Lunacy, Not Blunders
"Our Iraqi Mistake. What Was It, Exactly?" asks Jacob Weisberg in Slate, rightly noting that the question has legs because it goes to the unresolved quandary of where American foreign policy goes from here. Weisberg concludes that "even in this mistakenly chosen war, our failure wasn't inevitable. It is the product of blunders made along the way by President Bush and his people—and the blunders they are making still."
It is a helluva puzzle for liberal hawks, whom or what to blame for the ongoing catastrophe, and it is not a question for them alone. But with the word "blunders" Weisberg tries to solve the puzzle without the keystone piece--the formative, fundamental nature of the Bush government and the movement conservatives who brought it to power.
Weisberg struggles his way through an argument to the effect that the U. S. should not succumb to either bogeyman isolationism or prissy realism because, in principle, it is capable of hoisting up its pants and making an occupation work:
nothing that went wrong in Iraq, including the Sunni-Shiite civil whatever, was fated or inevitable. The difference between Kosovo and Iraq isn't between a country that wanted peace and one that didn't. It was a matter of better management and better luck. To assume that American intervention can't work ignores the relative success of recent "wars of choice" in Bosnia and Kosovo (leaving aside the more debatable propositions of Somalia, Haiti, and Panama).
"Better management," "better luck"--the euphemisms miss the essential less-than-betterness of the Bush group. The Bosnia and Kosovo interventions had limited, practical objectives--to stop genocides (sorry, ethnic cleansings) in progress. The men and women who devised these interventions were not millennial game-changers. They did not justify what they did with the idiotic rhetorical claim that the barbarian regime in question "used weapons of mass destruction against its own people," when such use in Iraq, sanctioned by the U. S. at the time, actually preceded the invasion by 15 years. The Clinton administration blundered, too, but like other grown-up non-hallucinators, they learned from their blunders how to correct their thinking--what to do when, you know, stuff happens.
Whatever one might care to argue about the general proposition that all American interventions are doomed to disgrace and disaster, Weisberg commits a cardinal error. He remains trapped in the liberal hawk's naivete about the nature of the reigning government. He does not understand how deeply, how fundamentally, how wildly, zealously irrational is the Bush gang (who, at this moment of "surge," show no signs of having learned a thing).
Whether, in principle, a rational American government could arrange for an occupation that works remains debatable. Afghanistan is the tough test case. Unfortunately, the Bush gang have so botched their military deployments that we won't get to find out how well the Afghan occupation could (or could not) go as long as Bush is in power.
Here's the point: Bush does not commit blunders. He is a walking, strutting, stumbling blunder. He (& Cheney & Rumsfeld, & Co.) did not think out what they were doing in Iraq. They did not perform if-then calculations. They did not think through what was possible and desirable in Iraq--any more than they have reasoned about global warming, disaster planning, Social Security, port security, deficit spending, intelligent design, late-term abortion, "no child left behind," or for that matter, whether to take al-Qaeda seriously before September 11, 2001.
What most liberal hawks don't see (Peter Beinart is an exception) is that the fantasist nature of the Bush gang was evident before March 2003. They are not in the thinking-through game. They are in the hallucinating, fact-bending, reality-canceling game.
No discussion of where to go from here can begin without wrapping the mind around just who is running the country.
I'd like to recommend a read of Antonia Juhasz' excellent article "The Spoils of War: Oil The U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area and the Bush Agenda" in the January 3 edition of In These Times. Unfortunately the article is not yet online. She describes the Bush post war plan rather well.
January 4, 2007 7:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Gitlin says:
Once that mind-wrapping has thoroughly and rigorously concluded, is there any honorable course aside from bringing articles of impeachment? I'm looking forward with all eagerness to congressional oversight.
aMike
January 4, 2007 7:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Analogies between American politics in our times and the fascist regimes of the recent past are overdrawn and tendentious, but one thing they genuinely have in common is this fantasist element of political culture. Christian fanaticism and exceptionalist nationalism have fused into a compound as toxic and irrational as anything European cultural revanchism ever produced, even if its contours are not the same and its political power has not (yet) swept all before it. The liberal hawks need to take a close look at the horse they're trying to ride.
January 4, 2007 7:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
the utter inability of the liberal hawks to understand is not, in any significant way, different from the utter inability of the bush administration to understand.
which is why slate is no longer worth reading.
January 4, 2007 7:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
Saddam with a fully functioning chemical and biological weapons program was not a strategic threat to the United States. A better targeted system of sanctions and UN Inspections could have prevented even that. Saddam with an even partially functioning chemical and biological weapons program was a tactical threat to Israel. While he had no real possibility of attacking Israel head on, even a chemical warhead or two in the hands of Hamas would have facilitated a terror attack.
That is the cold reality that liberals, and particularly those liberals that support Israel generally (although not necessarily the policies of the current government), need to confront.
This was a war of choice promoted by a group of Americans (who we can shorthand as PNAC and TNR) that broadly define American national security in ways that include Israeli security. This is not necessarily pernicious, NATO is organized around the same principle of joint security, an attack on one is an attack on all.
But a preemptive attack on a country that had neither attacked you on behalf of another who had been "attacked" if anything by Saddam sending money to families of suicide bombers (and if there were any other overt acts by Iraq against Israel I would like to hear them) would have been an impossible sale, and the Peretzes, Perles, Wolfowitzes and Ledeens of this world understood that.
So they hyped up some existential threat to the United States that never existed, and any number of people who should have known better, and many who probably did know better, went along with the charade.
If people really believe that Israel was under attack by Iraq then you can't quarrel too much with the idea of the US giving assistance to the Israelis for their own self-defense. And we have been doing that for decades with arms aid and intelligence sharing. But trying to extend that to suggest that the US fight foreign wars as a proxy is going a couple thousand bridges too far.
I as sure there are people out there who will regard an accusation againt Peretz, Perle and Ledeen as being more loyal to Israel than the United States is somehow anti-semitic. Well whatever you want to think. What I do know is that they have the blood of 3000 Americans and literally countless (because uncounted Iraqi) on their hands. And don't seem particularly upset by that fact even today. At least none of them are pulling for withdrawal and Ledeen is pushing for extending the war to Iran.
January 4, 2007 7:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
They are in the hallucinating, fact-bending, reality-canceling game.
It's worse than that. They are in the denial of truth for purposes of PR game. The insurgency couldn't be properly dealt with at its outset because military leaders were not permitted to use the word "insurgency." Tactics against guerrilla warriors could not be discussed because "geurilla war" was not allowed to be said. Working out tactics to deal with civil war or a failed state are impeded because those conditions cannot be said to exist.
Or, as the president puts it:
Mr. Bush still insists on talking about victory, even if his own advisers differ about how to define it. “It’s a word the American people understand,” he told members of the Iraq Study Group who came to see him at the White House in November, according to two commission members who attended. “And if I start to change it, it will look like I’m beginning to change my policy.”
It's all about what color lipstick they can put on the pig.
January 4, 2007 7:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'll meet you halfway here, Todd. This piece started so optimistically. Finally, I thought, someone will be shifting the debate from the botched occupation of Iraq, to the botched policy that got us there in the first place.
But then you ended off with a round of crowd-pleasing Bush knifing.
I tell you, there's a time and place for directing all the deserved opprobrium at Bush. But when it comes to the question of what was the mistake with respect to Iraq, it is not a simple issue of erroneously trusting Bush to run a something competently.
The whole damn Iraq project was misconceived from the outset. And if you indulge in these laborious diatribes that Bush f*cked this, Bush f*cked that like he always did, you are playing into the liberal hawk/neocon hands. These people need the argument to be framed in these terms. If they are convincing enough that that Bush is the main reason Iraq is falling apart, they have the upperhand in either calling for an escalation, or "staying the course" till we have a set of brains in the White House.
The answer to "Our Iraqi Mistake. What Was It, Exactly?" is simple - we invaded and occupied the country. Anything else about botched occupations is laying the groundwork for justifying an escalation, which rests on the assumption we can still fix Iraq and it is important we do so.
That's the lunacy.
January 4, 2007 7:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well what lessons can we draw from Iraq then, Todd? What do the events of the past few years indicate about the future of US foreign policy, and where we should go from here. As I read you, there are hardly any lessons we can draw from Iraq other than:
We should not elect wildly, zealously irrational movement conservatives; and if we do elect these kinds of conservatives, we should avoid military interventions in other countries while they are in office.
Everything else is apparently still on the table. This is depressing. Isn't there anything we have learned that doesn't depend on the weird and anomolous nature of the Bush administration? Are you saying that once the movement conservatives are gone, everything goes back to square one, and none of the debates and tragic events of the past five years will have moved us forward at all?
As far as I can tell, you really don't disagree with Weisberg in any essentials. You just wish he had insisted more on the incorrigible wretchedness of Bush and his government. So that when Weiberg says things could have gone better with better management, your rejoinder is: "Perhaps, but you must recognize that there is no way the Bush administration crazies could ever have performed competently."
Aren't the liberal hawks guilty of anything other than overestimating the capacities of the depolorable Bush administration? Did they display no zealous and irresponsible irrationality of their own?
January 4, 2007 8:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Uh...I think you completely missed the point of Gitlin's excellent post. Viz.: the reason the occupation was a string of horrific errors was the same reason why we invaded Iraq in the first place, which is that Bush and his crew are crazy idiots. The fact that the occupation was mind-bogglingly screwed up, the fact that the invasion was a crazy idea in the first place, and the fact that the Bush admin is a bunch of fumbling nutcases are all inextricable from each other, and Weisberg's effort to untie them is silly.
"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone
January 4, 2007 8:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
I thought the single stupidest thing I ever heard with regard to Iraq was David Brooks, on the eve of the Sept 2002 authorization, saying that those Democratic Senators who oppsed the war were 'preventing the flowering of Democracy in Iraq." It neatly encapsulated the willful and puerile romanticism underlying the whole project. Not we have Weisberg saying that we could have succeeded in Iraq, we just needed "better luck." Mr Weisberg would actually sound smarter if he announced that hope should have formed a larger part of our plan.
January 4, 2007 8:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
I too noticed this article yesterday. I think Weisberg really goes astray by refusing to seriously consider that going into Iraq was a doomed venture from the start. Clearly, "mistakes were made" in the early months of the occupation that went a long way toward creating the terrible situation we have now. But the simple fact of the matter (and the reason Bush 41 shied away from occupying the country) is that a guerrilla war there in response to our invasion was almost inevitable. The parallel he draws between Iraq and the Balkans in the 1990s is a fallacious one, both in the purpose of the intervention, and insofar as an American military presence means very different things to people in the Middle East vs. people in Kosovo. And history tends to show that guerrilla wars are almost impossible for a distant occupier to win. The guerrillas only have to keep the country destabilized enough to keep the occupiers from declaring victory, while the occupier has to expend enormous resources to, effectively, tread water without any clear end in sight, a situation that becomes economically and politically untenable. So, I think it's very reasonable to argue that our defeat in Iraq would have taken a minor miracle to avoid, even without all the terrible mistakes.
January 4, 2007 8:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's funny that Weisberg didn't seem to tease out one 'minor' detail.
The Kosovo intervention was to...
STOP
a war.
The Iraq invasion was to...
START
a war.
How could such smart Jewish writers be so blind to the obvious?
Gitlin seems to be on to something in his observation that Iraq was more about Israel than the US. Often, the arguments about oil imperialism or military bases miss the mark. If you look at the supporters and rationalizers, the Israel issue is front and center.
I think the reason that otherwise brilliant Jewish thinkers seem to have blinders on - or don't show remorse about 600,000 dead - is that they feel the expenditure of blood and treasure on their holy homeland is PIOUS - the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and the trillion US dollars are just those eggs you have to break to make your Israel omelete.
I'm coming to realize that there is a quasi spiritual/emotional connection for Jews that is practically ineffable - even if they weren't disingenuous about saying "Hey, it's not about WMD, it's about Israel," I wonder if they could even communicate exactly WHY the connection is so strong. As a Catholic, I wouldn't care all that much if Italy took over Vatican City or something 'like that.' In fact the lack of suitable analogies is telling - what other 'races' or creeds have this sense of dual citizenship? More importantly, what other group makes defense of the 'motherland' priority number one?
Peace? Oil? Stability? 600,000 dead? Yeah, yeah, yeah...but Israel, Israel is what's really important.
January 4, 2007 9:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
Right, but beside the point.
Under this leadership, going into Iraq was a horrible error - given what we now know about the thorough incompetence and lack of grounding in reality that characterizes them. But under other leadership - even other leadership that made the same intelligence mistakes/fabrications in lead up - a greater display of competence, pragmatism, and reality-grounding post invasion could have resulted in a far better situation in Iraq than we're now seeing. To deny that is to deny that the lack of competence &c. since invasion has been material to the outcome, which is absurd.
There is no original sin common to all-and-only those who would invade a country that dooms all occupations and reconstructions to a current-Iraq-like outcome. Nor is there an original sin that infests all-and-only "conservative" or "hawkish" thinkers. Nor, despite the dismal ranks of the current Republican party, have all conservatives, over all time, been similarly reality-divorced and stumbling - if that had been the case they wouldn't still be with us.
January 4, 2007 9:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
From the outset of this war, it was apparent to me that Bush and Co. were delusional (this was once a minority position, but I have more company now), and that the Iraq war was certain to be a disaster, because delusional people are, by definition, not competent. I had no way of knowing exactly what mistakes they were going to make, but I was certain they would not succeed.
Debates about how non-delusional people would have conducted a policy that was based on delusion are not only utterly pointless--they make as much sense as arguing with a crazy person.
Todd Gitlin is spot on. The central political fact of our time is that we are dealing with a President who is a crazy person. If we don't deal with that fact, we are deluding ourselves.
January 4, 2007 9:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
This was a horrendous decision under any leadership.
Tom
January 4, 2007 9:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Gitlin isn't as clear as he could be but I see the invisible argument. It is not just the wacko conservative personel that are the problem it is the ideas they advocate and promote. Rejecting the personel is rejecting the ideas.
The irresponsible irrationality of the liberal hawks was not recognizing the reckless nature of the PNAC ideas that demanded the military occupation of Iraq. There was also a big dollop of intellectual narcissism in so much as the Iraq war had to be fought in order to strengthen liberal internationalism. There was this rediculous fear of permanent precedents, the idea that if we turn down an intervention we will turn down all possible future interventions. Rediculous, but I remember that argument being in the forefront of pro war liberal opinion; we need to agree to Iraq to stop the Rawandas of tomorrow. A fear the neo conservatives exploited to the max. The neocons played the liberal intellectual interventionists like violins.
If I were a Weisberg or an Ignatieff I would be mad as hell at being used like this. This seach for a mushy middle by Weisberg tells me that he isn't quite there yet, Bill Kristol still "rules his world". Jacob, leave the abusive boyfriend and come into the light.
January 4, 2007 9:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
You missed my point.
I won't dispute that Bushco are a bunch of fundamentalist goons ("zealously irrational" is a not a bad generalization). And I won't dispute the criticism that is levelled at them for playing their "hallucinating, fact-bending, reality-canceling game".
My problem is that I don't see what relevance this has to the debate of what do with respect to Iraq.
The Iraq invasion was not wrong because Bushco believed in it - that's just a dopy, borderline McCarthyite argument. The plan was conceptually wrong in its own right, not simply because Bush adopted it and he was trusted to execute it competently.
And the bigger issue is this - if you buy into Todd's central argument, that "no discussion of where to go from here can begin without wrapping the mind around just who is running the country", where does that leave you? That we must withdraw from Iraq because we have an lunatic in the White House?
Sorry, but we've got to do better than that. We have to demonstrate the strategic necessity of leaving, and we do that by arguing the strategic blunder of going there in the first place. And that means cornering everyone who supported the invasion in the first place and until they admit it was a terrible idea on its own merits and support an immediate withdrawal. Hanging the failures on Bush might be fun politics, and even a justifiable apportionment of the blame, but I don't what good comes from it.
The lesson from Iraq is not simply - don't trust a moronic administration. There were plenty of eminently sensible people who supported this war, and we all, irrespective of political leanings, need to take on the substantive policy lessons from the debacle.
January 4, 2007 9:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
There is no one reason, in fact there were no reasons at all for going to war. This president has left a trail of misery and death and destruction for no reason whatsoever. Why? Because in his opinion, "wartime presidents are great presidents." This war is about him - even today his sociopathological narcissism is stunning - his refusal to change course, to correct mistakes (or even acknowledge them) is because he is afraid to appear weak, in his own words, "if I change it, it will look like I'm beginning to change my policy." When his staff finally arranged to tell him he needed to change his policy, he left the meeting early, met with General Casey who was carrying out his policy, and came back in "a buoyant mood." This is truly frightening behavior - he leaves one of the most important meetings of his presidential life, and flies off to seek reassurance and reaffirmation of his policy.
When he did reluctantly agree to reassessing his policy, he did so out of fear that he might have to accept The Iraq Study Group's plan, not because he might be wrong or mistaken in his policy. When he finally met with his commanders at the Pentagon, he told them, "What I want to hear from you is how we're going to win...not how we're going to leave." He not only hasn't "reassessed his policy" he doesn't want to hear any views that would contradict his policy.
Of course the logical question to ask this President is what are we supposed to win? We're not at war with the Iraqi people, we're not there to inflict complete and utter humiliating defeat upon those people, we're not there to expand our territory, so what is there to "win?" We're there and we remain there to vindicate and support one man's mistaken view "that a wartime president is a great president."
This war is about him; about who is loyal to him, who supports him, who agrees with him and who serves him. The Iraqi people are meaningless to him - he neither consults them, seeks advice from them or even acknowledges them as human beings with their own right to self-determination.
This is the sorrow and the pity of this war - that one man, incapable of empathy and compassion for his own people, can inflict so much human misery on another people, and with the complicity and submissiveness of others, resolve to inflict more.
January 4, 2007 9:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hey, Hitler occupied France with much greater success...for a while.
You do have a point there. Still, consider how murky the motive for invasion was: He made the Bush family (uh, America that is) look weak! So Bush had the vengeance thing clouding his 'competence' before any shots were fired. Then, when the Pentagon wanted to sorta 'cut and run' by installing Chalabi, leaving the Bath party and Army in place and making the ticker tape parade by May 2003, Bush decided, in his new role as Mideast Messiah, that the Shiites were finally going to have their day in the sun (hey Iran is shia too...uh oh).
DeBathification and dismantling the Army? That decision is clearly front and center in the debate about 'management' as opposed to morality of invasion occupation. Well without the Army to provide security and rebuild the country, hmmm...hmmm...who could we think of to do those things? Hey, here's an idea, how about Dick Cheney's company? Here's all your expenses plus 20% Dick.
Oh, and plus there's the little fact that we want to dominate Iraq with OUR army...how are we going to dictate terms to a country with a big, well equipped army? And then they might make us leave someday...we don't want THAT now do we?
So you see, it's hard to unwrap the 'incompetence' from the greedy, self dealing, Messianic, towering hubris that lay in the hearts of these warriors of choice.
January 4, 2007 9:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
The central political fact of our time is that we are dealing with a President who is a crazy person.
Dammit, Danius - you just opened up the insanity defense! Now we'll never get him impeached!
"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone
January 4, 2007 9:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
The liberal hawks are guilty of pursuing a pipe dream that every other administration, starting with Reagan, rejected. They're guilty of buying into a neo-con fantasy, of pumping up Bush's brayingly false hype. They're guilty of completely underestimating the magnitude of this project,and of enabling the fantasists of this administration to have wild-ass crazy scenarios get taken seriously. They're guilty of uncritically reporting the "evidence" that underlay the pretexts, and of smearing any opposition.
Now their guilty of claiming that even though it turned out worse than any of their own worst scenarios would have projected, they're blaming other people for the execution of the project. If only....then things would have been different. Well, first, you wage the war with the commander in chief who you have in power when you smear the opposition. And, second, the counterfactual blather that people like Jake push out ("450,000 troops") was never possible.
The bailing wire and sticking plaster "Iraq is a grave and growing danger" story was coming apart in March 2003. The inspectors were finding nothing. It was clear that Iraq was no threat. The US had 3 or 4 votes on the security council, including its own, for the invasion. The "ties" to al qaeda had been exposed as entirely false.
Taking the time to put together an occupying force of 450,000 and viable plans for reconstruction would have taken at least a year. An additional year would have meant that the inspectors would have proved their negative. Iraq would have been involved in no terrorist event and the fearmongering would have collapsed under the weight of facts on the ground.
The liberal hawks complicity comes in their joining the neocons in ignoring the evidence gathered from January to March of 2003, which was well on the way to proving that none of Cheney's pretexts were true, and that his stovepiped "intelligence" was wrong.
Without the complicity of the liberal hawks, there could well have been no war. But there could never have been a "successful" war.
January 4, 2007 9:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bev,
This is a classic. You ought to send it to a newspaper.
Tom
January 4, 2007 9:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
. . . the . . . reason why we invaded Iraq in the first place . . . is that Bush and his crew are crazy idiots.
Then, how do you explain the enthusiasm, pre-war, of so many "internationalist liberals" and "liberal internationalists" for the policy?
January 4, 2007 9:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks, Tom.
January 4, 2007 9:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's precisely the point.
January 4, 2007 9:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Afghanistan demonstrated two things. The enormous power of the American military and the ineptitude of the Bush Administration. Bill Kristol's dismissal of the potential problems between Sunni and Shite Iraqis also demonstrated that the intellectual fathers of this war were never honest with themselves let alone with the American people.
As one who might be described as a liberal hawk, though one who knew Bush was not the one to lead us in war nothing said by Todd or anyone else really disproves that getting with of Saddem was always going to be a failure. It was not necessary to allow the weapons caches and hte borders to be open to all. It also was not necessary allow the chaos that ensued that led the Shite militias to call a halt to their being targeted by Sunnis both Al Qaeda and Iraqi.
Almost from the begining the uniformed military was more interested in the post-Saddem Iraq. They tried to bring democratic votes to Iraqis and were thwarted by Bremer. To indulge in a bit of stereotyping it is a bit strange that the Marines were more concerned with the Iraqis enjoying safety and democracy that were either the Defense Department of the State Department. That was not necesary just sade.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
January 4, 2007 9:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Damn. Where are Zionista, BradtheDad, and Daniel A. Greenbaum when we really need them?
January 4, 2007 9:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
The Iraq invasion was not wrong because Bushco believed in it - that's just a dopy, borderline McCarthyite argument.
No, it's not. The point here becomes more complicated than is easily limned in a blog exchange. But the gist is that in evaluating the trustworthiness of a statement, you have to take into account what you know about the speaker; the meaning of a statement changes depending on who's saying it. We knew the character and competences of the Bush administration by 2002, and we knew that they were, for instance, prone to conflating different actors into a single "threat"; that they were inexperienced with and suspicious of the diversity and complexity of the world outside the US; that they were ideologically opposed to nation-building, and thus lacked competence at it or familiarity with the issues it involved. They were highly skilled within the world of US partisan politics, but that was the limit of their competence. We knew this. We also knew they had a casual attitude towards hard facts; we knew that since the budget debates in the 2000 campaign. The way that the anti-Iraq campaign developed highlighted all of those weaknesses. In the case of the invasion of Afghanistan, because that response seemed so logical and unsurprising after 9/11, it made sense to support the administration. But when they began making highly speculative arguments for launching a new and unrelated war, one's spidey sense really should have started tingling.
We know now that no administration which did not share this administration's combination of ignorance of foreign affairs, overweening hubris, politics-is-everything indifference to facts or to good policymaking, jingoism, and even religiosity would ever have recommended something like the Iraq war, because it was simply an absurd venture. I think that translating "don't trust a moronic administration" into "don't trust a President with very simplistic and ignorant ideas about the world abroad when he recommends launching a hugely risky war for uncertain ends" would cover much of the ground of lessons that need to be learned here. It would, for that matter, embrace LBJ, too -- another master of domestic US politics whose ideas about foreign affairs and war proved dangerously simplistic.
"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone
January 4, 2007 9:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
We know now that no administration which did not share this administration's combination of ignorance of foreign affairs, overweening hubris, politics-is-everything indifference to facts or to good policymaking, jingoism, and even religiosity would ever have recommended something like the Iraq war, because it was simply an absurd venture.
No, we don't know that at all. That suggests that Iraq war II is the only ill conceived war that the US ever engaged in.
And it fails to explain why so many people in the US drank the Kool-Aid.
January 4, 2007 10:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
nothing said by Todd or anyone else really disproves that getting with of Saddem was always going to be a failure.
The reason we went to Iraq was 9/11 and al-Qaeda.
Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and al-Qaeda.
Therefore, a failure.
Dissent Protects Democracy.
January 4, 2007 10:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
Once the President puts an initiative out there, and it becomes clear the administration is really going to push to make it happen, it becomes "real" and enters the policy debate, often regardless of the basic nuttiness of the idea. It's very hard for even intelligent people to believe that the President and the government of the US may in the most basic sense be completely ignorant and delusional about a life-and-death issue. Here, all the responsibility devolves to the top. GWB abused the authority of his office to make ludicrous proposals a reality. And he surrounded himself with people who had similar tendencies.
On the other hand, it also reveals some unflattering things about many liberal internationalists, notably that they share some of GWB's refusal to consider the world abroad as a wide array of real places which are actually permanently different from the US, and are not subject to quick and easy transformation courtesy of the USMC and USAID.
"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone
January 4, 2007 10:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
I suspect that it was because the crazy idiots convinced the internationalists that they were about to get something for nothing which any con man knows is the essential characteristic of a likely mark.
January 4, 2007 10:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Daniel is here, but you're right, the others are sorely missed!
January 4, 2007 10:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
The enormous power of the American military and the ineptitude of the Bush Administration.
I just don't get this. It demonstrated that a collaboration of US special forces, in theatre intelligence assets and popular indigenous forces could achieve a limited objective very cheaply.
The US was lucky, imo, that the arab-dominated Taliban was so broadly unpopular. People were glad to see foreign rulers tossed out.
Todd or anyone else really disproves that getting with of Saddem was always going to be a failure. It was not necessary to allow the weapons caches and hte borders to be open to all. It also was not necessary allow the chaos that ensued that led the Shite militias to call a halt to their being targeted by Sunnis both Al Qaeda and Iraqi.
The incompetence of the execution of this operation will be cited as a reason to dismiss it as historical evidence that the US cannot successful conduct wars of imperial occupation.
In point of fact, the US cannot conduct wars of imperial occupation, especially without a draft. The 450,000 troops that comes trippingly to Weisberg's keyboard could not have been raised in the pursuit of an imperial conquest. And the pretexts that Bush raised could not have been sustained while that troop buildup took place.
This war was folly from the outset, as every other administration from Reagan on recognized.
January 4, 2007 10:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Might I ask you to clarify a point? When you speak of "the war", are you referring specifically to operations in Iraq, or all military operations by the current Administration?
For me, policy debates can get very confusing when I realize criticism of "the war" really refer to the Iraq catastrophe. That fiasco, defying military and cultural history, properly should be considered a campaign, within the Central Command theater of operations, within the broader national security policy/grand strategy of the United States.
To equate the war to Iraq makes it very difficult to evaluate the resources and attention diverted from much more focused operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
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Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
January 4, 2007 10:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
What's your point?
You write: "In the case of the invasion of Afghanistan, because that response seemed so logical and unsurprising after 9/11, it made sense to support the administration."
Yet, you take issue with me when I assert: "The Iraq invasion was not wrong because Bushco believed in it [...] The plan was conceptually wrong in its own right".
You can't have it both ways, bud. Either (a) it's acceptable to look at a Bush policy on its merits (which is by your take on Afghanistan), or (b) it's not acceptable because it's a Bush policy (which is your take on Iraq).
You know where I stand. Where do you?
January 4, 2007 10:34 AM | Reply | Permalink