Krautmas came two weeks early this year

Thanks to Fred Hiatt and Jackson Diehl, The War Criminal Post remains a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

In fact, it’s actually worse now, with the additions of Michael Gerson, Marc Thiessen, and Jenghazi Rubin. (Not to mention all the guest war-criminaltorials from the likes of Elliott Abrams and Dick Cheney since 2003.)
~

Yeah well he obviously isn’t going to shut up but that’s no excuse for the WaPo to publish his toxic drivel.

No, someguy88.
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Besides, taking control of the oil was part of the plan. It was just another thing which they screwed up royally.

but some powerless kooks were wrong about one of the possible reasons why our leaders were lying.

I think Tiny Tim clearly is on the right track. It was part of the plan. But the planners had some difficulties with execution. “Any Jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.”

Thanks to Fred Hiatt and Jackson Diehl, The War Criminal Post remains a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

I agree. And here’s some notable background.

Krautmas comes but two and two-fifths times a year!

People have lost sight of the true meaning of Krautmas since it got all commercial. It’s a shame.

mattski @10
I skimmed through some of that two-part piece that you link by James DiEugenio. I’d like to single out something that jumped out at me from part 2 of the piece, namely DiEugenio’s attack on Walter Pincus.

I don’t know much about Pincus’s history and perhaps it does contain all the bad things that DiEugenio lists, but DiEugenio fails to mention that Pincus is one of the most knowledgeable reporters, if not the most knowledgeable, about the ins-and-outs of the defense budget and he’s certainly not an uncritical booster of the Pentagon. I don’t read him very often but whenever on the rare occasions I have looked at Pincus’s writing in WaPo in recent years I’ve been quite impressed. Specifically I’m thinking at the moment of a piece from some months ago in which he criticized the Pentagon’s huge budget allocations for its already-excessive (in terms of overkill) nuclear sub fleet. It wasn’t written in the language of Counterpunch or TomDispatch etc. but it was effective criticism, buried unfortunately on a back page of the paper. Yeah, Pincus is an ‘insider’ but he also happens to be a good reporter.

I sometimes wonder if people who go on about WaPo as “a hive of scum and villainy” have ever read any of the WaPo except for the editorial page and certain of its op-ed columnists. There is more to the paper than that. (Of course like perhaps a few other topics, this is something that it’s almost impossible to have a rational conversation about at this blog.)

The opinions of Krauthhammer and Bolton matter because K&B are public voices of certain segments of the Republican party, Jeb in particular given his announced foreign policy team. No one in DC is ever convinced by anything they say — people that mattered bought into the positions, if not the professed reasons, long before the columns appeared. But it does indicate the priorities of the neocons and acts a a first test of potential Republican talking points. These columns are stalking horses for future arguments to be made by their benefactors.

To the extent there were any open issues regarding the effects of neocon policies, they have been settled. Similarly, to the extent that there were open issues regarding the effects of fiscal austerity and expansionary monetary policy, they’ve been settled as well. That won’t stop the neocons and inflationistas from re-parsing the same failed arguments. But what you’re hearing from Krauthammer is what you’ll hear from Jeb if it rocks the supporters and passes the centrist laugh test (and not if it doesn’t.)

Finally, the most recent John Bates Clark Award, given to the best economists under 40, went in part for research into the political orientation of newspapers. They found that the editorial pages reflect the biases of the readers, not the publishers. You’re selling papers and you don’t want to piss off the customers.

@Barry

is there a single honest columnist at WaPo?

Yes. For starters, Harold Meyerson, E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson. Taking “honest” in this question primarily to mean “people we are likely to agree with more often than not.” (Not to defend Krauthammer, of course, who is everything the OP says.)

Btw, Barry, are you aware that The Monkey Cage, a blog with which the author of the OP here is associated, is hosted by WaPo? (Just thought I’d ask.)

@ifthethunderdon’tgetya…

ok, it appears we agree on some things.

On CNBC right now:

Larry Kudlow telling Judy Miller how brave she is, and can she put to bed the myth, “George Bush lied about Iraq.”

Judy: That’s what my book is about!
~

rea, Saddam didn’t have nukes, but he was working on a weapon to disperse clouds of toxic fungus spores. That’s what Condeleeza Rice was talking about, that’s what was really in the vial at the UN.

Indeed, if you look at a picture of Powell at the UN, the vial is not full. It is clearly false to say that there is not mushroom in there.

“To me that means that Bush was delusional, but to Miller and Kudlow it appears to mean that it was a mistake anyone could make.”

The old stupid vs evil debate. At the end of the day it was probably both.

And there you have it. People you disagree with must be silenced/held accountable because they are always wrong. People you agree with are always right even when they were wrong.

Someguy88–

You may not have noticed, but you made an assertion in your first post, it was refuted by several people, and rather than come back with a counterargument you make some vague comment about how unnamed people are censoring other unnamed people because the first group doesn’t agree with the second. It’s almost like you have nothing substantive to say.

Collin Street 04.22.15 at 9:23 pm:

The evidence is compatible with “genuine organic cognitive problem”.

IANAD. “Anosagnosia” was just a guess.

12 Krauthammers = 60 months = one Deca Friedman Unit?

Has political discourse in America always been this shitty? I don’t remember it… but then I remember Watergate, Vietnam, Ollie North, etc.

I can’t stand Krauthammer. But he has a very big audience of fans (I’m related to some.)

@Tom Slee: Awesome!

@floopmeister: Yeah, I was puzzled about that on another thread. Someone suggested it was his birth-year. That would be consistent with the quality of his posts– I’m an old fart, so 27 yoa seems young and green to me.

But, if not age-related– well, there you go.

As a comment on this blog many long Kraphammers ago noted, “When all you have is a Kraphammer, every problem looks like a fail.”

It’s worth mentioning that the nuclear-weapons-passed-to-terrorists meme is one of the most venerable journalistic and media standbys of modern times. I personally recall it from the 1970s, when it was being seriously suggested, even in government, that the IRA might hijack tactical nukes and use them. There was a massive wave of panic at the end of the Cold War when it was alleged that thousands of mini nuclear weapons were circulating in the former Soviet Union, and would eventually find their way into the hands of “terrorists”. Then of course Iraq, then of course Iran, and even panic about factions in the Pakistan Armed Forces passing nuclear weapons to “terrorists” so that they could …. well, we’ll get back to you on that. I’m not an expert on nuclear weapons, but I have met some who are, and they tell me that just arming a weapon correctly takes a long period of training by specialists.
Why the is this a particularly American thing? I think that’s obvious – a deep seated fear of punishment for Hiroshima, mixed with a guilty feeling that such punishment would actually be just if it happened. It’s therefore necessary to conjure up dark forces bent on revenge, even if they don’t have any real existence.
Incidentally, does this guy Krauthammer actually exist? I ask because I’ve heard the name in the past, and always assumed it was a nom de plume of some kind: “hammer of the Krauts” – come on, sounds like a WW II super-hero. I thought it might be a collective, or even a piece of software of some kind.

David @44
There was a massive wave of panic at the end of the Cold War when it was alleged that thousands of mini nuclear weapons were circulating in the former Soviet Union, and would eventually find their way into the hands of “terrorists”.

The bigger concern, I think, of the US FP establishment at the end of the Cold War was not “mini” nuclear weapons in the former USSR but the strategic nuclear weapons formerly belonging to the USSR and subsequently ‘inherited’ by its successor states. Under the Nunn-Lugar program, coupled w/ the Megatons to Megawatts program, and by agreements among the US, Russia, and the relevant Soviet successor states, the nuclear weapons of Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine were dismantled and the highly-enriched uranium converted to low-enriched uranium and sold to the US to fuel nuclear power plants. As Graham Allison wrote five years ago: “Few Americans are aware that, thanks to the Megatons to Megawatts program, half of all the electricity produced by nuclear power plants in the United States over the past decade has been fueled by enriched uranium blended down from the cores of nuclear warheads originally designed to destroy American cities.” (G. Allison, “Nuclear Disorder,” Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 2010, pp.82-3) Whether, in retrospect, Ukraine would have been better advised to keep some of its nuclear arsenal is a separate question, rather off-topic here.

As for the guilt-feelings-for-Hiroshima issue that David raises, I’m not sure. For one thing, the U.S. firebombing of Japanese cities, with ‘conventional’ not nuclear bombs, killed more people than did the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions, so I’m not sure why there wouldn’t be equal or greater guilt feelings for that. Actually, at the current remove of 70 years, I think most Americans (rightly or wrongly) see both Hiroshima and the firebombing of Tokyo as ancient history. Historical memory, esp. for things one might prefer to forget, is not usually a strong point of American culture, though there is a certain amount of variation depending on the event(s) in question.

Donald Johnson,

Are assertions questions? I, say, mostly not. By refute do you mean pathetically assert an unfalsifiable counterfactual?

You answered your own question. F******ing bananas! Any pretext will do. We got poked. He was a convenient villain. We threw his shitty little country up against a wall. Oil schmoil.

Oil shmoil.

@ LFC

I appreciate your reply. I’d like to respond at greater length later on as I’ve only read pt. 1 of Jim D’s piece. But a couple of comments:

One of the lessons, I believe, of closely studying how power propagates in our country is that many people play very mixed roles. They do good work in certain areas, they get compromised in other areas. I think it is vital to understand the power of “Sinclair’s Law.” People–I’m talking mostly about journalists–often face a choice between digging for the truth and advancing their career. Or merely protecting their career from damage.

In part 1 of the piece on Ben Bradlee we hear about Operation Mockingbird, which is CIA efforts to influence the news media both overseas and domestically. Henry Luce, for example, worked closely with the intelligence services. (If you read Gaeton Fonzi’s, The Last Investigation, which I highly recommend in any case, you’ll be treated to a tale of Claire Booth Luce deliberately sending Fonzi on a wild goose chase in order to stymie his investigations on behalf of the HSCA.)

If you read Jim DiEugenio’s, Destiny Betrayed (2nd edition) you’ll get huge insight into CIA’s massive covert attack on Jim Garrison’s lawsuit against Clay Shaw. And you’ll see examples of people acting on the agency’s behalf offering witnesses plush jobs/careers in order to dissuade them from testifying at the trial.

So, it’s entirely plausible that Walter Pincus–for example–can do much good journalism while at the same time have some blemishes on his record in the form of buckling to pressure from some fairly powerful and intimidating people/agencies.

Don’t care much about Krauthammer and what he has to hasn’t to say. But that care about what’s happening in the Middle East, and not just settling their domestic political resentments, maybe wish to take such comments seriously: “….Hezbollah—an organization sponsored and directed by America’s new Iranian partner—has repeatedly used force to block every effort toward democracy or reform [in Lebanon]. Assassinations, bombings, and military invasions were some of the tools that the Party of God employed to intimidate the pro-Western March 14 political camp into surrendering the state…..”

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/189809/obamas-harvest-of-violence

and about WMDs: don’t know what the real reason for the invasion of Iraq was. The fact is that the Ba’ath regime had chemical weapons and used them against Iraq’s own citizens in 1988. What happened to rest of this arsenal? Nobody knows for sure. Not even CT’s bloggers. The fact is that the Ba’ath regime in Syria has used chemical agents in its current war on its population.

But westerners don’t care, do they? They use the Middle East to score some useless points in their domestic political debates. Criticize Krauthammer all you like. I for one, couldn’t care less about him and have nothing to say in his favour. But is it too much to ask for a little of empathy for the victims of the murderous dictatorships in Iran and formerly in Iraq, in the process?

Maya. “They use the Middle East to score some useless points in their domestic political debates.”

No. I am simply appalled at the use by my government of erroneous facts and twisted logic to make decisions.

mattski @52
many people play very mixed roles

I’m sure that’s true in general, and could well be true of Pincus specifically. I haven’t read the Jim D. piece carefully. I was just looking through it rather quickly. (Perhaps I’ll return to it at some point.)

@kidneystones

Your own quote from Chivers in the NYT makes the key point:

The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West.

The distinction between “active” and “long-abandoned” programs, clearly made by Chivers here, is crucial.

As for your comments about the 2011 intervention in Libya, it would take too long to respond. But suffice to say that most of the US and European left did not seem too enthusiastic about it, contrary to your suggestion.

Maya @54
The fact is that the Ba’ath regime had chemical weapons and used them against Iraq’s own citizens in 1988. What happened to rest of this arsenal? Nobody knows for sure.

The issue is whether there was an active WMD (chemical/bio/etc) program in Iraq in ’03, as claimed by the GW Bush admin and its supporters. There wasn’t. This is not a matter of “settling domestic political scores,” as you assert. It’s a matter of getting the historical record right.

Maya @54 As well as we can know what the US did with its chemical weapons, we know what Saddam H. did with his. The latter was forced to host several visits of inspectors, and they did a very ace job – Hans Blix showing more competence in his brief spotlight in the media than Geroge Bush has shown in his entire life. In fact, some of the discarded weaponry was discovered, as the NYT has recently reported, in various weapons dumps in Iraq. It was not weapons grade material – the inspector regime had forced the Iraqis to dispose of it. Yet it was still toxic to handle. One of the ace incompetencies of the whole Bush Rumsfeld disaster was the idea that you could occupy Iraq with a minimum force of American soldiers – something that was preposterous, according to General Shinseki, who made that point before the invasion and was punished for it. No Washington Post Op ed position for him! Given the initial mistake and the evident fear among the Bushies that calling up 500,000 soldiers for an indefinite occupation of Iraq would screw the re-election vibe, they simply didn’t guard the dumps. It was like, free weapons for insurgents day every day for years and years.

As to the oil…
It is true that those who said the US was going to steal Iraq’s oil were deluded about the power and intelligence of the American military and political establishment. Among that group was Paul Wolfowitz, of course, who testified blithely before the war that the whole thing would be paid for by the grateful Iraqis – which is a mushmouthed way of saying we will take their oil. Oopsy – off the mark by about a trillion dollars there, Paul! No sweat though, you’ll still be called on to write thought pieces in the media until you die. As it turned out, the US, in its five years in Iraq, couldn’t even get the electricity to work as it did under Saddam even with the sanction regime. But you can look back, if you want, to discussions in Business week and elsewhere in the runup to the war about how good it was all going to be, with the cheap oil and the imposition of a Chile like regime of laissez faire on Iraq. Alan Greenspan has said that he thought the main reason for the war was oil. So I guess the choice comes down between was it robbery or was it vandalism motivated the krewe of crooks. I still think robbery – I don’t think they were cartoon evil characters. More like your standard corporate Mafiosi.
By the way, Krauthammer was one who obviously thought the US would control Iraq’s oil after the invasion. Here’s what he wrote on February 27,2003:

“First, as soon as the dust settles in Iraq, we should push for an expansion of the Security Council — with India and Japan as new permanent members — to dilute France’s disproportionate and anachronistic influence.

Second, there should be no role for France in Iraq, either during the war, should France change its mind, or after it. No peacekeeping. No oil contracts. And France should be last in line for loan repayment, after Russia. Russia, after all, simply has opposed our policy. It did not try to mobilize the world against us.”

No oil contracts! ah, that does say it all.

@Maya @54

“But is it too much to ask for a little of empathy for the victims of the murderous dictatorships in Iran and formerly in Iraq, in the process?”

Not at all. That was my own primary reason for considering the invasion foolish and a disaster in the making. It was obvious in advance that the war would make most Iraqi’s FAR worse off. This is precisely what happened. Saddam was nasty to his enemies, and a wicked man, but people knew his rules and could avoid trouble with him. What they have had since is anarchy, tribal violence, and often the need to flee homes to survive.

Bush Sr. and his defense secretary, none other than Dick Cheney, understood what would happen, and wisely stopped short of ousting Saddam in 1991. There is a great video if Sec. Cheney explaining this back in 1991 which absolutely nailed it. I am quite troubled by the fact that he changed his view so dramatically for the worse.

Maya–That is one weird link you posted. The writer seems to think that American military action to depose Assad would be the way to help Arab liberals. Maybe Arab liberals had better think of some better ideas, because America has deposed dictators in Iraq and Libya and it didn’t work out too well in either case. And all snark aside, I can’t fathom how someone could write such a piece with the catastrophic example of Iraq (and on a lesser scale Libya) just a few years behind us.

Henry — Not sure why I was caught in moderation but it seems to happen to others on a random basis as well. Hope you (CT) can fix the problem. A moderated and released comment that finally appears after 20 or 30 other new posts just isn’t read. Kinda defeats the purpose…

#60
Thank you for reminding us that Henry is not alone in producing questionable claims about easily checked facts. My remark re: the European and American left:

“The European and American left learned nothing from the Iraq experience and permitted President Drone Strike I Never Said That and his pals in Paris in London to do to Libya what Franks, Cheney, and Rumsfeld did in Iraq. ”

Your response:” most of the US and European left did not seem too enthusiastic about it, contrary to your suggestion.” There is absolutely nothing in my remark about enthusiasm.

Your remarks re: active/inactive programs as ‘the point.’The transcript confirms unequivocally that the questioner is challenging Krauthammer about the presence of weapons of mass destruction.

MR. : [?], visiting Austrian journalist. I am most impressed by the quality of discussion and also by some degree of naivete concerning the future.

Credibility gap. Number one, the weapons of mass destruction haven’t yet been found.

Number two, the contacts between Saddam and al Qaeda haven’t yet been proven. This is also criticized in the European and the American press.

Number two, credibility gap. I believe, Mr. Krauthammer, that he wants values, no question about that, but there are people who also want money. And if you look at the situation in awarding contracts, major contracts without a tender to major companies, Halliburton, Bechtel, which are direct or indirectly connected with major political figures, I don’t want to mention names, it also doesn’t help the credibility gap.

DR. KRAUTHAMMER: Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem. I don’t have any doubt that we will locate them. I think it takes time. They’ve obviously been deeply hidden, and it will require that we get the information from people who know where they are.

If you’re looking for anthrax and VX gas, which can be hidden in a basement or a closet, in a country the size of Germany, you can understand how in five weeks we might not have stumbled across them.”

The questioner does not even mention WMD programs, active or otherwise. Nor does Krauthammer in his response. Whatever point you wish to make, it has nothing to do with the questions posed Krauthammer or Krauthammer’s response. As for the Childers reference, I’ll break it down for you: the NYT piece clearly confirms the presence of WMD in Iraq “5000” chemical weapons. That’s the question the questioner asked. In his response Krauthammer claimed that chemical weapons would be found. Chemical weapons were found.

That’s the ‘point’ the questioner and Krauthammer are discussing. Not nuclear weapons alone, as Henry clearly implies, and not active or inactive WMD programs.

You can understand that much, I’m sure.

“If you’re looking for anthrax and VX gas, which can be hidden in a basement or a closet”

Does this not suggest to you, as it suggests to me — as I am sure it was meant to suggest — that Krauthammer was implying that we would be hunting and finding nefariously hidden WMDs Blix & co. had failed to uncover?

That didn’t happen. The credibility problem remains quite real.

@kidneystones 72

The NYT excerpt you quote begins: “From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.” The justification for the invasion was not there were 5,000 old chemical weapons lying around somewhere in Iraq left over from years earlier. The claim, as I recall, was that there were current weapons, and that Saddam was deliberately concealing them from inspectors.

You write that “In his response Krauthammer claimed that chemical weapons would be found. Chemical weapons were found.” When Krauthammer said
“Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks,” do you think Krauthammer was referring to old chemical weapons lying around in places the regime probably no longer even knew about? Or was he referring to carefully hidden caches of weapons that were in a condition to be used and with means of delivery?

According to Chivers, over the course of seven years (2004-11), soldiers found 5000 chemical warheads, shells, or aviation bombs. Where were they found? In how many separate locations? What sort of condition were they in? What kind of threat did they pose? Did Saddam’s regime have operational delivery systems for them? Did the key people in the regime know where these weapons were, or had they been randomly dumped in various places by lower-level people? I assume the Chivers article takes a stab at answering these questions, which would seem highly pertinent.

= = = LFC 04.24.15 at 1:54 am
This from the piece linked by commenter Happy Jack @75:
…to locate all of Iraq’s old chemical ordnance was an impossible task. As Duelfer’s report predicted in 2004, the U.S. would continue to find chemical shells — not because the Saddam Hussein regime had been hiding them, but because they had been “abandoned, forgotten and lost during the Iran-Iraq war [since] tens of thousands of CW munitions were forward deployed along the frequently and rapidly shifting battle lines.”= = =

Note that France has a government entity that specializes in digging up and disposing of artillery shells and other munitions, primarily from WWI but some from WWII, and that they find hundreds of chemical weapons per year.

“What you’re seeing is the birth of a new denialism.”

Yes. I’m a little surprised to see so much of it in a CT comment thread, but much of the Right never concedes anything on any subject.

Response from deniers: [running off, tails between legs]

Trader Joe, you are right but still understate things significantly.

Had Saddam’s supposed covert WMDs been found the astounding vindication of Bush/Cheney/Powell/Rice/Wolfowitz would not only have dominated Fox News, but all the networks and print media. The told-you-so-ing even from quite a few Democrats would have been deafening.

“Had Saddam’s supposed covert WMDs been found the astounding vindication of Bush/Cheney/Powell/Rice/Wolfowitz would not only have dominated Fox News, but all the networks and print media. The told-you-so-ing even from quite a few Democrats would have been deafening.”

True. There’s a certain type of centrist liberal that loves to hippy punch and if Saddam had been shown to pose any genuine WMD threat, the antiwar left would never be allowed to hear the end of it. The war pushers might even feel they could now retire the Chamberlain/Munich meme and replace it with all the naysayers who doubted our glorious cause in Iraq.

The Libya intervention discussion here on CT had no people who I remember saying “Hmm, I like the idea of humanitarian intervention, but am I just being a sucker for war again?”

Not so, or at least not exactly so:

Here is a link to one of my comments from March 22, 2011 on Conor Foley’s The case for Intervention. I think it fulfilled most, if not all, of your requirements.

Krauthammer is a weapon of mass destruction……..of facts.
Richard Cottrell

. . . but let’s remember that . . .

There are certain phrases I think I would be utterly embarrassed to reproduce in a comment on this subject, but other people are apparently not that circumspect.

I certainly have a baseline anti-war attitude. Unapologetically so. My sense is that the collective violence of war should be a very rare thing. The wikipedia timeline of U.S. military interventions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations#1960.E2.80.931969)is, to my mind, shocking. Similarly, I think the number of uses of forces numbs one to the use of force and creates a militaristic atmosphere that is bad for all kinds of things I believe are good. For example, why is the US so suddenly insistent that it has to “counter” China? That’s just pure power lust.
Libya is a perfect case, to my mind, of the vast problems of military intervention. For one thing, the intervention is irresponsibly scaled, so that a system is destroyed and no new system is put in its place – myself, I think if the US bombs a place, it owes that place an unlimited amount of money to establish security and remake its quotidien life.
I count as miltary intervention something that isn’t mentioned on the Wikipedia timeline: the massive selling of arms. The category of Weapons of Mass Destruction is, of course, fucked from the beginning, especially as the imperialist powers have no intention of giving up theirs. But one of the most fucked things about it is that it is drawn so that the sale of weapons of mass destruction can still go on. What are the saudis bombing yemen with, if not the wmd sold to them by the US? Like all double standards systems, this one promotes a violence that it will, eventually, not be able to overcome.
I’m not a pacifist. But I am extremely sceptical of any military intervention, especially when it is neither preceded nor followed by more straightforward aid interventions or changes in policies that are obviously not working. Iraq is a good case. Saddam had posed no threat to the breakaway kurds for more than a decade. What was needed was a push – for instance, abandoning the double sanction regime, recognizing Iran, and sending large amounts of aid to Northern Iraq. This, I think, would have shaken the Baathist establishment so badly that Saddam Hussein would not have survived for long. I might be wrong about that, but there was no attempt at all to operate along these or similar lines.

Sorry, I assumed that you were against the war from the beginning and that this therefore fell into the “unchanging” case.

No, you’re largely right in your assumption, so the misunderstanding may have been mine. The crux of the issue probably hinges on the meaning of humanitarian. Like you, I reject the idea that we can afford to leave the definition of the word in the tender care of the Ministry of Truth, and I likewise refuse to concede that hellfire missiles could possibly have any humanitarian uses. On the other hand, non-military interventions of one kind or another seem more consistent with our concerns and our principles than turning our backs on situations such as Ruanda, the Balkan conflicts, or, yes, Libya.

Even so, non-military intervention itself is tricky. Consider the scenario we saw not so long ago in Somalia: the UN flies in food to prevent a widespread famine. The local warlords attack the UN warehouses, take the food and distribute it according to their own patronage systems. The US sends in troops to defend the food distribution principles of the UN. Then, perhaps predictably, we get Blackhawk Down, and before long, we’re bribing the Ethiopians and Kenyans to invade Somalia.

The first principle to establish, it seems to me, is that we shouldn’t presume to be the masters of other people’s destinies. If that puts a hitch in Hillary Clinton’s gitalong, or gives John McCain dyspepsia, so be it. If sticking to that first principle ends in genocide, then I suppose I should expect to be taken to the woodshed. At this point, though, I doubt very much that what we’re pleased to call genocide can be laid at the feet of people who opposed bombing Belgrade, Benghazi, Kirkuk, or Sana’a.

I don’t think the anti-war left had any difficulty agreeing that bombing Libya wasn’t going to be a good idea. It is true however that few political actors are consistently pro- or anti-war. Regarding the European center-left, most of them learned to love the bomb in 1999 when NATO started a clear-cut war of aggression against Serbia, in the process committing various clear-cut war crimes, including the intentional bombing of civilian media outlets (specifically banned under the Geneva conventions). All of this was done just to show that “we” could and nobody could prevent “us”, and former pacifists including the German Green party flocked to the opportunity to unapologetically embrace war, with the added bonus that the victim had been bombed by the Wehrmacht 55 years prior.

Oops – sorry about the ad on the link above! That’s what you get for linking u tube without checking it :)

The thread begins the WMDs of Chucky K and moves to

RP, just so’s you’ll know, there’s a reply to you in moderation somewhere up about #96 or so. Not as specific, or as detailed as BW’s 103 above, but along roughly similar lines.

Wilder

I appreciate the case against wars of unprovoked aggression, but we do not live in a world of independent states, where that general principle can be spun out into a coherent philosophy.

Imo, you’re confusing two different meanings of “independence” here. States are obvs not economically ‘independent’ (self-sufficient), and w a few exceptions like N Korea they are very affected by global economic forces. But states are juridically independent, and the basic rule is still that govts can do pretty much what they want inside their countries (w/ some, inconsistently applied, exceptions).

My view is that the American military like seemingly every other public institution has become primarily a vehicle for moving tax-payer money into the pockets of politically connected white people. Hence we can fight a war for over a decade in Afghanistan, and yet still be almost completely dependent on local translators.

Bruce Wilder says “The (second) Iraq War was the moment when American policy lost all the moorings that tied it to something I would recognize as either practically sensible or morally defensible (let alone anything remotely in the neighborhood of my personal preferences).” and “Krautmas, I suppose, is an anniversary when we can mourn the moment when popular understanding of policy ceased to have any root appreciation that policy — actual policy — might require responsible expertise and knowledge to execute.”

I would be interested in hearing about this ??-2003 golden age when American policy was moored to something practically and/or morally defensible and when it was the now lost ‘popular understanding’ that policy requires responsible expertise and knowledge to execute.

Only three European countries invaded Iraq: Denmark, Poland and the UK. (By my count 2 left, 1 right). 11 intervened in Libya in what was a rightwing Sarkozy-Cameron-Berlusconi project. Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Spain, and the UK (By my count 3 left 8 right). You’ve got strange decisions by individual leaders – notably the UK 2003 and Spain 2011 – but I’m not sure the Left actually has that bad a record.

The main problem now is this sort of self-rightousness and fetishising of 2003 era anti-war sentiment made the world bail on Iraq earlier than was responsible, and did enormous harm. Perhaps we should be memorialising that:

“Now, Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”

To the extent possible, try and figure out matters of fact and function first, then try and figure the normative implications, whether rationalizing the former or opposing. Otherwise, you might end up espousing an absurd, unmoored and self-referential idealism, which just ends up re-enforcing the status quo, taken as given, rather than trying to find a path through and beyond what might be taken as given.

Abbe Faria @ 112: Perhaps we should be memorialising that: “Now, Iraq is not a perfect place. . . . “

Excuse me while I vomit.

Perhaps we should be memorializing: America used to be a free country. . . . So glad that’s over.

RP @ 117:

fresh idiom — yes.

Of course, they lie about everything, and war is hardly the only policy decision entrusted.

Val @ 111

In my experience, it’s not so much that the Leftists have no sense of fairness, it is that they have no sense of how to focus their righteousness constructively. It isn’t that some people are idealistic and others are practical; it is that in any group, different people of Left sentiments, will choose to champion different elements and different combos of idealism and pragmatics, willy nilly. So, either you get circular arguments — a kind of argumentative conga line, in which each person talks into the next person’s posterior. Or, social norms emerge in some Left fragment, that deny inconvenient facts about political structures on the one hand, or morally inconvenient truths on the other.

When I was very young, older Left-leaning people had fairly elaborate ideas or theories of how the world worked, of what gave the political world structures, and how those structures might be usefully reformed, to make a structured world better — not a utopia, but a practical improvement. There were a variety of such theories, of course, then as now. The more socialist Left had Marx, syndicalism and some other ideas; the center-left had institutionalist ideas (some of which I sorta subscribe to), represented in America by the then rapidly fading vision of Galbraith, but with more vigor in Europe by the ordo-liberalism of the European project and the social welfare state. Foreign policy opinion in the light of day was still guided by notions about the United Nations, multilateralism, a common good realized in cooperative free-trade, and democratic institution-building, even if the “secret” underside of foreign policy was rotten thru and thru. (People should read those links mattski provides on who killed JFK and why.)

One of the most remarkable political developments during my lifetime has been the fading away of any political agenda for the center-left. I think neoliberalism is empty and foolish — almost completely a product synthesized by cynics and PR experts, in which no one but useful fools really believe — but it’s power is preserved in the face of near-complete discrediting, because centrists can conceive of “no alternative” and the Left has nothing coherent to offer. “Just say no” sometimes works out, at least as a temporary expedient and rallying cry, as in the defense of Social Security, but it’s not that effective in shaping policy in general, when the agenda is entirely in the hands of conservatives and neoliberals.

Peter T
it is telling that the US, in the Cold War, devoted considerable resources to building up a cadre of people with good knowledge of the Russian language, politics and history and of the Soviet system. It has never, AFAICT, built up a comparable base of expertise on the Middle East

Probably not in as focused a way; but there are M.E. experts and Arabic speakers in the State Dept (and to some extent prob. elsewhere in the govt). But the top policymakers have to call upon them and listen, and GWBush et al, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion and after, were in no mood to do that.

Deep regional expertise is very necessary but not always sufficient. It helps if it’s joined to the kinds of things that (thoughtful) ‘generalists’ sometimes know. But above all, the top policymakers have to call on and use the available expertise, whether it’s in or out of the govt. There were Southeast Asian specialists who could have been consulted in the early days of the Vietnam War; by McNamara’s retrospective testimony, they usually weren’t. In the case of Iraq, at least one or two of the top people, like R. Crocker, had regional expertise, but when the overall policy’s misguided, that usu. won’t be enough.

The fundamental fact is that the invasion of Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with WMD. A host of real politic factors drove shaped the decision, notably how to continue sanctions, their efficacy, bringing Iraq’s oil to market, and getting US troops out of Saudi Arabia. The trigger, of course, was 9/11. Bush was in over his head from the very beginning of his tenure. Recall the Chinese forcing down a US AWAC and parading the parts, and crew, if memory serves me. When elected Bush was more an isolationist than a neocon. Unfortunately for us all, he was also a confirmed born-again Christian. Like many Americans, he regarded the 9/11 as an attack on the American way of life, which it most certainly was. However, for the born-again right this American way of life has a distinctly Christian character. The shining city on the hill and manifest destiny are not the stuff of fiction for these folks. Bush saw himself called by God like so many biblical figures before him – the unwilling warrior forced to respond to a divine command, all for some greater good.

Scary, especially when we consider that there are just as many lunatics in the Middle east who hold equally loopy beliefs. What made the volotile mix truly terrifying is America’s horrifying sense of retribution. Pause to consider how many US civilians died during WW II. Practically none. Yet, the two Democratic presidents helped obliterate millions of civilians on two continents because Germany and Japan ‘refused’ to surrender.

As Duncan Black constantly reminded us at the time: the reason for the invasion was simple, after 9/11 a whole lot of brown people were going to have to suffer and die, emphasis on the suffering part. Remember Silly Sully baying for blood for years in a state of permanent delirium. He wasn’t alone. That was the tiger Bush was riding. Kill them all.

The miracle is how few Iraqis and folks in the Middle East actually lost their lives, given America’s disproportionate sense of ‘justice.’ Did Bush lie America into Iraq? Damn right. If enraged Americans in 2003 understood what the real cost of the Iraq invasion was going to be, what percentage do you think would have said: ‘F$ck it. Nuke them all.’ Bush understood that much, to his credit. Today, Bush displays a sense of real responsibility for his actions, unlike his Dem enablers, although I expect few here are willing to acknowledge as much.

Hope and Change. How the bile rises tapping out that piece of quackery. An Australian friend, upon seeing Drone-Strike Peace Prize I Never Said That elected, observed that he hadn’t seen so many American clapping since the bombs started falling on Baghdad. It’s mind-boggling to recall how many lapped up the peace-prize rhetoric, ‘usher in a new way of doing things’ blah-blah-blah.

By 2006, I realized that if Bush didn’t exist, Dems would have had to invent him. The same goes for Krauthammer now. He’s a tool, in the purest sense. Henry brings out his little Krauthammer doll and the Moral Minority here line up to stick pins in it. Frightening stuff to say the least and more than a little pathetic.

I stand by my original comment. Henry’s post is unseemly, especially in light of the hundreds of children’s bodies being pulled this week from that ship carrying refugees fleeing the impact of our new ‘smart diplomacy.’ What do we have now? Hope and Change, drone strikes, and red-lines? If this is victory, I’d hate to see defeat.

BW: “Of course, they lie about everything, and war is hardly the only policy decision entrusted.”

Sure, but war lies are among the most damaging. More people die because of them than the number of people that die because of most political lies. They are the most difficult to contradict with personal experience: if a politician lies about the nature of the Syrian rebellion, I’m less likely to know anything about it than if the politician lies about the U.S. health care system. They are lies about justification rather than about policies — if a politician lies about policy, it’s probable that there is some document describing the policy that can be analyzed, while a lie that gets us into war has no contradiction except later events. Finally, they commit the whole country to a course of action due to executive branch adventurism in a way that legislative branch graft doesn’t commit us — later legislators can revoke a policy, but you can’t bring people back to life.

Hi Rich. You’re missing the point. Most Americans didn’t know or care whether Saddam had any clear link to 9/11. Brown people had to suffer and die. Get it?

In all of WWII about 2500 US civilians died. Around the same number died on 9/11. The war against Japan was all but won when the US launched 1500 fire bombings of Japanese cities in the spring of 1945 before the US dropped two atomic weapons. On the first day, U.S. warplanes dropped 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo over the course of the next 48 hours. Almost 16 square miles in and around the Japanese capital were incinerated, and between 80,000 and 130,000 Japanese civilians were killed in the worst single firestorm in recorded history.” That was just the first day. Many, many followed, all before the big event: mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and then Nagasaki.
Do you seriously think most Americans, Democrats and Republicans, wanted restraint in the days/months after 9/11, or kill them all? The invasion of a Iraq was a policy decision, one I strongly opposed, and an exercise in restraint given the US record of disproportionate responses. Indeed, you’ll find a number of analysts ready to argue that the Iraq war failed because it wasn’t violent enough. Carthage delenda est.

kidneystones: “Most Americans didn’t know or care whether Saddam had any clear link to 9/11. Brown people had to suffer and die.”

And we had already gone to war with a country, Afghanistan, that had a much more credible connection to the 9/11 attacks. If people simply needed to see others suffering and dying, they were. The whole “Bush gets credit for restraint in a war that he created” line has no connection to reality that I can see.

@Layman. I’ve cited what I consider to the most important – namely accepting the responsibility for making the decision, rather than pulling a Pelosi. I suspect, however, that you mean ‘apologize.’ Bush didn’t invent torture, or war crimes. The US record of atrocities is long and well-documented, as is that of France, Germany, Japan, and Great Britain. I find the willingness of Bush and of Cheney to accept the responsibility for their actions, actions I consider quite wrong on just about every level, commendable and refreshing when compared with excuses, lies, blame dodging, and generally contemptible behavior of leading Democrats. Any notion that Obama would not have voted to invade Iraq had he been in office has been laid to rest. Bush has done a lot of good since he left office, just ask Bono or any of the folks involved with AIDS relief in Africa. He goes there to paint schools. He also regularly spends his free time with the people who ended up losing limbs and friends because of his decision to invade Iraq. That takes a form I don’t see often. I don’t believe he’s collected a fraction of the speaking fees of Clinton, not that he could command the same figures. When Bush was in office I wrote a lot of very unpleasant and unfair things about him. Compared to Drone Strike and HRC, Bush is a portrait of integrity. Stick a pin in your Bush doll if that makes you feel better.

“I’ve cited what I consider to the most important – namely accepting the responsibility for making the decision, rather than pulling a Pelosi.”

I’m afraid I don’t find that compelling. To the extent that matters, Bush adopts the same position as Pelosi, that he acted on the basis of wrong information. He blames the faulty intelligence, which is to say, those responsible for producing it. As recently as last year, he has said he doesn’t regret the decision, and would clearly do the same thing again. If his position is, first, that it was not a mistake, and second, that if it was, it was someone else’s mistake, what can it possibly mean to say that he displays a real sense of responsibility?

Maybe I don’t understand what you mean about responsibility. To help me understand, give an example (any example ) of a person (any person) displaying a sense of responsibility for their actions without admitting they were a mistake or apologizing for them or otherwise engaging in some form of penance for them.

= = = kidneystones @ 2:24 “The decision to invade Iraq was bi-partisan. It was a stupid decision and we’re living with the consequences. Making Bush the fall guy for a policy that made most American hearts sing with joy is both convenient and easy. Americans wanted blood and the world to know the cost in pain and death of attacking the bastion of freedom and democracy. “= = =

This conveniently leaves out the 14 month campaign to convince the DC Village that attacking Iraq was good and necessary, and to market/sell the invasion to the general public. The close correlation between the people at the heart of that marketing program plus the people responsible for collecting and stovepiping the intelligence and the graduates of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), with its infamous “stir the beehive” strategy paper, indicates that invasion of Iraq was intended or at least desired before 9/11 and the that even was simply used as an excuse.

Yes, HRC should have seen through Cheney and the PNAC gang of chickenhawk warmongers. Then again even Colin Powell now admits he was deceived and manipulated by that bunch, and if in a large-scale representative democracy we cannot trust people with Powell’s level of experience and knowledge to make sound decisions we have a serious problem that cuts across 80% of the polity.

kideystones also leaves out the vicious program of counterattack against anyone who did question the run-up to the unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Iraq, but he would probably counter that powerful members of the Democratic Party and neoliberals participated in that campaign of vilification and hippie punching and he would not be wrong in that.

Kidneystones, this is pretty much a Rovian response (in the sense of politically attacking your opponent’s strengths) to the argument that voting for a Democratic candidate like Obama or HRC is voting for a lesser evil. There are a lot of just critiques that can be made of our supposed moral imperative to vote for the lesser evil, including parsing just how much lesser that evil is. But making someone like Bush *into* the lesser evil is not one of them.

= = = Abbe Faria 04.25.15 at 7:25 pm

GWB was quite open about Bush Doctrine: pre-emption, democratisation, and targeting of rogue states. The problem is that wouldn’t convince anyone who didn’t already believe in the need for action – so the argument became centred around WMD, which could potentially change minds.= = =

It is unusual to find neocons openly admitting W Bush lied to justify the unprovoked invasion of Iraq in support of a PNAC preemption strategy, but I’m glad Abbe Faria finally came clean about it. First steps.

= = = Donald johnson 04.25.15 at 3:56 pm
Kidneystone–
Most of what you say about America is standard boilerplate Chomsky-style leftism and many or most of us here agree– […]= = =

Blaming Nancy Pelosi for the colossal sin of serving as a very effective Speaker in a parliamentarian system of government [1] and applying the word “refreshing” to the most obscene acts of the neoconservative faction are tropes of the brietbart faction of the Radical Right. I suppose you could draw links between Chomsky and breitbart.com, just as Chomsky draws links between things that aren’t apparent at first glance (although in Chomsky’s case, with considerable more intellectual depth), but claiming that kidneystone speaks for “the left” (all 7 remaining members of the US left that is) and the average CT reader/commentator is pushing things a bit.

[1] and of course ignoring that even with majorities in both houses the Republican leadership has had to turn repeatedly to Pelosi and Reid for help in getting its own bills passed.

@Abbe Faria

In contrast, Obama’s pandering to anti-war sentiment meant he refused Iraq’s request for support airstrikes against ISIS in mid-2004 [you mean mid-2014] which directly resulted in the conquest of NE Iraq. GWB would never have allowed ISIS to launch a ground invasion of Iraq.

GWBs post-2003 actions have been mostly admirable. The anti-war sentiment which has been nurtured by the media/leftists bitter and fixated about 2003 has had disastrous consequences for Iraq.

I disagree w all of this. The notion that US airstrikes in mid-2014 wd have prevented ISIS from establishing strongholds in NEIraq is v. dubious.

There is a tangled ideological/political as well as military struggle going on in this part of the Arab/Muslim world, and its outcomes are likely (v. unfortunately for those directly in the path of the violence) to take a while to work themselves out (see John Owen’s piece in current F.Affairs). The idea that US airstrikes can determine the result is erroneous.

af at 144: He {bush} also was very engaged with Iraq post-invasion, as opposed to Obama’s interest in golf. So you are saying that the disaster of Bush’s foreign policy could have been averted if someone had gotten him interested in golf?
An interesting counterfactual. Alas, the only sucessful thing Bush did in his entire life was cheerlead for the Rangers, which friends of his fathers arranged for him to buy a share of, so his heart was already torn away from golf.

I also like the image of Bush the resolute, who would never have allowed that ISIS to get a head start in Iraq. This is Bush the resolute who allowed al qaeda to deliver a devastating attack on the US on september 11, 2001. Perhaps you remember? The Bush who told his CIA handlers in august of 2001, when they informed him that al qaeda was going to attack the US, that they had now “covered their asses” and went back to cleaning cedar on his ranch. If only he’d learned golf, maybe he would have had a bit more time for those CIA boys. They could have played 18 holes and he could have said, my maybe I oughta tell some of my cabinet about this. Get Rice involved. Maybe the transportation secretary, heck, what with the plan to hijack planes in the Philippines that you told me we uncovered.
We will never know what we lost when Bush opted for cedar cleaning instead of golf.

LFC @ 122
“But above all, the top policymakers have to call on and use the available expertise, whether it’s in or out of the govt. There were Southeast Asian specialists who could have been consulted in the early days of the Vietnam War”

But the US knew exactly what was going on in Vietnam. We refused to hold the Geneva Accord stipulated elections specifically because we knew that the nationalists would have won a smashing victory. There was no lack of knowledge as to which side had the majority support of the population.

We were on the morally wrong (by our own claimed democratic ideals) side of that fight from the very beginning, and we knew it. We decided that we preferred a corrupt military dictatorship (that made pro-western noises) to a popular nationalist government (that made communist noises). Our decision, our bad. The only thing we didn’t know was that it wasn’t possible to bomb the nationalists into submission. But that’s hubris and stupidity, not lack of knowledge.

@D Littleboy

Don’t think I ever thanked you for your ref. to Operation Praying Mantis on another blog comment thread. (Haven’t looked it up yet, but will.)

—

Re Vietnam: I agree w certain aspects of your comment (though the North Vietnamese and the NLF were both Communists and nationalists, and, w.r.t their leaders at any rate, I see no reason to pretend that they “made communist noises” only as a sort of afterthought). I do think one (not the only one, but one) of the roots of the US’s errors was what S. Hoffmann summed up, in Primacy or World Order (1978), as “the neglect of local circumstances” (p.23). I suppose that’s not exactly the same as “lack of knowledge,” but it’s related. Hubris also played a role.

p.s. Let me recommend the entire first chapter (“The Burdens of Containment”) of Hoffmann’s Primacy or World Order. Published 37 years ago, it still repays reading, incl. by those who locate themselves, as many commenters here probably would, somewhere to the left of the author.

@mattski
Thank you for the linked article @153.