Unqualified Offerings

As a preamble, even this blog wasn’t all war all the time in March 2003. The very first entry links to a series of anti-Ashcroft items by Radley Balko. What’s funny is that we’d take Ashcroft back in an instant now! My greatest achievement in this instance is not following up the Radley quote with “Indeed.”

Hereafter, links by archives page.

Page 7 (Wordpress counts backward). Kind of the “Don’t talk about the war page.” Snark about the FBI bureaucracy and mention of the preview edition of a roleplaying game that, when it came out, gave me about as much fun as I’ve ever had in the hobby.

Page 6. No naked women, but this looks like a sequence I can be reasonably proud of. An early item (hence toward the bottom ) cheers the capture of Kalid Sheikh Muhammad, but flags the likelihood that KSM was going to be tortured. Because of the near-certainty that he was, his eventual “confession” was treated as a bad joke.

Man, I was doing fitness blogging back then! In the earliest item on the page I figure out that slow-cadence weight-training was note the ultimate exercise.

This page has my critique of Kenneth Pollack’s case for war against Saddam Hussein. I would say that it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done blogging, and pretty close to as good as anyone has done blogging. Soon enough I ran out of patience for that kind of critique because I decided the people I was trying to reach existed beyond argument in a realm of pure need for war. The blog entry concludes that it’s “very hard” to see how Pollack could have been arguing in good faith. I’ll chalk this one up as a case where I was very, very right.

So right that it completely outweights the fact that I took an anonymously sourced report in Capitol Hill Blue seriously. Completely! With credit left over! I’ll tell you when it runs out. The report was either White House disinformation or the random neuron firings of Doug Thompson’s brain.

I slagged off Hillary Clinton and by extension the Democratic Party leadership for energetically supporting the war in defiance of their own base. On Hillary specifically that’s rightness that has stood the test of time. Gandhi famously said Christ sounded great but “I do not much like your Christians.” When it comes to Democrats I’m in the reverse situation. I did chide the bloggers who became the Netroots as follows: “they were letting their political team get away with less effort against the war than they themselves are making.”

I rode my favorite conspiracy theory - that the Saudi Royal Family had set Bin Laden up as a magnet for disaffected Saudis and provided him enough material support that this anti-Royalist rebel did everything but try to depose the Saudi Royal Family - too hard. I suspect some Princes sympathized with Bin Laden, and he likely had a tidy income as a remittance man, but in after years he proved all too willing to strike directly against Saudi targets.

I agreed with LRC.com’s Jeffrey Tucker that the Gulf War showed that American conservatism was not, in fact, compatible with libertarianism, and that the rot on the American right went well beyond the neocons. I award myself a “correct!” on this one.

It was also a big month for torture talk. It’s been a big decade for torture talk. IOZ would call what passes for the “argument” on this page incredibly naive. It seemed worth trying to remind the country of its ideals, rich as they’d gotten on residuals from vice over the centuries. I don’t bitch when he quotes Washington’s farewell address as if anyone but he and I gave a shit about it any more. Let me have the occasional Captain America moment.

Page 5. Lots more torture talk on this page, including actual arguments. I’ll say I got this one right, but not as right as Eve Tushnet, whose sequence on the issue deserves rereading all these years later.

Page 4. Yeah yeah, torture, but this page shows that I was the first blogger to liken the ticking bomb scenario to the old “Would you sleep with me for a million dollars?” joke. Add that to the Pollack critique and I could buy off a month’s worth of treating Baghdad Bob’s statements as straight news, if I had done that.

There’s an item on this page where I flip around the classic characterization of the League of Nations as “toothless,” writing that “one of the Fates was a toothless hag too.” The argument was that if you considered the League as a kind of Greek Chorus, Italy was incredibly foolish not to heed it, and we should interpret the similarly toothless UN’s stance against Iraq in that light. I’ll stand by this one.

In a non-war-related item, I declared that “I’ve stopped reading any blog who’s author uses the verb coinage ‘Fisk”’without irony.” I’m sticking by that one.

Christ! Remember “unmanned drones?” Clearly, when Persons Unknown ran out of anthrax, they started sending stupid powder through the mail. Still targeting media figures, too.

I was never smart enough to realize that they had nothing in the way of W”M”D evidence. But as the month went on I started to get an inkling, writing in a piece on the Niger forgeries, “If their other pieces of evidence are so good, why do they keep throwing this crap out there?” Yes, I really should have seen the answer.

Page 3. I used “I” where “me” was correct. I remain convinced that I was right and Max Sawicky wrong, for the reason stated.

‘The inevitable deforming of the personalities of decent guys, for what one hopes is a temporary period, is one of the chief moral reasons why one should never fight “optional wars.”’ Don’t worry. I get wrong later in the month.

Speaking of blogosphere firsts, in after years every third blogger reproduced the Tom Stoppard quote that came to me when the balloon went up. It was always an illusion that ordinary citizens could have stopped the war, or that the people who mattered in the Bush Administration might see sense ahead of time. For the most part, I recognized that, except for one foolish week in January 2003 when I thought the size of the anti-war demos in Britain might cow Tony Blair and so rupture the “coalition of the willing” that the US would have to forego invasion. But that week is, as we say in accounting, out of scope.

My “here’s what I’m gonna do, buster” post. At the time, this one offended Andrew Olmsted and my wife. I’ve never seen them together. Here’s the most correct passage, though: “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.”

Ah, finally I can stop patting myself on the back! This page has the item where even I succumb to hype and foolishness. In an act of monumental vanity, I make a recommendation to our rulers. Frankly, it doesn’t even matter what it is: the mere fact of writing a “what the government should do” item as if the government could possibly give a shit is too stupid to adequately describe. But it gets dumber. In addition to the absurdity of suggesting that the Bush Administration might have the least interest in appointing a respected, foreign honest broker to the Regency, I picked a guy who was almost certainly far too ill to travel and take a high-stress job. They should have pasted a sign to my derriere and let Kenneth Pollack kick it I was so dumb.

I argued that Salam Pax was authentic. I was right. Much later I spent twelve hours entertaining the absurd notion that he was a hoax of Diana Moon’s. Also too foolish for words, but out of scope!

I wrote, ‘If you seriously maintain that “neoconservative” is a code word for “Jewish,” you are an ass.’ I’m sticking by this one. On the rare occasions I’ve seen actual anti-Semites inveighing against neocons, they swiftly move to more generalized complaints about Jews. They can’t help themselves. Anti-Semites are idiots.

Early riposte against Glenn Reynolds’ premature triumphalism. Advantage: Me.

Page 2. Six Iraqis were coming across the border from Mexico to sow terror! Remember them? I didn’t.

This is a weenie page. Everything’s too cagey to apply a verdict to it. The most direct claims on the page were that the Iraqi regime was fighting in a way that suggested they expected to survive the war, and that, “If Israel did not exist, our benevolent hegemons would have to invent it.” The latter is pretty reasonable, I think. The former is as untestable, but I thought Saddam said some things in his interrogation that tended to bear it out.

One thing comes up again on this page that I’d written about earlier in the month: the pointlessness of “news blogging” in a rapidly developing situation like a war where both sides are lying to you and good information is scarce.

Page 1! Our long national blogmare is almost over!

I claim that the extreme compassion hawks express for the oppressed people of Iraq is as deep as a dried-out puddle. The pattern has repeated ever since: “You doves don’t care about the Iraqis!” to “We should have/yet kill a lot more civilians to bring the ungrateful bastards to heel” and back, depending on the day and the news.

This is the page where I start to get too credulous about the “bogging down” reports floating around and then jerk myself back. There’s a nice piece evaluating the worth of a briefly hawt Russian warblog with entries made entirely out of Spetsnatz veterans who could reach through your monitor and kill you with their bare, virtual hands. Overall, I got a little too caught up in the details after warning myself and everyone else at the beginning of the war not to do that.

And that’s that.

So, what have we learned? 1) This was the wankiest exercise in wankery ever, even wankier than all the other people who played the March 2003 Retrospective Game. At least Glenn Reynolds was concise, though frankly, I would be to if I had his record. 2) I used to be a damn good blogger! 3) Link rot is the curse of the blogosphere. Probably a minority of my links from that month still work. (Waxy.org, I wouldn’t have given odds that it would include you, if I had remembered that you exist.) Any number of links to fine Arthur Silber pieces now go nowhere, for instance. The NoWarBlog archives have disappeared. Of Glenn Reynolds famous “victory conditions” post on his now-defunct MSNBC blog, all that survives is Radley Balko’s critique of one small part of it.