Looking Bacq - at Iraq

I think it would behoove most people to read this post from the Slate. It is a series of articles written by pro-war turned anti-war writers, who are all asked how they could have mis-judged the Iraq situation so badly. I have my own opinion on this, and so I read the individual posts with great interest. I am sorry to report, however, that the explanations are sorely lacking. They are lacking, not so much in substantive thought, as they are in introspective analysis. Most of the authors are still trying to admit their mistake without admitting that they were wrong. A good example of this is the post by Jeffery Goldberg. The following post seems to be the de-facto response from most: ...another larger mistake was to put my trust in the Bush administration, not so much on matters of intelligence—faulty intelligence was a near-universal phenomenon—but on matters of basic competence. Ah, I see...in Hillary Clinton-esque fashion, if the war had just been run well, it would all be OK. I consider this to be a monumentally pathetic cop-out, and an ends-justify-the-means explanation. There has never, to my knowledge, ever been a war fought with what I'm sure Goldberg would consider "basic competence". This is due to both the scale of the undertaking, as well as the nature of the enemy. How Goldberg could not have known this is nearly mind-boggling. Here is the closest we will come to Goldberg's actual feelings: A long time ago, I was certain that the Iraq invasion would be seen as a moral victory. Most Americans quite obviously do not see it this way. But on my last trip to Iraq, four months ago, I learned that many of Saddam's victims continue to see the invasion as a triumph of justice. The Kurds, who make up nearly 20 percent of Iraq, remain, by and large, quite pleased with the Anglo-American invasion, which removed from their collective neck a regime that did an excellent job over the years of murdering them. This must count for something, and I'm hopeful that one day, when President Bush is gone and the Kurds are free, it will. So then Jeffery, why wait until 2003 to cheerlead this cause? Andrew Sullivan does a much better job of analyzing the philosophy of the decision - even if he misses what I believe to be the true reason. He divides his response into 4 sections. 1 - Historical Narcissism Sullivan describes this as the following: I became much too concerned with fighting that old internal ideological battle and failed to think freshly or realistically about what the consequences of intervention could be. I allowed myself to be distracted by an ideological battle when what was required was clear-eyed prudence. This is true to some extent. When armed conflict erupts, the pacifist element of the US will speak out against it. This requires almost reflexive retaliation from the Republicans, who will argue something similar to Sullivan: I saw the opposition to the war as another example of a faulty Vietnam Syndrome, associated it entirely with the far left—or boomer nostalgia—and was revolted by the anti-war marches I saw in Washington. This could explain some of the reaction. 2 -Narrow Moralism I became enamored of my own morality and the righteousness of this single moral act. And he was a monster, as we discovered. But what I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster, and unless one weighs all the possibly evil consequences of an abstractly moral act, one hasn't really engaged in a truly serious moral argument. I saw war's unknowable consequences far too glibly. The fact of the matter is that no living American can honestly say they have witnessed a foreign fighting force on American soil. "War" is something we see filtered through the lenses of CNN. It becomes an idealized, movie-like event, where the good guys do the right thing, and all is right with the world. We see evil (and make no mistake, Saddam was evil), and we think that if we apply our movie war scenario to it, we can make everything better. The pacifist who says "war is never the answer" is much nearer the mark than Sullivan was in his pro-war stance. 3 - Unconservatism ...i.e. Sullivan didn't do his homework. He says things like this: I bought the argument put forward by many neoconservatives that Iraq was one of the more secular and modern of Arab societies; that these (Sunni-Shiite) divisions were not so deep; that all those pictures of men in suits and mustaches and women in Western clothing were the deeper truth about this rare, modern Arab society...I pathetically failed to appreciate how those divides never truly go away and certainly cannot be abolished by a Western magic wand. Huh? Sullivan thought that Iraq was like...America? I find this borderline unbelievable. Anyone with even cursory knowledge of the Middle East knows that religious and social unrest has been its hallmark for hundreds of years. The relatively recent complication of Israel smack in the middle of it should not obfuscate the previous issues. For Sullivan, apparently, it does. 4 -Misreading Bush In a similar excuse to Goldberg's, Sullivan cites not Bush's competence, but his moral judgement. Sullivan says this: I had no idea he was so complacent—even glib—about the evil that good intentions can enable. This is his condemnation of Bush?? Especially after saying about himself: I saw war's unknowable consequences far too glibly. It seems that Sullivan didn't mis-read Bush at all, but instead shared the same opinion. I truly did not believe that Bush would use 9/11 to tear up the Geneva Conventions. When I first heard of abuses at Gitmo, I dismissed them as enemy propaganda. I certainly never believed that a conservative would embrace torture as the central thrust of an anti-terror strategy and lie about it, and scapegoat underlings for it, and give us the indelible stain of Bagram and Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib and all the other secret torture and interrogation sites that Bush and Cheney created and oversaw. I certainly never believed that a war I supported for the sake of freedom would actually use as its central weapon the deepest antithesis of freedom—the destruction of human autonomy and dignity and will that is torture. I would certainly hope not. Most of the other essays contain something similar to these sentiments - hence, my disappointment. I had hoped that at least one of the group would point to the real reason. Richard Cohen gets the closest here: No, I'm not going to sit here passively and wait for it to happen. I wanted to go to "them," whoever "they" were, grab them by the neck, and get them before they could get us. One of "them" was Saddam Hussein. Cohen cites anger and outrage as his motivators, but it is actually another, closely related emotion that is the true culprit. Fear. For as long as any current American has been alive, war has been a philosophical discussion, to occur in places that are far, far away from our homes and families. Suddenly, on 9/11, war ceased to be about philosophy - Americans were dying in their homes and offices. Not poor, lower-class soldier Americans who were sent off to fight in one of our favored armed conflicts, but upper and middle class civilians who were right here, "safe" at home. Incessant repetition of the images of businessmen plummeting 60 stories to their deaths invoked the chilling realization that these businessmen were just like us. That could have been us, or our children. And we were afraid. In our fear, we needed to strike back. To make ourselves safe again. There was only one problem - we didn't know who to strike. The enemy infuriated us by having the audacity to avoid our soldiers and our missiles. We just couldn't find them. The Bushites were smart enough to know that there needed to be a bad guy, and that bad guy had to pay. To their great satisfaction, there just happened to be someone available. Someone who we had fought before, and someone who had committed despicable acts (sometimes with our help, but let's forget that part). He also couldn't run away very easily, being that he was attached to a particular country's government. We had the perfect culprit. Much time and energy was devoted to developing circumstantial "evidence" that connected the two events. And people bought it, with the help of the cited journalists and others. People bought it because they were afraid. People were told that 9/11 could and would happen again. It might even be worse, if Saddam unleashed his mythical "WMD's". We were told that Saddam supported terrorists, and those terrorists were "a threat to your children". And we were afraid. Logical analysis belies any explanation offered at the time of the decision, as the last 5 years have shown us. The WMD scare was simply a farce, and we knew it. We had people in Iraq with extensive knowledge of the situation. Hans Blix (remember him?) was the weapons inspector in Iraq who told us that Iraq had no weapons: Speaking on the anniversary of the United States' invasion of Iraq, originally declared as a pre-emptive strike against a madman ready to deploy weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), the man first charged with finding those weapons said that the U.S. government has "the same mind frame as the witch hunters of the past" — looking for evidence to support a foregone conclusion. "There were about 700 inspections, and in no case did we find weapons of mass destruction" Well, that just wouldn't do. We needed our bad guy in response to 9/11. Blix agrees: Blix speculated that the Bush administration's real motivation for invading Iraq was in reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. "The U.S. was attacked on its own soil. I was here; it was like an earthquake in this country," he said. "It was as if Afghanistan was not enough." And he was right - it wasn't enough. We needed to be right again - to be strong again. Our aura of invincibility had been stripped away - not by an army, but by 19 determined individuals. We felt vulnerable. We felt naked. And we were afraid.