.

Layman @39
The ‘Petraeus school’ (to use that shorthand) referred a lot to the Br. experience in Malaya. (Not that I am endorsing any of that.) The ’06-’07 surge has laid the basis for a defeat-snatched-from-the-jaws-of-victory narrative (sound familiar?), as exemplified for instance by McCain’s overwrought (or so it seemed to me from the audio, I didn’t have the video) appearance on the NewsHr last night.

Layman @ 43

Two points.

1. Oil

2. there were advocates who must have understood the realities No.

J Thomas 06.19.14 at 3:02 pm

” Barry, you could be right. But how else can we intervene? Isn’t that what intervention *is*?”

Could you please explain what you are talking about? Perhaps by quoting my words?
I’ve looked at my comments, and can’t find anything relevant to what you are saying?

Ed Herdman: “Likewise, I don’t think the standard “US government lied” line is necessarily true. The military was reporting far more optimistic civilian casualty numbers than the independent groups arrived at, but staying “on message” made sense given the volatility of the situation and what was being asked. The people who were actually making the policy and who were in a position to be honest with the public – they were in the White House.”

In other words, they lied.

Ed: “That was a response to Barry @ 32. I don’t disagree with what you’ve written here at all, except for the characterization that I am arguing we just needed to throw more resources at it. I don’t draw that conclusion at all.”

Actually, no. I was pointing out that the US government’s spin was not trustworthy.

I’ve been skimming your comments for a couple of posts now, and frankly, you’re a bullsh*tter. This will be the last reply to anything you write, since it’s not worth debating with a liar.

The people who want to rescue Iraqis could take some in.

To mbw @25: that was a heck of a pamphlet. Thanks for trying.

I humbly submit that we stop paying attention to the foreign policy recommendations of anyone who is not a Marxist.

The problem for most of the Very Important People admitting they were wrong in 2001/2002/2003 about Iraq isn’t that they were wrong. It’s that they were wrong for transparently (at the time) intellectually and factually dishonest reasons. Whether Rumsfield or Cheney or any of the pundits lied or were stupid (malice or stupidity) matters very little: either way we shouldn’t listen to them now.

The other thing to remember is that previously they were wrong about Guatemala, Nicarauga, supporting Saddam Hussain against Iran, and a multitude of other applications of US force, going all the way to Southeast Asia. Most of them didn’t start being wrong in this millennium. They have a long history of meretricious blather, usually ending in the deaths of thousands of innocents.

In these circumstances, it seems to me the most rational response to one more attempt to gin up the unfortunate tendency for the US to think that killing people is the answer is the Rude Pundit’s “That Dick Cheney is still alive is a demonstration that either there is no God or that God said, “F@ck it” and walked away a long time ago. ”

Enjoy: http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2014/06/father-and-daughter-cheney-can-go-suck.html.

Wait you were wrong on Iraq ? I was just thinking how much less time I would spend reading stuff on the web, if I decided not to read anything by anyone who was wrong on Iraq, and I had no idea. Don’t you live in Singapore ? I thought the summer of war (ht Andrew Northrup aka the editors) had something to do with something in the US water system. I now realize that the pathogen could be transmitted over the internet.

I honestly can’t fit my head around the idea that you, John Holbo thought it was a good or least bad idea to invade Iraq”nahhh not John Holbo, you’re pulling my leg — I know about Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum (till the last minute) Matthew Yglesias, Mark Kleiman, Ezra Klein, Andrew Northrup (aka the editors), [please don’t tell me any more] but no way John Holbo “. I think you should take that as a compliment.

Bruce Wilder @ 57

“The Project for a New American Century types saw the establishment of the American Imperium, rooted in the occupation of Germany and Japan and those nation’s subsequent economic miracles, as a precedent, if not truly a model. This would be an opportunity, in the wake of the end of the Cold War, to push back the frontiers of Empire, to create a new occupation, followed by a new miracle.”

Yes, I get that. It’s what I meant when I wrote “It’s easy for me to believe that some of those who promoted the war (e.g. Cheney) secretly had permanent occupation in mind…”

You see the rest as useful idiots. Some were, but it’s hard to believe that they were all one or the other; that no one not in on the con ever asked how & when we get out.

An interesting thing about Japan is that Douglas MacArthur signed a law authorizing land reform without a second thought and in one stroke broke the back of the Japanese aristocracy. Plus, the occupation was filled with liberal New Dealers (as opposed to U of Chicago libertarians) with whom the Japanese populace eagerly collaborated.

“Lots of people thought we were right to intervene in WWII, that the world would be a worse place if we didn’t.”

Perhaps lots of people did, but apparently not enough, since we never did choose to intervene in that war. We got dragged into it by the other side, as I recall.

it was never really the case that the US occupied Greece or used its military forces to maintain order & control the country

True. There were a number of US pilots in Greece, and I talked to a man who was in US ground forces there who talked like there were thousands. But just now I could not find a record of a single US casualty during the Greek war. I guess the US military people didn’t fight much at all.

As to Panama, were we fighting an insurgency there?

If you can run an occupation and change of government etc without actually getting an insurgency going, isn’t that better than mismanaging things enough that you have to fight an insurgency? The fewer people you have to kill to prevail, the better.
As to Panama, were we fighting an insurgency there?

Btw, Zakaria’s June 12 column, wh/ I just read for the first time, is pretty good, and tends to contradict the McCain line about why a ‘residual’ US force did not remain in the country (though no doubt the details of what happened re the negotiations are not yet fully known):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fareed-zakaria-who-lost-iraq-the-iraqis-did-with-an-assist-from-george-w-bush/2014/06/12/35c5a418-f25c-11e3-914c-1fbd0614e2d4_story.html

Layman @34

“Invading Iraq was a crime. That’s the problem, not that we executed the crime poorly.

Well it sort of matters when people say the crime caused the region to slide into chaos when it’s possible that the region was sliding into chaos anyway.

If the U.S. had built Iraq into global economic superpower as they did with the defeated Axis powers Germany and Japan, more people would overlook or play down the crime.

The question is whether or not the region was sliding into chaos whether or not there was a war.

I don’t understand why that is the question. Surely the body-count matters.

“Well it sort of matters when people say the crime caused the region to slide into chaos when it’s possible that the region was sliding into chaos anyway.”

If I stole your wallet, would you say I caused it to be gone, or would you say I didn’t because it might have disappeared anyway?

“If the U.S. had built Iraq into global economic superpower as they did with the defeated Axis powers Germany and Japan, more people would overlook or play down the crime.”

How would we do that? I could be wrong, but I think we spent more in 2004 on Iraq reconstruction than we did in West Germany during the entire Marshall Plan, in constant dollars. And it’s my impression that the economies of the former Axis powers took decades to recover.

Beck almost has it right, but who was saying that Iraqis didn’t want to be free? Poison in that sweet wine. Now, liberals did say things like “Iraqis have to be the driving force, from the grassroots up” and evidence seems to bear that out. Strange, but even in his admission of guilt, that kind of right-wing-ish thinking, almost like a “stab in the back,” creeps in there. The people of Iraq didn’t fail us; we failed them in trying to envision a state that wasn’t there and wasn’t going to be there without their forming new alliances between groups.

I’d be very interested in learning whether Belle supported the war, ever.

You will be disappointed.

I want to come back to that word ‘we’. It’s the most seductive part of the pro-war argument – the assertion that, in the face of this horror or that inhuman tyranny, we can’t just sit back and do nothing. It resonates: as we(!) watch the news (generally from a sedentary position and while not doing anything), it’s easy to think I want this stopped! There must be lots of people like me – if only someone would do what we want!

But it’s a fallacious and ultimately spectacular way of thinking. The agency we’re invoking, 99 times out of 100, is that of the state. And the default position of the state is never sitting back and doing nothing. It’s true that you and I as individuals had no identifiable interaction with (say) Malala Yousafzai until the first time we saw her on the news, but our governments were interacting with the government of Pakistan in a hundred different ways. States are always already related, always already interacting. To trade with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was doing something; to maintain a specific set of sanctions was doing something; to vary those sanctions would be doing something.

Those people who told us that we needed to do something, when they really meant that our government needed to stop doing what it was doing and wage an aggressive war without a long-term plan, should never be trusted again. If all your problems look like casus belli, you’re probably holding the wrong tool.

It’s Pascal’s Wager with God as a bomb.

Sorry Dr Science, but your attempt at gendering the issue of Iraq war support is rather embarrassing – especially given the facts, but not only – and a tiny bit offensive as well.

Well, true enough, Jamie.

No, Bruce, and I didn’t mean at all to minimize the disastrousness of how the pattern was used re: Iraq. It would just be nice to figure out a way to break that pattern…in a lot of situations.

#72
The leaders didn’t say “the region is sliding into chaos so we need to invade.” They said that it would be easy and cheap and Iraq would quickly turn into a democracy so we could safely ignore that part of the world again soon enough.

That’s what they said ahead of time.

After it failed and people accused them of driving the region into chaos, now they argue that for all you know it would have slipped into chaos anyway so that wasn’t their fault.

It’s a “I didn’t set start the fire by smoking in bed, the bed was already on fire when I lay down in it” argument.

Or Saudi Arabia

“**As this thread approaches 100 comments, the word “syria” has yet to be mentioned.”

In comment 94 it is, with entailed self-referenced contradiction. So I nominate myself for wise-ass nit-picker of the thread.

The incursion into Afghanistan was marginally morally justified by looking for bin Laden. Anything beyond that was opportunism of the worst sort. And we schmelected the worst sort of opportunists, with the worst sort appointment of Supreme Court justices beginning with Ronny-boy politicizing that schmselection of the worst.

P O’Neill @94
You call for ‘placing Iraq in regional context’ (who cd object to that?), but simply mentioning the word “Syria” doesn’t mean the resulting analysis will be good. Anne-Marie Slaughter’s NYT piece leads off by mentioning Iraq and Syria in the same breath pretty much, but that doesn’t mean that Slaughter’s (vaguely hedged) advocacy of the use of air power in both Syria and Iraq is sensible (I think it’s prob. not and wd prob. be counterproductive). There is a view to the effect that (1) Obama shd have done more and earlier to support the ‘moderate’ forces in Syria, (2) his failure to do that contributed to ISIL’s rise in W.Iraq and E.Syria, (3) this was all rather predictable and therefore the admin is blameworthy for being shortsighted. This may be right (I’m not sure/don’t know whether it is), but seems a bit too neat to me. (The situation in Libya has not evolved in the way that the proponents of Op. Odyssey Dawn had hoped it wd. That doesn’t seem to be mentioned all that frequently in these discussions.)

@ Bruce:

I thought the common consensus among anybody who’s looked at the Colin Powell fiasco is that he’s at the top of the list of prominent military figures the Bush Administration humiliated, along with Shinseki. Powell himself admits that it was a mistake; he did so nearly ten years ago. But he was basically coerced into it. His choice was basically “do nothing and Bush’s crew moves forwards without him,” or “do what he could to make sure that we didn’t go in without international support.”

I put him in the same camp with all the other folks who we say, with hindsight, could have done more to speak out against the war, and who thought (just as they did at the very top) they could tame the beast. But absent a mutiny in the armed forces, we would’ve gotten that war anyway, and the Administration had sold it to him.

It’s also worth mentioning that Powell “clashed with then-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright over the Bosnian crisis, as he opposed any military interventions that didn’t involve US interests.”

In hindsight, I’m sure this can be said to look damning of him. What I see is that in the darkest moment of modern American history, when he was caught off-guard by 9/11 and the Administration had him rethinking his principles, they pounced, pushing him into presenting an ill-prepared speech without leadership, with only the clear specter of ignominy should he fail looming in the background.

Powell admits it was a mistake, in the ritualistic rhetoric of apologia issued by someone, who thinks people should continue to trust and honor him (as per the OP), but he doesn’t, even now, identify it as a con. And, people don’t generally dishonor him as a liar and someone, who failed his country in an office of great trust — Ed Herdman did not do so in his comment, he made more excuses for Powell. Instead of confronting the horror of what Powell did, in the service of a criminals committing a great crime, Ed Herdman offers fanciful counterfactuals. He made sure the U.S. had some international support for its ill-advised war crime. (How’s that an excuse?)

I’m not concerned with whether Cheney and company somehow bullied and humiliated Powell; boo hoo, the might General got bullied on the playground — I’m concerned that Powell shamed his own country, and contributed mightily to the injustice and misfortunes of the world we live in.

My point, here, isn’t to beat up on Ed Herdman, who is a thoughtful commenter; it is to question how we all became so weakminded. This is a “consensus” as Ed Herdman called, and I think he called it that correctly. And, it is a real problem: a pattern of discourse that drives politics into the ditch, again and again.

roy belmont @102

My father used to like to say, “You can’t cheat an honest man,” an echo, I’m sure of the 1939 film by W.C. Fields: “You can’t cheat an honest man; never give a sucker an even break, or smarten up a chump.”

The confidence we want to place in our leaders is our fault.

I have to plead an imperfect memory here. The “choice” I recreated above focuses on the period before the presentation at the UN, when Powell was fed bad intel. Sure this is a counterfactual (or consideration of the possibilities, more accurately) – but it’s also not strange to attempt a reconstruction of the likely state of his mind at the time, which you have to do when declaring what his intent was. Our condemnations are weakened if we cannot even guess what failures in vision or reason lead Powell away from the path we suggest we would have taken in his place.

Come on down from there, Bruce; there’s a difference between an explanation (or at least an attempt at one) and an apologia.

And your characterization of Powell’s apology indicates you don’t know or care what he said, or the early date (as early as 2005) when he said it. I agree it’s still too little, and too late, but I could see somebody who was emotionally invested, and felt they had a duty, needing a year to un-convince themselves about that – and at that same time his training as an officer likely rebelled against the idea of undermining the enterprise that he still thought was just! All the while I’m sure he was being told not to worry about it, that there was other and better intelligence or even proof just around the corner – we all remember that Bush was so determined to find it that he even searched around the White House for that evidence. What commitment!

Not that it makes much difference in this argument, I think where Powell comes in for criticism is after UN presentation and the British newspaper expose of the fake intel’s source (I’d forgotten all about that until this thread).

Even that, however, wouldn’t have been enough to sink the whole enterprise; it was known there was a lot of jockeying in the worldwide intel communities to feed the biggest whoppers to the U.S. No doubt Powell felt – in fact I believe the Bush Administration members probably sincerely felt also (they were taken in by that one expat Iraqi huckster who was supposed to be the new, energetic leader of the nation; remember that guy?) that at least some of their reasons were still good and added up to a coherent case, in their minds.

I’m not a military expert, and Powell is; he has still held to his belief that the war was necessary and just, and that it was precipitated by failed attempts at negotiation. I don’t trust his expert judgment here – plenty of other voices, as well as the ultimate dissent of the miserable plain failure of that campaign, show beyond a reasonable doubts that he was very wrong. But since you mentioned counterfactuals, I think you’re creating one where you concoct a scenario where Colin Powell pushed a war he didn’t think was just or likely to succeed. Even though a lot of that support was for reasons that look laughable in hindsight (some of the usual reasons – the “surge” should have happened sooner, not enough soldiers, etc.), those were still his reasons.

Wrong, yes, but a liar? A con artist? Only by proxy, unless somebody can show me new evidence of duplicity in this. Even of the Bush Administration center circle, it’s plainly strange to see the many assertions over the years that they only acted cynically, and never sincerely. No – they clearly had been taken in by their own story, even if it had started as just that. And failing to even admit this possibility means that we spend a lot of time shaming for behavior that, emotionally, is very improbable to have really taken place, and a distraction for the real reasons for condemning them in the first place. It is yet another case where people focus on the murderer and forget all about the victim.

Powell knew exactly what he was doing. Here he is in Feb 2001:

QUESTION: The Egyptian press editorial commentary that we have seen here has been bitterly aggressive in denouncing the U.S. role and not welcoming you. I am wondering whether you believe you accomplished anything during your meetings to assuage concerns about the air strikes against Iraq and the continuing sanctions?

SECRETARY POWELL: I received a very warm welcome from the leaders and I know there is some unhappiness as expressed in the Egyptian press. I understand that, but at the same time, with respect to the no-fly zones and the air strikes that we from time to time must conduct to defend our pilots, I just want to remind everybody that the purpose of those no-fly zones and the purpose of those occasional strikes to protect our pilots, is not to pursue an aggressive stance toward Iraq, but to defend the people that the no-fly zones are put in to defend. The people in the southern part of Iraq and the people in the northern part of Iraq, and these zones have a purpose, and their purpose is to protect people — protect Arabs — not to affect anything else in the region. And we have to defend ourselves.

We will always try to consult with our friends in the region so that they are not surprised and do everything we can to explain the purpose of our responses. We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions — the fact that the sanctions exist — not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein’s ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime’s ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue.

I think being able to admit that the second Iraq war was a huge blunder is a pretty low bar for being taken seriously….

That said I don’t blame some people for being taken in by elite opinion at the time. That is how propaganda works. And I must admit that, while I didn’t support the invasion, I was shocked/appalled with how poorly the immediate aftermath was handled.

The case for invading Iraq was always weak. It wasn’t just an error whose unwisdom only became clear in hindsight. Millions all over the world understood the war’s illegality and predictably disastrous consequences. It was promoted by big-lie propaganda by people who knew exactly why they supported Operation Iraqi Liberation. Those responsible for the war were criminals and belong on trial, not on cable news. The hell with letting them off with some sort of “mistakes were made” evasion. Obviously justice is unlikely to be done, but we should at least remain clear about what justice would be in this case.

All of which makes another reason why it is a good thing that we didn’t listen to the neocons to bomb Iran. Bill Kristol and those other people should lose their television careers.

A superfluous comment:
John, you must be too young to have lived through Vietnam.

Iran got rid of the Shah and got Khomeini, which was a fine improvement for freedom but not so good for science, technology, or relations with the USA.

Huh? Somewhere around there’s a Khomeini speech in which he promises chains (meaning religious law). So maybe “somewhat reliable rule-of-law” is the improvement, while restrictions on women keep growing.

http://www.iranhrdc.org/english/publications/legal-commentary/1000000261-gender-inequality-and-discrimination-the-case-of-iranian-women.html

Bill Kristol — a face for radio, a voice for writing, and a mind for television.

Lee A Arnold:

I was on the fence about invading Iraq. I don’t think a war of choice is a good idea, I don’t think breaking international law is a good idea, and I don’t think getting into something you don’t understand is a good idea. And I never believed the weapons of mass destruction thing. BUT I think that getting rid of dictators is usually a good idea, especially a cruel one. I prefer to discuss real events unless the conversation is meant to be theoretical or psychological. What the U.S. is doing now seems to me to be smart.[!?!] . . .

That was a superb example of the OP’s recommended rhetoric of self-rehabilitation.

Should we expect you on Fareed or Face the Nation this Sunday?

“I prefer to discuss real events unless the conversation is meant to be theoretical or psychological. What the U.S. is doing now seems to me to be smart. Iraq must break up into 3 (Shia, Sunni, Kurd) because now, it has gone to pure tribalism.”

I don’t think there’s any *must* about it. Afaict, people who know Iraq are divided between those who think the US has to pressure Maliki to creating a more accomodating Iraqi government (and who stress that there *is* a real Iraqi national identity), and those who think the regions borders *are* being redrawn, either implicitly through ungovernable spaces and ethnic cleansing, or potentially explicitly (through possible international recognition of those new borders – I wonder what LFC thinks about the possibility of regional borders being redrawn at the international level? )

“Stopping this new semi-jihadist state unfortunately means supporting Assad’s cruelties, and many other Western countries appear to be deciding that is the best thing to do right now. ”

Not really, I wouldn’t think. The Syrian war isn’t *only* the Jihadi threat and nation building project, but hundreds of other local conflicts removed from that aspect of the war. Dealing with the Jihadi threat/state building doesn’t necessarily depend on supporting Assad’s cruelties.

” An interesting sidelight is a slightly closer U.S. rapprochement with Iran in the pursuit of saving the Iraqi Shi’ites from much more harm.”

An Iranian intervention (afaict) would be the final factor that really allows the conflict break down on sectarian lines (if it hasn’t already) A real US/Iranian rapprochement might be a good idea(it also might not) but I really don’t see it replacing the US/Saudi relationship.

” Thus the U.S. can stand on the sidelines and end up with slightly better relations with all sides, eventually.”

I think leaving them come to a ‘regional solution’ is the worst of all worlds. Certainly don’t send in anything above Special Forces, but the history of realpolitiking in the Middle East isn’t great.

It’s so easy to get distracted by the fascinating game of thrones, which is the Middle East.

For geographic, not ethnic reasons, Iraq will tend to become one country one way or another, whether it is ruled from the headwaters or the delta, the center or from Iran, it will tend to become one country, even if that means domination of large parts of the population by other parts.

The U.S. is clearly out of its depth in the chaos of Syria/Iraq, not least because of the American relationships with Saudi Arabia (which is backing ISIL — are we not supposed to notice?) and Iran (which is a major support to the Shiites in Iraq). Why is the U.S. implacably hostile to Iran and strongly supportive of the Saudi’s? Just on the surface, Saudi Arabia would seem like an enemy of the U.S., and Iran, if not an ally, then at least a potential cooperative partner regionally. This craziness, I think, is directly traceable to allowing American foreign policy to be hijacked by oil interests operating covertly.

If we had truly wanted stability in Iraq, it would have been achievable, if and only if we were willing to see the Iraqi’s use the oil for their own development and industrialization, foregoing in fairly short order the imperative to export it all. As long as Iraq (and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the other Gulf States) are extractive regimes, extracting and exporting the oil, there are strong political economic incentives to concentrate income, wealth and power in very few hands, which leaves most of the population very, very poor and without prospects. The West wants the oil, with increasing desperation, so maybe we don’t really want a vigorous mass-market economy in the Middle East consuming its own oil and producing its own food and manufactured goods and generally enjoying a high standard of living. It’s a quandary, and though an enlightened regard for mutual benefit and human rights and welfare might, theoretically, animate American foreign policy, we settle the difficult question by allowing oil and financial interests to drive the conduct of policy and military intervention, and the oil companies and international banks prefer to promote extractive regimes, that concentrate the wealth in financial instruments and export the oil.

We are not a nice species, we humans.

JET @ 62: There are various examples of US occupations that could be considered successful. The best of them were Germany and Japan post WWII, but those were total defeats which you ruled out. For Japan we got some good anthropologists to help work out the details about how to manage it.

In both cases those nations had worked through all the details of being nations before they implemented their local forms of democracy. In Germany’s case they kept the forms, if not the democratic functions, of the preceding state and we kept those forms afterwards so the local elites and their bureaucracies just sailed on through the whole time. Japan kept the emperor and we kept the locals, same as Germany.

Iraq was cobbled together by the British, run by the British and successors of the Ottoman bureaucracy and then abandoned by the British and then shaken up by various coups, and then they had Saddam for a long time who had a bureaucratic structure dedicated to him. And then we came along and bombed, starved, bombed again and invaded over the space of 13 years, and then we expunged the local bureaucracies. So Iraq never underwent the regular process of state formation and was perpetually riven by ethnic and religious rivalries never settled by a widely accepted civil truce. The goal, of course, was to purify Iraq of its government and bring in an entire new replacement so you can’t say that was mistake separate from invasion.

The problem then is that we have never successfully done what we were attempting to do.

A Leninist-Stalinist takeover might have managed it (the Baathists being sorta that way to begin with), at the price of a great deal of blood.

I could imagine that Iraq could possibly have gone much better. First, quickly work at local elections for town councils and city councils. Then democratic regional associations, and try to quickly work up from the bottom. Second, let Iraqi engineers rebuild as quickly as they could, and let them decide what replacement parts they needed. We had US inspectors who took a year to decide what US equipment was needed, and then it took an ineffective US bureaucracy much longer to get that stuff imported and installed. Make it clear that we would stay just long enough to get things organized and then leave.

I can’t imagine Iraq could have gone better because the people who would be cooperating to accomplish those things were more concerned with getting rid of us, or using us to get at their ethnic enemies, than they were with doing what you suggested.

We could have invaded and immediately left (assuming we had bagged Saddam on the first go) and the Baathists would have sorted something out eventually, but then, getting rid of the Baathists was goal one for the invasion.

max
[‘PURITY OF ESSENCE! ESSENCE OF PURITY!’]

From Ronan’s link:

Conversely, there is no precedent for subdividing the Iraqi territory on the basis of sectarian identities

The precedent has been set since 1991, and Kurdistan has relative peace and oil. It’s not westerners doing the partitioning in their case; it’s the Kurds. So yes, it doesn’t speak to the Iraqi much at all at this point.

I would say as well (afaik) that most of the pressure for the Saudi relationship and the US policy of ‘stability’ (oil production) in the Gulf, has come from policy makers (rather than sectional interests) for strategic reasons (to supply Europe and Japan(primarily) with low cost oil) So it hasn’t just been US oil companies corrupting US foreign policy.

but not so good for science, technology,

You might want to look at the education stats for Iran under the Shah v. under the Islamic theocrats.
The consensus cliche is woe betide the freedom-loving, but the fact is women in far greater numbers entered fields previously reserved for privileged males.

I’m saying people should be wary about extrapolating from that grand schemes for redesigning Iraq along sectarian lines.

I agree completely.

The consensus cliche is woe betide the freedom-loving, but the fact is women in far greater numbers entered fields previously reserved for privileged males.

Yes and no; women are restricted from certain fields. Educational freedom is both oversold and undersold there, sometimes by myself in the same sentence.

There are two paragraphs at the end of this section of the link I posted above in which you can get an impression of the hype opponents of the regime use against it, and the reality that the regime does indeed not want women in this place or that and that they want to close opportunities:

http://iranhrdc.org/english/publications/legal-commentary/1000000261-gender-inequality-and-discrimination-the-case-of-iranian-women.html#7

Still, after 1979 the ability to get an education was expanded dramatically.

ronan @123
I wonder what LFC thinks about the possibility of regional borders being redrawn at the international level?

The short answer is I really don’t know enough about Iraq’s political geography to give a good answer. But even an independent state of Kurdistan in the north wd prob require a quasi-concert of major powers pushing and endorsing it, which doesn’t seem to be on the horizon afaik. I’m wary of looking at a map at a distance and projecting schemes onto it, when the effect cd be to deepen the misery and displacement etc. that’s already occurring. I suppose it’s possible that after the ’03 invasion, when the country was still under US occupation, a partition scheme cd have been devised and possibly realized (emphasis on ‘possibly’) if there had been acceptance by all affected parties. But that moment has long gone, and I don’t know whether it wd have been a good idea.

There is some precedent for regional boundaries changing status (so not “redrawn” so much as “reclassified”) to int’l boundaries, e.g. dissolution of USSR, but of course that was a different situation w its own context etc.

On another subject, I also feel that I don’t know enough about ISIL. I noticed that Barak Mendelsohn wrote several posts at L. Sjoberg’s blog Relations International about ISIL and al-Qaeda central and the rift betw them, but I haven’t read them.

137 last

War Nerd on ISIL

@mcmanus
thanks, that appears to be on the whole (tho perhaps not in every particular judgment) a useful and informative post.

Wait, Holbo, you supported the Iraq war? Jesus. Why? (Haven’t read the thread, so sorry if this has been covered.)

I now see that Robert Waldman and Doctor Science covered my sentiments rather well upthread (tho I disavow the gendering—it’s way too easy a let off.) Still, Jesus.

Shouldn’t this meta debate be expanded a bit to go beyond individual culpability? For I think there is a strong structural question here. What people said and did – Cheney, Wolfowitz, the Weekly Standard crowd, the Ignatieff liberal crowd – is on the record and, due to the internet, easier to access than ever. So, the structural question is: why does this make no difference? Why is Wolfowitz’s p.r. person answering requests to appear not only on Fox news, but on all kinds of news shows and no doubt various op ed pages (the betting is on: how long before Wolfowitz has an op ed in the NYT?).
The press went through a light bit of mea culpa-ing back in 2004, but basically, the paradigm of the establishment press hasn’t changed at all. It is a culture of impunity. Nobody would ever ask Wolfowitz, for instance, about estimating that the war would pay for itself in 2003 and how we are to take this 1.5 trillion dollar mistake. Criminal negligence? Ignorance so deep that the person who appointed Wolfowitz to a position of responsibility should answer for it? These questions and many, many others will never be asked.
So what are we to make of a liberal press (in the post-clinton sense in which, say, Obama is liberal) that is mired in a culture of impunity? Does it say deeper things about the press’s model for reporting the news (the ignorance of any of the methods developed by sociology, the reliance on authority as truth-makers, the entwined influence of the more powerful news figures and the establishment, etc.)
I have on optimistic days the notion that it was the Iraq war that killed the Washington Post – which hasn’t changed under its new management. But this is certainly very very little. The news is everywhere, and everywhere it is badly reported, not reported, tarted up and misleading. This isn’t true of all news. I think I can get a fairly accurate picture of the Kardashians reading the gossip rags. But the high standards of veracity and investigation that are brought to the celebrity set seem absolutely absent when brought to Iraq – or, recently, Ukraine.
This, to my mind, is a much bigger problem.

As I said I’m no expert, but Toby Dodge and Reidar Visser (who I linked above),for example, argue that any major border changes aren’t needed. Why would you want to read a military analyst ? As I said, there is another argument (afaict) that argues the Middle East is going through a period of intense nation building that *will* be resolved through large scale ethnic cleansing and violence. All I was implying is you shouldn’t be so definitive in your solutions.
I don’t know (obviously) what the US should do re Syria. I’m saying there are other options (special forces, local alliances etc) that could begin to deal with the Jihadi threat short of throwing in with Assad. (Also bear in mind Assad’s links to the Jihadist’s and how they can be manipulated)

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n07/peter-neumann/suspects-into-collaborators

On the last question, because a regional solution will decend into the usual quagmire (power politics, sectarianism, no long term solutions) Because it’s not a solution. Because even by your analysis you are risking a lot for some minimal potential gains. (Thus the U.S. can stand on the sidelines and end up with slightly better relations with all sides, eventually.) Because international politics is not a zero sum game ?

btw, re military analysts – this is Petraeus’ position (afaik) The surge and awakening were explicitly acts of state building (getting local Sunni groups to drive out foreign Jihadi’s and then (hypothetically) incorporate them into an Iraqi government)This is still his position (and a number of other analysts)

Obvious idiots and assholes are not going to do the right thing in carrying out what was very clearly the wrong thing.

Exactly. It was wrong twice over—which part did someone like John Holbo, whom I quite respect, think had any chance of turning out well? And more importantly, why?

Ronan(rf), You write “I don’t know (obviously) what the US should do re Syria” but then you write, “I’m saying there are other options (special forces, local alliances etc) that could begin to deal with the Jihadi threat short of throwing in with Assad.” Wait a minute. You “don’t know”, but there are “other options”? What?! This is why YOU should be reading military analysis, so you won’t write wishful thinking.

I want to read military analysis by people who have been there, because that is the only stuff that I don’t already know. ANYBODY can write, “because quagmire”, “because not a solution”, “because not zero sum”. That is almost nonsense. Tell us something we DON’T know, such as, what is happening between the people; what is going on between the forces.

Petraeus’ top military advisor on the surge, David Kilcullen, an Australian, called the invasion of Iraq, “The biggest fucking mistake in U.S. history.” Think Petraeus really doesn’t believe that? Don’t confuse generals accepting a mission, with what they really believe. Kilcullen would be well worth hearing from at this moment. The guy is almost a genius. [If you want to look at something brilliant about the near future of warfare, something you should really know, watch at the YouTube of a recent Google talk by Kilcullen. Among many other things you will learn how the Syrian rebels are putting together military vehicles from off-the-shelf components. Completely fascinating.] Col Patrick Lang at Sic Semper Tyrannis is very interesting to read, right now. Or consider the fact that Navy admirals publicly stated that bombing Iran would be a very bad idea — a few of them said this, when Bush and Cheney were making noises about it. (That is how close we apparently came to it: the admirals had to step out publicly and say “no”. They said it again recently, when the neocons were pushing it just a few years ago.) I already have my own reasons why it is a bad idea to bomb Iran. I won’t bore you. But the reasons why the ADMIRALS think it is a bad idea are knowable, and worth knowing. And that is about military analysis.

It’s worth noting how few people who claim to have been duped about Iraq at high levels have gone on to do anything to practically make amends, or to try to bring the liars who manipulated to any sort of accountability at all.

David Brock shows what making amends looks like when it comes to the right-wing media establishment. John Cole and Charles Johnson do when it comes to warmongering. I don’t actually expect someone like Colin Powell to make a career of it, but where he is (for instance) to be found telling the public just who was spreading what lies when? Where are any of those alleged people of good will doing anything like – pressing for hearings, supporting criminal investigations and courts martial, anything at all to bring some accountability? Nope, it all fades away into rationalizations and reasons to keep on with the usual suspects.

Powell said yes early and often. He never once even thought to say no, to take a chance on going through life relying only on the resources that a man with integrity can conjure out of compromises which don’t compromise him. It’s a grand waste of time, it seems to me, to debate the degree of his moral culpability. There just ain’t no there there.

Or to put it another way, you seem to be getting causation backwards. Is violence the result of deep seated sectarian differences and demands for separation, or are they the result of the violence ? It would seem it’s the later, that sectarian and geographic divisions are the result of decades of war and then a Shiite dominated political system that was unresponsive to Sunni concerns, rather than the idea that Iraq was always an ‘artificial state.’
In this situation there seems to be two main solutions (in this thread) (1) try and pressure Maliki into allowing a more pluralistic political system which will give the opposition a stake in running the country (2) divide the country along sectarian grounds. Number (2) cannot be done by outsiders, but if it happens as a result of the violence then it happens, so the only game in town is still (1). There is also no evidence that the second option is better than the first. Where is the evidence that those states will be viable? That they will be seen as legitimate (domestically, regionally, internationally) ? Where is the evidence that they will be stable ? So the only real solution is to still work through option 1.
What you might see in a decade or two is an Iraq divided along sectarian lines, perhaps even completly disintegrated. If that occurs it doesnt mean it’s natural or inevitable, it is still the result of decisions made by people and groups in the context of the specific circumstances that preceded it.

So the only real solution is to still work through option 1.

That was a good idea back in 2005 when we were making our first attempts to allow Iraqis to have a degree of self-government. But instead we insisted that no prominent Sunnis could be allowed in government. Because along with the Sadrists we had chosen them for enemies.

It was still a good idea back in 2007 when we officially reversed our policy to keep Sunnis out of government and told the Shia government it had to give Sunnis a lot of patronage jobs. There was no follow-through when we got distracted and let them take those jobs away, though.

I think now it’s too late. If we try to pressure Maliki into a coalition government because Sunnis are winning the war, what does that tell Sunnis they should do more of? Why would they believe we mean it this time, when we didn’t mean it last time? And anyway our influence on Maliki has reached a low point. Why would he allow his enemies into his organization? Because we say so? We can offer him airstrikes, which all along have been a big political liability for him because his supporters weren’t convinced we could tell good arabs from bad arabs from the air. We can offer him money. I guess if we give him *enough* money maybe he’ll put it in a swiss bank and leave the country, which would be some improvement….

Still, I think your number 2 is the best option for us. We can’t let everybody see us doing nothing. And provided we don’t actually send any military people back into Iraq or spend too much money, it is the least bad choice. We can let the world see that we are pressuring Maliki to make a government that Sunnis would rather join than secede from. While this is like unlocking the barn door and inviting the horses to come inside after they have come back with flamethrowers to burn it down, it’s still the best choice even though it will inevitably fail.

Harold the Turks tried to get along with the Israelis, and the Israelis didn’t want any.

In the medium run, how can Turkey get along with us when they can’t get along with Israel? If there’s some important purpose to recognizing a Kurdish nation, we can write off Turkey a little early. But I don’t really see what that purpose would be.

Layman @77

“Well it sort of matters when people say the crime caused the region to slide into chaos when it’s possible that the region was sliding into chaos anyway.”

If I stole your wallet, would you say I caused it to be gone, or would you say I didn’t because it might have disappeared anyway?”

Doesn’t really apply to what I was saying.

“If the U.S. had built Iraq into global economic superpower as they did with the defeated Axis powers Germany and Japan, more people would overlook or play down the crime.”

How would we do that? I could be wrong, but I think we spent more in 2004 on Iraq reconstruction than we did in West Germany during the entire Marshall Plan, in constant dollars. And it’s my impression that the economies of the former Axis powers took decades to recover.”

According to Wikipedia it was $13 billion over 4 years. I would guess that is more than was spent on the Iraq War adjusted for inflation. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

“The years 1948 to 1952 saw the fastest period of growth in European history. Industrial production increased by 35%. Agricultural production substantially surpassed pre-war levels.[60] The poverty and starvation of the immediate postwar years disappeared, and Western Europe embarked upon an unprecedented two decades of growth that saw standards of living increase dramatically. There is some debate among historians over how much this should be credited to the Marshall Plan. Most reject the idea that it alone miraculously revived Europe, as evidence shows that a general recovery was already underway. Most believe that the Marshall Plan sped this recovery, but did not initiate it. The United States worked to direct the Marshall Plan towards children and an increase of nutritional material for all citizens within western Europe so as to shed a positive light on its goals as it worked to effectively defeat communist threats.”

But yes it took decades whereas the Iraq war was ten years ago and the Saudi-Iran-Israel Cold War isn’t over. It’s heating up. It’s been heating up ever since the Iranian revolution and since Saddam annexed Kuwait. And since Israel’s occupation and Lebanon’s civil war. Now Syria and Iraq are worse than Lebanon.

You are apparently of the Vietnam generation. A younger, post Cold War generation was naive to think that America would stabilize a region after getting rid of a dictator. We were naive to think a nation as rich and powerful as the U.S. wanted to stop humanitarian crises and could do it (this was before the housing bubble/financial crisis and before the Republican party clearly went off the deep end.). It was stupid for people to think that Bush would do a good job with nation building. Didn’t the Bushies understand that such massive negligence and dishonesty would damage their brand?

Did anyone see the clip of Fox News’s Megyn Kelly hammering Dick Cheney? It was brutal and well deserved. He was going about how Obama was wrong about everything and then she SLAMMED him for being wrong about everything: no WMDs, the insurgency being in its last throes, etc.

It does look like there is something of a split on the right. We shouldn’t overhype it, but some conservatives see the sheer negligence and dishonesty of Cheney, just as some of the lunatic conservative base took out Eric Cantor.

It looks like there is going to be a Kurdistan. As long as they don’t mistreat the Turkomen, Turkey will probably live with it. Anyway it will be next to impossible for any force in Iraq to rout Peshmerga out of Kirkuk. The Kurds just sold a million barrels of oil to Israel, to be delivered today in fact. This had been in violation of Baghdad’s policy and US wishes, but somehow I think the US will live with it.

Does the US still have a huge listening post up there? I remember that just a few months after the 2003 invasion, news reports said that US intelligence was building a huge installation in the Kurd area.

#165

“The years 1948 to 1952 saw the fastest period of growth in European history. Industrial production increased by 35%. Agricultural production substantially surpassed pre-war levels.[60] The poverty and starvation of the immediate postwar years disappeared….”

But yes it took decades whereas the Iraq war was ten years ago….

If we could have gotten big substantial improvement in 1 year, or maybe 2 years, it would have made a great big difference socially and politically. Just getting public services like water works and power plants working quickly would have made a great big difference. In the Gulf War we tried to damage that sort of thing, and after the war they largely had it working again in 8 weeks. Lots of jerry-rigged temporary fixes, but working. In 2003 we weren’t trying hard to damage infrastructure, and 2 years later we still didn’t have basic repairs done. That may have given Iraqis the impression that we didn’t really want to repair the damage….

…the Saudi-Iran-Israel Cold War isn’t over. It’s heating up. It’s been heating up ever since the Iranian revolution and since Saddam annexed Kuwait. And since Israel’s occupation and Lebanon’s civil war. Now Syria and Iraq are worse than Lebanon.

This might be a good moment to bring up Roy Belmont’s question. Who benefits?

Egypt has a degree of chaos with another quasi-military government that has strictly temporary public support. Syria is in chaos, as is Iraq. Iran has had sanctions partly lifted, temporarily, worse sanctions or US military attack depend on coming US elections.

I would argue that Israel is not better off from this. Israel would be better off with a comprehensive peace and open borders for trade. However, Israelis might believe this is not in the cards. They can’t get normalized relations until arab governments agree that Israel is the sole owner of Judea and Samaria and the Golan, and does not owe anybody anything. And that agreement is unlikely in the foreseeable future. So it might easily seem to many Israelis that the best attainable goal for them would be to have every populous neighbor in chaos with many arabs killing each other.

It was stupid for people to think that Bush would do a good job with nation building. Didn’t the Bushies understand that such massive negligence and dishonesty would damage their brand?

Saddam claimed to have vast proven oil reserves which he could not legally sell. If he had been telling the truth, imagine the possibilities! I can believe that the Bush administration thought that while they developed that oil there would be many well-paying jobs in Iraq, and once it flowed world oil prices would go down. Iraq would be wealthy, selling as much oil as the Saudis. The USA would be wealthy, buying cheap oil. Once they turned Iraq into a wealthy libertarian paradise, Iraqis would be too busy getting rich to bother killing each other.

If the oil had been there, the occupation would not need tremendous expertise. Lots of people who hoped to get rich would support them in lots of indirect ways. Much easier to get people to cooperate when they see giant rewards by doing so. Seeing the giant rewards they wouldn’t have been upset at the US keeping control and providing them (and their oil) military protection.

But Saddam lied. They were stupid to believe him, but it was soooo tempting because if it had been true the rewards would have been wonderful.

They understood the damage to their brand the day after Baghdad was liberated and they got a close look at the Oil Ministry records. But it was too late then.

Peter K @ 165

It may interest you to know that Iraq GDP grew by 55% in 2004, has grown by more than 4% every year since 2005, and exceeded 10% in 2007 and again in 2013. This compares quite favorably to GDP growth for West Germany and Japan in the 10 years following the end if WW2.

And, again, the US spent far more on reconstruction in Iraq than in either West Germany and Japan. In fact, the US spent the aftermath of WW2 actually dismantling German factories as part of a plan to eliminate Germany’s capacity to wage war in the future.

The information is easy to find.

http://www.facethefactsusa.org/facts/us-spends-more-rebuilding-iraq-afghanistan-than-post-wwii-germany

Among the having-been-wrongs is at least one hot presidential candidate; it might be more interesting to go into that situation, than to belabor such hulks as Cheney and Powell, who are (hopefully) now politically aground and rotting.

I agree, but a reasonable explanation of how people were deceived, from the point of view of those deceived, which is part of belaboring the rotting hulks, does not seem to be forthcoming. (It could be most useful in counteracting the further deceptions yet to come.)

Meanwhile — if I may shift to a more pungent metaphor — Cheney and Powell are now well down in the sewers of history, whereas others of their kind are still swimming cheerfully about the drain and making noises. They may do more damage before they go down. What can be done?

It doesn’t make sense to concentrate on persons. There is plenty of material, many Cheneys, Powells, and Clintons, and new ones are born every day. Trying to discredit them all is not a meaningful approach.

I am not talking about ‘how the US has treated them’ and I’m not ‘chastising them’ by noting their foreign policies have been quite destructive in the region. (and I dont feel the need to pin my colours to the mast every time I criticise an Arab regime by also noting all the bad things that the US, UK, Israel whoever has also done)
I am talking about the alliance with Saudi, which people seem to think is morally reprehensible and strategically idiotic(I half agree on some of it) I’m wondering how would a similar alliance with Iran be any less morally reprehensible.

Path dependence ? Anyway I did answer his question. Clearly the Saudi relationship is (has been) primarily built around maintaining access to oil for the US and it’s allies. The hostility towards Iran is indeed irrational (imo – as I noted above) and primarily a result of the fall of the Shah, rise of Khomeini, the hostage crisis, the political economy of the new alliance system (interests building up in the FP community in the US and pressure coming from allies in the region (Saudi, Israel) not to ease relations with Iran) so on and so forth.
When has Iran been punished with war by the US ? I know Iran isn’t Arab.

Iraq ‘punished Iran with war.’ The US helped fund the Iraqi war effort and gave tacit approval to the use of chemical weapons. (not that this is relevant to anything Ive said above, so Ill leave it there)

Layman 06.21.14 at 5:26 pm:

Does that include the forty pallets of cash that went missing?
Minimal estimates $6 billion+. Spent money.
Or the dark budget for contractors like the valiant heroes of Blackwater and its morph-mutant current iteration. Lots of cash going down that hole.
Spending money is not the same as accomplishing something, is it now?

I could spend $2000 getting my bicycle tires changed. Because the bike guy’s a rip-off and I’m a chump.
Hey man I spent $2000 getting my bicycle repaired!

Results dude. Results are what matters. Even more than intent.
Which in this case is so obscenely immoral most of the commenters here seemingly can’t even get next to it.
You aren’t watching a “mistake” boys and girls. You’re watching iniquity writ large before the eyes of a passive helpless world.
And commenting about it “judiciously, as you will.”

Barry @ 189

See section 8.2 of your link.

In Iraq, right now, the U.S. is supporting the Iranian-backed government against the Saudi-backed ISIL.

Not very actively, and I have my own speculations about what is going on. Tar-baby.

As far as the rest of the thread, I have stayed off, out of boredom with the nostalgia of days when the centre-left could even pretend to have an ethics to betray. I am so tempted to one-up Belmont and go all max Godwin on your butts.

But let’s continue to discuss OUR country’s illegal murder of tens of thousands and the destruction of a nation as if it were a budgetary item on a highway project or a SCOTUS
decision on eminent domain. Calm. Judicious. Reasonable.

Let’s not.

As far as Holbo’s transgression of the pieties, my own romantic temptation benefited by attention, memory and a search engine, is to imagine a small temporary handwaving in service of social comity while attempting to anchor in a challenging but necessary refuge.

I honor and admire that much more than the self-serving entirely useless and ineffective opposition. I also give Klein and Yglesias a pass. Hell, I will give all words a pass, including my own sarcasm of the time. “50 million troops for five years, 5 million for fifty.” Everybody else was spouting nonsense anyway.

We weren’t going to stop the war, and I didn’t care to send a signal of my social submission.

Moral outrage is good, but arranging critiques on innuendo and failing to differentiate between players is not. Though I don’t really have any argument about whether somebody wants to criticize Powell, for example, at the highest volume (even though I don’t personally agree with it), I do worry that it lessens the impact of the critique against others.

I mean, this:

Meanwhile — if I may shift to a more pungent metaphor — Cheney and Powell are now well down in the sewers of history, whereas others of their kind are still swimming cheerfully about the drain and making noises.
I mean, what the hell? This is just fearfully wrong. Powell hasn’t (to my knowledge) come out to say the war was wrong, but he did apologize for the UN report, he split ways with the fearmongering camp, and he’s gone against his own party twice in a row to support a Presidential candidate who made his criticism of the war a central plank in his platform. I’ve never seen anything to rebut this conclusion of the NY Times a decade ago. A failure? Sure.

He’s also not writing alternate-universe op-eds trying to drum up continued support / hysteria for the war.

But hey – there’s no second acts in American lives, are there?

@ bob again: I already Godwin’d things (a very small part of the debate with no obvious impact), just weeks after 9/11! I just wish I’d been better placed to do some damage to the warmongers’ argument.

Ed, I would point out the moral and logical flaws in your argument but I don’t think anybody here is at all swayed by what you say, so why bother?

As a spokesman for evil you are pretty much worn out. Probably time to come back with a new name and a different patter.

JET @ 144:
It may be my well-developed imagination.

No, it’s the RPN, Jonah. (Well… the language utilizing the notation.)

I say, if we had made it clear by words and actions that we did not intend to stay, Iraqis might not have tried so hard to get rid of us. And I don’t think it’s certain how intense the ethnic strife was before we did everything we could to intensify it.

But we do know. In 1991, both the Kurds and the Shia rose up in revolt against Saddam. (They were risking their lives, fortunes and sacred honor.) They didn’t have to (maybe some of them liked Saddam), but we encouraged them. But our encouragement wouldn’t have meant jack if they were happy with the guy. The counter-argument is that it was just a problem with Saddam, but the Kurds were happy to continue to not deal with Iraq, and the Shia were organizing their own revolts in the middle of a murderous dictatorship.

Having gotten rid of Saddam, and having say, the Shia engage in an ethnic cleansing campaign in Baghdad right under our noses should put paid the notion that the ethnic groups involved would really just love each other if we just gave peace a chance. It hasn’t and it won’t because that’s an ideological commitment extended and maintained in outright contradiction to the known facts of this particular case. They don’t want to believe that (in this case) so they don’t.

We have gone through an entire century of empires being broken down into their constituent ethnic parts every chance people get pretty much, but that does not matter because people want to believe they can overcome that through the right form of bureaucracy. (Sometimes you can but almost invariably after massive amounts of bloods have been spilt.)

I wanted to believe there was a chance. Get democratic government for cities and towns, with local tax collection. Then each local population starts out with some independence. (Except of course for the central government organization that imported food and distributed it. Pasta, rice, lentils, etc. The big majority of the population depended on those imports, and depended on the central government to handle that efficiently, and they depended on the railroads to move the food. As soon as that food stopped reaching ethnic areas there would be big trouble.)

But why should anybody back (much less implement) local control when they’re trying to maintain the power of the central government?

So for example we made an attempt to eliminate the Ba’ath police and secret police, and our soldiers did an utterly incompetent job of police work themselves. If each local government had its own police — kind of like we do here

Jonah, they have provinces and local councils and what not. They have a strong central government, but it does delegate power to a certain extent.

— they could hire Ba’ath policemen if they wanted, or replace them, or get them to teach police methods to people who could join them and represent ethnicities or whoever needed representation among the police. Or temporarily set up a city militia to keep order. It wouldn’t necessarily be *good* everywhere, but likely it would be far more orderly on average, and places where things were bad people would feel they had a complaint against their local governments.

You’re trying to write a small function (do_local_gov[]?) and then invoke the function repeatedly. That’d be sensible if the various provinces and towns weren’t a) particularist and b) corrupt. The way they did it in Germany was simply not to mess with the local structures at all, DeNazification or no DeNazification. That worked, in part, because preceding German governments had already standardized and worked hard against corruption. In this case, when you invoke your function, the individual virtualized versions aren’t going to produce consistent or coherent results.

Anyway, get towns and cities with their own independent local governments, and then ask them which other towns and cities they want to ally with. More voting.

And they promptly start fighting because the Shia in the central government don’t want the Sunni to tell them to screw off.

Then if the provinces can’t agree to join up into a central government, you have a de facto partition.

We structured the constitution we (more or less) wrote for them in exactly that way, skipping the Ethnic Feud!-style voting.

They might have trouble about ethnic cleansing or people choosing to move to areas governed by their own kind.

Wow! They had lots of ethnic cleansing, much bombings, very killing, such crying.

the more likely that large-scale ethnic violence could be avoided or delayed.

The delay has ended.

“What a ridiculous idea! In Iraq we have gotten along peacefully for generations. There are lots of mixed marriages and nobody thinks anything of it. Why do you Americans think this way?”

Unreliable narrator. One could also consider unreliable reporters prompting the interviewee for the Western-acceptable answers.

But also a lot of Shias were never as friendly to Sunnis after that.

The Shias wound up in charge. There were enough Sunnis unhappy about that to produce those kinds of bombings – and the Shia were angry Those People couldn’t just accept that the government should be Shia-dominated. In much the same way the Sunni could not understand why Those Shia couldn’t just accept Saddam.

later tensions like who owned what oil riches might have resulted in later conflict, but I’m not certain it had to fail.

I am certain it had to fail (that is democracy + Iraq as unitary state + imposed by Americans) because there was no mode of success. (Actually there is a mode of success but it’s really slow: let them fight it out til they get tired of it, but that’s -American occupation.)

But of course we never really gave it a try.

While I am entirely confident in the notion that people staffing the occupation in Iraq were pretty incompetent, I also note that they tried everything, pretty much.

Say we forgot about that goal. Local elections. Let Baathists take whatever office they get the votes for.

So, basically, you kill Saddam and then let the Iraqis vote for whatever they want as long as its democracy and not anti-American. Tried that.

Maybe you get Baaths taking over Sunni cities, and having no chance in Shia cities unless they are individually popular in those places.

And maybe we turn up to down and and black to white. I mean, you can try.

Let the politics work itself out.

War is politics by other means, and politics is war by other means. They’re working out the politics with automatic weapons.

Not giving them the right to try was a stupid policy.

If we’d organized an election in Kurdistan in 1991 giving them a choice of re-joining Iraq and becoming independent, which would they have chosen? We didn’t want them to become independent for various reasons, so we didn’t give them the right to try. Not giving the Iraqis the right to try has been baked into the policy from the beginning.

max
[‘Oy.’]

mcmanus 195: too cryptic.

why the media bother to dig up the 2003 Iraq warhawks
Ask.
Ask the question.
And then don’t even answer it.
You must not answer that question. It is forbidden to answer that question. Ask it all you want, but you are not ever going to be allowed to answer it with any degree of honesty.
Fuck Godwin.

Muqtada Al-Sadr is the closest thing to a visible saint in the Middle East today, as he was ten years ago.
Condi Rice was and probably still is a heavy-smoking dyke, hyper-intelligent, on the make and willing to front a compromised surface to get what she wants.
Al-Sadr was consistently shown in a light that made him look like a snarling animal to the American public, while Condi, hey Condi and Bush, you know, you ever wonder, I mean…

These things don’t go together.
They don’t fit together, those images. They won’t…merge.
Until we get to the immune system response of evil to virtue, and the need for a proxy shield for iniquitous duplicity.
Then, hey presto! They do start to fit together.
Colin POwell was sacrificed, a cut-out, a proxy front, a fall guy, a chump, and he was chumped off.
Al-Sadr was so often described as a “firebrand” in the oughties press it might as well have been his middle name, and Condi was there, being all made-it good Negro gal and liberated woman and so thus impervious to liberal venom.
Which is now so diluted anyway you guys are talking about Colin Powell (in 2014!) and asking asking for all that’s holy, why Wolfowitz and Kristof and Cheney, and who knows what other dreck-filled carcasses are being primped in the green rooms of what’s left of American mainstream journalism, are being “consulted” on this latest iteration of Sauron’s expansionist wet dream.
Asking and never even answering your own fucking question.

Maybe, just maybe, your main narrative isn’t quite centered on the real.

Also get his saints wrong.

My favorite saint is Lorenzo, who purportedly said while being barbecued, “I’m done on this side. Turn me over.”

Arnold:

I would expect you to know more than the average passive observer about al-Sadr.
No really, I would.
Based on your other smarmy chauvinist comments here, you’d almost have to have him on the radar. Danger lurks. Got to watch them haters, eh?
Especially the ones that have been driven into cosmic levels of rage by the perfidy of those you defend.

The disgusting arrogance behind your tiny grasp of al-Sadr’s position and your glaring omission of any response to my acknowledgment of his background … and hey let’s just go there for a second, ‘kay?
His father was murdered by Saddam.
Don’t know about you but me, somebody murdered my dad I’d be all up on them real hard.
But your affiliates in the seats of power, as American went into Babylon, to vengefully take Nebudchanezzer’s treasures for themselves, among other duplicitously accomplished “missions”, made sure that the American people saw, and still see, al-Sadr as dangerous, because he was, and he is. Just not to decent people.
Dangerous to the swine that are running this cabaret of horror.

Without any testimony as to your personal or dogmatic requirements for sanctity I can’t get an opinion together about how specifically full of shit you are about al-Sadr and his threat to you and your people.
Which is probably as real as most of the other threats you face now.
Iniquity is always most threatened by virtue and moral strength.
The backwash of that iniquity is going to be monstrous.
My advice to you and yours would be stop adding to it. Now.

“So we can get you banned”!
Where’s Bloix when you really need him, huh?
Out there somewhere having an identity crisis, as his ethical sense, obvious, sincerely held, smacks into the concrete depths of how bad he’s been played.

Framing this “question” as one of these lying sacks of shit having been “wrong” as the OP does, is to me, a kind of unconscious quislingism. They weren’t wrong, they were lying. They were lying then and they’re lying now and that’s when they’re being given a podium. You know that, and I know you know that.
And now you know I know you know that.

C’mom man you know you want to, don’t make me say it again – give it up.

OK, I’m happy enough to praise my moral intuition in being against Iraq 2, but I’d also like to think that there was a general principle in there somewhere. People seem to be phrasing that general principle as “Don’t invade countries”. I can’t help feeling, though, that that has a flip side, which is “Horrible tyrants who avoid civil war are better than civil war, and we ought not to threaten the position of horrible tyrants unless we are absolutely certain that civil war will not ensue.” If we had an opportunity to bring Saddam back, that is, we’d do it. I, to be consistent, would do it. And I can’t see how that can’t also imply that I ought to support Assad against ISIS/ISIL. Which is not, as far as I can see, a conclusion that has occurred to any of the moral philosophers who’ve commented above, who have universally concluded that their responsibility stops at not invading and concluded that such a position enables them to imply that they would neither have invaded nor supported Saddam but would rather have found a completely different right answer that is now no longer available. I’m not being sarcastic; I just can’t see how the debate can be carried on without implying _something_ about supporting Assad or supporting his overthrow. If the Iraq example doesn’t imply anything about a very closely related dilemma, does it have any generalisable features at all? And if not, what on earth is the good of it?

“I’m not being sarcastic; I just can’t see how the debate can be carried on without implying _something_ about supporting Assad or supporting his overthrow.”

Excluded middle: Do neither.

Roy not only are you a bigot, you are a moron as well.

You wouldn’t use that term to my face you sad, pathetic little man. Don’t post it here.

Belmont you moron stop drinking. Everybody knows his father was killed by Saddam. I JUST WROTE that the evidence was that he was going to be an important political leader back when the neocons were dismissing him, 10 years ago. The Sadrist fighters are responsible for lots of bloodletting (they have just been called out again) and he managed to get a lot of them shot up the last time. I seem to remember that al Sistani had to implore them to stand down. You seem to think that “saint” means “political leader”. Stop drinking. You are almost incoherent.

#200 Max

In 1991, both the Kurds and the Shia rose up in revolt against Saddam. (They were risking their lives, fortunes and sacred honor.) They didn’t have to (maybe some of them liked Saddam), but we encouraged them. But our encouragement wouldn’t have meant jack if they were happy with the guy.

Yes, of all the people plotting against Saddam, we encouraged a Shia group and the Kurds. Pretty much everybody is prejudiced against kurds and they want their own country, that’s clear. But then we advised a Shia group, and then we double-crossed them and left them to Saddam’s mercy. Saddam decided that Shias were suspect and purged from his government the ones that looked least reliable, and had his secret police look for more Shia conspirators. So from that time on he gave them solid reason to want him gone.

Then we came in and made a big distinction between Sunnis and Shias, we strongly discriminated against Sunnis and tried to set up a Shia-only government. It’s as if we did everything we could to start a civil war between them.

The counter-argument is that it was just a problem with Saddam, but the Kurds were happy to continue to not deal with Iraq, and the Shia were organizing their own revolts in the middle of a murderous dictatorship.

Either Saddam was just paranoid, or there were lots of attempts at revolt. We backed the Shia attempts and not the others. Kurds of course did want their own country, and the more everybody else stamped on them the more they wanted it.

Having gotten rid of Saddam, and having say, the Shia engage in an ethnic cleansing campaign in Baghdad right under our noses should put paid the notion that the ethnic groups involved would really just love each other if we just gave peace a chance. It hasn’t and it won’t because that’s an ideological commitment extended and maintained in outright contradiction to the known facts of this particular case. They don’t want to believe that (in this case) so they don’t.

After we did everything in our power to make that happen, it did happen. I don’t know how to tell how much of that was from our prompting, and neither do you. If you say it would have happened anyway no matter what, it’s possible that you’re right.

We have gone through an entire century of empires being broken down into their constituent ethnic parts every chance people get pretty much, but that does not matter because people want to believe they can overcome that through the right form of bureaucracy. (Sometimes you can but almost invariably after massive amounts of bloods have been spilt.)

Yes, like the Flemish and the Walloons kind of get along but they aren’t real happy about it. And in the USA we have various Protestants and Catholics and Jews all coexisting under one government but they don’t like it either and they’d surely split up if conditions let them. It’s that way pretty much everywhere. There are places — Utah and surrounding areas — where a superficial look would make you think it’s a majority of LDS who would get everything their way. But if you look closer, they are divided among *different kinds* of Mormons who don’t get along all that well, who would split up given the chance.

And yet sometimes people do try to get along.

“I wanted to believe there was a chance. Get democratic government for cities and towns, with local tax collection. Then each local population starts out with some independence.”

But why should anybody back (much less implement) local control when they’re trying to maintain the power of the central government?

We had destroyed the old central government, and we were trying to set up a new strong central government. The reason I think we should have backed local control is that there was a chance it would have worked, while what we did got us the results we got. If we started with local control and then built upward from there, and at some point people didn’t want to build farther, that would give them the basis for a peaceful partition. It wouldn’t solve all the problems, but it would be a far better start than waiting for ad hoc armies to control whatever they could hold onto. And maybe they might decide to split for some nonethnic reason. When we decide the ethnic issue is the main thing, we lose if it turns out something else is also important. Let people just decide who they want to be allied with, on whatever grounds they choose, and we don’t have to second-guess them.

“If each local government had its own police — kind of like we do here…”

Jonah, they have provinces and local councils and what not. They have a strong central government, but it does delegate power to a certain extent.

As I understand it, the police everywhere were paid by the central government. Local governments were also paid by the central government and responsible to it. Then we came in and we disbanded the police — everywhere — because they were organized by Ba’ath. Easy to disband them, don’t pay them from the central government offices that we controlled.

You’re trying to write a small function (do_local_gov[]?) and then invoke the function repeatedly. That’d be sensible if the various provinces and towns weren’t a) particularist and b) corrupt.

Would you say that is untrue of our own towns and state governments? And yet we mostly get buy. People tend to accept the system, and when they object to corruption or racism or whatever then they tend to organize to win elections instead of shooting the voters they disagree with. It depends on a collection of things like elections people trust not to be rigged. Many of the things that tend to prevent armed revolution are breaking down here, but if we had done the right things we could have helped get them to work right in Iraq.

The way they did it in Germany was simply not to mess with the local structures at all, DeNazification or no DeNazification.

Yes, but we did not do that in Iraq.

“Anyway, get towns and cities with their own independent local governments, and then ask them which other towns and cities they want to ally with. More voting.”

And they promptly start fighting because the Shia in the central government don’t want the Sunni to tell them to screw off.

That’s why you do that before you create a central government, and then you create as much central government as they’re ready to vote for.

“…the more likely that large-scale ethnic violence could be avoided or delayed.”

The delay has ended.

Yes, it’s far too late now. But the time might come again when people want to set up a democracy someplace they don’t already have a long democratic tradition. I have a concept about some of what’s important for that. In some cases it’s impossible — for example in places where everybody hates everybody else. I think it’s better to start small and build it up as far as people feel like building it, and then stop. Because the more people you get in the same democratic government who care more about how much they hate other voters than about how to make things work, the worse the democracy runs. (One of those things we’re having problems with here, these days.) I think it might be better to have several working democracies that have bad relations with each other, than one big dysfunctional nation.

If you claim that you can’t have democracy any place that doesn’t already have a long established democratic tradition, you might be right. I’d rather look at whatever can be done to help it work, and try it repeatedly before I decide it’s impossible.

“What a ridiculous idea! In Iraq we have gotten along peacefully for generations. There are lots of mixed marriages and nobody thinks anything of it. Why do you Americans think this way?”

Unreliable narrator. One could also consider unreliable reporters prompting the interviewee for the Western-acceptable answers.

You could be right. It looked to me like the unreliable reporters were prompting for conflict. I don’t know what the truth was.

It’s hard enough to find the truth about objective stuff. Saddam’s censuses said there were a lot of Sunnis. The CIA published data that said there weren’t so many, that there was a large Shia majority. I noticed that opinion surveys in Iraq consistently sampled more Sunnis than the CIA said to expect. So they would “adjust” the results. They would take their actual opinion results, and separate out the answers by Sunnis versus Shias, and then change the published answers to reduce the Sunni contribution and increase the Shia one to match the CIA ratios. This fits standard accepted practice. The polls have random errors, and if you care about particular known variables you can “correct” for those variables. But the bias was always in the same direction….

We said there were so many more Shias than Sunnis that the Sunnis would just have to knuckle under and accept their minority status. But maybe the ratio wasn’t as far off as they said, and Sunnis were too large a minority to ignore.

“Say we forgot about that goal. Local elections. Let Baathists take whatever office they get the votes for.”

So, basically, you kill Saddam and then let the Iraqis vote for whatever they want as long as its democracy and not anti-American. Tried that.

What we claimed we tried, was elections where Iraqis could vote for whoever they wanted provided they were not Ba’ath and not religious. What do you think would happen here if we had elections where you could vote for anybody you wanted provided they were not Christians and not Republicans? We would probably have gotten better results if we let people take office even if they are anti-American. If we weren’t planning to stay, what’s the harm?

“Not giving them the right to try was a stupid policy.”

If we’d organized an election in Kurdistan in 1991 giving them a choice of re-joining Iraq and becoming independent, which would they have chosen? We didn’t want them to become independent for various reasons, so we didn’t give them the right to try. Not giving the Iraqis the right to try has been baked into the policy from the beginning.

Yes, I know. We had fail baked into the policy from the beginning. I say there might have been a way to do it right. That’s because I have an ideology that says democracy can work, that it can sometimes be better than shooting until the losers surrender.

If you believe in democracy and you think about its implications, you will wind up with an idea for Iraq similar to mine. But we did not try anything like that because we were being run by people who did not believe in democracy for other people, whose goals had nothing to do with letting Iraqis develop a government that worked for them.

Ideally, democracy serves as a sort of crude simulation to tell them what results they can expect if they fight it out. On each issue they wind up with some sort of result that’s better for everybody than they can expect from fighting, so they don’t fight. Anybody who feels like they are better off to fight than to accept the totality of those decisions will fight. When we keep people from actually negotiating, we defeat the purpose. Saying “you can have democracy provided it doesn’t include anybody who was on the wrong side before, or anybody who’s religious, or anybody who won’t to do what the USA wants” turns it into a sham.

Incidentally, for places like Afghanistan it might be good to make that symbolism plain. Like, at elections maybe voters should be required to bring some kind of firearm and within 3 tries hit a target at 2 meters. And then in the parliament, each politician gets as many votes as he has people who have shot for him. It would be a sort of reminder….

ChrisB 06.22.14 at 7:59 am:
‘‘ OK, I’m happy enough to praise my moral intuition in being against Iraq 2, but I’d also like to think that there was a general principle in there somewhere.’

How about ‘Don’t kill (etc.) people unless you really, really have to’? And ‘Don’t support or consent to others doing it’? Is this too naive? Does it assume too much? It seems to me a lot of people will at least give these principles lip service, which suggests to me a widely held sort of intuition, even if it is not widely obeyed.

Where I fault Powell is that he was supposed to be a man of reason and a soldier, not a mad dog like Cheney. He was the kind of person we counted on to stop the mad dogs, not run with them. Or at least call out, ‘Hey, that’s a mad dog there!’

(I know this is very late, post-wise, but it has to be said)

John Holbo @14

The best part of that Pollack Op-Ed is the first 2 comments and the fact that we don’t hear many people site Pollack on anything. He certainly hasn’t said anything close to ‘I know you have no reason to trust me, given how wrong I was before in a case that looked an awful lot like this one’, and it seems like it’s going to haunt him for a long time. We can probably chalk that up to his being ostensibly a “liberal”, now I just wonder what it’ll take to place those others in that same category? This post is certainly a nice reminder though.

#212

People seem to be phrasing that general principle as “Don’t invade countries”. I can’t help feeling, though, that that has a flip side, which is “Horrible tyrants who avoid civil war are better than civil war, and we ought not to threaten the position of horrible tyrants unless we are absolutely certain that civil war will not ensue.” If we had an opportunity to bring Saddam back, that is, we’d do it. I, to be consistent, would do it.

I want to believe those are not the only two choices.

Let’s back up to say 2002. We didn’t want Saddam and we didn’t want to continue the sanctions and no-fly zones where at any time a US pilot might die. What if we offered Saddam a couple billion dollars and amnesty, and we buy Iraq from him? He and his family get to come to the USA with no prosecution for previous crimes. Give him a few billion to distribute among his top 100 or so loyal followers who could follow him into exile. We then take over an unbombed Iraq complete with functioning government, secret police, torture chambers, the works, and we look at how to reform it and turn it into a functioning democracy. Every couple of years we let Iraqis vote whether they want to keep the status quo, go independent, or apply for US statehood, like Puerto Rico.

If it worked it would be far cheaper than the violent invasion was. We would have the chance to reform an existing system rather than build a system from the rubble. And if it didn’t “work” it would still be by far the cheapest way to decapitate the Iraqi government.

Of course, it would be immoral. Saddam would get far too much mercy instead of justice. But how much did our effort to bring Saddam to justice cost? Was it worth the price?

And of course, the rest of the world and particularly the UN might likely disapprove. It’s a bad precedent to let a dictator sell his nation. It’s a bad precedent to let another nation vote whether to dissolve itself and become part of your nation. National boundaries are supposed to be sacrosanct and you must never absorb another nation into yours, that’s imperialism and a big no-no. And yet….

There ought to be other choices besides to “support” a dictator with tools to help him suppress his people, or bomb his draftees plus collateral damage, or do nothing.

And I can’t see how that can’t also imply that I ought to support Assad against ISIS/ISIL.

To my way of thinking, ideally we would find a way to encourage the people on the various sides to continuing negotiation, looking for things they prefer over violence. The stronger sides might tend to get more of what they want, balanced against the weaker sides’ need to get enough to be better than fighting a losing war which would severely inconvenience the winners too.

Officially Syria is a democracy, and Assad is the elected president. But for a long time, the president ran with no second candidate, and 2/3 of the senate was officially required to be from his party. It was a sham democracy. Now they have officially changed and anybody can run for office or run a political party, and the insurgents refuse to participate. If they believed the elections would be fair, wouldn’t it make sense for them to run for office and try to get votes? If they won (and if Assad followed the rules and stepped down) they could win without a fight. I think that they do not believe the elections would be honest, and they do not believe Assad would step down if defeated, and also they do not believe they would have enough support to avoid major embarrassment.

How can these insurgents threaten the government when they lack public support? Because they are heavily armed by outside governments.

Two orgaizations that lack public support but that threaten people, that can perhaps each get some support because people hope to get protection from the other. And you are not sure which to arm?

Here is a proposal. It is not realistic. I got it by following the logic, which unfortunately is notoriously unreliable for practical solutions.

Let’s say we want Syria to be a more-or-less-peaceful democracy. (Democracies sometimes get a sense of national outrage and go out to start stupid wars, like we did with Iraq etc. It happens.) But they can’t do that now because they have a dictatorship (that’s democratic on the surface) and some undemocratic outsider-funded insurgencies. None of the people who have the power to stop democracy are willing to accept it. And we can’t stop foreign nations from arming both sides. (Israel probably arms anybody who can create chaos in Syria. Assad was threatening to make peace, all he wanted in exchange was the Golan but Golan is worth more to Israel than peace with Syria. Their refusal makes Israel look bad. So the more Syrians that kill each other or get killed by foreign mercenaries or foreign fanatics, the better.)

We can’t stop the combatants and we can’t stop the people who arm the combatants, and while those small groups are much more powerful than anybody else, they can prevent negotiation.

So — the obvious logical conclusion is to arm everybody in Syria. Do, say, airdrops. Drop hundreds of thousands or millions of little parachutes with guns and ammo, for anybody to collect. And let the armed Syrians decide for themselves who they support. We don’t arm one unpopular group or another unpopular group, we arm *everybody*. And when it’s dangerous to push anybody around, the insurgencies and the government will both be weaker.

Does that sound too crazy libertarian? OK, if we try it and it doesn’t work, that’s data about libertarian approaches that is worth having.

But my fundamental approach is still: Do what we can to promote negotiated settlement rather than violence. Try for a negotiated agreement that each side finds acceptable. The BATNA — the Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement — is civil war.

So did the discussions on the left in 2002-03 about WMD, Powell’s veracity and integrity, the arguments for and against the invasion “make any sense?” At the time, they didn’t to me, as in “why are we talking about this stuff at such length?” Does it make sense in retrospect? Cheney is back on tv.

Well, the meaning and sense of a discourse is its utility, and since the purpose of the discussion was not to stop the war, which wasn’t going to happen, in order for it to not nonsensical one has to impute purposes and utility in some opposition to those which were stated.

We didn’t want to stop the war. We wanted an opportunity to point and say “Stupid evil Republicans.” At the expense of Iraqis.

#204

Colin POwell was sacrificed, a cut-out, a proxy front, a fall guy, a chump, and he was chumped off.

Yes.

Al-Sadr was so often described as a “firebrand” in the oughties press it might as well have been his middle name, and Condi was there, being all made-it good Negro gal and liberated woman and so thus impervious to liberal venom.

You’re saying that Condi Rice was there to be somebody that liberals would not really question. That makes sense.

Which is now so diluted anyway you guys are talking about Colin Powell (in 2014!) and asking asking for all that’s holy, why Wolfowitz and Kristof and Cheney, and who knows what other dreck-filled carcasses are being primped in the green rooms of what’s left of American mainstream journalism, are being “consulted” on this latest iteration of Sauron’s expansionist wet dream.
Asking and never even answering your own fucking question.

You made it very very plain what you were saying, but you said it in a way that would encourage people not to listen. Why was that?

Let me rephrase what I think you meant:

After 9/11 if not before, the mainstream media became Bush’s mouthpiece. They repeated our government’s propaganda without much of any independent checking or independent thought. They did a whole lot to get the US public to go along, we’re just lucky that Walter Cronkheit wasn’t still around to say “And that’s the way it is” or they might have gotten 99.99% of us.

Why is the media going back to the same old liars today and asking them what we should do, as if they never learned anything and never noticed that they were and are out-and-out liars? Because the mainstream media is still shilling for them. Not just Fox News.

And you think it’s pathetic that so-called liberals and so-called independent thinkers tiptoe around it, and pretend they don’t understand it. They seem to TAKE SERIOUSLY claims that “mistakes were made” etc. And pretty likely the conmen who planned it, who are still going strong, are thinking “With enemies like this, who needs friends?”.

@227
I mean by that logic we should be inviting David Duke or Pat Buchanan to post here in order to “learn” from them.

#232
I mean by that logic we should be inviting David Duke or Pat Buchanan to post here in order to “learn” from them.

Only if there’s a reasonable chance they will say things we don’t expect.

Roy Belmont is already here, and he is saying things that you have given no indication you understand. If you ignore his reasoning because you are prejudiced against his culture, what good is that?

Also drop the “don’t be prejudiced against prejudiced” routine. No one is buying it.

Why would that be?

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Sun Tzu

I’m not saying to agree that bigots are right. I’m not even saying to love them. But when you refuse to understand them, you give up something important.

@ Bruce Wilder
You claimed @191 that the US tried to impose an “autocratic state” on Iran. I asked what you were referring to. You haven’t answered. (McManus said something about Sistani but that was unresponsive to the question, b.c Ayatollah Sistani of course is Iraqi not Iranian.)

J. Thomas: . . . you said it in a way that would encourage people not to listen.

I thought he said it in way that expressed very well his contempt for those, who seem determined not to hear.

I appreciated your more prosaic statement of the case, but do you really think omitting profanity removes anything but an excuse?

bob mcmanus @ 225, 228, 229

The purpose of much centre-left discourse is to feel informed, righteous and aggrieved, and excused for passivity. . . did the discussions on the left in 2002-03 about WMD, Powell’s veracity and integrity, the arguments for and against the invasion “make any sense?” . . . As long as you are giving a single thought to “What do we do about Iraq?” Halliburton, Exxon, and the Pentagon will use that five steps ahead of where you think they are. They will make history while you watch.

You are on an end-of-thread roll.

A few weeks ago, I read David Kaiser’s No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War. Though certainly not the author’s intent, he describes quite well the initial stages during which America’s nascent corporate state was organized for world domination.

Contrary to Layman @ 67, the United States did intervene in WWII in a big way, prior to Pearl Harbor, but FDR chose to walk a political tightrope by refraining from a declaration of war, trying to gain time and space for industrial and military mobilization, even though the absence of a declaration of war meant it was difficult to manage the total mobilization of society that the scale of effort ultimately required.

FDR appointed Republicans to head the War and Navy Departments (there was no Defense Department, yet), beginning the precedent that Democratic Presidents have followed through Obama. He effectively drafted leading businessmen to planning commissions, including the head of General Motors, and a number of other leading businessmen of the day. There was a remarkable degree of public-spiritedness in all of this, with businessmen serving for a $1 a year and some hard-nosed negotiating over whether the government would own the war production facilities or intellectual property it was going to pay for, and how much profit business should expect to earn from the war effort. FDR did not want anyone coming out WWII with the kind of money and power that the DuPonts came out of WWI with.

Of course, in the 1930s, there were plenty of people, including leading lights of the Democratic Party, both liberal and conservative, who were highly skeptical of the motives and practices of corporate America. Organizing countervailing power was the major project of the New Deal.

I see the Rise and Fall of that New Deal America in the course of subsequent history. It’s not nostalgia, I think, so much as a recognition of the cyclical process of institutional aging. Powell was a spokesmodel for a senile, syphilitic corporate America, retaining the form but corruptly stripping out truth and substance from the precedents of WWII. George W Bush giving an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, and refusing to take “yes” for an answer was history repeating as farce. The war machine that ground Japan to helpless surrender in less than 4 years while invading Nazi Europe, couldn’t win a war in one of the poorest countries in the world in more than a decade of spending every year more than that country’s GDP.

That Empire, that world order, created in WWII and its aftermath, is coming apart, like a termite-ridden house or a cancer-ridden nonagenarian. It’s all blowback all the time, now. While we’ve been contemplating the consequences of the failure of the Iraq War, a humanitarian crisis is erupting out of central America that’s challenging Obama’s hardline immigration policy — Honduras is breaking down into lawlessness. I’m sure somebody on Fox News is struggling to find a way to make that into a Islamic Clash of Civilizations, and some leftist is trying to remember what Eisenhower had to do with it.

Thailand. Ukraine. The Euro Crisis. The list is very, very long, and remarkably diverse and, increasingly, all-encompassing.

bob mcmanus: When your only thoughts are “What do we do about Halliburton, Exxon, and the Pentagon,” and the answer is not “HRC instead of Paul” but rather what does America look like when corporations and the MIC are smoldering ruins then and only then will you be really helping Iraq.

Indeed.

I have a lot of friends, who want to talk about HRC, as if she doesn’t work for them, as if she really thinks she and Bill earn those $200,000+ speaking fees, by “working hard” and that she remains “independent”.

I don’t hold out much hope for organizing insurrection, especially in the goldfish bowl that is the twitterverse. But, remember Bruce’s dictum: Conservatives make revolutions.

The preservationist instinct among American liberals runs very strong, but is fundamentally misinformed about the limits of practical possibility. Their conservative counterparties . . . “misinformed” doesn’t begin to cover the case, does it?

@B Wilder
I don’t think the WW2-Iraq comparison makes a whole lot of sense.

As for the postWW2 world order falling apart, I think that judgment may contain a certain amt of wishful thinking. It’s often hard to distinguish serious from not-so-serious crises while they are actually occurring. So just listing headlines doesn’t constitute evidence of collapse. You may be right, but it prob. won’t be possible to tell for a while.

LFC @ 238

I didn’t mean to ignore you. I thought you answered your own question. I was referring to the history of American support for the Shah’s regime (and for shading that regime’s character away from constitutional monarchy and toward autocratic repression — SAVAK and all that.) So, yes, the 1953 coup d’état on behalf of corporate oil interests, though the history goes back at least to the Persian Corridor in WWII, when Mohammad Rezâ Pahlavi displaced his father with Soviet and British connivance, and American troops played an occupier’s role.

From an Iranian’s perspective, this wasn’t an isolated incident in 1953, it was a pattern of American subversion of Iranian national aspiration, which has continued to the present day. The U.S. leads Western efforts to impose draconian economic sanctions on Iran, which constrain their government’s efforts to develop the country and visibly reduce the prosperity of the country. The American story — nukes and Israel — is not credible to Iranians (and not entirely credible even to disinterested observers), but the threat of subversion, assassination, military attack or even invasion is very real. The U.S. attacked Iran in 2005 with the Stuxnet virus, and there have been naval incidents as well as assassination attempts. The U.S. or Israel has assassinated Iranian scientists, and the Iranians may have attempted to assassinate U.S. officials in central Asia in retaliation.

I don’t think it is really in the U.S. national interest for U.S. to be a friend of petty tyrants and mobsters, and an enemy of people trying to build their countries as modern, inclusive political economies, with elections and social welfare, etc. But, it’s what we do, because U.S. foreign policy is the creature of predatory business interests by default.

LFC @ 243

You don’t think Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on earth? I really didn’t think I would need a footnote for that one. You’re welcome to look it up. It is pretty damn poor, whether I “declare” it so, or not.

Dear Miss Trans-Havisham:
Me, a bigot without an actual targeted target for my bigoted bigotry.
Which is doable I suppose, somehow, just not sure how it would work.

My mom was in the NAACP, as a white person auxiliary supporter. I loved my mom for that, among many other examples of her compassion. Still do.
Racists left hateful weird-ass propaganda in her locked vehicle one time. I found that very upsetting. Still do.
What’s missing from this is what I do when I’m very upset by something. Besides rant around on the internet I mean.
I marched with Cesar Chavez and his supporters through the streets of Big-Ag Salinas, at a time when he was getting serious death threats from racists and plutocrat-sanctioned thugs.
The emotional base for those actions and reactions hasn’t changed for me, just deepened and gotten far more complex.
I wore a pink shirt and an ear-ring to high school at a time when that was indisputable proof of gayness. Big fan of lots of artists with out reputations. Elton John knows who I am, in real life. There’s no animosity between us, no rejection on either side. Not that it’s any of your business.

What you’re mistaking for bigotry is my rejection of your knee-jerk mindlessness, shielded as it is by political conformity and the undeniable historical fact of prejudice.
Much the same way that Zionists hide behind the active shield of accusations of anti-Semitism to avoid the truth.
And just as in that fetid cess-pool of irrational defensiveness, once they get hold of you…gaah.

Thanks JThomas, for your somewhat off-center sort-of advocacy.

@238:

Sistani is, in fact, Iranian (“Persian”), though he resides in Iraq. His accent speaking classical Arabic has often been remarked upon.

@Roy,
actually, according to my observations MPAV is a male flaming troll (Victoria, the Canadian province, is its habitat). No communication possible, no point replying.

Who do we blame for the mistake of this discussion thread?

#237

/ Also no one has ever been convinced by quoting Sun Tzu at them in a pseudo-deep way.

“You can lead a force to slaughter, but you cannot make them think.”

I grant you free will so your choices are not my problem.

However, I would like to learn from you and what I’ve noticed of your comments are almost entirely your disapproval other people due to throwaway phrases they put in. I’d like it if you give me more to work with.

255: Never can be sure what you mean, and I couldn’t find a quote, but googling did lead me to Savitsky, Ramon Fernandez, and “The Idea of Order at Key West” for which I thank you.

Sometimes it just feels so hard to learn anything.

@258:

Oh, come on Bobby Mc. In response to B.W.’s dissing of Powell (and implicitly Holbo), I posted the title @104. Since no one took the hint, I posted the text of the poem @156. I don’t know when the poem was written, prolly in the 1930’s, but the cold man who peddled fire insurance was prolly the premier poet-inquirer into American Idealism. It seems a relevant citation. Almost prophetic.

There are no irony tags on the tubz, but sometimes contemplative reflection is better than piss-poor arguments.

Layman @ 249: I read the whole passage, looking for the intervention, but never found it.

Don’t be a jerk. It’s not my job to teach you the history of the Second World War.

The bases agreements with Britain, the gift of 50 destroyers, naval cooperation with Britain and Lend-Lease aid were the most important substantive interventions; the Atlantic Charter statement was the most important moral commitment. All occurred before Pearl Harbor.

That the U.S. and the Axis powers regarded each other as enemies headed toward war was not a secret in 1939-41, and hostilities took place in advance of a declaration of war.

But, since you need instruction, here’s a helpful timeline:

July 1937 – Japanese and Chinese troops exchange fire in a skirmish near the Marco Polo Bridge, beginning the Second World War.

December 1937 – USS Panay attacked by Japan during runup to the Nanking Massacre.

September 1938 – FDR appeals to Hitler for peaceful resolution of the dispute with Czechoslovakia.

September 1939 – Germany invades Poland; Great Britain and France declare war against Germany.

September 1939 – The U.S. begins “Neutrality Patrol” in the western Atlantic.

September 1939 – Soviet Union defeats Japanese army in major border clash; Japan ends ambitions in Siberia. Soviet Union invades Poland.

October 1939 – U.S. “Neutrality Patrol” begins reporting contacts with warships “promptly” and “in plain English” to aid the British Navy in locating enemy shipping. A Conference of Foreign Ministers of the American Republics meeting in Panama agreed to extend the patrolled neutrality zone to the northeast coast of South America.

November 1939 – The Neutrality Act of 1939 ends the arms embargo against Britain and France, permitting cash-and-carry sales.

September 1940 – U.S. institutes its first peacetime draft. Polls indicate more than two-thirds of Americans support compulsory military training of young men.

September 1940 – U.S. gives Britain and Canada 50 destroyers in “exchange” for base rights along the Western Atlantic. Additionally, unrelated to the destroyer deal, the U.S. agrees to build an airbase on Bermuda and to establish bases in Newfoundland, relieving Britain from responsibility.

October 1940 – US ends steel and scrap export to Japan.

December 1940 – FDR declares the U.S. should become the “Arsenal of Democracy”, proposing aid to Canada and Britain in their war effort. A five-fold increase in the defense budget to $10 billion proposed.

February 1941 – FBI infiltrates major Germany spy ring in the U.S.

March 1941 – Lend-Lease enacted by the U.S., effectively authorizing unlimited aid to Britain. Extended to China in April and in October to the Soviet Union.

April 1941 – FDR authorized a Special Air Unit, later known at the Flying Tigers, equipped with American aircraft and staffed by volunteers recruited from the U.S. military services, to serve in China.

April 1941 – A U.S. Navy base established at Bermuda, for a Neutrality Patrol operation and a carrier group. U.S. naval forces begin patrols along the South American coast from a base in Trinidad.

April 1941 – USS Niblack attacked a German U-boat, while rescuing the survivors of a Dutch ship sunk by that U-boat.

May 1941 FDR declares National Emergency in relation to the world war.

June 1941 – U.S. freezes all German and Italian assets and orders all German and Italian consulates closed by July 10.

June 1941 – Germany attacks the Soviet Union

June 1941 – U.S. ends petroleum export to Japan (Many contemporaries thought the cutoff of oil might lead Japan to attack the Dutch East Indies, where Royal Dutch Shell had major refinery capacity.)

July 1941 – The U.S. took military control of Iceland from Britain, which had occupied the country since May 1940, landing a contingent of U.S. Marines. U.S. Navy plans to escort U.S.-flag shipping to Iceland in coordination with British convoys.

July 1941 – U.S. assumed responsibility to patrol Greenland waters, pursuant to an agreement with the Danish ambassador in Washington, originally offered in April 1941 (on the anniversary of the German occupation of Denmark). A U.S. Coast Guard cutter destroyed a German weather station there in September. (The Danish government in occupied Denmark declared the Ambassador a traitor.)

July 1941 – FDR federalized the Philippine Army, recalling MacArthur from retirement to service as Far East commander.

July 1941 – Roosevelt demanded Japan withdraw all its forces from Indochina. The U.S., Britain and the Netherlands declared a joint oil embargo of Japan.

August 1941 – FDR and Churchill, meeting in Newfoundland, issued a joint declaration of post-war aims and objectives, the Atlantic Charter. In September, all the European governments-in-exile, the Free French and the Soviet Union endorsed the Atlantic Charter as a common statement of principles guiding the Allied war efforts.

September 1941 – The U.S. claimed the USS Greer was attacked by German U-boat off Iceland. FDR ordered the U.S. Navy to “shoot on sight” German and Italian naval vessels in the western Atlantic.

October 1941 – USS Kearny, one of three destroyers dispatched from Iceland to relieve a Canadian convoy under U-boat “wolf pack” attack, was struck by a German torpedo.

October 1941 – USS Reuben James, sailing from Newfoundland escorting an eastbound convoy, sunk by German U-boat.

Which they were probably offered first anyway.

Ronan(rf) @ 247: What corporate interests are placated by isolating Iran?

It’s the Saudis and their allied Gulf states, whose fear and loathing of the Iranians, drive this. And, the Saudis have many friends in international oil and international finance. Not least among them, the House of Bush.

That conflict and enmity have many dimensions: ethnic, cultural, historical, religious, as well as political and economic. The key economic problem is the extractive resource economy model that the Saudis exemplify, which practically requires an extremely reactionary politics, even if tradition and religion did not put such politics on steroids. Big oil, big money, and repression attract a very ugly sort of Western support.

Iran is a challenge to Saudi Arabia on many levels. It’s a big challenge to its religious authority and cultural authority, to an extent and depth that no one in the West can appreciate. (Locally, Iran is the populist religious leader of the underclass, which doesn’t make the Saudis or Gulf emirates love them anymore.) More important with regard to the Western interests, Iran doesn’t embrace the extractive resource economy model to the same extent, doesn’t seek to concentrate wealth in the hands of a very few, and repress the rest, and so does not appear to be as open to corruption by the corrupt. Iran wants to sell a relatively modest quantity of oil and natural gas, and buy stuff — buy development into a modern industrial superstate — not just financial instruments for a sovereign wealth fund.

Can I be viceroy?

Sistani was more like Khrushchev to Al-Sadr’s Che.

@266 – okay, fair enough. Even if that is the case (and I don’t personally buy all of it, but that doesnt really matter) it still doesn’t say that US policy is driven specifically by ‘corporate interests.’ US (oil) policy in the region is driven to protect oil supplies, and so protect (US friendly) oil producers. A lot of times (particularly since the 70s) the US has explictly sided with their allies against the interests of US oil companies. (particularly in the 70’s when the local regimes started demanding more control over supplies)

Ronan(rf) #271: “It obviously didn’t create sectarian differences, but exacerbated them.”

What was new that wasn’t latent before? There was no love lost between these two tribes. The fact that the US got rid of Saddam is not the cause of this. The fact that when things are free to go tribal, everybody chooses sides for fear of life is something like a proximate “cause”, but this “exacerbation” is splitting more hairs. The Shi’ites were already under fear of life. They were 60% of the total population and were kept under Saddam’s thumb, sometimes violently. Payback started immediately. Now the Shia are up to almost 70% (I think). Imagine that the fundamentalist Tea Party in Congress was 60-70% of the US population.

” I wish people would stop referring to the US occupation of Japan as a success for democracy. The US influence on the Japanese constitution resulted in one of the most corrupt democracies among the a.i.d. nations. Dan Lazare’s book on the US Constitution and its ideology in which he contrasts the German and Japanese occupation (in the German case, the US tinkering was more effectively resisted) is quite illuminating.”

This is a point worth remembering but on the other hand considering that Japan ended up being one of the richest countries in the world, as well as one of the safest, they couldn’t have done THAT bad a job.

j.c. halasz:
Sistani is, in fact, Iranian

noted.

#276

This is a point worth remembering but on the other hand considering that Japan ended up being one of the richest countries in the world, as well as one of the safest, they couldn’t have done THAT bad a job.

Thank you! That makes a lot of sense.

Of course I think objecting to calling someone a “Dyke” also makes a lot of sense….

I wouldn’t forbid you to do that. I’d consider it hypocritical on my part to say it’s OK to scorn somebody by calling her a dyke and then say it’s wrong for you to scorn them by calling them a racist/sexist/etc.

My preference (which I don’t say you have any obligation to honor) is that you also look at what else they say, and perhaps respond to whatever they say that’s worth responding to, beyond their casual epithets. And if it happens to turn out that you wind up praising somebody for some special insight in the same comment that you scorn them for some of their attitudes, there’s nothing terribly wrong with that.

Ronan(rf) #277: “There are plenty of countries… The point is that the relevance of sectarian identities is dependent on context, not fixed in perpetuity…”

The Baathists repressed religious movements of any sect. It was a centralized dictatorship. To get to a democracy, the dictator (Saddam) would have to been followed by a more Western-liberal sort of person with the agenda of setting up a constitution. (So first you have to get the psychopath Uday out of the way, or hope he doesn’t murder Qusay, of whom we may know even less.) Let’s skip over this part of the wishful thinking to get to the nub: Any constitution that is not the Koran itself is in direct violation of the Islamic political ideal, which is that the Koran directly determines the politics and the courts. We are seeing this objection raised in “plenty” of countries… Thus ANY move toward democracy in Iraq will directly unleash a fundamentalist religious belief that will make its own decisions on how things go. (Assad’s problem in Syria, etc.) And in the case of Iraq, that makes it a Shia vs. Sunni bloodbath in addition, because they have fundamentally different interpretations of Islam. Which may not be fixed into perpetuity, but has been going strong for about a thousand years. And that is why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld started having worried looks in their photographs already by around the Spring of 2004, and that is why they tried to impose a strongman (first, Chalabi), and that is why al Sistani out-maneuvered Bush and got elections much sooner. Because elections are a means to an end, but they will NOT lead to a secular constitutional democracy in Iraq. Not any time soon it would appear.

@284 – again though you’re arguing a strawman. I’m not talking about ‘secular constitutional democracy’ in Iraq, I’m arguing against your extremely simplistic take on sectarian relations in Iraq (and regionally) which doesn’t make any allowance for the multiple non sectarian identities and movements that exist(or have existed) in the region (nationalist, secular, pan Arab) or the specific reason there has been a ‘religious turn’ in the last three decades.

“Any constitution that is not the Koran itself is in direct violation of the Islamic political ideal”

This is nonsensical. Plenty of religious movements have shown themselves willing to accomodate themselves to political reality. (which means a constitutional order that isn’t just Koranic law verbatim) There are variances across regimes, across movements (across people) about what role they see for religion in governance. (And although it seems clear that at this moment most countries, if genuinely democratic, would vote for parties commited to some incorporation of religious doctrine into governing institutions it *doesn’t* mean that this has to be the most extreme, caricatured version you are pushing, making any cross sectarian unity impossible)

I mean you might as well be arguing that the Northern Irish conflict was fought over the concept of transubstantiation, rather than the specific form the Northern state took (sectarian, discriminatory and exclusionary towards Catholics) the emergence of and response to the Civil Rights movement (which was in large part non sectarian and willing to work through the northern state, afaik) and then the space allowed for sectarian and irredentist movements to instigate a conflict that broke down (substantially) on sectarian lines. That is *not to say* that sectarian identity is not important in Northern Ireland, it is to say that it is important in specific ways at specific times. (And the solution *has* been – because it had to be – some form of cross sectarian unity and inclusive governance – which is fragile and doesn’t work perfectly but has largely resolved the violence)
When one form of governance is challenged by another (in this case authoritarianism in the Middle East) it is *very difficult* for any meaningful change to occur (because so many elites are invested in the previous system; economic, political, security etc) and any success will depend on the interaction between the old elites and the reformists. As in Syria the political and security establishment responded with violence, which isolated the moderates, radicalised(and divided along sectarian/ethnic lines, somewhat) the opposition, and allowed a space for extremist religious organisations to flourish.(Which *don’t* receive popular support)
From that *can not* be extrapolated grand, uni causal theories of the Middle East state system, the Arab mind and the Muslim faith.

The Tom Tomorrow cartoon today is vicious and to the point! :D

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/23/1308368/-Cartoon-In-a-just-world

The Baathists repressed religious movements of any sect. It was a centralized dictatorship.

Yes. Although toward the end Saddam tried to look kind of religious because he needed support.

To get to a democracy, the dictator (Saddam) would have to been followed by a more Western-liberal sort of person with the agenda of setting up a constitution.

You figure it needed an Iraqi strongman to set up a constitution? I guess that’s one way to do it, but likely not the only way.

Any constitution that is not the Koran itself is in direct violation of the Islamic political ideal, which is that the Koran directly determines the politics and the courts. We are seeing this objection raised in “plenty” of countries…

If all the politicians and judges etc happen to be good muslims, then the Koran will directly determine politics and the courts. You don’t have to have it in the constitution etc, it will just work out that way. Voters who are good muslims will elect representatives who are good muslims etc.

Thus ANY move toward democracy in Iraq will directly unleash a fundamentalist religious belief that will make its own decisions on how things go. (Assad’s problem in Syria, etc.)

I agree that there is a tendency in that direction. You talk as if that’s the only factor that matters, but I think other things play a part too and this may not be enough to guarantee failure.

And in the case of Iraq, that makes it a Shia vs. Sunni bloodbath in addition, because they have fundamentally different interpretations of Islam.

That sounds like a good reason to do separation of church and state. Once a bunch of religious leaders see that it’s a question of getting their own version of Islam in complete charge of the government after the bloodbath is over, versus working out ways to continue to live in peace, there might be a strong religious movement to avoid the bloodbath.

Because elections are a means to an end, but they will NOT lead to a secular constitutional democracy in Iraq. Not any time soon it would appear.

Kurds might very well wind up with a secular constitutional democracy. Sunni Kurds and Shia Kurds seem to get along pretty well.

They might wind up with as many as three workable constitutional democracies in Iraq. Too soon to tell. I believe we could have much increased the likelihood of that sort of outcome if in 2003 we had done things that encouraged it instead of discouraged it. I don’t know whether they would have gotten a democracy, or three democracies, or seven democracies etc.

I don’t really know what was possible, and I don’t think you really know either. I want to think that there was a chance, and there might be another chance in coming years.

But I could be wrong. Maybe it was really 100% certain that the ethnic diversity in Iraq would lead to a long extended bloodbath, just as it is 100% certain that the ethnic diversity in the USA will lead to a long extended bloodbath.

Ronan(rf) #288, if you go to (say) the Wikipedia article on “Islamic democracy” you will see that number of current Islamic democracies is less than a handful — and Turkey is now questionable and, after watching the astonishing documentary “The Act of Killing,” you may think that the inclusion of Indonesia is a cruel joke.

Regardless, if you take the position that each country has its own path, and go on to imagine an alternative path for Iraq, then you might AT LEAST give us a step-by-step REALISTIC alternative procedure by which Iraq (NOT northern Ireland) might have come to the status of a “not free” (or “partly free”), “authoritarian regime” (or “hybrid state”), or whatever your definition of “democracy” is today. And “realistic” means do NOT say, “Well I don’t know, but it could have happened, and how do you know it couldn’t have?” Because I don’t really care. I worry about what is going on, right now. I knew this was going to devolve into wishful thinking, airy theory, and personal attacks, when I commented at number 114. So it has. What is important to a lot of lives NOW is whether ISIS is going to continue to beat back the dissolving Iraqi regulars, whether the Pershmerga can keep hold of Kirkuk, whether Iran is going to invade on behalf of the Shia, and whether the US Administration in obviously trying to prevent that is going to get more Americans shot up trying to support Baghdad.

But if “radical” means “going to the root,” wouldn’t your direction be downward?

I don’t mean it that way. We *come from* fundamental, down-to-earth realities and move forward.

Without having a preference for a sort of society you wish to create, it is impossible to “move forward”.

The radical front does have preferences, just not left or right preferences.

We are currently a small movement. The left and right tend to directly oppose each other, each trying hard to keep the other from achieving their goals. This results in a degree of stasis, although it looks to me like the right has gotten too much support for some of their stupidest ideas.

——-><——-
^

The problem is that when large forces are released this way without sufficient control, they can do considerable damage. So we try to point out that more than two possibilities are available, without actually pushing hard for third choices on a timescale that is so short they would be probably to be done wrong.

@294 – I am NOT claiming to have an easy fix solution to these incredibly complex, constantly evolving situations, let alone a step by step plan on how to turn Iraq into a liberal democracy. Why the hell would I ?Anyone selling such a solution is a charlatan.

I was responding to your initial definitive claims about what MUST be done, backed up by your stripped down simple retelling of HOW things are (ie it’s all about the Sunni/Shiite split). I’m saying I don’t think a Middle East with brand new borders is realistic because (1) it won’t(probably) get regional or international recognition (2) it probably won’t have domestic support (as similar plans in the 00s didn’t) (3) there *are other* cleavages in these societies not Sunni/Shiite (ie well formed national identities) and you don’t give any idea on how these new states will deal with minorities still under their control, create legitimacy etc (4) you haven’t shown how these states will be viable (how will you divide up resources) and (5) you haven’t shown that a region of small/medium sized sectarian states will be more stable.

So, my layman’s answer would be you have to work through what you already have (ie already formed (if in some cases weak), nation states) by first trying to bring control to insurgent areas, and then trying to incorporate minorities into power sharing governments (which might include some amount of regional religous autonomy).
What I (personally, ideally) would have liked to see post GulfWar 1 was not an Iraq isolated and crippled with sanctions, but integrated into the international system with diplomatic pressure put on reform and grassroots institution building. AGAIN this obviously wasn’t politically feasible, or a panacea, but that would be my ideal. I guess.

The point is I don’t have a solution (how could I?) but neither do you. But you can’t reduce this to simple stories (as you are doing imo) about artifical borders, religious divisions, and grand schemes of (unfeasible) border changes.

“Ronan(rf) #288, if you go to (say) the Wikipedia article on “Islamic democracy” you will see that number of current Islamic democracies is less than a handful — and Turkey is now questionable and, after watching the astonishing documentary “The Act of Killing,” you may think that the inclusion of Indonesia is a cruel joke. ”

So what ? Your argument that I was responding to was :

“Any constitution that is not the Koran itself is in direct violation of the Islamic political ideal, which is that the Koran directly determines the politics and the courts. We are seeing this objection raised in “plenty” of countries”

Your copy and past alone disproves this contention. (All I said was a number of poltical-religious movements *have* reconcilled themselves to the compromises of realistic politics. Including regionally – the Muslim Brotherhood (up until recently perhaps) in Egypt, Hamas, Hizballah. To varying degrees and with differing results, but to see them as having a completly recalcitrant position on religious issues is wrong -although you might have difficulty getting them to cede power organiationally)
And having watched ‘the act of killing’ (which I did see) doesn’t give one a clear eyed insight into Indonesian politics.

Ronan(rf) #298: The point is I don’t have a solution (how could I?) but neither do you.”

Wait a minute. I certainly did not claim that I have a solution. I described what appears to be happening: Iraq must break up.

I stick to describing what seems to be happening: it must break up. I doubt there will be many problems with international recognition, particularly of Kurdish oil. Meanwhile the other group identities and problems of stability do NOT appear to be stopping what is happening.

I think that you don’t like what you read emotionally, and so you impose your own interpretations upon it, and then you wish that something else must have been possible. That is the way many of us try to absolve ourselves from personal culpability (–or so it would appear, from this thread of comments.)

Where is the hard evidence that any of the Middle East fundamentalist movements that you name, have “reconciled themselves to the compromises of realistic politics”? Are you supposing that the “authoritarian regimes” predominating in the Wikipedia list of “Islamic democracy indices” are repressing their fundamentalists sects, and so therefore we are to call a sect’s quiescence in the face of repression, a “compromise to realist politics”? Because that may be how the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah and two dozen others would describe their situations.

And again, specifically in regard to Iraq: How do you propose “first trying to bring control to insurgent areas”? Are you going to send in US troops? Or else, why are we having a conversation about hypotheticals in some other situation, instead of thinking about Iraq?

Isn’t this sort of how we let the neoclowns get us into this mess in the first place?

#302

I certainly did not claim that I have a solution. I described what appears to be happening: Iraq must break up.

Yes. And now they have no way to break up without a fight.

We set up a Shia government and told them they owned the whole country, and we funded a big army for them. We tried to train it. They have no obvious way to back down from that. They aren’t about to negotiate how much of the country that the world has agreed they own, to give away to new governments. The armies will decide where the borders are.

In 2003 it probably didn’t need to be that way. Regions could have voted to decide who they wanted to join. Maybe they would have chosen to be a single nation. Maybe several nations. That approach likely wouldn’t get them borders that were defensible against each other, and that might or might not matter, up until they got some issue that was worth fighting a war over.

If they wound up with a map that looked like the South Vietnam agreement, or the UN partition of Israel/Palestine, it might have quickly been changed around by a war. But maybe not.

Now it’s definitely going to be settled by the armies, and if you’re the wrong kind of person on the wrong side of the border, then you either settle down and live with few rights, or you get yourself ethnic-cleansed. Maybe it didn’t have to be that way, but it does have to be that way now.

Glossolalic (misspelling of glossaholic)- a person addicted to vocabulary lists.

You’re so willing to write that you just don’t check when you’re wrong. Which can be funny I guess: it’s easy to set you up because you’re unwilling to use a search engine now and then.

PS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_2005

J Thomas #304: “We set up a Shia government…

NO. The US tried to set up a corrupt strongman and al Sistani demanded free elections, because the Shi’ites automatically would win.

Or mainly anyway.

In the UK, we have had a “majority” government which got 35% of the popular vote on a 60% turnout so with the active support of about 22% of the electorate – and how many of them were just voting to keep the other lot out?

Yes, and your voters aren’t about to actually fight over it.

If they cared, another 40% could go out and vote. And if they cared, they could get IRV or acceptance voting, and 35% of the vote wouldn’t win, the winner would get more than that.

But British voters are mostly satisfied with how it works. Also, Britain is an exceptionally rich nation and they can afford a strong enough police + military to put down any small revolutionary movement.

Imagine what it’s like in a poor country. Imagine that you get 3% of the population that supports the government enough to actually fight for it (as opposed to taking a military paycheck). And say 2% have expensive foreign weapons, and together that 5% roams around destroying stuff until maybe 15% of the population are internal refugees or have left the country.

Maybe the government lobs artillery shells your way because you are in “insurgent-controlled territory”. Maybe the insurgents stage a little raid and kill people on the street because they are assumed to be government supporters. Foreign nations offer to help you out with airstrikes and invasions etc. Or maybe they’ll settle for putting sanctions on you to teach you not to support the government or something.

If people believe that insurgency is not *necessary*, that all they have to do is convince the voters and they can win, it’s a whole lot less suffering. But if people start to believe that it doesn’t work — that through no fault of your own you cannot possibly influence public opinion without the active support of rich people, who won’t support you unless you give them the lions-share of goodies — then revolution starts to look like the only way.

..or, ignore the snark and hostility in that comment and let’s try and turn it into a conversation rather than succesion of lectures ?

Democracy works for different ends.

To my way of thinking, the most important of them is to provide a framework for negotiated settlements. Given a disagreement, you can

1. Agree to disagree.
2. Negotiate a settlement.
3. Fight.

#3 is expensive unless one side is ridiculously weak but still makes demands they can’t actually stand behind. If you use democracy for some other goal and then you wind up fighting, you’ll probably lose more from that than you gain from achieving your other goal. If you do achieve your other goal.

The vote in Iraq elected a Shi’ite government which started to systematically disempower the Sunni areas. If you were an Iraqi, what would you, yourself, have done to stop that?

If I could get the ear of Shias, tell them that we either need to secede from the majority-sunni lands or else try to cut them a decent deal. Because otherwise we’ll be fighting their armies within 5 years after the Americans leave. And civil war is expensive, it hurts a lot of people. Unless we have a plan to kill off or drive out most of the Sunnis, we’re going to have to live with them somehow, so why not try to be friendly? Not like they all worked for Saddam.

They might likely ignore that though, since the CIA told them that all the Sunnis are alike and all complicit in the killing of their political/religious leaders etc, so why should they be nice to any Sunnis? And the CIA told them that Sunnis are less than 20% of the population, so why worry about them? If Sunnis start trouble they can just get killed until they learn not to do that.

If I could get the ear of Sunnis, urge them not to boycott elections. Get Sunni figureheads who can legally run and get them elected. Also look for campaign issues that are not about sunni/shia but about issues that need to be handled. Boycott the elections and it will be an all-Shia government and the Americans will still fawn over it and give them lots of money. What good is that? Shias are officially a majority but by working with Kurds and splinter Shia groups we can stop them from getting too outrageous. We will fight later if we need to, and if we need to fight now it helps us to have a voice in the government.

In both cases, point out that there are well-established methods to avoid voting fraud, and we should campaign vigorously to get those methods used and not let the Americans cheat about the election results. An honest election might easily result in more Sunni votes and more Sadrist votes, and the Sadrists made a point of trying to make alliances with Sunnis.

But I notice that looking at what I just said, I’m falling into the usual trap. I’m talking about Sunnis and Shias as if they are unified blocs that each tend to agree with their own. This falls into the American trap. Think of the Other as a unified group that has its own goals opposed to yours, and they become The Enemy. But really they are diverse groups that can barely hold together enough to hang onto a common label. The unified group that coordinated well to achieve group goals was the US military. They were The Enemy if anyone was.

And now, it is too late for wishful thinking anyway: the Sunnis won’t lay down their guns again (it was, by the way, the American officers in the “surge” who convinced them to fight al Qaeda then lay down their guns to try to work with Shi’ite Baghdad, in the first place!

Yes. First we decided they were The Enemy and we persecuted them at great length. Then Petraeus figured out we could never win that way, and he listened to them when they tried to make a deal. But he didn’t persuade the Shias to make a deal, so eventually the whole thing fell through.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it) Why? because the Sunnis might surmise, quite correctly, that they will be killed if they do.

Probably so. Agreed that it’s probably too late now. After a lot of killing they might get too tired to continue and then be ready to make a deal. Or maybe they’ll negotiate for real earlier. I see no reason to expect it, but I don’t know all the little details of what’s going on with them.

Made. That. Up.

Right.

The fundamental fallacy implicitly accepted by nearly all comments above is that external powers intervening in a nation’s affairs can design the outcomes they wish to see. The only choice interveners have is the side that they back from among the genuine contenders. After that, if you succeed you get the kind of state that your proxies want, and if you lose you get the kind of state that your proxies’ adversaries want. If you stay out, you can’t influence which side wins. But you can’t invent a side (incidentally, have you noticed that Chalabi’s back on the news?), and you can’t really modify a side, because the only sanction you have is to move to one of the other sides that you’ve already decided are even less desirable.

J Thomas #318: “If I could get the ear of Shias… If I could get the ear of Sunnis…”

You are supposing they haven’t already heard this stuff, or know it.

I am very slow… It suddenly occurs to me that Iraq is almost certain to break up now, because if Iran enters to defeat the ISIS forces which are now routing Maliki’s army, to save Shi’ite lives, then that means Sunni countries like the Saudis may jump in to fight back. Either that, or the US goes back in for a full-scale occupation again, which the US people are unlikely to accept. They have had enough of this. So the outside world may force the partition, just to keep the oil supply stable. Watch and see if the G8 holds a sudden meeting.

You need to go one step further. “I was really wrong. But now that I have made a big mess, it is my responsiblity to work and to fund undoing the chaos I have created, to undo my error not by abandoning a people to genocide and civil war, but instead by using my might to protect innocent people and my resources to rebuild and ensure stability and safety. I won’t give in to the prevailing public opinion again–which this time happens to be ‘Abandon Iraq, we need to take care of our own.'”
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2213508949/

roy@305: I’ll take honest on-site emotion-driven testimony above cold-hearted armchair rationalism any day.

Cold-hearted armchair rationalism for me!

It’s far more human, way less insectile.

Roy, are you a speciesist in addition to all those other bad things?

#324

The vote in Iraq elected a Shi’ite government which started to systematically disempower the Sunni areas. If you were an Iraqi, what would you, yourself, have done to stop that?

“If I could get the ear of Shias… If I could get the ear of Sunnis…”

You are supposing they haven’t already heard this stuff, or know it.

??? You asked me what I’d do. Iraq had a population around 35 million, so if the power was evenly distributed I would have roughly one thirty-five millionth of the influence.

I’m getting the impression what you’re trying to ask me is, “If you were an iraqi with a magic wand who could make things happen the way you want them….”

No, that isn’t it. It’s more like you’re asking a rhetorical question, like “Can’t you see that what happened was 100% inevitable and there was nothing anybody could have done that could have changed it in the slightest.”

No, I don’t see that. It could be true. It could be false. If we could go back and try it over a few thousand times with variations, we could find out. But we don’t know how to do that. So we don’t know.

Except somehow you give the impression that you think you know just how 100% inevitable it was, you 100% know there could not have been any different result no matter what anybody did, and anyway nobody could have done anything different.

And I wonder how you know that.

J Thomas #331: “It’s more like you’re asking a rhetorical question, like “Can’t you see that what happened was 100% inevitable and there was nothing anybody could have done that could have changed it in the slightest.”

Not at all! And I think you make many good observations, a lot of good points. But I am interested in what is happening at this moment, and so alternative scenarios for the past which are not attempts to be 100% solid just fill me with more misgivings and dread.

Ronan (e.g. @123) already said what I just said about “must.”

This metaphor should suffice for tonight:

@325/6 – ok, I give up. I don’t think you’ve even tried to look past the first link in the chain here. You just seem to be reacting on an a daily basis to whatever happens to be on CNN at any given moment. G’luck.

“whatever happens to be on CNN at any given moment”

Yeah, it certainly does sound a bit like what a “very serious person” would say: the Sunnis want this, the Shia that, the Kurds the other; they all hate each other, consumed by tribalism. IOW: silly wogs.

Various people talk about Sunnis as if they were a monolithic bloc. They aren’t and never have been (neither are Shias). In particular, the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia are not typical of the historical mainstream Sunni tradition, and are a relatively recent phenomenon, although there has always been a minority of militant Sunni puritans.

During WWI the Turks were allied with the Central Powers, so the British gave support to ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia who was fighting a rival clan which had the support of the Ottomans. The House of Saud had a historical partnership with the Wahhabis.

The British also supported a very different Sunni leader, Hussein ibn Ali, hereditary Emir of Mecca and Hejaz. He was a Sharif, that is a descendant of the Prophet via his eldest grandson Hassan. But the Wahabbis despised the (in their view) more religiously lax Hussain. After the end of WWI and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Hussein made the strategic mistake of declaring himself hereditary Caliph (like declaring yourself Pope perhaps). A genuinely outraged (as well as opportunistic) ibn Saud invaded and expelled Hussein, who was abandoned by his erstwhile allies. the British.

The British did however carve out new kingdoms for two of Hussein’s sons, Abdullah and Faisal. These kingdoms, Transjordan and Iraq, were in constant conflict with ibn Saud and his Ikhwan (Wahhabi fighters) until ibn Saud was threatened personally by their rebellion and he suppressed them at the Battle of Sabilla in 1929.

So, WWI and its aftermath destroyed the existing balances in the Middle East and sowed the seeds of more or less all the current conflicts there. It also firmly established Wahhabiism, which has been become a global Sunni movement, financed by the Western nations who have bought Saudi oil for generations.

Bob @340 4) Look at the Abbasids. under their rule, Baghdad became the most culturally advanced city in the world, because of the hadith “the ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbassid#Islamic_Golden_Age

..although I will reply to the comment directed to me @325.

Lee – the thing is you’re not replying to *any* of the comments directed at you with any substance, so you responded to my 315 with:

” Ronan(rf) #315: “not going to happen” — Appears to be happening now. ”

But you clipped my statement, the not going to happen bit is:

” Look, you haven’t even defined what you mean by break up. Do you mean the actual dissolution of the Iraqi state (recognised internationally and regionally – not going to happen) ”

It *is not happening now*, it might in the future (though I would doubt it) but the international and regional response is not to dissolve the Iraqi state. (Quite clearly) This is important, because it speaks directly to the feasibility of your argument.(Even if regional authority is ceded, if no one outside Iraq is willing to acknowledge border changes then the future is still an Iraqi state, with different levels of regional autonomy. As said above)

You said (quoting me):

“This doesn’t really mean anything.” — What doesn’t mean anything is, “I don’t think a Middle East [do you mean Iraq?] with brand new borders is realistic because (1) it won’t(probably) get regional or international recognition” — What?! ”

It doesn’t mean anything to say that ‘Kurdish oil will have international recognition’, when what we’re talking about is a Sunni/Shi’ite split in the country.

I am talking about Iraq *and* the region. Any official change in borders in Iraq (again) will need acknowledgment internationally and regionally. Any official change in the borders (NOW) will more than likely make the situation worse; change the dynamics in regional conflicts, empower sectarian groups, becoming a self fulfilling prophecy (leading to more ethnic cleansing). Again, you haven’t shown whether such states are viable (economically, militarily or politically) or if they have domestic legitimacy.

If you are making the more limited claim that Baghdad will not be able to control Sunni majority areas for the forseeable future, then fine. But that’s a differen’t argument.

“The evidence is that Hizbullah and the Muslim Brotherhood have shown themselves willing to work through political systems” — These groups still have the aim of eliminating their opponents, if possible. They are compromising with the repression to get to a stronger position. They don’t want to live with Israel either. ”

Again there’s no point going into this, but you’re ignoring the history of these movements, the organisational and ideological complexity both with these organisations specifically and within Islamic movements more generally, and imagining some impossible level of homogenity amongst Islamic belief.

Here’s something that appeared at the MC yesterday, which is short and general but should caution against such simplistic positions:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/06/23/what-do-we-mean-by-islamist/

Just to add, then I’ll finish – the idea of regional recognition of partition does seem unlikely. The lens through which security threats (primarily) among the main powers in the Gulf are viewed is domestic regime legitimacy (which is why they interfer in each-others affairs through cross national sectarian/ideological networks, and which is why the Saudi’s have spent so much time and money in stabilising monarchs regionally – because they see any challenge to monarchs as an ideational challenge to their rule). They live off the status quo.
The idea that they would be willing to acknowledge a precedent like the partition of Iraq seems very unlikely to me (though I might well be wrong) which *would* (more than likely) cause trouble for them domestically by empowering opposition in their countries. (Not to mention that a divided and weak – though not partitioned or constantly unstable – Iraq is probably in their interests)

@345 – because you *consistently* refused to define what you mean by breakdown, disputed that there was such thing as an Iraqi national identity and imagined everything in purely sectarian terms.
Since I now know what the hell you’re talking about, then I guess I do agree (to a degree)

In fact, you quoted my sentence at #123!

Bob McManus #340: “1) Will the Maliki gov’t ( for the sake of brevity, even with Maliki gone let’s call it that) negotiate with that local Sunni sheik, some local autonomy, profit and power-sharing?”

The longer answer is that the Sunnis are a mixed bunch: a) ISIS fundamentalist killers, b) live-and-let-live, scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours locals like the sheiks, and c) more-or-less secular Baathist military people who appear to be the cause of the military successes. So I will GUESS that the sheik isn’t going to do a deal with Baghdad, because 1. his new “friends” are ISIS who just handed him the management of the oil refinery, and so 2. if he crosses them, he will get his head chopped off.

An interesting question is what these Sunnis will do to each other, if and when they can establish a stable control in these areas. Here is a new interview with an ISIS fighter:

https://elijahjm.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/isis-usa-decision-to-hit-us-will-have-a-positive-outcome-and-will-show-a-usal-maliki-alliance-against-the-sunni/

Kjs, Please do condescend at some point, and pray tell us what has truly transpired!

Neither “kjs” or “David” left addresses

Probably LGM

Ok, shall we agree that John Holbo is sometimes a victim of his own honesty and humility? On this happy midsummer day let’s raise a glass to the water-boarding that carried Hitchens off to his grave. Tis a pity he was not boarded in blood.

“Cold-hearted armchair rationalism for me!”

He was praising riverbend and contrasting her with people here, I think. He had a point, IMO.

The other point he and Bruce and Bob M and others are making seems also about right–calling the Iraq War a “mistake” doesn’t seem quite right. I don’t really know what’s going on behind the scenes, but it certainly isn’t well-intentioned people doing their best to make the world safe for democracy.

On Colin Powell, someone way way upthread quoted a report he wrote on the My Lai massacre. I can’t find my book on the subject, but Powell was asked to investigate the initial reports of something bad happening, and he duly came out with a report that said nothing bad had happened. He’s been an apparatchik his whole professional life. That’s our respectable Colin Powell. He knew how the system worked and rose as high as he did because of it.

They really hated riverbend because she didn’t fit the narrative – it was sad to see, but also very educational.

I remember reading Riverbend just after her blog started. Someone mentioned her on DeLong’s blog sometime in late 2003. I think she was the only independent information source to be found in those days. I sent her a message but I don’t know if she got it.

I remember that it was through her posts that I learned that there was a lot of Sunni-Shia intermarriage in Baghdad under Saddam’s regime.

My post went into moderation and I don’t know why. Here’s the first part of it, I want to see if it was in here.

#357

…but the rhetoric of reaction never works very far (one of Hirshman’s points, I think). It doesn’t protect us against being hornswoggled into the next war, because they bring in the new-and-improved liars, who find another ridiculous national security reason, which momentarily boggles everybody because the left refuses to think hard about national security issues. Always.

You always use these absolutist terms. Every single time, you take a situation which is changing fast and all uncertain, and you always say that there is only one possible way it can go and there’s nothing anybody can do to make any difference to it.

You never, ever admit that there can be even the tiniest bit of uncertainty. And you never will.

“ps is politico actually good these days ?”

Mostly still establishment garbage. But something interesting slips through from time to time.

#371

I should have put a smiley on that or something. It was a joke.

So how long has that wordpress version of D-Squared Digest been in existence anyway?

I don’t know, I usually enjoy Roy’s stuff. It will be a travesty if folks manage to get him banned.

@Ze Kraggash: ha ha.
@Yama: I don’t think anyone is calling for banning him. I’m not, at any rate.

Barry #378 — It is actually possible to be undecided about something. Bush never fooled me. I still believe that getting rid of dictators is usually a good idea.

“One of the things that the Bush gaggle did was to toss up every reason they could think of, even contradictory ones.”

This was what nearly drove me mad at the time. I mean if the Bush administration REALLY believed that Iraq had WMD then putting a couple of hundred thousand American troops in close proximity to these weapons seems like the last thing you would want to do….

“I’m not asking for Roy to be banned. It’d be swell if he was less of everything he pretends not to be and wrote coherently.”

Same here. Though it would be nice if a member of management would chime in on his use of homophobic slurs.

Me: “One of the things that the Bush gaggle did was to toss up every reason they could think of, even contradictory ones.”

MPAVictoria “This was what nearly drove me mad at the time. I mean if the Bush administration REALLY believed that Iraq had WMD then putting a couple of hundred thousand American troops in close proximity to these weapons seems like the last thing you would want to do….”

Yes, are we liberating them or killing them for doing 9/11?

This piece by Digby seems pertinent. Basically we will never be free of these people.

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/25/the_rights_scoundrel_returns_why_is_elliott_abrams_allowed_back_in_polite_company/

Getting rid of dictators a good idea?

People should get rid of their own dictators – and sometimes they do. The Iranians eventually got rid of the Shah, who was installed by the British in a coup against his own father, and then made a dictator by another CIA/MI6 coup which deposed Mossadegh, the elected PM. Of course it went wrong, but whose fault was that?

Perhaps things would have been better if they’d been left alone to start with?

In my lifetime the US has supported many dictators and many coups d’etat It is not a dictatorship itself: more a corrupt but self-righteous oligarchy with a democratic veneer. It remind me of Athens before the Peloponnesian War.

It remind me of Athens before the Peloponnesian War.

There are probably two competing oligarchies, maybe Pareto’s “foxes” and “lions”

Stirling Newberry’s brilliant 2004 piece “Sparta 286 Athens 254” is apparently no longer available. Pieces are still out there, in these archives and MYDD.

The second was a way of saying that the social changes that come with a high production, high value added economy – namely a cosmopolitan society – would happen under Kerry.

That is Kerry was presented, accurately, as being a threat to the social and economic hierarchy to the land owning classes. Land, which holds its value through having cheap gasoline, demands a military machine to obtain the oil and to maintain the social inequality should it come to that. Kerry was, accurately, presented as someone who would not go to war for oil.

If one looks at the map – the division – between the large blocks of the country whose value is sunk into rent and the smaller city areas that generate value through capital – is clear.

This social structure – paralleling the ancien regime of France is based on two alliances. The oligarchic rich place their faith in Church and State, they ally with the landowning peasants that stock the army, against the tradesman and the very bottom day laborers. The hieararchical society tries to tax by forced savings the tradesmen, and keep the “rabble” in line with force. The hiearchy is not a mere marriage of convenience – each knows that it needs the other. The reactionary side of the ledger is not cleavable between “economic and social conservatives” – because the wealthy knows it needs a military, and the miltiary knows it needs someone to batter the rising professional classes into line.

“Even if you believe “getting rid of a dictator” is a thing you should assemble a massive killing machine to accomplish, the guys running it were obvious idiots and assholes. They were not worth supporting in the achievement of any foreign policy goal.”

Yep. It was very much a case of bad policy being carried out in a bad way by bad people.

Roy when you stop posting bigoted things I will stop calling you out.

You may not have noticed, but every now and then he calls you out for calling him out. When he does it, it isn’t as boring as when you do it.

This isn’t your space. You don’t own it and you do not get to tell me what to do.

You appear to believe that it’s your space, that you own it and you get to tell him what to do. Why is that?

Every now and then he posts some keyword and it’s utterly predictable how you will respond. It’s like he’s established a Pavlovian response, he says the word and you jump. It isn’t really any big deal to me, but I’d like it if you could arrange to be less predictable. Maybe say something witty. The more predictable the text, the less information content….

Yep nothing more informative than “dyke”.. ..

I am sure that no one else besides me cares about this but up thread roy called me a “Snitch” for saying that management here should comment on his use of a homophobic slur.

A Snitch.

That is what the bullies in middle school called me when, after trying to deal with their abuse by laughing along with it, by ignoring it and by fighting back, I finally couldn’t take it anymore and went to the administration and asked for help.

A Snitch.

Roy is more like those childhood bullies than he probably wants to admit to himself. They also called people “dyke” and “faggot”. They too felt that they were hilarious and original. And they also hated being called on their bullshit.

So call me a Snitch roy and I shall judge you by the company you keep.

401

403
To deny access:

1) When attempting to access a forbidden webpage
2) When attempting to perform a physical action
1) Yeah, I tried to FTP that file, but got 403’ed
2) Yeah, I tried to have anal sex with Meagan last night but got 403’ed.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=403

“It is deeply insulting in the modern time to be called a bigot, and that’s not nearly all the abusive shit I’ve taken from you.”

He’s upset, but can’t change. Oh well.

I can’t really tell what’s going on in his head, but my impression is that this is just tu quoque.

Of course he wants to say you’re abusive, that you’re worse than what you’re ranting about. But it’s about like somebody on Red State saying you’re a nanny-state abortion-loving commie. It just goes with the territory. Nothing to get upset about.

We can’t prescribe what other people get upset about, but it’s become a much nicer world* since people started getting upset about the language bigots use.

*Various caveats here regarding planetary destruction. Oops.

“I know there are people in the world who do not love their fellow human beings–and I hate people like that. Tom Lehrer

Hey, who changed my comment numbers?

Ha. Oh lord. Where to start? I’ll start at the end: my super-secret agenda is ██████ ████████ and we █████ to the ███████ and all █████████ must be dealt with accordingly.

Roy, when you talk about those chihuahuas, you remind me of Nietzsche on the priests he imagined to be his persecutors: “. . . a species of malicious dwarf. Subterraneans.”

That’s the crazy Friedrich of Ecce Homo; he of the egomania, paranoia, and persecution complex.

Dare I suggest that, like the great man, you bring it on yourself?

I’m guessing it has something to do with occasionally, and apparently randomly putting comments into moderation. Which begs the question, I think. Am I using that right?

Place it. Evidence. Me, bigot. Where? When?

If your brain is the problem examinations by your brain will not reveal the problem. Self-testing requires external standards and requires that you trust those external standards over your own judgement.

You cannot trust your own judgement of your own judgement, for reasons that should be obvious. You need to ask other people, and you need to listen.

It’s because previous comments have come out of moderation and now take up old numbers.

What is actually happening is kind of silly, because the premise is that a vastly different point of view is being espoused, you will hear it no where else!, and the rude language is necessary to make the points. But we already know all this stuff. There is nothing new. The rude language is a diversion from the fact that an interlocutor actually has said nothing new, and may have nothing new to say.

Just don’t use those words, even ironically. Please? It would be really nice to just let them go.

All intolerant people should be shot!

I’m sorry to say that some of what I’ve seen on this page smacks of cyber-bullying.

There are very few of us who are not bigoted about something in unguarded or angry moments. Unfortunately, the need to hate or disparage appears to be embedded in our species: there seems to be a need to increase our own self esteem by diminishing that of others, and their perceived value as human beings.

Orwell hit on something fundamental when he coined “Hate Week”: in reality, every week is Hate Week in parts of our media. Certain networks survive by feeding the Dark Side of the Force. The intention is to poison public debate and bully people into not thinking for themselves. That’s how, at least initially, the war machine neutered opposition to the invasion of Iraq.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese-eating_surrender_monkeys

The Temporary Name 06.27.14 at 7:01 am:

“Just don’t use those words, even ironically.”

Doubleplusgood!

“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.”

Yes Sasha, those racial slurs become the tools of fascists even when the masters of irony use them.

A further note about the reasons for my (symbolic) vote. Consciously or unconsciously, bigotry does often disguise itself these days as iconoclasm, at least among the usual suspects, but despite all the puffery from his accusers, I don’t find that to be the case with Roy’s disputed comments. For what it’s worth….

despite all the puffery from his accusers

It’s not puffery to point out that Roy can’t seem to operate without using slurs for people I know and love.

I think it was the second paragraph of R. Belmont’s 205 (time stamp 6/22/14 at 3:48 a.m.) that drew MPAV’s initial objection here. If Belmont’s language had been necessary or helpful to make an interesting or original point, that would be one thing. But as Lee Arnold said above, it wasn’t. The result was simply to draw an objection (which could have been foreseen) from MPAV, and a resulting round of charges and countercharges.

Personally I wouldn’t object to the interesting, intelligent, purposeful, or ironic use of language that, in a more straightforward context, would be deemed offensive or even bigoted. But since R. Belmont’s use of the language in question was not interesting (or even that intelligible) , the result of his using it was just to offend MPAV (and prob. some others) and start an exchange that ended up being a diversion from the substance of the thread (such as it was). (And as J Thomas noted above, MPAV and R. Belmont have had these exchanges before.)

RB thinks he is being persecuted by a pack of “neurotic chihuahuas,” but the feeling is heightened (if not created) by an apparent overestimation of his own literary and expressive gifts. Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian could get away with using any language he wanted, any way he wanted, b.c it’s a great novel. RB’s comments here, not so much.

The CT commenting policy, last I looked at it, puts limits on freedom to choose particular modes of expression, and although it might be a close call, a case can be made that RB has crossed the limits in question. But that’s really a judgment for the blog’s owners, none of whom has weighed in.

I see nothing wrong with criticising a comment as bigoted/offensive. What makes me uncomfortable is when I see contributors being ganged up on with comment which I perceive as“we know what you are like and we don’t want your sort around here! “

As LFC@ 439 suggests, the comments policy makes clear that we are all guests, and the blog owners reserve the right to moderate/ban whomsoever they wish. Leave such things to them rather than setting up ad-hoc censorship committees.

It is too easy for fundamentally decent people to become angry, and then dig themselves into a position which may not be worthy of them. To misquote Yoda “anger leads to the Dark Side”. Personally I like the Quaker maxim “Look for the light within” , which has never let me down – whenever I’ve actually found the courage and strength of mind to apply it.

To return to the original theme, that is exactly what John did when making the confession which initiated this thread. I’m going to have a beer now – peace be upon you all! :)

LFC @ 439

All good points, but not in my view enough to convict — at least not of bigotry. Dyke in the original comment comes closer to doing the work MPAV and others accuse it of doing than the work Roy claims to have intended, but at least in academic circles, bluestocking was once a perfectly acceptable alternative for what he seems to be getting at, even though, as often as not, it also hinted at what dyke bellows out loud.

So as I read the passage in question, Roy was calling out Ms. Rice for being overly competitive, trying to best the male boors of the Bush-Cheney team at their own game in return for a little of their power — which, given her intelligence, she probably felt entitled to. One thinks here of a female Henry Kissinger, not a stereotyped dominant lesbian. So yes, Roy isn’t Cormac McCarthy, let along G.B. Shaw or Shakespeare, but who among us is?

I have learned a great deal I did not want to know about my fellow commenters.

This thread is poisoning the well, it needs to be stopped, now. People are committing themselves to positions of personal insult and antagonism, which are out of proportion to the questionable use of a profane pejorative.

As MPAVictoria has said, registering a simple objection would have been sufficient. The accusation of bigotry crossed a line into personal supposition that did not need to be crossed, and it has been joined by gratuitous criticism of style.

We do not need to be picking sides. We should not be picking sides. Let’s stop justifying ourselves. Several commenters have written altogether too much already in this back and forth, expressing resentments better silenced. It has become bullying.

Moderation might judiciously close this thread as hopelessly off topic and not one of the CT commentariat’s finer moments.

I’m just glad I read along far enough to see the Roy Belmont to Cormac McCarthy comparison….cost me three good squirts of Windex to clean the coffee from my monitor.

Thanks for the chuckle @439 LFC (and the thoughtful points).

I still think Lee Arnold was the real scourge here : )

and Bruce Wilder

What a quagmire.

#454

“somebody named Moggin or Catawumpus who would get into silly arguments”

Never could figure out what the hell that was about. I did not know your interpretation of Job was an issue of such vital importance.

For myself it was an existential thing. I deeply wanted to believe in the Korzybskian NullA thing, that you can never expect to know everything, that our theories should be compatible with the evidence but there will always be other theories compatible with the same evidence if we look hard enough, that if I’m smart enough I will never again be stuck in kill-or-be-killed, I can find common ground and shared unknowns. If we can’t compromise we can coexist. Moggin shook that. It was “I’m right and anybody who disagrees with any part of it is wrong” all the way. I tried saying “If you want to treat it as a public debate, let’s find some neutral third party to judge it” but he didn’t respond to that, just “You’re wrong because you thought there was an alternative way to see things and there can’t be.” I’d try until I got too tired of it, and later I’d call him back and try again. Never any hint of results.

“I beseech you in the bowels of Christ,think it possible you may be mistaken.” But he had a low opinion of Christ and also of his own god.

At any rate the Libyans seem to be plugging away and they seem to be doing about as well as can be expected after their crappy government was destroyed.

I mostly agree with you about everything you say. I figure that democracy gives you a way to approximate the political results of fighting to decide issues, without the expense and destruction and killing of the actual fight. When democracy gives some other result and people figure the cost of the fighting is worth it, then they fight. It isn’t an all-or-none thing, but the longer you go without a civil war the more wealth gets built up. The USA has gone 149 years without a civil war or any big war fought on our land, which helps explain our wealth. But maybe we’re due.

I would claim that working out the various impromptu, unofficial and unwritten agreements that get embedded in the culture in such a way as to allow normal democracy to occur takes a lot of time.

One of the big things is the shared understanding that factions will keep their agreements. If your faction is getting weaker, the best time to fight is right now before you get weaker still. If you make a deal and then when you’re too weak to fight the other side breaks it, maybe you should have fought. Or else accepted the inevitable.

I don’t know how long it will take in any given case. Sometimes we might get a pleasant surprise. We can’t expect it to work out well automatically, but it’s a way that *can* avert fighting, so it’s worth a try.

It certainly took a great deal of time for the United States (and lots of other countries) to work one out – and we waged a mass extermination campaign and kept people as property while doing so. Even a functioning democracy can be a not particularly nice place.

It’s a cheaper alternative to civil war. It can serve that function for despicable people as well as nice guys. Sometimes they fight instead.

I would say the introduction of foreign occupation troops doubles the problem from the single issue of ‘How shall we be governed?’ to two issues, the second of which would be, ‘How the hell do we get rid of these people and/or sucker them into attacking those people we hate over there?’

It depends. When you keep the old police in the job, the ones that were preventing free speech before, that’s a drag on getting democracy started. When you have no policing and let poor people support themselves by kidnapping richer people for ransom, that has drawbacks too.

If you do have occupation soldiers on the street, it’s better if they look professional. They should have clean uniforms and stand tall. If somebody attacks one of them then you quick bring in overwhelming force and catch the perp and put him on trial as a criminal. It’s bad to have frazzled soldiers who’ve just been in a war, who’re primed to shoot everybody in sight when their nerves catch a subliminal signal that something bad is about to happen. And it’s a lot better if the occupation soldiers make it clear that they are here to maintain order for a short time until the locals get their own police organized, and then they will leave.

Well, just think, Jonah, when we had the army there in 1991, we could have backed up the Shia instead of tricking them and there might be a 20-odd-year old democracy in south Iraq, parallel to the one in Kurdistan. Oh, wait, we can’t do that, because we have to maintain the fictional lines in the desert and also DEATH TO IRAN.

Schwartzkopf said he had read up on the diplomatic issues. He made it plain that his job was to weaken Saddam, but leave him strong enough to keep Iran in check. Bush Senior was playing a cautious geopolitical game. At the time it seemed kind of despicable to me. Now I’ve seen worse.