If I were less tired, I would write a post exploring the applicability, in our post-WMD world, of The Five Standard Excuses for any Failed Government Project described by Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister. I conjecture that some varietal of each of them will be found in talk about Iraq as prior certainties about Saddam’s monstrous armaments evaporate. The excuses are as follows:
1. There is a perfectly satisfactory explanation for everything but security prevents its disclosure. (The Anthony Blunt excuse.)
2. It has only gone wrong because of heavy cuts in staff and budget which have stretched supervisory resources beyond the limit.
3. It was a worthwhile experiment now abandoned, but not before it provided much valuable data and considerable employment. (The Concorde excuse.)
4. It occurred before certain important facts were known and could not happen again. (The Munich Agreement excuse.)
5. It was an unfortunate lapse by an individual now being dealt with under internal disciplinary procedures. (The Charge of the Light Brigade excuse.)
Some of these excuses have been employed by the U.S. government for some time, notably (1). A version of (2) is also becoming more popular with them. These excuses also do double-duty as rationales that critics impute to the Bush administration. Many, for instance, will favor some version of (4) or (5) in an attempt to resist alternative theories involving vulgar phrases like “blithely imperialist” or “neoconservative maniacs,” simply because of the appalling vista suggested by the latter views. I personally find it worrying that the administration’s choices in domestic and foreign policy are starting to puzzle clever economists. These, after all, are people who by temperament and training will bend over backwards till their spines snap before saying the words, “Yeah, I guess you’d have to say that was pretty irrational.” If those guys give up on you, you’re really doing badly.
To describe a project as failed, though, we need some idea of what its aims were in the first place. If the aim was to rid the world of some nonexistent WMDs then it certainly is a failure. Whether Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld actually had that as their central goal is open to doubt. As for Blair, David Marquand speculates on OpenDemocracy about his objectives (and has some interesting things to say about Hutton/Gilligan/Campbell as well).
Also worth noting — someone else will if I don’t — that a failed projected can have unintended though anticipated good consequences and that some of the war’s supporters (such as Anne Clwyd, Bernard Kouchner and the various liberal and left hawks) supported the war in anticipation of those very consequences. Despite the very great good that is the downfall of Saddam it looks premature to say that what eventually emerges from the mess will be sufficiently better to justify their perspective in their own terms.
If the aim was to rid the world of some nonexistent WMDs then it certainly is a failure.
Probably pretty difficult to rid the world of nonexistent anythings. Or possibly very easy. :-) Anyway, this is a version of (1) above — there’s a perfectly good explanation for our actions, but we can’t/won’t tell you what it is for security reasons, and so here are these other justifications instead.
a failed projected can have unintended though anticipated good consequences
See excuse (3).
I think the problem is that none of the cited reasons will really hold much water; given the various positions taken in the lead-up to the war. (1) was popular before the fighting started as the govts involved could do the old ‘we know more than you know but can’t tell you for National Security reasons so you will just have to trust us’ re the WMD threat but now that Iraq has been fallen and occupied there is no real reason to keep any of this knowledge all that classified or secret anymore as far as intelligence on Iraq goes. I know some people, who would have trusted Blair, on the grounds that he knows things not accessible to the general public, now feel kind of betrayed when this does not seem so much to be the case.
(2) is also kind of hard to put forward, as it involves some people admitting they were very wrong and that the approach to the war was not as well thought as it could have been. I seem to recall that some senior Pentagon generals were eased into early retirement when they objected to Rumsfeld’s projected manpower estimates for the operation and how many men/resources it would take to occupy and police the country. It also raises uncomfortable questions of why weren’t these preparations made beforehand when ministers assured the public that they were; the recent imbroglio over the whole bullet-proof jackets and Hoon is a case in point. Of course no one can prepare for a war perfectly with complete anticipation of events; but there does seem to have been some lack of planning as to what would happen after the successful prosecution of the campaign.
(4) is another hard one, as it means admitting that intelligence had large gaps or was flawed. To do this causes two problems: it will lead people to ask why were such strong positions taken on such shaky grounds and to make sure that it does not happen again, that some overhaul of the way intelligence is analysed and presented and the way that it is scrutinised by the govt to make sure that there is no repetition of this in the future. Not something that govts generally would like to embark on in the best of times and certainly not now. Especially since other ‘rogue’ regimes are being lined up for pressure.
(5) is a possibility but then there has to be the selection of who goes and who gets blamed for what. As the O’Neill case shows, there are limits as to how far up the blame can fall without some insecurity and backtracking. Those high up enough to have some inside knowledge might not go quietly without revealing some embarrassing things that no govt would like to come out and those who don’t have this kind of knowledge are most likely too junior or low down the political-bureaucratic hierarchy to realistically be held responsible for such major decision making processes.
Which leaves only (3), given that Iraq obviously wasn’t sold as a job-creation or wealth-generation programme; only the aspect of unintended or secondary positive beneficial moral and political consequences comes forth as an ex post justification. This is a tenable, if somewhat uncertain point to argue, it depends much on what happens to Iraq and how the transition to any democracy is handled. If it lapses into some sort of civil war then the results are not going to be so positive; even relative improvements can be quite depressing. One only has to look at Afghanistan to see how things may fare here; if there is a cycle of weak/failed states acting as a breeding ground for extremist internationally-orientated terrorist movements then patchwork solutions are not going to be of much help beyond the short-term. The record of imposing democracy from above or top-down reform is not really a reassuring one either; not to mention the fact that there is meant to be a broader War on Terrorism going on and if the sole benefit of the Iraq campaign is the overthrow of a repressive regime with an improvement of some of the political and civil freedoms for its citizens (setting aside the nationalist backlash and anti-occupations insurgency) then this is still quite a serious failure. As elected govts, the US/UK need to serve the interests of their citizens first, as the pro-war argument rested within this framework of Iraq either posing some sort of credible threat or having links to the group targeted in the WoT look increasingly weak now if not actually completely unfounded; it is possible to say that there are few if any direct positive results from this policy which has cost the respective countries not an inconsiderable amount of money and lives lost. Not a good record for any govt.
“Despite the very great good that is the downfall of Saddam it looks premature to say that what eventually emerges from the mess will be sufficiently better to justify their perspective in their own terms.”
Posted by Chris Bertram
Let’s say that things fall apart in Iraq in 2005, resulting in a civil war/nasty repressive government(s).
The neo-cons1 will just go back to talking about WMD’s. By then, most people will have forgotten that there are none. The neo-cons can say that the war prevented them from being found. If they’re really, really dishonest (like they are), they might even advance the argument that the failure was because ‘liberals’ didn’t want to use sufficient troop strength!
[1] Neo-Con: ‘neo’, from the greek word meaning new ‘new’, ‘con’, from the US slang term ‘confidence man’.
Not clear if you’re taking issue with me here or not Barry. Anyway, what I meant to convey in the sentence you quoted was just this: that people like Anne Clwyd supported the use of force to remove Saddam on human rights grounds quite independently of the WMD arguments. From their perpective, so far so good (since Saddam has gone). But, as you say, a nasty civil war followed by repressive dictatorship would suggest that those who backed the war on those grounds were mistaken to have done so.
As for the Bushites and neocons: mendacious liars all. They’ll go on to say whatever suits them.
“It occurred before certain important facts were known and could not happen again.”
“Jerusalem - A government critic said on Tuesday that Israel was aware before the war against Iraq that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, but Israel did not inform the United States.
“Israel put itself on war footing before the US invasion last year, passing out gas mask kits to its citizens and then ordering them to open the kits, a step that eventually will cost millions, since components would have to be replaced.
“But lawmaker Yossi Sarid, a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, said on Tuesday that Israeli intelligence knew beforehand that Iraq had no weapons stockpiles and misled US President George Bush.. . ” -at:
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=3&art_id=qw1075852801225B262&set_id=1
Good to see you’ve spotted that the state bEUrocracy is a terrible way to organise a society!
Go Timber Libertarians!
As for the Bushites and neocons: mendacious liars all.
Mendacious liars are of course the very worst kind. Is there no end to the Bushite perfidy?
Meanwhile, I have been somewhat flashed back to a New Yorker story from last year:
The former intelligence official went on, “One of the reasons I left was my sense that they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with - to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.” He added, “If it doesn’t fit their theory, they don’t want to accept it.”
Although perhaps technically “We just cherry-picked data that supported the conclusions our prior ideological commitments required” isn’t actually an excuse as such.
Chris, I’m not going after you. I’m pointing out that the neo-cons who advocated this only switched to human rights concerns after the WMD excuse fell through. And that they’ll have no compunction about switching excuses again and again, as needed.
(continuing) I’m sure that there were some who genuinely wanted Saddam removed chiefly for human rights reasons; I don’t believe that any of those people were in this administration, or were listened to for advice.
Conrad Barwa:
“(5) is a possibility but then there has to be the selection of who goes and who gets blamed for what. As the O’Neill case shows, there are limits as to how far up the blame can fall without some insecurity and backtracking. Those high up enough to have some inside knowledge might not go quietly without revealing some embarrassing things that no govt would like to come out and those who don’t have this kind of knowledge are most likely too junior or low down the political-bureaucratic hierarchy to realistically be held responsible for such major decision making processes.”
It would be fun to watch the administration try to dump somebody like Rumsfield or Wolfowitz (Powell they could sh*t on; that’s his job in this administration). They’ve both got to have extensive, detailed and utterly damning files. In multiple locations.
And as Brad DeLong has pointed out, the only people fired from/eased out of this administration are those who told embarrassing truths.
Non-embarrassing lies, massive incompetancy, and corruption are not reasons to get rid of something.
“They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with - to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.” He added, “If it doesn’t fit their theory, they don’t want to accept it.”
A perfect description of the followers of Marx!
des has kindly provided the money-shot, supra.
These people are Lysenkoists, so good luck breaking their loop. The American aristocracy has spent a generation developing a pet intelligencia whereby they can be comforted in whatever they need to believe this week (the masses being along for the ride, mostly) . Bypassing the CIA (again!) has brought this Ph.D. as spokesmodel model into the decision making process, even the war room. American military might is reduced to a strap-on for the pnac. It’s an ourobouros of self-deception, a nauseating display of autofellatio, a hermetically sealed solipsism.
In Texas, they now have to preach superstition to women seeking an abortion. Science matters not; that which does not flatter the metaphysics of the customer is “liberal,” “revisionist,” a “conspiracy theory.”
See? Impervious. Unassailable.
One could argue that the goal of the project was simply to follow and support whatever the American decided to do (the “poodle” brand of national security decision-making). Has it succeeded? Seeing Bush’s approval, I doubt it. We’ll see in November I guess!
But these weak excuses are not the American way.
The American way is to deny there was any failure, and to accuse all those who talk of failure of being unpatriotic if not treasonous, and lambast those who raise these painful questions for giving comfort to our enemies.
My favorite vulgar phrase is “incompetent plutocrats bent on world domination”.
(But I don’t usually use it in public, let alone around conservatives or swing voters—it just doesn’t do much good. You can accumulate all the reasonable, moderate credibility you want, but no matter how much you’ve done that—when you say what you really think of Bush you will be immediately dismissed.)
This discussion raises an important linguistic question, the kind of question that analytic philosophers specialize in. If you set out to get rid of something, say a unicorn, and it never existed, did you succeed or fail? Brian, any insight?
Actually, most of what we get is the Peewee Herman defense:
“I meant to do that!”
“If you set out to get rid of something, say a unicorn, and it never existed, did you succeed or fail?“—walt
Phrased that way, the answer is “fail”. You didn’t “get rid” of it. Imagine the converse: that you set out to “make” something. Just because it exists somewhere in the universe doesn’t mean that you were successful in “making” it.
If the question is phrased as something like “ensure that something doesn’t exist”, then the answer is different.
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