What Now
To be perfectly clear, it isn’t important what I choose to do with this website in the changed circumstance of a formal shooting war between Iraq and the US. Atrios has had a lot of fun with the grandiloquent pronouncements of some bloggers – well, you ain’t catching me, Mr. 15,000 Visits a Day! The world will little note nor long remember what I say here. With a couple of exceptions: it matters to me, by definition, and probably to some subset of the people who are kind enough to read this site on a regular basis. So here’s the plan:
As to the war itself, I hope we win and win quickly, with minimal loss of American life and minimal loss of Iraqi life. And I hope that whatever happens in the coming years to underscore the folly of the “Bush Doctrine” and the grand strategy of “benevolent hegemony” first laid out in 1992 is, miraculously, nearly pain free in terms of actual lives lost and ruined. We’ll see. What I won’t be doing:
o Stopping with the “antiwar” talk, as Radley says he will;
o “Warblogging” in the “following every twist and turn of every available report” sense. Hesiod and Glenn Reynolds, from their separate perspectives, were the most energetic This-Is-Blogistan reporter sorts yesterday, and I suspect that will continue. I enjoy following such blogging, with reservations, but have neither the work schedule nor the inclination to engage in it myself. In a very real sense, I consider it a waste of time. Three factors tend to make most up-to-the-minute war reporting useless – the media gets initial reports reliably wrong; the allies fill the airwaves with propaganda and misdirection; the Iraqis do likewise. There may indeed be mass surrenders of Iraqi troops, for instance. But some “pre-war” reports of these appear to be wishes fathering thoughts. (See John Smith on the situation in Northern Iraq.) I doubt the validity of this poorly sourced Independent story about a supposed Iraqi helicopter attack on a Kurdish village yesterday. There are strong operational and political reasons for both parties to the war to lie and structural reasons for the press to sieze on rumors. Hesiod and Instapundit both spent much of yesterday tracking and then refuting the rumor that Tariq Aziz had defected, been captured or killed. They did a good job, but they can have it. Obviously, as long as his access lasts, Salam Pax is your source for news from Baghdad itself.
o I won’t be installing the Iraqi Body Count doodads, as suggested by my Stand Down colleague Rachel Cunliffe. I’ll regret each death, but my opposition to the war has always been rooted in a concern for Americans, not Iraqis. I also instinctlively distrust the reliability of such tracking programs – the people behind them have agendas too, and their own motives for fudging the figures.
o Hawks will sieze on every short-term thing that goes right with the war as proving its merits. After a dozen years of WTC I, the African embassies, the Cole and the massacres of September 11, 2001, one still encounters hawks saying that there was no terrorist backlash from Gulf War Phase I, as opponents had predicted. I will try to resist the countervailing temptation to trumpet every reversal we encounter during the battle as demonstrating that I was right all along. We’ll see how I do.
o Return to writing in the third-person impersonal as a symbolic protest. UO promises.
What I will do:
o Write about the war and US foreign policy from what I hope will be a somewhat longer view.
o Link to war coverage by bloggers and others that strikes me.
o Write about other things. Fitness blogging and (soon!) fishing reports will continue, so also with items on domestic politics, comic books, games and, who knows, maybe even music and movies at some point.
o Continue to make the case for a foreign policy grounded in republican virtue and discretion. I obviously have a lot of work to do here.
o Track the injuries to decency that I’ve been cataloging under that phrase of Orwell’s, “the lunatic atmosphere of war.”
o Finally clean out my @##$%^ inbox. I apologize for having been so lame about it. Part of the in-box cleaning will include the Kenneth Pollack and torture-related mail that came in this month. I would disagree with any argument that these issues are no longer relevant “because the war changes everything.” The war, I think, changes very little (not least because it’s been going on for twelve years already). As I’ve said before, never confuse politics with current events.
o Try to figure out what the hell ant-interventionists should do next. I have, simply, no flipping idea right now.
Anyway, all that starts tonight.
