Remarkably Stupid
Conditions in Iraq are "doing remarkably well" the Vice-President of the United States said today. Apparently, the uniformed Iraqi death squads that kidnapped 13 carloads of victims and the AK-47-toting gangs flooding Sunni communities didn't get the Veep's message.
Someone a whole lot smarter than Dick Cheney, British liberal hawk Norm Geras has some much more interesting comments to make about that remarkable little war in Iraq. And early and staunch supporter of the invasion of Iraq, Geras now laments that the war has "failed." While he's still unwilling to call for a U.S./British troop withdrawal (for fear that things could get even worse), Geras concludes that if he could rewind the tape, he would not have supported the war:
That is, had I been able to foresee, in January and February 2003, that the war would have the results it has actually had in the numbers of Iraqis killed and the numbers now daily dying, with the country (more than three years down the line) on the very threshold of civil war if not already across that threshold, I would not have felt able to support the war and I would not have supported it. Measured, in other words, against the hopes of what it might lead to and the likelihoods as I assessed them, the war has failed. Had I foreseen a failure of this magnitude, I would have withheld my support. Even then, I would not have been able to bring myself to oppose the war. As I have said two or three times before, nothing on earth could have induced me to march or otherwise campaign for a course of action that would have saved the Baathist regime. But I would have stood aside. Were we therefore wrong to support the war, those of us who did? In terms of what we hoped and what we thought likely, we obviously were - given how things have actually turned out. But on the basis of what could have been reliably foreseen, I think it's harder to say that. Only if the disaster was always foreseeable as the most likely outcome would I be convinced of it... ...I am bound to acknowledge that, though I never expected an easy sequel in Iraq, much less a 'cakewalk', I did not anticipate a failure on this scale, and had I done so, I would have withheld support for the war without giving my voice to the opposition to it.I sympathize with Geras' agony. The notion of knocking out Saddam's tyranny should have brought a flicker of joy and hope to the heart of any democrat -- at least on paper. I never supported the war precisely because I lacked any confidence that -- in reality-- the Bush administration would be capable of carrying out what it had promised. Nor did I believe for a moment that Iraqi democratic renewal ever seriously figured in the White House calculations. In that context, as closely as I identified with Geras' arguments about decapitating the Baathist dictatorship, we wound up barely separated by the dividing line between anti and pro-war polarization. That said, I respect Geras' willingness to engage in some public rethinking. It's an exercise few on any side dare to attempt. Meanwhile, there's this piece from historian Gareth Porter that argues that worries about a U.S. troop pull-out making things worse is now obsolete. Either leave now or be forced out, says Porter.
October 17th, 2006 at 11:02 pm
Let the games begin….
October 18th, 2006 at 4:39 am
Yes, Marc, but the decision about going to war is not just another policy debate in which one can fairly come down on one side or another based on a nuanced view of the options and likely outcomes. Mr Geras’s self-justificatory breast-beating-lite never comes to grip with the responsibility of a polity to know what on earth it is doing when it decides to invade a country that does not pose a threat to it. War is not tax reform and demands a higher standard before we decide that it is time to unleash the machines of death and destruction on a populace. As you imply, Saddam’s crimes never bothered Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush when they served U.S. interests, and that sole fact should have given Mr. Geras and many, many others more pause before they signed away the store.
October 18th, 2006 at 6:35 am
“As you imply, Saddam’s crimes never bothered Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush when they served U.S. interests,”..”what on earth it is doing when it decides to invade a country that does not pose a threat to it.”
So what was the interest of the arch enemies of the world Timmy, if it posed no threat. What other sinister plots did they have, after planning the Trade Tower demolition……to keep a war going in order to boost their re-electablity?
We are all waiting with bated breath. We just can’t function the rest of the day until the logician “Timotheus” speaks again.
October 18th, 2006 at 7:11 am
Geras: “Were we therefore wrong to support the war, those of us who did? In terms of what we hoped and what we thought likely, we obviously were – given how things have actually turned out. But on the basis of what could have been reliably foreseen, I think it’s harder to say that. Only if the disaster was always foreseeable as the most likely outcome would I be convinced of it…”
No soap, guy. A staid beltway thinktank with James Baker on board issued a report before the invasion predicting, as “most likely outcome”, that we’d be wading into the Big Muddy. And now James Baker co-chairs the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, the formation of which has been attended by murmurs of endorsement from Dubya, even though he reserves the right to reject its recommendations for how to wade back out.
Disaster was foreseeable, Geras. You just chose not to look. Over the next few years, I expect a lot of Keyboard Kommandos to show up in their pajamas for their daily blog labors, carrying excuse notes from their doctors explaining that, in 2002-3, their Paxil dose was just a wee bit too high, and has since been adjusted downward. Or at least, that it’s been adjusted downward for those among them who don’t need an sharp increase.
It sucks to be wrong, of course. Take my Kurdistan Petrostate Quasi-Exit Strategy — when I first came up with it, I thought we would be well on the way to that endpoint by early 2004. At this point, I think we’re maybe only 70% of the way there. So I guess I’m not immune to feverish optimism myself, in my own way. But it was a mild case of the sniffles compared to all the blogosphere whooping cough that’s been going around the last few years.
October 18th, 2006 at 8:27 am
Let’s not forget that despite his lip-service against going into Iraq, Cooper supported the occupation on the basis that a precipitous withdrawal would be irresponsible. In other words, he is barely distinguishable from mainstream Democratic Party opinion.
October 18th, 2006 at 8:31 am
Jimmy R: let’s go have our meds in the common room, then there’ll be applesauce and we can have a nice, quiet afternoon and not get upset.
October 18th, 2006 at 9:24 am
I read his whole post and I find it fascinating that a number of these lefty hawks are so concerned with falling on the right side of history. Perhaps these grandiose notions of historical judgement and their own self-importance (as if anybody gives a shit what side of history got Norm Geras) is what clouds their judgement. Guys like Geras and Hitchens didn’t treat seriously anyone with doubts because they saw pragmatism and skepticism as enemies of the true fight. Their calculations resemble Bush’s divine gamble more than I would have expected.
To anyone with open eyes, it was obvious that the following were true: 1. the threat of nuclear weapons was cooked up by the Bush team. 2. the Democracy Domino theory was horseshit 3. this administration disdained experts and outsiders. 4. the people in power knew very little about the Middle East and Iraq in particular.
All that, and I’m sure some one can think of a lot more, was patently obvious before the invasion. In my view, it takes some kind of messianic faith in your own moral rightness or a credulity not befitting grown-ups to assume things would go well.
October 18th, 2006 at 9:27 am
A possibly more interesting rethink might be the invasion of Afghanistan. Supported, as it was, by centralist liberals like myself, never dreaming U.S. leadership would fumble so badly there; betraying a real disinterest in the region as anything more than an oil spigot. While we may have chased down some of the 9-11 killers, we’ve left the region ripe for breeding more such people.
So my critical public rethink would have to be a trip to the woodshed for my own stupidity in thinking anything good might come out of The Bush Presidency.
October 18th, 2006 at 10:15 am
What Mavis said…
That a bunch of folks who’s primary preoccupation seems to be claiming to be the true partisans of the capital L “Left” – even if their pretensions have been reduced to mere nostalgia for those heady days when parsing Trotsky and waving broadsheets at the masses “mattered” – that they’d end up sharing some of the same hubris/credulity of a guy who claims to be urged on by God or of the imperial schemers of PNAC who wanted to foment regime change from their Beltway command centers isn’t really surprising.
Wall speaks to the second most urgent tragedy of the Iraq War, after the hell it’s visited upon the Iraqi populace, which is the failure to act effectively in Afghanistan. Moving against the Taliban was justified, given that they were harboring bin Laden, but the shambles of what has passed for “strategy” there is also evident. I’m not going to flagellate myself for supporting Bush when we went in, but I’ll flagellate him for abandoning a serious effort in favor of a crackpot misadventure in Iraq.
October 18th, 2006 at 10:17 am
What do you say to a “Liberal” hawk like Geras? Sorry but “Had I but known” just will not cut it. Plenty of people knew. People who, unlike Geras, actually had some expertise in the area. People, like the minions around Bush 41 (Skowcroft and others) who had fought one Gulf War. People at the CIA and State that were leaking like sieves at the time. But Geras and his ilk didn’t listen.
Two points:
This morning Al Franken (yeah Marc AAR is still going) read a series of quotes from that great Foreign Policy maven Thomas Friedman going back to 2003 that said, in essence, the next three to six months would be crucial. THREE YEARS of such quotes. No wonder ATRIOS coined the measurement “One
Friedman” to distinguish six month intervals in Iraq.
And Friedman’s paper the NYT had an interesting article the other day in which it asked various DC types to distinguish the difference between Shia and Sunni Islam and the countries where one or the the other predominated. Guess what? Almost no one could tell the reporter. And this was NOW! I wonder if Geras knew? Or if he knew the history of Britain in Iraq? I wonder if he had read Fromken’s book on Post WWI Middle Eastern Politics A PEACE TO END ALL PEACE? I did and it left me in no doubt as to what would happen.
So if I could figure it out, And I claim no great expertise or prescience, why couldn’t Geras? Maybe because facts are stubborn things and get in the way of beautiful theories about the way things ought to be rather than how they are. And the real question is why should I now give a damn what he or Friedman have to say on anything.
October 18th, 2006 at 10:54 am
The GOPers: Excruciatingly Dumb or Grotesquely Immoral ?
Josh Marshall has this clip from the Uniontown PA Herald-Leader:
Embattled U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said America has avoided a second terrorist attack for five years because the “Eye of Mordor” has instead been drawn to Iraq.
Santorum used the analogy from one of his favorite books, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1950s fantasy classic, “Lord of the Rings,” to put an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq into terms any school kid could easily understand.
“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.
“It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S.,” he continued. “You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”
(end clip)
How can these bastards reconcile their alleged concern for bringing peace and democracy to Iraqis and ridding them of the horrors of the Saddam regime with this “Better to fight them there, than here” and “terrorist flypaper” crap, which is premised on the notion that it’s better for Iraqi children to die in our war with terrorists than to go after our enemies head on.
Aside from major faulty reasoning even in its own terms – because strategically, it doesn’t hold up at all – this is an astonishingly cynical, amoral attitude. Especially for a little prick who parades his “Christian” values. It’s one thing for a person to feel emotionally in their gut that they’d rather see a war break out someplace else than in their backyard, but to favor deliberately starting one, using a bunch of humanitarian and “self-defense” rationales that prove baseless, and then claim it’s justified because its opportune and in our self-interest to use Iraq as the killing field is nothing less than appalling.
Jim R – your side’s mental health professional is calling. And I can’t explain this thing neatly. That it doesn’t make much sense from any rational U.S. national security perspective is the main reason I didn’t support it. Because Saddam’s oxygen intake wasn’t on my list of priorities, despite the rhetoric of the right against war critics. But it doesn’t take a genius to see that the folks who cooked this thing up have a range of direct connections to companies that can fairly be termed war profiteers, to the Israeli right-wing, to the oil industry and to Iraqi exile groups that saw a shot at taking power on the backs of American troops. Who benefits ? Other than the crazy Islamists and the Iranians, of course. All of these groups represented by powerful Beltway players saw huge potential benefit, whether or not it turns out they were delusional. The national security argument – which was thin – couldn’t have justified an invasion without a campaign of hyping it that was conducted by real people with real connections to real groups that saw potential to profit, either financially or politically. But, bottom-line, without a very shallow, insecure, incurious, inexperienced President in the Oval Office and a bully of a Veep allied with a crazed cabal driving the agenda, it wouldn’t have likely happened.
“Crazed cabal”, incidentally, is a polite term for the likes of Doug Feith, David Wurmser, et. al.
October 18th, 2006 at 10:55 am
I guess the only difference btween Geras and Robert S. McNamera is Geras didn’t wait 25 years to tell us he screwed up.
October 18th, 2006 at 11:07 am
What good has come out of the Bush presidency?
http://venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1853
October 18th, 2006 at 11:17 am
As someone who opposed the war, from the get-go, I’m not willing to let geras off the hook for this reason:
He still refuses to acknowledge that principled people who opposed Sadam Hussein’s vile regime could have also have opposed this war.
How responsible would it be for someone if they knew that something disastrous would happen kept their mouth shut? Christ, even Cassandra made predictions with the knowledge that no one would believe her.
October 18th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
Great! So the global influence of that progressive powerhouse China is spreding. I’ll get my thank you right off to Condi Rice.
October 18th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
The Chinese are all over Latin America making deals and they are also active in the Middle East.
Today Bush the boy-king signed a new “National Space Policy” that declares the US will reserve the right to deny space to “Hostile powers”. How they plan to do this is left up in the air (sorry!) but combining these two facts make me think of Tom Leher’s song, “Werner Von Braun”:
“In German and English I’ve learned how to
count Down.
And I’m learning Chinese”, says Werner Von
Braun!
October 18th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
Personally, I’m pro-Iraqi. Live ones. I’ll leave it up to them to decide if alive under Saddam is better than dead and free. Or free to live in chaos. It is arrogance and narcicisism that makes people want to spread violence and war with the goal of offering them what we have like we can read their minds. Our way of life is clearly superior so of course they will welconme us with roses and candies. Violence begets violence, period. If you want to offer someone something that they would consider a better life, then the means matters in achieving the end. War in never the answer.
October 18th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Oh yeah, its National Character Week!
October 18th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
Dick Cheney increasingly reveals himself to be a full-on sociopath.
In terms of Norm Geras, what Mavis and reg said.
I have exactly zero sympathy for Geras “agony,” since his point of view did not, in fact take into account the wishes of the Iraqi people who, as much as they desperately wanted Sadam to disappear, predicted that, if the American military came to in to take him out, hell would follow after. The arrogance of the Gerases of the world and their bullshit self-referring morality that allows them to believe that they know best for everyone else, is exactly what has allowed the truly immoral likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and company to have their tragically inept way.
“I did not anticipate a failure on this scale, and had I done so, I would have withheld support for the war without giving my voice to the opposition to it.â€
Well good for you, Norm, honey. But here’s the deal: others DID imagine failure on this scale. Among those who imagined it were most of the Iraqi people, and nearly the whole of the near east desk at the State Department. But hey, why ask them?
Just for the hell of it, I went back and reread an article that I wrote for the LA Weekly in October of 2002 (Marc edited the thing), in which I spent several weeks interviewing Iraqi expats about whether or not they supported an American invasion to overturn Saddam Hussein. I talked to ultrareligious enclaves and secular contingents, professionals and blue-collar workers, the politically active and the uninvolved. And all—I mean all, except for a single group in Orange County that was directly aligned with Ahmed Chalabi— opposed the invasion. They all wanted Saddam gone, as soon as humanly possible, but no one trusted that having him removed by the Americans would result in anything but disaster.
“We all believe the bloodshed will be up to our knees,†one woman doctor told me. “It’s an old Arab saying, but it’s what we believe. It’s what we fear.â€
Well, the blood is up to the knees of the Iraqi people and rising. Thank you Dick Cheney. Thank you, Norm “I-couldn’t-have-opposed-it” Garas.
October 18th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
My feeling when the war started was that what I wanted was for there to be no war, but seeing as how the administration was determined to have one and that no one could stop them, what I wanted was for them to get it over with as quickly as possible.
Imagine my disappointment.
October 18th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Just popped in for a moment, but two of the best docs on why Iraq has gone so bad were last nights `The Lost Year in Iraq’ on Frontline, and the video release `Why We Fight’. If you’re a
fan of Lt Col Karen Kliatowski, you’ll love the latter.
October 18th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
Would Iraq have gone better with a competent crew in charge? I’ve been thinking about that lately as the Mess-O-Potamian hijinks have led me to reexamine our other big foreign policy fiasco: Vietnam. I’ve been rereading the “Classics” of that conflict -DISPATCHES, THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST, A BRIGHT SHINING LIE, and OUR VIETNAM – and several lessions stand out.
First and foremost was the ignorance, in both cases, of the principal decision makers about the region they were dealing with. In the case of Vietnam that was the result of the purging of the State Dept of anyone with expertise in great McCarthy Witch hunt over “who lost China.” In Iraq the principals simply ignored all the expert advice telling them what would go wrong.
Whatever your historical judgements may be it is clear that the team around Kennedy and Johnson were far superior to the Bush 43 crowd in understanding the world. People like Maxwell Taylor and Lucein Conein had a deep understanding of unconventional war and knew the doctrines of Sun Tzu and Mao. And advisors like John Paul Vann had admirers across the political spectrum. There is no comparison to the likes of Wolfowitz, Feith, and Tommy Franks. But still with all their talent they failed to see Vietnam for what it was, a nationalist struggle. And, as a result, they lost.
No, I don’t think Iraq would have “worked” if we had sent our Best and Brightest. And that is the truth we must acknowlege. When Henry Cabot Lodge arrived in Saigon to be US Ambassador, Neil Sheehan told another reporter, “Ah another Westerner come to be humbled by Ho Chi Minh.”
Some things never change.
October 18th, 2006 at 8:12 pm
Hang on a second. There is a hell of a lot of self-congratulatory breast beating over the complete obviousness and inevitablity of the outcome of this war going on right now on this blog, and I think some of that needs to be checked. Some here are failing by essentially conflating the “inevitable” outcome of the war with the way the criminally negligent Rumsfeld conducted the war. It’s a mistake to make that move. There are other ways this war could have been conducted: More troops, using the plans the military had in place for occupation, not disbanding the army, a less aggressive de-baathification policy, toppling Saddam and then getting out fast come to mind. It is unclear whether any of them would have worked, but it is not pre-ordained that they would not have, and none of you can convincingly say that it was.
I very much had Kosovo in mind when I supported this war, and I did it under the banner of an important principle to me–anti-fascism. I never once believed the bullshit about WMD’s, Niger, Al-Qaeda or any of the rest of it, and I thought it was, at best, irresponsible to talk this way. But I still felt, despite the more nefarious, or even messianic motives of Bush and Co., that it was possible to hold your nose and temporarily make common cause with them in the interest of reducing one tiny spot of tyranny in the world.
This has turned out to be untrue to say the very least. But I think it is a little too glib and easy to label those of us who felt that there might be a way to free tyrranized people from oppression and help create the conditions for a better political life, as idiots, or self-referring bullshitters, or any of the rest of it. And for what it’s worth to all of you who rightly point out the hyprocrisy of our abrupt changes on the likeablity of Mr. Hussein over the years, I felt that if anything, that very hypocrisy increased our obligation to remove what we had helped make.
It is a horrific decision to go to war, and I’ve never suported such an effort in the past until Kosovo. In that, not to sound too high-falutin, I felt a sense of broad human solidarity with the opressed, and I felt precisely the same thing when the Iraq issue came up (and I defy any of you to look at Kosovo, or East Timor or Darfur, or….and not feel the hideous sick of your outrage made limp by the impossibility of helping, even saving people from tyranny and death.) I was well aware of the risks, but felt the upside could very well be worth it, and I felt we owed it to a region we had abused so readily in the past.
And yes people were going to die, Iraqis and Americans both, but weren’t Iraqis already dying and weren’t many of them being kept alive by the admittedly imperfect instrument of American and British air power?
It’s just far too facile to say you “knew” and that many of the above things were immaterial or easily ignored. If they were, then I doubt your humanity, just as thoroughly as you excoriate Geras and others who reasoned along those lines.
October 18th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
What Dan O said.
October 18th, 2006 at 8:58 pm
…were you reading over my shoulder Dan O? I’ve got about 2000 words of “wait a seconds” but you managed to cover most of them very well.
This war in Iraq was not preordained to fail. No one has that ability to foresee the future. To have gone to war, to end the Hussein crime family regime over Iraq was going to entail risk. The comments of Mr Geras that Marc built his leading post upon are enlightening to some degree. But to another degree this whole exercise is problematic. Mr. Geras is mostly guilty of playing into the “Knowing what I know now, would I have…” polemic. Apparently this schtick is good for talk show hosts and poll-takers, but it is an impossible standard in the real world, working in real time. The human condition just simply hasn’t evolved enough to exploit that dimension of fore-knowledge that some here seem to posess. One cannot demand victory ahead of the struggle.
October 18th, 2006 at 9:11 pm
Dan O, there isn’t enough glib in the world to properly apply to your stupid. Yeah, I’d like to wave a magic wond too and wipe away a patch or two of facism. The central lesson of our lives, as Locicero points out, is that it’s not that easy. To leave it to the craven and the dim calls into account the autheticity of your passion.
Many in the State Dept. felt the best we could hope for was a kinder, gentler (defanged) Saddam, but that we were heading in that direction. I sense your final questions are a prelude to the grand cop out we will no doubt be treated to for years to come: that Iraq was headed down that road anyway.. blah blah blah.
There’s nothing wrong with hoping for the best; but it’s unfair to pretend some people didn’t call this right down the line; because they did. There is a lot of rightousness in the air; a hefty dose from the Media (so PROUDLY embedded, not so long ago) and the chattering class (” A President who wins the war gets to celebrate it the way he wants to” said the Washington Post editioral page at the mild rumblings over “Mission Accomplished”) , but don’t blame those who didn’t fall for it; just because you did.
October 18th, 2006 at 9:16 pm
…sorry folks for the multiple posts, but I guess now is about as good as time any to say the following: When is anyone here going to condemn the prime motivator of the violence in Iraq? When is someone going to say, enough is enough? The major factor that makes one Iraqi kill another Iraqi is the grandest stupidity that ever inflicted the human race — religion. A curse upon you Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. If only there was a hell.
October 18th, 2006 at 9:28 pm
“There are other ways this war could have been conducted: More troops, using the plans the military had in place for occupation, not disbanding the army, a less aggressive de-baathification policy, toppling Saddam and then getting out fast come to mind. It is unclear whether any of them would have worked, but it is not pre-ordained that they would not have, and none of you can convincingly say that it was.’
The problem with this analysis is that it assumes the United States Adminstration was actually conmcerned about the well being iraqis.That this gang of neo cons who viewed the Iraq intervention as part and parcel of a much broader plan to reshape the Middle East in their interest cared peace, good order and democracy for Iraqis. Sorry but those of us with a much longer memory of US interventions in the Middle East, who dont view the world as a struggle between good and evil and are skeptical of USA power had good reason to believe that the invasion and occuation of Iraq would be a disastor. In the lead up to this war people like Geras spoke about going into Iraq as if they were the policy makers, as if they were Bush. Hitchens is so delusional that he recently told someone that both he and Wolfowitz persuaded Bush about going into Iraq. Do former proponenets of this war actually believe that an adminstration which acts as an accomplice for war crimes in Lebanon and promotes a hideous policy of starvation in Gaza can be counted on to look after the best interest of Iraqis. Here’s Tony Judt’s take on bush’s usual idiots
http://tinyurl.com/g4b5r
October 18th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
Mr. Wall: I wonder if those brilliant minds in the state department contributed to the Washington Post editorial today, bemoaning the lack of a more muscular position of the US towards the fear that Al-Qada terrorists might find a haven under an Islamic regime in Somalia. Perhaps they leaked a little blah, blah, blah foreseeing a regional war which is about to, now, ignite.
Onward to Somalia! Err no, Darfur, …ah no, let’s go back to Afghanistan. Whatever, whereever, it will only be GWB’s fault.
October 18th, 2006 at 9:35 pm
Christalmighty! I’m starting to sound like Woody.
Gotta do a beer run.
October 18th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
Ahmed:
Reasonable points, to which I would say (in contradiction of my usefulness as an idiot), even if you ascribe the most base and venal motives to Bush (which I largely agree with), any plans they had, required a stable and reasonably safe country, which I thought would be their first order of priority. I had no idea, and neither did anyone else, even those predicting disaster, that these guys would be so horribly callous about post-war conditions. The neigligence is mind-boggling. And given all the talk about democracy, I gauged that this also would need to be a major priority. After such copious public declarations it would be unthinkable to leave another strong-man in place. I didn’t reason that these guys were both callous and delusional. You can disagree, but, given what I just wrote, it’s not fair to call me stupid or an idiot. I understood this was bargain with the devil, but also thought their post-war concerns would absolutely dictate stability as the first move.
That reasoning is at least as subtle as the predictions of disaster and as likely an outcome. I warrant had Bush Sr. pushed into Baghdad the occupation would have looked very different. The apple fell mauch further from the tree than I bargained.
October 18th, 2006 at 10:11 pm
Dan O: “It’s just far too facile to say you ‘knew’ and that many of the above things were immaterial or easily ignored.”
Which is why I *don’t* say I “knew”. Geras requires only high probability of some such outcome as we are seeing now, and that’s precisely what I think he chose to ignore.
“If they were, then I doubt your humanity, just as thoroughly as you excoriate Geras and others who reasoned along those lines.”
Had they actually *reasoned* along any lines driven by little more than a certain strutting moralism on the one hand, and political convenience in the means to achieve ends on the other, maybe you’d be right. But they didn’t. So you’re not.
We find out recently that Rummy threatened to fire anybody who said another word about planning for any kind of long term occupation. He didn’t want the American people thinking we might be in there for a long time, and not having a plan (which might leak, after all) was, to him, a reasonable price to pay for entry into Iraq untrammelled by any concerns that the governed would withhold consent.
We hear over and over that our President doesn’t send more troops to Iraq because generals don’t ask for them. Which proves nothing. Generals don’t ask for the impossible, and more troops would require a draft, which is politically impossible.
Exactly what drove these curious decisions to disband the Iraqi army and to let de-Ba’athification turn into a sweeping purge is not obvious to me, but I suspect that an Iraqi army under U.S. command, tasked to restore order, might, in many cases have committed chilling atrocities that wouldn’t play well in the court of world opinion. Better an overall higher level of *chaotic* violence that could be attributed to “bitter-enders” and “terrorist interlopers” than the eventual discovery of mass graves dug by recommissioned Iraqi army units to cover their tracks, after they had returned to base to report “mission accomplished” — having achieved that goal through routine *systematic* violence of the kind that we had supposedly gone into Iraq to end, as one of the goals (besides rooting out that nasty WMD program and those Al Qaeda operatives).
Extensive de-Ba’athification probably helped make those purple-thumb elections look less problematic. After all, in the Sunni triangle, many Ba’athists running under that party banner might actually have gotten into office, which would have been rather embarrassing for the Occupation.
Once you buy into a war in which PR is always strategic priority #1, no matter how pure your motives, you have crossed a certain line: you’re an enabler for mendacity addicts. You’re going to start chugging from the same bottles not long afterward–though you’ll think of it as taste-testing, of course, and you’ll regard your role in the propaganda machine as one of writing reviews of the latest batch from the vineyards. “Iraq — a lovely nose, but rather granular mouth-feel, and with a somewhat too smokey finish. Later vintages didn’t measure up to the promise of the early start. We cannot rewrite our early assessments. At best, we can offer our sincerest apologies to those of you who bought whole cases of this stuff based on our prediction that, while it was perhaps overhyped by others, it would nevertheless age well. But really: how could we have *known* that it was nothing more than Koolaid spiked with carbon tetrachloride? You can’t blame us!”
October 18th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Dan O and Rob G – I don’t have any sympathy for the arguments of people who supported this war because the only moral rationale for a pre-emptive war is a looming threat. There was absolutely no valid national security argument put forward for this thing and the paucity of any such evidence was “knowable” in advance. Ask Anthony Zinni if you don’t believe me. When guys at his level of insider knowledge say that the war cabal is full of shit, I’m inclined to believe them.
If you were paying more attention to Hitchens and Geras than people like Zinni – and a host of others – your rationales have zero credibility, because Hitchens and Geras have zero credibility. They know absolutely nothing, other than what Mavis pointed to, which is some ridiculous notion of their world historical role as intellectuals. And of course, neither one has ever written anything on foreign affairs that rises on the credibility scale above the level of an ideological tract or a pamphlet. Absolutely nothing. Google Geras’ output in print – it’s a bunch of tedious stuff about marxism and what he construes to be politics. Why the hell would I care what he thinks about U.S. national security imperatives ? I might as well have a conversation with my neighbor down the street. At least he’s more likely to be annointed with common sense than some denizen of left-wing academia. And Hitchens is, if anything, worse. (Kissinger’s a war criminal ? Who knew ? Chelsea Clinton is a product of “the worst family” ? Go fuck your fat self. Paul Wolfowitz is a great humanitarian and Ahmed Chalabi’s to be taken seriously as a resistance leader ? Time to dry out.)
The needlessness and enormously counterproductive potential of this war from the perspective of U.S. national security was entirely knowable. The liklihood of it turning into something akin to a disaster within Iraq was a safe bet (although failure was surely overdetermined by BushCo’s unbelievably, careless, reckless approach) – definitely a safer bet than the crap about transforming the Middle East through military occupation. I’m not really about crucifying people who supported the war initially out of some good intention, because I supported it once it was a fait accompli in the sense that I hoped for the best. But the initial chaos of the occupation and unwillingness to even acknowledge growing problems by the Bush administration diminished that hope rather quickly and, frankly early on I felt that the architects of the war needed to be exposed and to pay a political price for their mendacity. I am about excoriating people who continue to rationalize the project or who deny that in hindsight their foresight should have been better.
Guys like Hitchens and Geras have been blowing hot air for several years now. They are completely irrelevant and increasingly ridiculous. Their prosecutorial airs and accusations against war critics were disgusting. For every moral idiot who opposed the war I can cite a dozen who supported it, so belching about George Galloway or some such making common cause with Islamists is telegraphing just how far removed one is from mainstream objections to the war that weren’t reducible to placards of the residual Left in Trafalagar Square but have been grounded in hard realities, apparently now discernible even to the learned Professor Geras.
As for humanitarian interventions, I’ll consider a coalition effort to intervene to stop a civil war or genocide. But Iraq wasn’t equivalent to Kosovo, and frankly whatever success we had in Kosovo came at a very dear price to the people there which tends to get underplayed by the heroic liberal interventionist crowd. In balance it was probably the best of some bad alternatives but let’s not gloss over what happens in a bombing campaign, however “well intentioned”.
October 18th, 2006 at 10:28 pm
I’ll add that “looming threat” was a vague and terrible choice of words – substitute “imminent” or “clear and present” threat of attack.
October 18th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
I opposed this evil war (all wars are evil, folks) as much as I could from the get-go, too. I even atetnded rally after rally sponsored by Marc’s betes-noires A.N.S.W.E.R., inlcuding the rather large Feb. 15, 2003 march. That day could have meant something if war criminal /torturer GW Bush had listened. But the “polls” said 70+ % of US Empire sheep supported the attack on Iraq, including the New York and Washington “liberal” newspapers. I’m a simple teacher and historian yet I preditced a US debacle and Worldwide emnity for this anachronistic gringo imperialism . I have no sympathy for those with blood on their hands; their hubris coupled with their ignorance is inexcusable.
October 18th, 2006 at 10:56 pm
“I warrant had Bush Sr. pushed into Baghdad the occupation would have looked very different.”
The occupation might well have looked different and been better organized, but the reason it never happened is that Bush Sr. and his advisors thought the result would probably be the same. The pragmatic AND moral thing to do would have been to keep Saddam’s helicopters grounded using our air power when the Shia rose up, letting the Iraqi chips fall where they may while recognizing that a Shia revolt, whatever the ideology driving it, was justifiable in the face of Saddam’s oppression. This is where I part with the “realpolitik” of a Brent Scowcroft – although I’m aligned more closely with his relative rationalism than I am with the imperial dreams of the neo-cons. Bush Sr. sold out the Iraqis who rose in the south for the same reason Reagan aided Saddam when he was committing war crimes and genocide – Iran. Frankly, I think that our situation with Iran would likely be better, not worse, if there had been throughout the 90s, at the least, a liberated Shiite region in the south of “the country formerly known as Iraq” which had reason to be grateful to the U.S. It would, of course, have been a boon to Iran but also a possible catalyst for something approaching a normalization of the Sunni/Shiite balance in the region and, perhaps, moderation. Occupying Iraq in ’91 and attempting to reshape it would have been just as crazy as it was in 2003. Giving some aid and cover to anti-Saddam Iraqis to directly take their own fate in their hands would have made sense.
October 18th, 2006 at 11:23 pm
I knew I was gonna take some shit for my post, but reg, I’ll thank you to accurately engage my position where 1) I readily concede there was no national security threat and the Bushies were talking shit, and 2) I don’t rationlize the project, but I ask some questions and make some claims about the inevitability of failure.
The probability point raise by MT is a worthy one, but I’m still not convinced that another 300,000 troops and a relatively quick withdrawal wouldn’t have been a very different thing. And if we’re talking probabilities, then the probability that this goes off better than it has goes up quite a lot, and thus my claim it’s not inevitable that the war turns into the cluster fuck that it has.
Yeah, I agree pre-emptive war is hugely problematic, and it may be that the military is too blunt a weapon to acheive any good in this way, and that US policy imperatves, especially under this group will always sour everything, but I have a moral problem with allowing crimes like the ones in Iraq, and elsewhere, to go on when the power to stop them is available. I sincerely thought we could do something good for Iraq, but maybe, there is no good that can come of these interventions. Of course the alternative future in any of these cases is no more knowable either, and all the blah blah blahs don’t change that.
October 18th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
Hey reg, M Turner. Good counters. Still…
Again, I second Dan O’s continued points that the war was not inevitable to become so bitched up. However, I too agree that there has to be some degree of accountability to this war. That’s why I have to seriously hope that the Democrats take both houses and force Bush to sack Rumsfeld. There has to be some major slap in Bush’s face… I may be a few shots of Absolute fuzzy tonight, but Rumsfeld, supposedly, has been ‘soberly’ running this thing for 3 1/2 years…!
And reg, seriously, I tried to square both of your posts — 10:15 & 10:56 — and the latter only seems to convince me further that the war had to be launched.
October 19th, 2006 at 12:45 am
“Occupying Iraq in ‘91 and attempting to reshape it would have been just as crazy as it was in 2003.”
The counterfactuals, the would’ves and could’ves, could occupy us forever. What remains, however, is this: whatever the “casus belli” really was for Gulf War I (Baker’s “oil and jobs”, I think), the ostensible principle in play was “the principle of national sovereignty”. You can’t invoke that principle as a reason to drive Iraq out of Kuwait, only to turn around and be an active party to carving up Iraq immediately afterward. Certain kinds of hypocrisy are just too blatent. The no-fly zones were about as far as it could go.
But I think there’s more to it than that. Saddam was left in power by Bush Sr (left less powerful on the international stage, but probably more powerful in relative terms within the parts of Iraq he thoroughly controlled) as a gesture of gratitude, I believe. For what?! you ask, incredulously. For letting US kick him out of Kuwait instead of leaving when asked. Sticking it out in Kuwait until forced to leave meant putting Iraq on a total war footing that could only consolidate and centralize Saddam’s command and help flush out resistance to his rule. The no-fly zones, by providing safe(r) harbor for those rising in resistance, actually took pressure off him. Had the resistance been cornered, it might have fought to victory. So the way we ended it was a favor.
The quid pro quo is interesting on the other side. Had Saddam left on the schedule demanded by the UN resolutions, he would have left behind a Kuwait in the hands of those who really knew how to operate the machinery of state. Which wasn’t this little bedouin tribal monarchy and its cousins and sub-clans. No, the people who knew how to get things done in Kuwait were almost all … Palestinians. And they were still there after those bedouins had fled the country. Worse, those Palestinians could have taken the historical opportunity and held elections. Then what what we have had? A Palestinian democratic *petrostate*. The U.S. isn’t going to invade a democracy to restore a monarchy, is it? So they would have gotten the shield of political legitimacy.
The mere thought of which would naturally send shivers up the spine of just about every other regional actor. Israel certainly–a Palestinian movement with an unlimited supply of petrodollars? Saudi Arabia about as much. Syria? They might have seen an angle, if anyone could have, but elected instead to cooperate in the eviction process. The Hashemite Kingdom? Quaking in its boots, thinking “We could be next”.
October 19th, 2006 at 12:49 am
“the latter (of your posts) only seems to convince me further that the war had to be launched”
Dept of Infinite # of Monkeys at Infinite # of Keyboards: When all else is failing BushCo, I manage, in spite of myself, to further convince someone that the war had to be launched. Get me a show on FOX News…
October 19th, 2006 at 1:38 am
“… but I’m still not convinced that another 300,000 troops and a relatively quick withdrawal wouldn’t have been a very different thing.”
Nor am I. Just as I’m not at all convinced that if my Aunt Mary had balls she wouldn’t be my Uncle Mario.
Convince me that the American people would have sat still for a very rapid call-up of draftees. I don’t know how else you would have gotten 300,000 US soldiers (with 450,000 likely needed) into Iraq, without abandoning every other military commitment we have in the world. I think the American people would have said, Hey, wait a minute, maybe we need to rethink this? And in that pause to reflect, rationality would have had time to reassert itself.
Convince me that even with an occupying force sufficient to restore order, we wouldn’t still be in there, and probably taking more total casualties (though perhaps with a lower proportion) simply because there would be far more “low-hanging fruit.”
After all, the US Occupation of Japan lasted over six years, even though it held power with the benefits of
(1) a compliant and contrite state figurehead (Hirohito) neutered and grandfathered into a relatively intact government,
(2) a strong sense of national unity and shared ethnicity surviving defeat, and a U.S. occupying force supported by
(3) a disciplined and obedient Japanese Army that had even fought on the British side briefly in Indonesia, after Japan’s surrender, as part of cleaning up that chaotic situation.
(4) Let’s not forget that this US force had been
drawn from a US population inured to high levels of conscription, which by then had declined dramatically anyway.
(5) Might I add that our evident ruthlessness in pursuit of victory over Japan, which devastated the cores of most of Japan’s cities, was a more than sufficient deterrent to any possible resistance?
Iraq presents us mostly with polar opposites:
(1) we tried to kill (still-glaringly unrepentant) Saddam during the invasion and he’s probably the focus of some significant insurgent loyalty even now.
(2) Iraq’s patchwork quilt of former Imperial possessions never was nationally, ethnically or religiously unified, except in oil greed and in war against Iran.
(3) Even if we had immediately recommissioned the Iraqi army, it would probably now be a major concentration of fifth columnists.
(4) We don’t have a nation inured to conscription, with conscription levels dramatically down; we have an entire generation of kids who don’t remember the draft, and some pretty sorry experiences associated with those memories by those who have them.
(5) As for pounding Iraqis into submission from the air, slaughtering many civilians in the process, while demanding an unconditional surrender, that was never even considered, and for pretty obvious reasons. It would have stunk too much of Vietnam, not VJ Day, and probably with equally bad results.
If you see Uncle Mario around, say hello to him. I don’t know where in the world he is now.
October 19th, 2006 at 2:41 am
Marc:
I agree Bush didn’t care all that much for democracy in Iraq – at least putting a serious miitary and infrastructure security that would allow negiotiations between factions.
But after deposing Saddam, what failings specifically did you see of his command that allow discontent (other than the slow-motion Paul Bremer provisional authority) to brew to a point of no return?
October 19th, 2006 at 2:48 am
Bush did not put enough money into building the country the way THEY wanted it…I would see that as a main motivation for terrorists popping up and pledging allegiance to either Saddam, Zarqawi, or Sadr; they wanted a powerful counterweight.
But the level of their discontent – killing innocents on a scale far greater than our errant bombs have – makes me think this isn’t just discontent; Islamic radicals who only align themselves with strong Islamic governing get much more popular backing because not only aren’t we helping nearly enough: they have tradition in that land that we could never usurp. If we gave boatloads more money, it still wouldn’t matter; simply trying to install a democracy wouldn’t have worked without bloodshed.
But Bush’s incompetence and mediocre to non-existent concern has increased the bloodshed.
If Powell ran over Rumsfeld and Wolfowicz, Bush would have no choice but to listen to his generals much more than he has.
October 19th, 2006 at 3:17 am
Norm Geras is a textbook case in how “Apparently Smart” can shade so easily into “Remarkably Stupid”. On closer rereading of his equivocations linked above, I find this:
“I don’t know how – morally, humanly – to deal in calculations that say that n deaths (where n is a very large number) are an acceptable price to pay for some putatively desirable end result.”
Well, dude, you must have engaged in some such back-of-the-envelope-in-your-mind calculation when you came out in support of the invasion of Iraq. Unless you thought the invasion would come off without any casualties. Whatever else we might disagree about, after all, we can agree that zero is a very small number. We can also agree, however, on another very small number: the probability that there would be negligible casualties. Welcome to the world of calculation! Your ideological enemies do it, Norm, so maybe you better start hitting the books.
From the beginning, my opposition to the war was rooted in a concern that the people instigating the invasion, executing it, and responsible for its aftermath, as well as the very nature of Iraq and its situation, argued strongly against some facile conclusion that whatever followed toppling Saddam had to be better than Saddam. There is no bad situation that cannot be made worse by incompetent application of good intentions mixed with moral hazards, not to speak of calculated application of venality camouflaged as good intentions. Iraq was bad, but it was far from the worst situation in the world. And invading it was not exactly free of moral hazards.
Somehow, people who won’t deign to submerge their pure minds in the pigsty mud of “calculations” feel that it’s not enough to stand by and wring one’s hands about a bad situation that happens to fixate one’s attention, heedless of any objectively greater horrors elsewhere in the world. Oh no — one must exhort *others* to go and do something about it. Even if those others are people to whom you wouldn’t ordinarily give the time of day. What matters is that the thing is getting done, is it not?
Some people calculated we had a good chance of ending up where we are today. They were thinking clearly, unlike Norm Geras (whose prose style makes me feel like I’m drowning in pureed tofu). It’s going to take even clearer thinking, based on even more careful calculations, to find a good resolution, if any is possible, or to find the best of some bad resolutions, which may be all we can hope for at this point. In the meantime, reading some guy who says “Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have supported the war, but I wouldn’t have opposed it either, and I wouldn’t criticize those who opposed it, but I also wouldn’t criticize those who favored it either,” feels like a ball-shriveling waste of time. This guy obviously doesn’t know how to write a simple truth, like “I should keep my goddamn mouth shut when it comes to things I don’t know a whole lot about.”
October 19th, 2006 at 3:33 am
Hey, anyone here predict WWIII prior to the Kosovo intervention? Anyone announce Armageddon after the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was hit? C’mon people don’t be shy! I can tell by the sky-high levels of ‘anti-war’ self-righteousness that some of you must have.
Marc Cooper at least has been big enought to admit that he was wrong in his speculations on the outcome of ‘regime change’ in South East Europe at the end of the nineties. Norman Geras should be given at least some credit for his willingness to do the same in a different context.
One of the problems with the ‘anti-imperial’ left is that it rarely has to face the consequences of its position. Hence, in the Balkans context, it elides the immense difference between a region that would have been dominated by a neo-fascist Milosevic regime and one, as at present, that isn’t. Remember folks there were no Srebenicas in Kosovo. And all because of big bad unilateral, NATO-led pre-emptive military action.
Some of you need to accept that non-intervention has consequences too. What, for instance would have been worse–no intervention in Iraq with Saddam cosying up to Ahmedinajad, Kim Jong-il, Chavez or Saddam doing a Gaddafi and Bush letting him into the fold so he could rattle his anti-Iranian saber?
Either way the ‘anti-imperial’ left would no doubt have remained above the moral fray and the Iraqui people would be f**ked. Perhaps we should have hung around and waited for Uday to convert to Shi’ism (as he planned to)once Saddam had gone. Then we really would have had the mother of all civil wars. But I bet I know who would have get the blame.
October 19th, 2006 at 3:58 am
Sergio, I’m all for blaming the public; but we should keep the record stright. I believe polls showed people were against the intervention without a clear U.N. mandate. When Bush didn’t get it; and invaded anyway; we were then into “back our boys” mode, and the kinds of numbers you sited occured.
This is the “support our troops, even if you don’t support the cause” con the right has been perfecting since Vietnam. It worked.
Alas, even if poor Rob can never come to grips with it; this war was more the result of one man than any in our history. 9-11 (wrongly) handed Bush the mother load of political capital. Some of his most ardent detractors hoped it might sober, mature, or humanize him. Alas, the shirt was truely empty, the vessel authenticly void, the bumpkin profoundly born again. Prince Hal far, far from Henry, the cigar just a stale, stinky, Vanity Fair photographed cigar.
October 19th, 2006 at 10:55 am
“One of the problems with the ‘anti-imperial’ left is that it rarely has to face the consequences of its position.”
Does that mean they won’t be getting the Medal of Freedom, a pension and a book deal ?
October 19th, 2006 at 11:30 am
For those interested in pursuing this further may I suggest the article “The Strange Death of Liberal America” by Tony Judt in the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS and the reply, in the form of a Liberal Manifesto by Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin and signed by a slew of well known Progressive voices in THE AMERICAN PROSPECT. You can access both pieces by going to TPM CAFE.
I’ll let others compare to the “Euston Manifesto.”
October 19th, 2006 at 11:47 am
If the American people would have prayed longer and deeper, we would have won.
October 19th, 2006 at 12:07 pm
“Hey, anyone here predict WWIII prior to the Kosovo intervention? Anyone announce Armageddon after the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was hit?”
Uh….no.
October 19th, 2006 at 12:26 pm
The wierdest thing is a very sharp and talented writer like Marc Cooper being so incredibly naive as to believe that the US would have brought democracy or sovereignty to the people of Iraq vial military intervention. And even after the intentions of the US were explicitly clear in terms of forced privatization and dependence on the US for economic and political decision making [purple thumbs notwithstanding], that somehow sending in even more troops would have been a contribution to either those goals or ‘peace’. Truly mindboggling the naivete of it all.
Geras is even more amazing, since he has gone beyond journalism and actually taught theory most of his life and its relation to something once referred to as ‘praxis’. He’s gone from brilliant [Rosa] Luxemburgist critiques of Lacau and Mouffe and postmodernism to Luxemburgist [!] defenses of the US military machine as a means of delivering sovereignty and democracy to the poorer regions of the global capitalist world! That is truly the sign of a tragically deteriorated mind. Deteriorated journalism and theory we get then, in one post from Marc Cooper here!
October 19th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
“Geras is even more amazing, since he has gone beyond journalism and actually taught theory most of his life and its relation to something once referred to as ‘praxis’…from brilliant [Rosa] Luxemburgist critiques of Lacau and Mouffe and postmodernism…”
Yeah, that’s like totally amazing. Hard to figure out how he could turn out to be something once referred to as “full of shit”.
October 19th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
“Either way the ‘anti-imperial’ left would no doubt have remained above the moral fray and the Iraqui people would be f**ked”
Yeah, those Iraqi people are doing great right now. Did you ever want to throw everything away and start over somewhere else? Thanks for giving them that opportunity.
October 20th, 2006 at 6:27 am
Gareth Porter: “Sadr is confident that, once the Shiite government has gotten everything it can out of the United States to strengthen Shiite forces, they can defeat the Sunnis by military force.”
As Porter points out, they can basically kick us out at any time, not least by throttling supply lines running through their territory. Which is something I’ve been pointing out for literally years now–given how well-armed the average Iraqi is, if they were unified around the goal of kicking us out, they could have done it in 2003.
And yet they haven’t kicked us out. And that should tell you something. What the Shiites must be engaged in right now is “appeasement” in the original Neville Chamberlain sense: making (relatively) nice with an enemy, until you’ve had time to build up decisive force against it. In the case of Britain, it was a buildup of decisively defensive force against the Nazis. In the case of the Shi’ites, it’s decisive crushing force against the Sunnis. Tanks. Heavy artillery. The stuff of massacres on the scale of Hafez Assad’s assault on Hama, repeated all across the Sunni Triangle as necessary. Which will probably have to come from us, if not from Iran. Turning against us will be a preliminary, requiring of them an even higher level of preparedness–enough to generate U.S. casualties on the scale that would finally get Americans to push for a precipitate pullout, and also enough to absorb a lot of casualties (maybe 10 for every one of ours) in the process, without degrading their capability to defeat the Sunnis in one crushing campaign afterward. One wonders what the required level of armament is, and what the trigger event will be. Juan Cole has propagated speculations that the U.S. keeps the Iraqi government underarmed precisely because of this foreseen scenario, with complicity from top officials in the Iraqi government, who are likely to understand quite well that this is one possible outcome.
If the study Gareth Porter cites is correct, the Sadrist militia now significantly outnumbers U.S. troop headcount, even though they were estimated at maybe 10-20 thousand back when people like Michael Totten were writing Kill Moqtada al Sadr. Of course, killing Moqtada al Sadr would have solved nothing–he owes much of his clout to his father’s martyrdom, and whoever succeeded him would simply be the next martyr willing to step up to the plate–possibly some heroic fighter figure. Decapitation gets us nowhere in this theater. More heads keep growing. Not to mention more arms and feet.
More “birth pangs of the New Middle East”? We’re going to need some emergency caesarians, some oxygen tents, maybe some of those surgeons who are good at figuring out which Siamese twin has to be triaged. This rough beast isn’t merely slouching towards Bethlehem anymore, it’s got the pedal to the metal. Maybe when the Iraq Study Group delivers its final report in January, the conclusion will be, “Well, the last six months were crucial, it turned out.”
October 20th, 2006 at 7:17 am
‘Uh….no.’
Bully for you reg. So you thought that it would undoubtedly help bring about the fall of Milosevic and prevent genocide in Kosovo. Ain’t YOU the seer?
‘Yeah, those Iraqi people are doing great right now. Did you ever want to throw everything away and start over somewhere else? Thanks for giving them that opportunity.’
Who said they were doing great right now? I merely speculated as to how great Iraquis would be doing if Saddam hadn’t been removed–that includes the short, medium and long term.
Fuck knows how long democrats ANYWHERE in the Middle East would have to wait if they were dependent on the solidarity of leftists like you.
Advice: Keep lurking. Intervention ill becomes you.
October 20th, 2006 at 8:01 am
It’s easy to call for assassinations when such things don’t impact your
family or friends in any material fashion. In fact, when wars don’t affect
your livelihood–and to some extent actually increase the number of prowar
fanatics who frequent your website–it’s even easier to support bizarre
ideas like ‘assassinate Al Sadr!’ as the ‘solution’ to the problems facing
the US occupying forces in Iraq.
October 20th, 2006 at 8:24 am
Not long after I posted my last, I saw this
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1927685,00.html
The Mahdi Army takes a southern city of 750,000, flattening three central police stations.
tony h, earlier: “What, for instance would have been worse–no intervention in Iraq with Saddam cosying up to Ahmedinajad, Kim Jong-il, Chavez or Saddam doing a Gaddafi and Bush letting him into the fold so he could rattle his anti-Iranian saber?”
Saddam cozying up to Ahmedinajad? What planet did you say you lived on again?
Gaddafi’s nuke program had long been mothballed when he revealed it, by the way. He’s been after rapprochement for years, and that was just him dealing out another card at a fortuitous moment. Saddam couldn’t do a Gaddafi anyway–he had no nuclear weapons program, so how could he? They asked him for a weapons manifest, he gave it to them showing no nukes, they said “absence of evidence only PRO-OO-OOVES you have ‘em, dude”, and invaded anyway.
Speculation is fun, but why don’t we base speculation on events that actually take place on this planet, not in your bizzaro parallel universe?
“I merely speculated as to how great Iraquis would be doing if Saddam hadn’t been removed–that includes the short, medium and long term.”
Things would suck. They apparently suck even worse now than they would have. If you define Saddam as Evil Axis Hubcap, well, the hubcap fell off long ago but the evil seems to be continuing for some reason: death squads, torture, massacres, a terrorized population. I don’t suppose you would be willing to speculate a little on why that might be? Welcome to planet Earth.
October 20th, 2006 at 8:29 am
I’m a seer and YOU are a HERO !
Intervention becomes you!
Which base in Iraq are you posting from ?
“Who said they were doing great right now?”
Nobody…because as has been clear since mid-2003, it will take another six months to turn the corner against the handful of deadenders. Or, worst case, until we catch Saddam, the insurgency crumbles within weeks and Democrats are forced to broadcast their criticisms of the war from the planet Zog (crossref. Maj. General Mark Steyn of the Fighting Keyboarders, 12/03).
October 20th, 2006 at 8:30 am
Sorry – that was for “tony h”
October 20th, 2006 at 8:56 am
If anybody hasn’t gotten it yet, the utter incoherence of the pro-war GOPers is clear in this glenngreenwald piece on McCain:
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/10/john-mccain-unveils-his-grand-plan-for.html#links
One of the most inane bits on Iraq was penned in the last couple of days by Jonah Goldberg, Spawn of Lucianne, who admitted the war was a mistake but that all of the anti-war critics were wrong when they opposed it. His Plan ? Let the Iraqis vote on whether or not to keep American troops in Iraq! Two questions. What the hell is a conservative doing asking another country’s populace to vote on how we utilize our military ? Aren’t such niceties the hallmark of liberal wusses who want to impose the “old rules” on our GWOT, which is, after all, a life and death struggle in which we must fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here ? And if Iraqis DID vote to keep the U.S. army in country, what the hell is Jonah’s new plan to improve the cost/benefit ratio for us ? Given the news today, with Sadr seizing key towns, Jonah’s status in the realm of total morons has just gone up a few notches, if any such thing could be imagined.
October 20th, 2006 at 8:58 am
“Jonah’s status in the realm of total morons has just gone up a few notches, if any such thing could be imagined.”
Oh, and he managed to do that while actually getting a large question right. Go figure…
October 20th, 2006 at 8:58 am
“Jonah’s status in the realm of total morons has just gone up a few notches, if any such thing could be imagined.”
Oh, and he managed to do that while actually getting a large question right. Go figure…
October 20th, 2006 at 10:15 am
Yeah but this is all a ploy by the “Dead enders” to have us vote Democratic on Nov. 7!
October 20th, 2006 at 9:27 pm
“Let the Iraqis vote on whether or not to keep American troops in Iraq!”
I’m for this, Jonah, but only as part of a general snap election in which Saddam is permitted to campaign from prison.
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