Henley Everywhere 2008alt.
The following appeared this week in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate and The New Yorker in a parallel universe . . .
How I Got It Right: Looking Back at a Time of Justified Opposition to a Mad, Violent Enterprise
So many publications have expressed such overwhelming interest in the perspectives of those of us who opposed the Iraq War when it had a chance of doing good that I have had to permit mutliple publication of this article in most of the nation’s elite media venues – collecting, I am almost embarrassed to admit, a separate fee from each. Everyone recognizes that the opinions of those of us who were right about Iraq then are crucial to formulating sane, just policy now. It’s a lot of pressure, so please forgive anything glib or short you read herein: between articles, interviews, think-tank panels and presentations before government agencies and policy organs I’m not permitted to mention, I’m a little frazzled.
On the bright side, and I can confirm that my experience has been similar to those of my fellow prophets, being the object of so much attention, being repeatedly quizzed by eager interlocutors on the same basic points, encourages one to distill one’s thinking to its essence. As Kenneth Pollack asked me the other day, “What the fuck was so special about you, anyway?”
“For one thing,” I said, “I am not sprawled on a sidewalk next the McPherson Square Metro Station, hoping to cadge enough quarters to enjoy the rare treat of laundering the vomit out of the only shirt I own, praying all the while that decent people do not recognize me beneath the matted beard and tangled hair.”
“But my thigh hurts!” He said.
“Shut up,” I consoled him, “or I’ll kick it again.”
Still he had a way of arriving at the essential question: “What the fuck was so special about me, anyway?” Why did I have the sense to oppose the US conquest of Iraq when so many of our great and good supported it? Sometimes I think the other question is almost more interesting: What the fuck were those other people thinking? Alas, answers to that one are hard to come by, since understandable shame has closed many mouths. So my own side of the story will have to suffice. Why was I right and you, if you were a powerful politician or respected pundit in 2002-2003, wrong? Some guesses follow.
1. I’m really very bright. I don’t like to brag, but my IQ places me in the 99th percentile of Americans. Odds are, for instance, that I am smarter than you. And if I’m not, you’re probably not that much smarter than I am. And even if you are, it would be unseemly for you to say so. What are you, stuck up or something? You aside, I’m certainly smarter than the President, or Doug Feith, or Joe Klein. I am seventeen times as smart as Senator Joseph Lieberman. I am twenty-five hundred percent brighter than GOP Presidential Candidate John McCain.
My superior intelligence is a superficially plausible explanation, and I don’t discount it, but two immediate objections suggest themselves. First, and less crucially, it simply raises another question: How did I get so smart in the first place? The shortest answer is, “Because my parents were smart, and their parents were smart too.” It’s very hard to say why that matters: IQ appears to be substantially heritable, but it’s hard to disentangle the genetic component from the environmental nevertheless – I was reared by my parents, and not, as you know, by yours. If I’d been reared by yours I’d have gotten more toys as a kid. We were poor and you, somewhat spoiled.
Distressingly, there’s no practical program for improvement there. “Be smarter!” we might say to Doug Feith, “You’ll make better policy!” But Doug Feith can’t go back in time and be born to other people. But in light of the second objection to the “intelligence theory,” that probably doesn’t matter.
Second objection: You didn’t have to be all that bright to oppose the Iraq War in advance. Heck, polls suggest that most Americans were dubious about the idea until the war became obviously inevitable. Real enthusiasm was confined to the elite media, the bipartisan defense-policy establishment and a bunch of Republican quasi-intellectuals who had spent ten years casting about for different countries to have a war – any war – with. I mean, for crying out loud, at one point our rulers declared that Saddam Hussein might attack America with remote-controlled model planes. You didn’t have to wait to bounce that one off the folks at your next MENSA meeting to judge its likelihood. Nor did you have to puzzle overlong, if someone tried to put that one by you, how much stock you should put in anything else that came out of their mouths.
Conclusion: My manifest intelligence was definitely not necessary to opposing the Iraq War. It may not have been sufficient either.
2. I wasn’t born yesterday. I had heard of the Middle East before September 12, 2001. I knew that many of the loudest advocates for war with Iraq were so-called national-greatness conservatives who spent the 1990s arguing that war was good for the soul. I remembered Elliott Abrams and John Poindexter and Michael Ledeen as the knaves and fools of Iran-Contra, and drew the appropriate conclusions about the Bush Administration wanting to employ them: it was an administration of knaves and fools.
People will object that the Project for a New American Century had heard of the Middle East before September 12, 2001 too, so just knowing some things wasn’t enough. And hey, true, but if you read “warbloggers” back in 2001-2003, the thing that really jumped out was how new all this foreign-policy stuff was to them. People without much knowledge on the subject went looking for someone to soothe a very real hurt they felt in September 2001, and the first people they ran into were raving, nationalistic morons with a preexisting agenda, clustered around the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard.
3. Libertarianism. As a libertarian, I was primed to react skeptically to official pronouncements. “Hayek doesn’t stop at the water’s edge!” I coined that one. Not bad, huh? I could tell the difference between the government and the country. People who couldn’t make this distinction could not rationally cope with the idea that American foreign policy was the largest driver of anti-American terrorism because it sounded to them too much like “The American people deserve to be victims of terrorism.” I could see the self-interest of the officials pushing for war – how war would benefit their political party, their department within the government, enhance their own status at the expense of rivals. Libertarianism made it clear how absurd the idealistic case was. Supposedly, wise, firm and just American guidance would usher Iraq into a new era of liberalism and comity. But none of that was going to work unless real American officials embedded in American political institutions were unusually selfless and astute, with a lofty and omniscient devotion to Iraqi welfare. And, you know, they weren’t going to be that.
Finally-er, being neither Republican nor Democrat meant that I wasn’t unduly impressed when even Tom Friedman, or even some Clinton administration hack, assured everyone that the tinpot ruler of a two-bit despotism eight-thousand miles away would and could destroy us if we didn’t get him first.
Here there are a number of objections. All too many self-described libertarians supported the Iraq War, with that noxious fervor for which we are notorious. These people were led astray by a combination of noble and base tendencies within libertarianism. Saddam Hussein was a vicious tyrant, after all, and some libertarians let a commendable hatred of tyrants overrule their common sense. Some libertarians remembered that war involved guns, and lots of them, and figured it must be good. And many feared that if the United States did not go to war, it might make some hippie, somewhere, happy.
The more telling objection is that you didn’t have to be a libertarian to figure out that going to war with Iraq made even less sense than driving home to East Egg drunk off your ass and angry at your spouse. Any number of leftists and garden-variety liberals, and even a handful of conservatives, figured it out, each for different reasons. This objection has the disadvantage of being obviously true.
What all of us had in common is probably a simple recognition: War is a big deal. It isn’t normal. It’s not something to take up casually. Any war you can describe as “a war of choice” is a crime. War feeds on and feeds the negative passions. It is to be shunned where possible and regretted when not. Various hawks occasionally protested that “of course” they didn’t enjoy war, but they were almost always lying. Anyone who saw invading foreign lands and ruling other countries by force as extraordinary was forearmed against the lies and delusions of the time. It’s a heavy burden, I’ll admit. But the riches and fame make it all worthwhile.
Comment by Jennifer —
March 21, 2008 @ 10:26 pm
I wish I lived in that parallel universe. This was great, Jim.
Comment by Dave W. —
March 21, 2008 @ 11:13 pm
I went 2 Canada.
Comment by crimelord —
March 21, 2008 @ 11:27 pm
I went 2 Vietnam, because of a lying Govt, and regret it to this day.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 22, 2008 @ 1:01 am
Goddamn was that good! Quite possibly your best post ever. And the fact that no elite media outlet will print this is a more damning indictment of the media than I could articulate in my posts of the last few days.
As to the humor value, I loved this:
Priceless.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 22, 2008 @ 1:50 am
I hope that Megan “I was right to be wrong when you were wrong to be right” McArdle reads this.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
March 22, 2008 @ 3:56 am
Darned good stuff, Jim. It deserves the attention you imagine for it, alas.
Comment by Doctor Slack —
March 22, 2008 @ 4:25 am
Another useful skill at the time: being able to smell a rat when it was rotting right under your nose. For example, suppose that in the early days of the war-drumming, the President ostensibly “planning” the war were to be caught out in an outright lie about IAEA inspections. That sort of thing could, to some minds, be an indicator that all is not well.
Comment by Mona —
March 22, 2008 @ 6:13 am
Awesome post, Jim. I’m prolly only in the top 95 percentile (I suck at spacial relationships and similar areas, which drag me down on any type of test measuring intelligence), but I don’t think it was that which caused me to ultimately decide in favor of invading Iraq. At first I was ambivalent.
The deciding factor for me was Colin Powell. I thought he was a smart, honest man of the military who would not be party to a bogus argument in favor of a war. None of the “nation-building” rhetoric moved me, and I never deviated from Hayek there; but I believed Powell when he made a case that Saddam had to be stopped, or he was going to be channeling WMDs to god knows whom.
Not an excuse on my part, but an explanation.
Comment by abb1 —
March 22, 2008 @ 6:40 am
Ah, the good old days when only a troll could be against the war. I miss them. It’s so much more difficult to say something outrageous these days…
Comment by CharleyCarp —
March 22, 2008 @ 7:03 am
8 — But Mona, did it ever make sense that a secular tyrant was going to give advanced weaponry to religious extremists dedicated to getting rid of secular tyrants so they can have their caliphate?
Comment by Mona —
March 22, 2008 @ 7:45 am
Charley asks:
He was a secular tyrant who, for his own reasons, hated the U.S. Remember the (unsolved) cases of real anthrax going through U.S. mail in the months after 9/11?
That wholly freaked me out. So, it made “sense” to me that we didn’t want someone who hated us building vast arsenals of WMDs — which it turns out, he was not doing. Saddam might have little use for AQ, but I was thinking he might think that for some purposes “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
March 22, 2008 @ 7:56 am
Mona, this is not not not a gotcha or anything, but a real question. Jim will vouch for me on meaning that, I hope.
In 2002-3, were you aware that Powell was the Army’s front man in the My Lai cover-up?
I learned about that in, if memory serves, late 2002, and it really cured me of finding Powell someone to trust.
Comment by KMcC —
March 22, 2008 @ 8:05 am
missing from your calculus is any mention of the Iraqi people, raped and tortured and gassed and thrown into mass graves for decades.
Also missing is any mention that Western involvement in Iraq didn’t begin in 2003.
Also missing is any suggestion of what might otherwise have been done to liberate Iraq from a noxious despotism, or any concern for what would have become of the country in the hands of Uday and Qusay on Saddam’s death.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t join in the general back-slapping and high-fiving this post seems to have provoked.
Comment by Miles —
March 22, 2008 @ 8:08 am
Good post; I would add only that for me the worst cliche of the “Why I Was Wrong” genre is the notion that anyone who actually protested the war before it started must have been a Filthy Hippy and therefore didn’t count as “right” in any meaningful way. For the few humans left in this country who don’t have a column in Slate, I’m not sure where we are supposed to air our opinions when they are urgent, since apparently any expression in a public space automatically lamps us as nutjobs. I guess next time I’ll just have to enjoy the exercise my First Amendment privileges in the privacy and comfort of my own home, thank you very much.
Comment by Nell —
March 22, 2008 @ 8:11 am
KMcC, you evince very little knowledge of Jim’s posts before 2008. I recommend a stroll through the archives.
For one thing, a staple of JH discussion of Iraq — just a few days ago, in fact, as well as back in 2002 — is the insight that U.S. war against Saddam Hussein never really ended.
So read more than a few of Jim’s Iraq posts, starting in the summer of 2002, and then come by and sneer.
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 22, 2008 @ 8:22 am
Kevin, I wish you would at least consider blowing me.
Comment by KMcC —
March 22, 2008 @ 8:40 am
Nell – you’re right, this is my first visit here. Life is short and the blogosphere is long, so forgive me for only going by what I read above.
You’re right again – the US’s war against Saddam lasted far too long. Imagine if Bush Sr had faced down the Russian, the French and the Syrians in 1991 and demanded that that international force had marched on Baghdad. Maybe the world would be a better place, maybe not, but for at least for millions of Iraq’s people they’d have had that monster’s boot off their necks.
Jim – that’s a devastatingly witty reply. Maybe I will read some more of your posts. And if you want me to blow you (btw, is homosexual sex innately funny to you or something?) I’ll consider whatever terms you’ve agreed with the people you already pay to blow you.
Comment by Monte Davis —
March 22, 2008 @ 8:54 am
“Another useful skill at the time: being able to smell a rat when it was rotting right under your nose.”
E.g.: in September 2002, the “debate” over the aluminum tubes.
On one side, a large number of people with expertise in centrifuge design saying “no way, and besides, they’re just like the tubes Iraq bought by the tens of thousands for rockets.”
On the other, the PNAC-Cheney crowd chanting “smoking gun, mushroom cloud.”
And holding the scales, the people’s tribunes of the press, led by Miller & Gordon, soberly opining: “experts disagree.”
Comment by Rob —
March 22, 2008 @ 9:04 am
If only Bush Sr was as stupid as his son! Stupid enough to destroy the international cooperation he spent his life working for in order to to illegally occupy a country he couldn’t control!
Comment by P O'Neill —
March 22, 2008 @ 9:16 am
Bush in Afghanistan 2006:
History has taught us democracies don’t war. Democracies — you don’t run for office in a democracy and say, please vote for me, I promise you war. (Laughter.) You run for office in democracies, and say, vote for me, I’ll represent your interests; vote for me, I’ll help your young girls go to school, or the health care you get improved.
Bush, a couple of days before the elections in 2002:
And my message to Saddam Hussein is that, for the sake of peace, for the sake of freedom, you must disarm like you said you would do. But my message to you all and to the country is this: for the sake of our future freedoms, and for the sake of world peace, if the United Nations can’t act, and if Saddam Hussein won’t act, the United States will lead a coalition of nations to disarm Saddam Hussein. (Applause.)
AUDIENCE: USA! USA! USA!
Comment by John Emerson —
March 22, 2008 @ 9:23 am
WHY FEW WOMEN ARE STRATEGIC PLANNERS
Most women don’t understand that when a bomb hits a wedding party and kill 15 people it’s unfortunate, of course, but sort of funny too. That’s why they don’t understand strategy.
Except Ms. Slaughter. When Anne Marie Flowergarden adopted a new last name, people in the biz knew that she had what it takes.
Comment by Donald Johnson —
March 22, 2008 @ 9:43 am
“missing from your calculus is any mention of the Iraqi people, raped and tortured and gassed and thrown into mass graves for decades.”
Except for the gassed part, things have gotten significantly worse since 2003.
Comment by Greg —
March 22, 2008 @ 10:28 am
–but for at least for millions of Iraq’s people they’d have had that monster’s boot off their necks.
What’s wrong with this man?
There was gunplay, sir, and he missed it.
Tackleberry!
Comment by Dave Kuzminski —
March 22, 2008 @ 10:34 am
Either way you look at it, people suffered and died. I don’t believe either side of this issue can claim moral superiority and neither side has a viable solution.
Comment by Jennifer —
March 22, 2008 @ 10:45 am
“missing from your calculus is any mention of the Iraqi people, raped and tortured and gassed and thrown into mass graves for decades.â€
As Donald Johnson pointed out, this has grown worse since we invaded. Also missing from your calculus is any mention of the fact that when Saddam was doing most of this stuff, he was our ally, and using weapons and toys we gave him. Remember Rumsfeld’s visits to Iraq in the 80s? He was GIVING Saddam weapons, not encouraging him to give them up.
Comment by raboof —
March 22, 2008 @ 10:51 am
Well, from the comment above it appears the “anthrax attack” did exactly what it was designed to do.
Interesting that no one was ever brought to justice and that it has almost totally disappeared from the public discourse.
But our government wouldn’t be capable of anything that. Of course.
Comment by PGD —
March 22, 2008 @ 11:11 am
Well, I did think at the time that the one justification for the Iraq war that sort of made sense is that it would get the boot of the American government off the neck of the Iraqi people — at least we would cut it out with the sanctions and the bombing and start having an interest in actually improving the place. In other words, we’d replace indirect with direct imperialism.
That didn’t justify it, though. It was still just too stupid. Occupying an Islamic country with 150,000 armed 19 year old Americans, none of whom spoke Arabic, led by a fundamentalist Christian President — yeah, that makes sense. And the history of popular insurgencies since WWII told you there would be no candy and flowers involved.
Comment by roger —
March 22, 2008 @ 11:32 am
But you shouldn’t have kicked poor Pollack! Surely, with his talents, he could do something useful in this world. I know – he could, perhaps, be a mortgage broker! I hear Olympia Escrow is hiring.
Comment by John Emerson —
March 22, 2008 @ 12:01 pm
There was an article about the Sunni militias who are allied to us at the moment. A major part of the surge, and a big reason why Iraq seems better now.
They’re all just being paid off, and everyone knows that at some point they’ll turn again. (Many were killing Americans not too long ago). It seems to me that the whole purpose of the surge was to postpone the disaster until after the November election. If the Democrats win, Bush can shell out a few billion to postpone the breakdown until the Democrats can be blamed for it. If McCain wins, a Republican will be President and that will be an enormous victory, and McCain will be able to stage-manage events to justify the escalation he already wants. He’ll have four years to patch things together, and he’ll probably have a mostly free hand during that time.
But my point is: are any of the Democrats talking about this? Bush is setting a booby trap, and they have to figure out now what they’re going to do about it. And one thing they could do is (I know this is counterintuitive if you’re a Democrat) say out loud that the worst President in American history has violated his oath of office for partisan reasons by setting a booby trap for the next American President.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 22, 2008 @ 12:04 pm
But saying out loud that this administration has done shitty things would mean that somebody in the elite media might not take them seriously!
Comment by Doctor Slack —
March 22, 2008 @ 12:06 pm
So… “KMcC” was frozen in carbonite in 2002 and just now thawed out, right? It’s been ages since I’ve seen a ‘monger attempt the crocodilian “just think about the Iraqi people, except if it’s us who’re oppressing, shooting and torturing them” routine.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 22, 2008 @ 12:18 pm
Regarding WMD:
I actually was not sure whether Iraq had WMD. The case sounded weak, but I wasn’t sure. The one thing I was sure of was that Saddam Hussein was shrewd enough to maintain his grip on power in a divided, messy country, and that meant that he was not dumb enough to give WMD to religious nuts.
Yes, the enemy of his enemy might be useful but (1) he’d have to be pretty damn sure that he won’t be caught doing it, (2) he’d have to be pretty damn sure that religious nuts wouldn’t turn around and use the WMD on him (he was, after all, an infidel in their eyes, and fanatical terrorists are not known for being trustworthy and constant in their allegiances with the non-religious), (3) he’d have to be pretty sure that Al Qaeda wouldn’t just play both sides by first using the WMD (smite America) and then identifying the sponsor (get America to smite Saddam).
You can argue about how likely such a betrayal or discovery would be, but I assume that Saddam was pretty paranoid and had his own “1% doctrine.”
Also, if Saddam did indeed have WMD, then the scenario in which deterrence was most likely to fail was one in which his removal from power was certain. With nothing left to lose, why not use the WMD? So that made invasion an even worse idea.
So I always figured that the risk of Saddam giving WMD to terrorists was practically nil, while the risk of something really bad happening in the invasion and occupation was pretty high.
Comment by doggril —
March 22, 2008 @ 12:37 pm
“missing from your calculus is any mention of the Iraqi people, raped and tortured and gassed and thrown into mass graves for decades.â€
Arguing that we HAD to go to war because of shit a despot committed AN ENTIRE DECADE EARLIER WHEN WE CONSIDERED HIM OUR FRIEND is stupidity defined.
Comment by Eric Scharf —
March 22, 2008 @ 12:51 pm
Jim’s final paragraph really should cover it. It nails the most widespread failing of the war supporters: the casualness with which the war was undertaken. Many of the people who described their reaction to 9/11 as “like a video game” were simply expanding their response to the next level.
My only codicil could probably be folded into Jim’s 3. Libertarianism point. Distrust of government in general and the corrupting nature of the war enterprise in particular were sufficient reasons to be skeptical of the Iraq War, but my distrust of this specific crew of kleptocrats cripples my patience with these Beltway schmucks who felt obliged to give all benefit of the doubt to the Commander-in-Chief, however he may have acquired that title. As an early adopter of Bush Derangement Syndrome, I narcissistically fear that many people gave their support earlier and/or continued it longer than they otherwise might have simply because not to do so would have given aid and comfort to people like me (”some hippie, somewhere”).
The other flaw in my addendum is that it is logically congruent with the position of Hillary Clinton, whose only objection to the Iraq War was (and continued to be) that Richard Holbrooke wasn’t in charge of implementing it.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
March 22, 2008 @ 1:00 pm
Eric, what distinguishes you from Sen. Clinton is that you have a general distrust of war and its effects as well as a specific distrust of the crew in power. Clinton seems not to have the general concern at all – it’s all about whether a particular fight can be pulled off well, not much at all about whether there’s any good justification for it in the first place.
Comment by Donald Johnson —
March 22, 2008 @ 1:12 pm
Fleshing out my earlier comment–I had some sympathy for the humanitarian argument back in the prewar days, in the sense that it did make me feel very uneasy opposing the war. But prowar advocates have real balls (where their brains should be) to bring this up now. It’s blatantly obvious that no one in the government was in the slightest bit serious about helping the Iraqis and the same is true of the prowar cheerleading squad then, or they’d have been yelling about this in 2002-2003.
One thing that annoyed me was when one brought up our earlier disgraceful history with Iraq and various other countries, people would say “Well, that’s not relevant–if anything, it’s an argument that we owe the Iraqi people an invasion to make things right.” Yeah, the fact that US in general and Bush Administration members in particular had a very poor record on human rights obviously had no bearing whatsoever on whether they could be trusted to lead a war to liberate the Iraqis. America starts every war and every intervention with the slate wiped clean, and nothing to learn from previous history.
Comment by Russell L. Carter —
March 22, 2008 @ 1:32 pm
I’ve made this point before, but I will make it again: Iraq is a desert. It doesn’t have much in the way of weather, most of the year. That means all those cameras up in the sky can look down with their 4 inch resolution and take pictures of anything that looks suspicious, and send it off to Langley for all those thousands of analysts to peer over looking for something, anything, that they could broadcast on the teevee.
And they saw nothing. Or rather, everything, EVERYTHING they saw, turned out to be nothing.
History quiz: what did the convincing in the Cuban Missile Crisis?
We are a nation of morons.
Great post Jim.
Comment by Jason F —
March 22, 2008 @ 1:33 pm
Five years later and I still can’t get over the fact that apparently nobody in power could tell the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’a, or thought through the implications, vis-a-vis Iran, of taking a Shi’a-majority country and knocking out the Sunni dictator of that country.
Of course, five years later and Senator McCain apparently still hasn’t grasped the difference, so I probably give the people in power way to much credit.
Comment by Barry —
March 22, 2008 @ 2:07 pm
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
“Mona, this is not not not a gotcha or anything, but a real question. Jim will vouch for me on meaning that, I hope.
In 2002-3, were you aware that Powell was the Army’s front man in the My Lai cover-up?”
I learned that in the mid-1990’s, from reading ‘The Nation’, after Powell had faded out a bit after retiring from the Army. Amazing that the larger ‘liberal media’ outlets didn’t find that newsworthy.
It started me on a theory that I’ve later mentioned here: I believe that very few of these people become dirty later in life. I think that they tend to become dirty much earlier, long before they became famous.
Comment by Kevin Carson —
March 22, 2008 @ 2:42 pm
Jim,
But in your alternate universe, instead of a presidential candidate wouldn’t McCain also be wallowing in his own vomit in the gutter?
KMcC,
And imagine if in 1990-91 the whipped dogs of the American press had reported that
1) the Kuwaiti incubator babies were a lie,
2) the Iraqi troops massed on the Saudi border were a lie,
3) the U.S. had encouraged Kuwaiti slanted drilling and other behaviors calculated to provoke a drilling,
4) April Glaspie had reassured Saddam that invading Kuwait would be no big deal, and
5) The CIA had helped put Saddam in power in the first place and encouraged his aggression against Iran.
In a just world, Bush I would have been dragged before a criminal tribunal in chains.
Comment by James —
March 22, 2008 @ 2:47 pm
Comment from Barry:
I would submit that Powell’s previous sins were irrelevant. Those of us who distrusted the Administration’s motives from the start were convinced that they would use any means to rally the war cry. So it doesn’t matter what Powell did or didn’t do – his past could have been as pure and honorable as a saint’s, and they would still have used him and later thrown him under the bus, which is exactly what happened.
As long as you’re being asked to trust the government on the basis of words alone and zero verifiable proof, it’s safe to assume that you’re being lied to – no matter who is doing the talking.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
March 22, 2008 @ 3:18 pm
James, “As long as you’re being asked to trust the government on the basis of words alone and zero verifiable proof, it’s safe to assume that you’re being lied to – no matter who is doing the talking.” is quite true, but Mona brought up a specific point separate from that, about Powell’s reputation as trustworthy. There’s room for both the general principle and a dissection of a case.
Barry, I agree. I don’t think power corrupts nearly so much as it expands the scope of possibilities for those wishing to indulge their corruption.
Comment by joe —
March 22, 2008 @ 3:52 pm
I came to the conclusion, as far back as the Summer of 02, that invading, taking over, governing, and fixing Iraq would be really, really hard – even if it was possible to do so under any circumstances – and that the people who would be carrying out such a tricky operation are incapable of successfully leading a troop of boyscouts across an open field.
This, of course, demonstrates a terrible partisanship, and a Derangement Syndrome to boot. I mean, what king of person would think that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld would screw up a war?
Comment by Leonard —
March 22, 2008 @ 3:56 pm
Great post Jim. High five!
I’m sorry to say that I bought some of the lies prewar — such as that they’d find WMDs. Not nukes, of course — that was insane. But I was pretty sure that even if no WMDs were there, they’d plant some.
OTOH, as a libertarian I know that war is the health of the state. It’s never good for liberty even when it is one of the rare wars which is truly defensive, unlike most of America’s. So of course I opposed it. Nya, nyah.
Comment by kishnevi —
March 22, 2008 @ 5:15 pm
Jim, I guess we’re just too smart to be entrusted with the delicate job of screwing up foreign policy. I did think that Saddam had a viable WMD program; I just didn’t think that even if he had one,that even if everthing the administration said was true, we should have done what we did. I would have attacked Syria, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia instead. At least those have the virtue of actually giving important support to terrorists.
(And btw, I’m smarter than 99 AND A HALF percent of the population. So there. Sticking out my tongue.)
Comment by Diana —
March 22, 2008 @ 5:57 pm
awesome post.
Back in 2002 I joined every antiwar protest I heard about, stood freezing every morning outside the UN holding an antiwar sign while the UN debated, took the bus to protest in DC, spread the emails about the protests and just watched the news with utter disbelief. Everyone I talked to (here in hippie NYC) thought the war was a bad idea and unnecessary.
A friend suggested that maybe when we were friends with Saddam our military had given him something so lethal that we had to invade the country in order to get it back.
This was the only explanation I ever heard from anyone during the run-up to the war that made any sense.
Comment by Gary Denton —
March 22, 2008 @ 6:18 pm
I was right about the war and occupation. For many of the same reasons.
It was so crazy trying to tell people who wouldn’t listen this would be the worst foreign policy decision ever, worst than Vietnam.
It was so crazy and frustrating I took up blogging.
Comment by matthew hogan —
March 22, 2008 @ 6:19 pm
As someone who at one point may have stood literally shoulder to shoulder back then with JH in opposing the war-to-be for much the same reasons, except I lack the similar IQ or the elegant quick-draft ability, I must say that I for one welcome our new respond-as-he-should-have-done-then-to-the war-geeks overlord:
“Kevin, I wish you would at least consider blowing me.”
A few more of that to “Tacitus” Instapundit, et al in ‘02 might have done wonders.
At least cathartically.
Comment by matthew hogan —
March 22, 2008 @ 6:22 pm
PS Ditto Gary Denton.
Comment by fauxmaxbaer —
March 22, 2008 @ 7:15 pm
I’m not that bright at all. But, I was against the war from the start because of the SCUDs. Saddam couldn’t hit Israel with them during the Gulf War. Hell, he couldn’t even hit Kuwait and that bordered him. So, the thought that he was a threat was ludicrous. And when they floated the idea that he was going to send drones over here with poison gas. I also had in mind the testimony about the babies being pulled from incubators that occurred during run-up to the Gulf War. This propaganda seemed even more clumsy.
Comment by Jonathan Goff —
March 22, 2008 @ 7:23 pm
Jim,
Great post! This whole reminiscing about what we were writing about five years ago got me to dredge up the articles I wrote at that time on my protoblog (now only findable via the Way Back Machine):
http://web.archive.org/web/20050419183805/www.et.byu.edu/~jag42/Musings/War/whyantiwar.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20050419180110/www.et.byu.edu/~jag42/Musings/War/iraqWMD1.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20050419204426/www.et.byu.edu/~jag42/Musings/War/july4phil.html
Being right would feel a whole lot better if it didn’t mean that so many innocent people got royally screwed. It might also make me feel better if so many of my prowar friends would actually admit that they were wrong–most of them are still Bu’ushist deadenders to this day…
~Jon
Comment by Brett Peters —
March 22, 2008 @ 7:41 pm
I come here for the great posts, but stay for the hippie baiting.
Comment by Mona —
March 22, 2008 @ 8:13 pm
Bruce sez/asks:
Bruce, pal, no one need vouch for your sincerity bona fides to me.
To answer your question, this is the first I have ever heard of Colin Powell playing any role in attempting to cover up My Lai.
Comment by Nell —
March 22, 2008 @ 8:26 pm
@Mona and all:
Colin Powell was only indirectly involved in covering up My Lai. He was in a p.r. role, responding to earlier allegations of atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers. Rather than pursue them, he participated in putting out the bland denials that were the norm.
My Lai was the event that gave the lie to those bland denials, and in a just world (like Jim’s parallel universe) would have caused a reassessment and closer look at the many earlier claims of similar horrors. But we’re not in that just world.
Also, what James said in 41.
Comment by matthew hogan —
March 22, 2008 @ 8:30 pm
Powell probably had no role or to quote a Nation magazine article:
“Powell has never been implicated in any of the wrongdoing involving My Lai. No evidence ties him to the attempted cover-up.”
He was part of the Americal Division’s command and had some access to information but he’s not accused of hiding anything.
More significantly, what My Lai cover up? (beyond the false reports of the initial time period when Powell wasn’t even in the job) it has hardly been a secret, and the Army did a fair job of bringing it out (though not necessarily punishing aggressively).
Comment by jcricket —
March 22, 2008 @ 8:42 pm
Let me second (third? tenth?) the kudos for this post. I too bought too easily into the Powell line, which is what led me from ambivalence to support. I should have known better in that regard, but I was insufficiently cynical (and I’m not one to trust Republicans generally).
I do find the whole “libertarians should have known better” kind of farcical, in that you appear to be the only Libertarian except for Radley Balko that actually hews consistently enough to the supposed principles of Libertarianism for it to mean anything. I’d argue a good 95% of Libertarians, in practice, are merely tax-hating gun-loving Republicans, who although they don’t really care about social prohibitions, go along with them because they get taxes lowered at the same time.
In other words, the dirty fucking hippies were right, and have been right for quite some time (unless you buy the argument that the destruction of all those emails and computers with the emails is wholly innocent). Libertarians provide pseudo-academic cover for Republican economic policies that make no sense. And there’s only one party left with any semblance (albeit just a little) of pragmatism left. Hint: It doesn’t begin with the letters R, G or L.
Comment by TGGP —
March 22, 2008 @ 9:13 pm
I opposed the way because I’m an isolationist. I don’t think we should have fought Iraq in 91, and I also think Charles Lindbergh was right in the 40s.
At the same time, I believed Iraq had WMDs. I figured that we know they had them before since they used them on the Kurds, there’s no reason to think they’ve disappeared, so they probably still have them. I just think its every country’s own prerogative to have WMDs, not a cause for invasion.
I assume most people here have read the Radar piece on how people who were right on Iraq got the shaft while those who were wrong got promoted.
Greg Cochran’s explanation sounds similar to Henley’s, but perhaps without the humorous intent.
Comment by anonymiss —
March 22, 2008 @ 10:39 pm
I must give kudos as well–I’m mystified by why we’re still taking advice from people who were wrong about everything. If a friend recommended I spend $35,000 on a Chevy with 275,000 miles on it, I might take his advice once, but I sure as hell wouldn’t take his advice twice!
For myself, as a New Yorker, I was pretty dang pissed off that we were giving up on Osama bin Laden to go after this jackass.
And honestly, it’s not because I didn’t understand how evil Saddam was. I’d have been just as ticked off if we went after any other jackass before we got the one who killed thousands of Americans on our own soil. Really, there’s no shortage of crazy evil dictators–Zimbabwe has a crazy evil dictator, so does Burma, North Korea…the list is pretty long. Really, I’d have been just as pissed off if we’d forgotten about bin Laden and sent our entire army to take over a totally well-governed nation like Sweden.
If Iraq were the only other nation on Earth, sending in our military on a nation-building-exercise-disguised-as-a-snipe -hunt-for-nonexistent-weapons-of-mass-destruction might have made a lick of sense. But on this planet? Not so much.
Comment by Larkspur —
March 22, 2008 @ 10:56 pm
I could never get past the concept of a “war on terror”. Yes, you can call things “war”: war on poverty, war on hunger. But this administration clearly meant a literal war on terror. I couldn’t imagine it, and I couldn’t support the second “battle” of the war on terror – against Iraq, after Afghanistan – because you can’t beat terror. And if you tell me that obviously, they meant a war on terrorists, I’m gonna say what I’ve said from the start: this should have been an international law enforcement action, aimed at finding, arresting, and putting the culprits on trial.
(Which I guess would have been doomed anyway, since GWB so courteously allowed various Bin Ladens and other Saudis to fly home in the immediate 9-11 aftermath, before any of them could even be interviewed. Which reminds me that the game was rigged from the moment he took office. And that all of my objections would only ever have merited a cold Cheney “So?”
(All of this, of course, brings us back to what only seemed inevitable to maybe half the electorate: give George W. Bush the government, and he will drive it into a big ditch just as he has every other enterprise he’s undertaken.)
There’s no joy in “I told you so”. This all just hurts so much.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
March 23, 2008 @ 1:43 am
Thanks to folks with Powell-related links. I will review before prattling further.
(I appreciate the courteous tone, too, especially if it turns out I’m more than usually wrong.)
Comment by Joe —
March 23, 2008 @ 7:54 am
Was the intelligence thing supposed to be amusing or something? I don’t see the relevance … it doesn’t ultimately take intelligence, which many war mongerers have, but judgment.
Comment by SanderO —
March 23, 2008 @ 8:19 am
The problem with way too many people is that take at face value what people in positions of power are saying and never ascribe any sort of “selfish” motives to them.
I usually believe exactly the opposite of what these “government” officials say and there you will find something resembling the truth.
Sadly when you look back with 20 20 hindsight and that means you need to also remove your blinders, you will see the events of the bask several decades and most recently the past administration as a coup d’etat of the right wing who simply wanted not only unfettered capitalism, but unfettered power to dominate the world. Our democracy and its notion of checks and balance and accountability was far to cumbersome to acheive this. Why? Because this would never be in the interest of the people.
This nation is run by the already too powerful financial/corporate interests. It’s as simple as that. When you learn to view the world through this prism you can see the truth through all the lying and fog.
You learn to see that the whole national security thing is all meant to keep the people afraid, willing to work and die for their masters and willing to believe “intelligence” reports.
The deal is to keep the people disenfranchised, buying useless junk, in debt and addicted to useless pursuits, while the world is plundered.
It’s that simple. Those who cooperate in this mission get to make cash, wield mid level management position in government and industry and promote the false narrative.
All one needed to know about Powell was that he was a player in all this. He went to West Point so he could be a “house nigger” and he was dispatched to “clean up” My Lai and then to lie at the UN. Who could question the integrity of a black man, soldier, for head of Joint Chiefs? This use of false imprimatur was the give away. But most people thought he was the real deal, just like all the generals with the medals that they parade out to sell war. Serious men who know what you don’t know and must be listened to.
Tommy Franks (we don’t do body counts)
Sanchez
Miller
Abezaid (he spoke arab!!)
Petreus
Look at the monster that the USA is and represents as the saviors of the American way of life?
Look at the captains of industry who have the moral compass of a tadpole:
Ken Lay
Skilling
Koslowski
Bernie Ebbers
Jim Cayne
Greenspan
The list is endless. These men are common crooks which have access to the bank vaults not the corner store. At the top of most corporations you will find the same more than not. That’s the world we live in.
All first class liars, thieves and murderers.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see this. You been told a thousand times before.
Comment by P J Evans —
March 23, 2008 @ 10:15 am
I was referring to the statements being put out before the invasion as the ‘excuse-of-the-month club’ – it was certainly clear to me that Bush wanted a war.
(In a just world, he’d have been handed report-for-induction orders as soon as he missed his physical, but this world ain’t just. In a less-just world, he’d have gotten lots of flak for breaking his promise to the people of Texas that he’d complete his second term, but this world ain’t even that just.)
Comment by ad —
March 23, 2008 @ 10:51 am
The war of Independence, for example.
Say what you like about the Declaration of Independence, it would have been perfectly possible to NOT declare independence.
Or the Civil War…
Comment by catalexis —
March 23, 2008 @ 12:21 pm
The War of Independence… You’re making a funny right? We declared Independence and the British declared war. We sent a high flown letter of protest to a king and he sent his army to punish us.
The Civil War, likewise was a war of choice started by the rebels, the first shot fired by the rebels, and while I have often thought we might have been spared a great deal of misery had we let the South go, there was disagreement in several border states that would have led to fighting there at least. So, I believe the quote stands, any war of choice is a crime.
Comment by cavjam —
March 23, 2008 @ 2:48 pm
Those who professed that getting rid of a despot was worth one drop of blood are seriously delusional. Those who professed such and were not standing at enlistment’s door are obdurate hypocrites. Those who professed such have no concept of, or respect for, international law (invading a sovereign nation for regime change is blatantly illegal; that’s why the original premise was Saddam’s remote-controlled magic carpets spraying poison fairy dust). Those who didn’t realize that communal violence, that most serious of actions, always has unintended consequences should be kept forever in stupidity quarantine.
Comment by TGGP —
March 23, 2008 @ 3:17 pm
The war of Independence, for example.
Some do not think highly of it.
Comment by Donald Johnson —
March 23, 2008 @ 3:46 pm
“He was part of the Americal Division’s command and had some access to information but he’s not accused of hiding anything.
More significantly, what My Lai cover up? (beyond the false reports of the initial time period when Powell wasn’t even in the job) it has hardly been a secret, and the Army did a fair job of bringing it out (though not necessarily punishing aggressively).”
That’s misleading, from all that I read. Powell was asked to investigate the allegations regarding My Lai. He came back with what you’d expect from a yes man– that the troops were, for the most part, behaving themselves. Whether you’d call that a coverup or not depends on semantics–did he cover up what he should have discovered if he’d done his job?
As for the army, they weren’t exactly broadcasting what had happened, though they did so some quiet investigating. Seymour Hersh is the one who let the world know, writing two books on the subject, one of them mentioning another independent massacre that was committed a few miles away which never made it into the press. Recently, Gareth Porter found that the Army investigation into the massacre covered up Westmoreland’s policy regarding the treatment of civilians in areas long controlled by the VC.
http://www.antiwar.com/porter/?articleid=12531
Comment by Donald Johnson —
March 23, 2008 @ 3:49 pm
The book that mentions Powell’s role in not doing his job–
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Hours-Lai-Michael-Bilton/dp/0140177094/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206301672&sr=1-1
Comment by Donald Johnson —
March 23, 2008 @ 3:52 pm
This passage from the wikipedia article on My Lai summarizes pretty well what the book above describes as Powell’s record–
“Six months later, Tom Glen, a 21-year-old soldier of the 11th Light Infantry Brigade, wrote a letter to General Creighton Abrams, the new overall commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, accusing the Americal Division (and other entire units of the U.S. military) of routine and pervasive brutality against Vietnamese civilians. The letter was detailed and its contents echoed complaints received from other soldiers.
Colin Powell, then a 31-year-old Army Major, was charged with investigating the letter, which did not specifically reference My Lai (Glen had limited knowledge of the events there). In his report Powell wrote: “In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.” Powell’s handling of the assignment was later characterized by some observers as “whitewashing” the atrocities of My Lai.[23] In May 2004, Powell, then United States Secretary of State, told CNN’s Larry King, “I mean, I was in a unit that was responsible for My Lai. I got there after My Lai happened. So, in war, these sorts of horrible things happen every now and again, but they are still to be deplored.”[24]“
Comment by Barry —
March 23, 2008 @ 4:16 pm
Which I think makes my point that Powell was corrupt, way back when I was busy learning kickball at my new elementary school.
Comment by purpleOnion —
March 23, 2008 @ 4:36 pm
…also posted at Balloon Juice
The problem was that there were many people who did not have their bs detectors tuned properly.
It must have been confusing to many, because there were so many deceptions coming from so many directions that in self-defense they assumed that minimally elected officials would not intentionally do harm to the United States. I do not harbor such an assumption.
Between Judith Miller and other intrepid embedded journalist stenographers across all media were told that true patriots supported the war and everyone else was a Communist who was soon to lose his or her chosen profession if he or she was not dedicated to the great purpose.
There were a few obvious signs of deception such as George Bush reciting a different reason for going to war on a weekly basis. There were also “experts” retired military toadies who had a difficult time keeping their stories straight depending upon the time between when they were last told what the reason was for war and the most recent excuse is usually a fairly good barometer for deceit.
Iraq did not represent a threat to an Afghanistan that the Russian military miraculously returned to the Stone Age from eight years of high altitude bombing raids, let alone America. Who claims that time travel is impossible when our leaders have no problem at all sending us backward in time.
Then there were the traitor accusations against anyone who used reason and logic with a dash of moral sensitivity to realize that backward, primitive Iraqi soldiers would surrender as rapidly as possible to prevent being converted into human ground beef. It’s true there were some who were aware that Iraqis knew a war with the U.S. would generally be thought of as suicide rather than martyrdom, but that would have required an intervention by mental health professionals.
The U.S. could not unleash total war against Iraq, because it would have had the uncomfortable feeling of participating in, choose one: slaughter, massacre, or genocide. Thus our brilliant military leaders chose the least effective type of warfare “limited war†in which a nation can win a war, but will be ambushed intermittently forever. Americans would resist such a plan, of course, because they foolishly believe that one enters into war with the goal of ending it with victory, not perpetuating it for as long as Americans can accept a statistical “minimal” loss of American soldiers.
Minimal is a relative term that is approximately four thousand over a five year period if one does not take into account the nearly eighty thousand soldiers who have been wounded so severely that their lives will not be the same as long as they shall live. Modern medicine is a miraculous creation of people dedicated to saving the lives of people they reassemble so that they can be labeled wounded instead of dead.
The calculation missing from many discussions about this war was the sadistic intellectualized racism that permitted some of our best political and military leaders to give very little weight to the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. After all, they were foreigners who were different from us, but that appears to be enough for some people. This is perfect for relieving us from feeling shame, disgust, and guilt over a principled war that was not an act of aggression and mass murder, because they were “strangers”. Who wastes their time worrying about strangers, especially strangers who don’t have a proper alphabet and believe in a heathen prophet that approve of war as long as it is against infidels; in other words, us.
Finally, the event that gave the entire historical madness a tinge of unreality was when the Iraqi leaders foolishly believed that if they accepted that they were going to be creamed unless they capitulated to both the U.S. and UN demands, and then did so a few days before the attack, proved how naive’ they were to think that the neocons would hold back the plans for invasion. The neocons were hungry for war because it appeared to be so easy and the profit potential was enormous, roughly twelve to fifteen trillion dollars.
Now what person, in his right mind, would not attack a weak nation for fifteen trillion? The answer is a responsible, pragmatic, logical, and moral person who understands that war is the last resort simply because of the unintended consequences and it is the slaughter of human beings. One of those unintended consequences was the possibility of turning one and a quarter billion Arabs, who at one point were somewhat curious about how we did things in the U.S., into extremist radical enemies. Imagine that. Some people do not have a sense of humor when it comes to the loss of their land, families, and sense of national identity.
Well, maybe when Mr. Obama sits down with some of these third world leaders they’ll realize that America had a severe illness that would only be cured by making certain that no warmonger bacteria ever infects our government and our people again except when it is necessary or in self-defense. If war does become necessary we should become merciless and calm barbarians.
Everyone together now, tune up those bs detectors, because, who knows, the life you save may be your own.
Sorry about the length. It is the effect of years of frustration, depression, and yes at times anger that may be converted into a celebration of a sunset on this terrible tragedy for all concerned, including the “minimal” losses on our side and the “acceptable” losses on their side.
I think the American people deserve to finally awake from the neocons’ and weak willed nightmare. A new day is dawning and we will be free of this national disgrace. I deeply apologize for not knowing how to prevent it.
Comment by Sue —
March 23, 2008 @ 5:22 pm
I knew the Iraq invasion was B.S. because I’m a middle school teacher, and I can always tell when a 7th grader lies to me. Even if his daddy was a president.
Honestly, how could anyone think Iraq could bomb us when we can’t bomb them? The collective U.S. stupid of 2002-2003, I chaulk up to selfishness. We were drunk on the prosperity of the Clinton years and we really thought we didn’t have to play by the real world rules. We thought it was a g-d’d football game, and we were gonna win.
Noone with a microphone was willing to ruin the party. The media is owned my the military/corporate complex. Without regulation, they wanted the war profits. Plain and simple.
Too bad noone had the backbone to speak up, except us protestors in the streets.
Comment by Junius Brutus —
March 24, 2008 @ 12:59 pm
Glibertarianism is still a ridiculously unfounded and stupidly oversimplified ideology, but that post is absolutely great and should win an award.
Comment by Junius Brutus —
March 24, 2008 @ 1:05 pm
Re getting Iraq right:
I figured it out in about January of 2003 and was absolutely certain after Powell’s mendacious presentation to the UN. By that time, it was absolutely clear that Bushco was lying about alumnum tubes and many other things.
I went by the Brutus Principle, an interpretive heuristic that says that no one lies when they don’t have to. Ergo, since Bush was definitely lying about at least some important stuff, he had to be lying about the whole thing. No one who had actual, solid evidence would lie, because it would be idiotic to lie when the truth was on your side and you could prove it.
Comment by John —
March 24, 2008 @ 1:38 pm
I saw Powell’s presentation and thought I was in the Twilight Zone. It was some very thin gruel. I thought, “where’s the rest”?
Comment by Chris Stiles —
March 24, 2008 @ 2:37 pm
“A friend suggested that maybe when we were friends with Saddam our military had given him something so lethal that we had to invade the country in order to get it back.
This was the only explanation I ever heard from anyone during the run-up to the war that made any sense. “
Arguably – if you want to be all conspiracy theorist about it – this explanation would still make sense.
Comment by Chris Stiles —
March 24, 2008 @ 2:38 pm
So, I guess that leaves Oliver Stone to write up the ‘Saddam had a neutron bomb’ script
Comment by Bonnie —
March 24, 2008 @ 3:09 pm
As to who-thought-what-when, who cares? I thought I’d be stimulated by this discussion but found it depressing. Maybe it was the comment about women not seeing the humor in violence (I spent an hour last night trying to explain to a bunch of guys why No Country is a funny movie). If we’re all so smart why haven’t we figured out how to get this president impeached? Please, no excuses. It’s shameful (and shame on us) that instead of focusing our high IQs (even those of us who apparently lack the strategic thinking gene), we’re competing to see which of us knew more first. Our country isn’t going to wake up until the crimes of this administration are placed in the proper context, fully aired and punished. Failing this we leave the door wide open for either the Bush booby trap adeptly descried above to do its work after a Democrat victory, or a McCain victory, because too many Americans are still confused as to why we invaded Iraq. What Bush and company do is simple: whatever it takes. In this way they’re no better than Saddam, except they operate in ways more appropriate to a supposedly well-informed “free” country. They make up stuff, twist the facts, retaliate against detractors, cover up, delete, erase, etc. For none of this, have they been held to account. How can we make accountability happen? Amy ideas?
Comment by Batocchio —
March 24, 2008 @ 3:17 pm
The only two things necessary to oppose invading Iraq were a high threshold for war and a decent bullshit detector. I’m so sick of these vain, arrogant wankers. But sadly, they’re still in print on on TV constantly, and your piece hasn’t run.
Comment by Lefty27 —
March 24, 2008 @ 3:24 pm
You’re smarter than 99% of us,and yet you are Libertarian?
Comment by Larkspur —
March 24, 2008 @ 8:35 pm
Bonnie, it matters to me in terms of me not being able to stand it when people say stuff like “mistakes were made”. As I said in my earlier comment there’s no joy in this. But I want to hear some evidence of taking responsibility. In this instance, it’s responsibility for opinions. In terms of responsibility for policy, I haven’t the smallest hope that those people will stand up and take some. People like Feith blame everybody else (in his new book, which I know only by review, not reading), and people like Cheney say “So?”
Comment by Kenneth Almquist —
March 26, 2008 @ 1:05 am
“What all of us had in common is probably a simple recognition: War is a big deal.”
One of the biggest surprises for me was the discovery that Bush invaded Afghanistan not because he felt the mission was critically important, but because he didn’t think that war was a big deal. In February 2003 we learned that the Bush Administration forgot to include any money for Afghan reconstruction in its budget request. In other words, Afghanistan was important enough for Bush to send Americans to fight and die there, but not important enough for his administration to check and double check that the budget included enough money to succeed in Afghanistan.
Comment by BP —
March 26, 2008 @ 3:28 am
Hear Hear! I almost lost it with a good friend on a train one night when he pulled the “hindsight is 20/20″ argument out of his ass. HINDSIGHT?! Everything that I’m saying now, I was saying before this shit started. What do you mean hindsight?!
This same friend should have known better because he had, in fact, almost stopped talking to me because my opposition to the whole fiasco had reached the level of “obnoxious.” But now that even he realized what a disaster it was I was one of the overwhelming majority of people who “listened to what every expert in the country believed to be true.” Even if it wasn’t. Even if I wasn’t.
But then I remember that those who supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein were “serious intellectuals” and those of us who couldn’t believe that so many people could actually be buying all this shit were well… either “lucky,” “naive,” or both.
But don’t worry! They’re still on the case. And they’re determined that we make don’t make the same mistake a second time in opposing war with Iran. Cuz to do that would not only be treasonous like last time, but dangerous (Remember that you when you say that, you have to pause and tilt your chin slightly above the eye level of the person listening to you. Allow a three second gap for the weight of your words to take effect. Drink a glass of wine. If you don’t have one, improvise ).
Comment by Steve Withers —
March 26, 2008 @ 5:29 pm
I smelled a rat when Bush made his first anti-Iraq speech at the UN in Spring 2002. Until then, the only serious talk about Iraq had been WHEN to lift sanctions – not if. Suddenly – all halt and about face – we have this threat. Oh. So show me. Bush never showed me. As time went on and proof of anything remained hidden, it was more and more obvious this was a pack of lies. If I could see it easily for what it was, why couldn’t the much more experienced and presumably skeptical opinion leaders and politicians see it too? That is a question I’ve never had a satisfactory answer to. The home of the brave and free speech? Or the home of the “me, too” flock of sheep? Too many who should not have been were among the latter.
Comment by Qwerty —
March 27, 2008 @ 12:24 pm
You’re spot on about the libertarian hate for “leftwing tyrants” like Saddam blinding them to the obvious – there were no mass graves of hundreds of thousands showing up either. Saddam was nasty and corrupt (probably not much more than Musharraf) but the country was functioning, secular, one of the most educated, egalitarian and women-friendly societies in the ME. It is now in shambles and will not recover for decades. Face it, it’s for the oil.