What Megan is still getting wrong
By Thoreau
Megan McArdle is taking a lot of heat, and she’s saying a lot in response. And some of it makes sense. But then she tosses out something like this:
Obviously, there are people who were right about the war for the right reasons, and we should examine what their thought process was–not merely the conclusions they came to, but how they got there. Other peoples’ opposition was animated by principles that may be right, but aren’t really very helpful: the pacifists, the isolationists, the reflexive opponents of Republicans or the US military. Within the limits on foreign policy in a hegemonic power, these just aren’t particularly useful, again, regardless of whether you are metaphysically correct.
“It won’t work” is the easiest prediction to get right; almost nothing does. The thought process that tells you something probably won’t work is not always a good way to figure out what will, even if you were right for the right reasons, as I agree lots of people were.
1) Yes, we know, there were indeed some kooky people at the anti-war marches in 2002 and 2003. There were also some very articulate and informed people offering up arguments against the war.
2) If you only want arguments that are “useful” to a hegemonic power, well, maybe that’s part of the problem. Granted, it may have been asking a bit too much to reverse and revamp the entire apparatus of US policy in 2002; I would have been quite satisfied if we had merely avoided the war, even at the cost of postponing the bigger questions. Still, if the most thoughtful critics of a disaster, the ones with the best track record of predictions, are also the ones with ideas that fall well outside the status quo, well, maybe that means something!
3) Yes, it is indeed easy to predict that a war will go horribly wrong. That’s exactly our point. It’s all but guaranteed that a war will go badly; you don’t get to blame that one on Bush. Long before Bush had even dodged a war, let alone started one, military lingo was full of colorful terms for massive screwups. Because it’s all but guaranteed that a war will have all sorts of awful consequences, the only acceptable reason to fight one is to defend against a threat that is real, imminent, and even worse than war. (Regarding my use of the word “imminent,” when the Bush administration attempts to defend itself from charges of dishonesty by claiming that they never said “imminent,” that just makes my point: If the threat wasn’t imminent, you shouldn’t be going to war over it.)
All of this talk about how it didn’t “work” and that’s the flaw in the 2002 cost-benefit analysis misses the point: The prospect of it “working” shouldn’t have even entered the analysis. Any case for war that gambles that some great social change will occur and make it all “worth it” is a flawed case. If your life isn’t in imminent danger, a danger that can ONLY be averted by war, then don’t go to war. Period.
That isn’t the sort of reflexively pacifist case that she would reject, because it leaves room for war against imminent threats that can only be averted by war. But it is a case that requires a very high threshold for war.
Finally, Megan has made much of the fact that she wasn’t very influential in 2003, so why should we blame her? Well, isn’t it interesting that somebody who was so wrong about the most significant policy issue of our decade has moved on from being an obscure independent blogger to being a featured blogger and writer at a respected national magazine? Granted, that wasn’t the only thing she blogged about. For all I know she may be a great economics writer. (Or not. I just don’t know.) But she continues to make foreign policy a major feature of her professional blogging. (Yes, I also blog a lot about foreign policy, but it isn’t a paying gig for me. In fact, although I do blog about scientific and academic matters my colleagues do not know about this blog.) At the very least, being so wrong in her writing on a major policy issue has not done the least bit of harm to her rising career in the punditocracy. No, I don’t want every writer and blogger who got it wrong in 2002 to spend the rest of his or her life saying “Do you want fries with that?” But, well, it’s interesting that being so spectacularly wrong on something so important is no impediment to a pundit’s career. If I had to publish retractions of my most significant research articles, my tenure application would be dicey.
EDIT: Megan says that writing about foreign policy has been a very small component of her professional activity. Because I cannot say that I’ve followed her work very carefully (especially her print work) I will take her at her word on this. I stop by her blog from time to time, but I do not follow it consistently and I do not follow her print work carefully. I take her at her word that her professional advancement has been based on her economic writings. I am retracting what I wrote above about her as an example of a pundit getting it wrong and advancing professionally.
Comment by Joe Strummer —
March 26, 2008 @ 8:44 pm
Well said.
Comment by Mr Duncan —
March 26, 2008 @ 9:00 pm
I do! I want them to be serving fries! They can even consider the cost-benefits of going to war against the grease merchant if that’s what makes them happy.
Comment by Megan McArdle —
March 26, 2008 @ 9:21 pm
a) I almost never write about foreign policy; I am interested to hear what you think constitutes my extensive foreign policy blogging in, say, the last two or three years. Indeed, I do not blog or write about foreign policy precisely because having gotten it so wrong in 2003, I have decided to stick to what I know.
b) This is probably why my opinions on foreign policy five years ago are not considered particularly germane to my career.
c) Yes, you are right, war almost never works, which is one of the lessons that we should take away from all this, at least those of us who didn’t know it before. But many of those who opposed the war are saying that having known this, they should therefore be given control over foreign policy, because those of us who didn’t know this, or didn’t remember it, are idiots. Unfortunately, “war doesn’t work” is not a sufficient insight to, say, determine what our position on Kyoto, the WTO, the international criminal court, the UN, military restructuring, ballistic missile defense, or any of a hundred other issues should be.
d) I respectfully disagree that “never go to war unless you have been directly attacked” is always the correct policy. If that policy had been followed, America would not exist (no French aid), and Hitler would have roamed unobstructed through Europe, because after all, that was all really between him and the Czechs.
American military force abroad has done a lot of harm, but it also defeated Hitler (no, the Russians and the British would not have done it without American supply), kept the Russians out of Western Europe, and kept the Chinese out of South Korea. American hegemony now almost certainly contains a great deal of local conflict, and is the reason, for example, that Taiwan hasn’t been forcibly “restored” to China. It’s far from clear to me that on net, our foreign interventionism has been a malign force in the world.
That’s not an argument for endless war–I quite agree that the threshhold should be a lot higher than we set it. But not “only when they attack us” high. That’s a license for countries a lot worse than us to kick their neighbors around a lot more than they already do. I’m interested in net human lives, not personal purity; I don’t prefer a situation in which more people die, but I can say I didn’t have any connection to it. Your mileage may differ, of course.
Comment by Kevin B. O'Reilly —
March 26, 2008 @ 9:22 pm
The Iraq war did not have to fail to be a bad idea, anymore than Russian Roulette is a good idea because you luck out. But the Iraq war did have to succeed in order to be a good idea. What Megan’s still not appreciating is that she makes it seem as though each war of choice ought to be examined on its own terms and, heck, honest well-meaning people on either side can get certain thing wrong. But the lesson of Iraq is to presumptively *oppose* wars of choice.
“This might work out,” was not good enough then, and it will never be good enough.
Comment by bad Jim —
March 26, 2008 @ 9:35 pm
Ms. McArdle seems to have forgotten that Germany declared war upon the U.S. in 1941.
Comment by Megan McArdle —
March 26, 2008 @ 9:45 pm
Yes, because our naval activity in the pacific, very far from our borders, had provoked the Japanese into attacking us in order to clear the way for the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. We also had marines in China. And we supplied the Allies against the Axis, both with Lend-Lease and extensive merchant shipping support. No interventionist foreign policy, no American participation in World War II.
Comment by Barry —
March 26, 2008 @ 10:13 pm
Thoreau: “Any case for war that gambles that some great social change will occur and make it all “worth it” is a flawed case. If your life isn’t in imminent danger, a danger that can ONLY be averted by war, then don’t go to war. Period.”
And that’s precisely the out of the mainstream, ‘kooky’ sort of thinking that does *not* get one a job with a major magazine.
Comment by Leonard —
March 26, 2008 @ 10:30 pm
Megan, we’re not asking for control of all foreign policy. Just asking to be considered about the warfare aspect of it.
Isolation works. I’ve said this before — including writing it in 2003 before the war — and I’ll keep saying it. Military isolation is easy to get right, because it is passive. Doing nothing (unless invaded, which is clear enough) gets it right. You seem to grasp that, at least.
Your knowledge of the history of warfare… I find it lacking. Let me just criticize what you’ve written above.
Do you deny that if all states did this, the world would be a better place? I cannot see how. If so, then it’s up to you to explain why this is not an attractive rule for international conduct. And why America is so special — perhaps because we are favored by God Himself? — that it should not apply to us just as much as everyone else.
(a) this is like saying “the South does not exist”. They lost a war, yes. But they exist. If we’d lost our secession war in 1776, we’d now be what — like Canada, maybe. Or Australia. Or New Zealand. Is this really so intolerable?
(b) You’re not making your point. Although it may be true that if France had been isolationist wrt us, we’d not have seceded successfully, that’s not what’s at issue. The question is, did this make France better off? Quite clearly, it did not. Rather, the regime literally lost their heads as a consequence. And not a few of the people.
Hitler would have never come to power but for WWI, which was emphatically not caused by isolationism. So, what you’re really arguing here is that if the world had suddenly gone isolationist in 1920, Hitler would have had a freer hand. Just so. Of course, then he would not have attacked the West; he’d have gone straight East first, which is what he wanted to do all along.
Posh. Germany lost the war in the winter of 1941 if you ask many historians, and certainly by the winter of 1942. This was before the USA had a single battle against Germans. The materiel impact of the USA was substantial, but we did not have to be at war to give it. (In fact Germany lost the war when they failed to go to full-out war socialism in 1939, 1940, or 1941 — until after Stalingrad!)
As for our “hegemony” containing conflict, it’s caused a heck of a lot more armed conflict than it is containing.
To you, I guess. It’s clear to me it has.
Certainly your opinion is what one would expect from those coming out of our schools, where nationalism, American exceptionalism, and flag idolatry are most assuredly taught, but anything like real military history is not.
Comment by TGGP —
March 26, 2008 @ 11:13 pm
I fully admit for getting it right for purely isolationist reasons, and did not anticipate things would go as badly as they did (I even though Saddam had WMDs). I defended the isolationist position on WW2 here.
Comment by Turkey Turkey Turkey —
March 26, 2008 @ 11:14 pm
Thoreau, very well said.
You’re being too easy on members of the pundit class who got it wrong in 2003, though. Forgiveness should not be extended to those who enabled the killing of a million people. Put the war advocates in places where they can’t hurt anyone else. McDonalds is a good start. Prison would be better.
Comment by McMartin —
March 26, 2008 @ 11:22 pm
TTT:
Seriously? You want to imprison people for writing op-eds? You think this is a feature of a well-run society?
Comment by Nathan —
March 26, 2008 @ 11:35 pm
I find McArdle’s attitude to this exceptionally annoying, especially since she’s keeping the anti-French jokes flowing on her blog even though they were right on this and she was wrong.
That said, I think she’s right, at least about (3), which only permit war for imminent self-defence. I think principle (3) would have kept the UK and France from going to war over Poland in 1939. It definitely would have kept Australia, New Zealand, and Canada out of WWII. It would have ruled out military action to stop the Rwandan genocide.
Now, the Iraq war is an example where that would have been a good principle to follow. But I have to agree with McArdle that the experience in Iraq doesn’t necessarily lead to accepting that principle.
Comment by Russell L. Carter —
March 26, 2008 @ 11:42 pm
Christ. I’m going to ignore anything Megan says here as an undeserved benefit TO HER.
Yes Thoreau, your post is completely correct.
Comment by Cala —
March 26, 2008 @ 11:52 pm
In a saner world, the fact that wars are likely to go badly would be taken as reason to refrain from warring, not as a reason to salve one’s conscience after embarking on an ill-conceived war.
Comment by ed —
March 27, 2008 @ 12:04 am
McMegan gives narcissistic Republican pseudo-libertarians a bad name.
Comment by Megan McArdle —
March 27, 2008 @ 12:05 am
Why yes, Leonard, I agree that if no one engaged in violence, violence would be unnecessary. I also agree that if no one stole, we wouldn’t need police, and if no one ever disagreed, we wouldn’t need courts, either.
However, I do not know how to get to this marvelous world where my willingness to refrain from offensive violence inspires perfect reciprocity from everyone else, and also, we have no history. I am therefore thrown back on less attractive systems to manage the problems of defection and path dependence.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 27, 2008 @ 12:55 am
Megan, I retracted my comments about foreign policy and your professional writing. I erred to assume that your foreign policy writings have been significant in your career advancement. I take you at your word that your career has advanced largely on your economic writings, just as mine has advanced on my scientific writing, not my blogging.
As to war: Even if one wants to adopt a more hawkish stance than the one I proposed, the situation of WWII could still be addressed by saying that we’ll only go to war if somebody else starts one, and we’ll only act to protect allies from aggression that somebody else initiates. In 2003 it’s clear that we were the aggressors. And there’s Leonard’s larger point about WWII–that it was the product of WWI, which was hardly the product of isolationism.
Comment by Leonard —
March 27, 2008 @ 2:09 am
Well, that’s progress of sorts. Good for you!
Fortunately, we do not need to live in this strawman world you don’t know how to get to, in order for the USA to stop initiating wars and live in peace. (I don’t know how to get to your strawman world either. That’s why I am a libertarian, not a radical pacifist.)
The USA is perfectly capable of not starting wars in this world. In fact — believe it or not — there have been whole years go by in which the USA did not start a war! No really — look it up!
Let me get a yes/no verdict from you on the following question:
Does the USA have the capability to not attack Iran in 2008?
Put another way, do you believe in fate? Is the future already written, such that we will attack Iran this year?
If you truly believe in fate, then I guess your failure to grasp the attraction of isolationism is understandable. But otherwise, not so much. Certainly, the examples you put forth above are not convincing.
Comment by KWK —
March 27, 2008 @ 2:12 am
Thoreau accepts going to war to protect allies, others accept going to war to protect innocents (e.g. Rwanda). Had the UN agreed on humanitarian grounds to depose Saddam by force, would that have been acceptable?
Unfortunately, that was never going to happen, as other nations –particularly France and Russia–had a vested interest in Saddam remaining in power (much like China currently has wrt Omar al-Bashir in Sudan). So in the face of recalcitrance on the part of other Security Council members, would some other “coalition of the willing” have been acceptable?
I guess my point is, those who were hawkish for humanitarian reasons (Tony Blair comes to mind, but I’ve not read extensively him extensively), as well as those who pushed for military action independent of the UN, may still have a leg to stand on when it comes to determining foreign policy at this stage. But I’m not seeing any room for such nuanced distinctions among those who want to indiscriminately throw their opponents behind bars (or worse, behind the counter at McDonald’s).
Comment by s.m. koppelman —
March 27, 2008 @ 6:27 am
Number of pages returned by a Google search of Megan’s old blog for “Iraq”: 1210
On “France”: 667
Number of pages returned by a Google search of Megan’s old blog for “housing”: 533
On “Greenspan”: 139
Comment by s.m. koppelman —
March 27, 2008 @ 6:36 am
Number of pages returned by a search of Ms. McArdle’s Atlantic blog for “Iraq”: 357
On “bubble”: 160
On “Greenspan”: 87
On “Bernanke”: 108
Comment by quasibill —
March 27, 2008 @ 9:16 am
It’s all easier than that.
If one were to apply McArdles arguments at the individual level, it would be easy to support national healthcare, gun prohibitions, and all sorts of welfare and regulatory state functions.
That she cannot grasp the basic flaws in her hawkish foreign policy premises speaks to how shallow her understanding of libertarian principles is. McDonald’s is indeed more appropriate than a soapbox from which she can claim to be in favor of free markets.
Comment by ` —
March 27, 2008 @ 9:24 am
Megan: ““It won’t work” is the easiest prediction to get right; almost nothing does.”
Says Megan McArdle, who lives (or did for a while) in NYC, one of the largest cities in the world, where millions and millions of people actually go about their daily business, and generally succeed.
So much for Megan’s non-foreign policy competancy.
I generally encounter Megan’s work when it’s linked from Crooked Timber. The second to last encounter was Megan demonstrating that ‘revealed preferences’ and ‘collective action problems’ were not terms that she understood, even after her commenters schooled her on them.
The last was a drive-by comment from Megan, where she said that Bear Stearns was not being bailed out [note: she changed her mind after the terms changed slightly]. This meant that Megan ‘Chicago MBA, where many of my professors had Nobel Prizes’ looked at a deal where the Fed agreed to take $30 billion of bad assets off of a company’s hands at book value, and couldn’t spot the bailout.
I have a used car to sell to her, which I’ll let her have at bluebook value.
Comment by ` —
March 27, 2008 @ 9:26 am
Also, note Megan’s comments on the utility of war - I propose a general principle, that when one has to hold up US involvement in WWII as the standard, then one is talking about the exception, not the rule.
Comment by Barry —
March 27, 2008 @ 9:26 am
Mr. ‘ is me.
Comment by Barry —
March 27, 2008 @ 9:28 am
Comment by KWK —
March 27, 2008 @ 2:12 am
“Thoreau accepts going to war to protect allies, others accept going to war to protect innocents (e.g. Rwanda). Had the UN agreed on humanitarian grounds to depose Saddam by force, would that have been acceptable?”
Let me help you with the whole ‘temporal dimensionality’ thingie:
Rwanda - ongoing slaughter.
Saddam - historical slaughter.
Comment by Barry —
March 27, 2008 @ 9:47 am
I just went over to Megan’s blog on the Atlantic, to do a quick count on FP vs non-FP posts. For the last ~30 posts, 7 were FP. Considering the recent brouhaha, it’s not evidence against her statement about FP being a minority of her posting.
But what struck me like a stench wave while skimming was the sheer vacuousness of her posts. A “Shorter Megan McArdle: ‘things don’t work out, how was I to know, and WTF, anyway?’” would be reasonable.
I was always wondering why somebody with a degree from one of the top 10-20 B-schools in the world would be working as a columnist, and this certainly illuminated that question.
Comment by Joe Strummer —
March 27, 2008 @ 9:52 am
Megan McArdle wrote:
However, I do not know how to get to this marvelous world where my willingness to refrain from offensive violence inspires perfect reciprocity from everyone else, and also, we have no history.
Well, a good start would be, you know, to stop intervening. This country hasn’t been credibly threatened since 1942. Even permitting for NATO during the cold war, we might re-imagine that world. Or at least begin now by not intervening further.
I am therefore thrown back on less attractive systems to manage the problems of defection and path dependence.
This is your problem. You assume that because there are potential threats out in the world, that the right approach is to ponder all the “less attractive systems” which, apparently, amount to intervention.
More generally, you have this obnoxious presumption the starting point is a world in which Americans are owed near-perfect security. The catastrophic results of intervention don’t weigh very heavily in your analysis. The result is a series of jokes, off-hand comments, and condescending remarks that make it all very galling to those of us who were right about the war. Or to me at least.
Comment by joel hanes —
March 27, 2008 @ 9:53 am
McArdle’s writings on economics have no more merit than her writings on foreign policy. So Thoreau’s point about pundits advancing their careers by being wrong still stands.
Comment by KWK —
March 27, 2008 @ 10:38 am
Barry wrote:
Right, because Saddam was the very model of a benevolent leader, whose people were gaily tripping through the streets of Baghdad, free from systematic torture, mass execution, and more general repression at the hands of the government. And there were ponies for everyone.
I’m not referring primarily to the Kurds or the Marsh Arabs, though come to think of it, even though Saddam’s phase of “historical slaughter” was over and done with, does that mean he should not have been brought to justice by the international community for it?
Comment by Barry —
March 27, 2008 @ 10:39 am
Joe, what Megan’s doing it a fallacy of pointing out that the world is not perfect, and using that lack of perfection to justify the necessity particular actions, even when they’re not. An extreme (but not much more) example would be ‘it’s possible that one of my neighbors could try to hurt me, so it’s O.K. to go out and kill them first’.
And it’s not the foreign policy vs non-foreign policy expertise that’s at question here; the illogic is so bad that Megan is either (a) none too bright, and not very well educated, or (b) dishonest.
When somebody who can be expected to know better repeatedly uses breathtakingly bad logic to support certain positions, it becomes reasonable to believe that they are holding certain positions for their own sake, and using the illogic to justify them afterwards.
Comment by The Modesto Kid —
March 27, 2008 @ 10:44 am
does that mean he should not have been brought to justice by the international community for it?
If “bringing Saddam Hussein to justice” entails “immiserating the population of Iraq”, then yes I think there’s a decent case to be made that the fact that Saddam Hussein is not currently committing atrocities means we should not “bring him to justice”.
(Does the fact that Billy the Kid has stopped robbing banks mean he should not be brought to justice by the sheriff community?)
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
March 27, 2008 @ 11:21 am
Unfortunately, “war doesn’t work” is not a sufficient insight to, say, determine what our position on Kyoto, the WTO, the international criminal court, the UN, military restructuring, ballistic missile defense, or any of a hundred other issues should be.
See, this is why I’d make a lousy Thoreau. Because I’d just give up at this point.
Megan doesn’t want to engage with people like Thoreau. Megan wants to engage with the silly straw-peaceniks who populate her imagination, and who think that “war doesn’t work” is an all-purpose approach to global warming, international commerce, and everything else. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and venture a guess that some antiwar protester somewhere actually said something sort of remotely like this once. So somehow this gives her license to turn every fucking discussion of Iraq back to “Yes, but what about the hippies? I may have been flagrantly wrong about everything, but surely we can all agree that smelly hippies are the real problem here?”
Right, because Saddam was the very model of a benevolent leader, whose people were gaily tripping through the streets of Baghdad, free from systematic torture, mass execution, and more general repression at the hands of the government. And there were ponies for everyone.
KWK, Megan. Megan, KWK. I’m sure you two will have lots to talk about.
Comment by Joe Strummer —
March 27, 2008 @ 11:36 am
Also, I should add, public policy is very very difficult.
There is no more difficult and consequential area of public policy than war-making. And yet, there is no area on which people with limited knowledge are more willing to opine. In part, that’s because the very complexity of foreign affairs/war-making means that those opinions are far less likely to be shown to be wrong. Opinions, when it comes to war, are like a**holes.
The Iraq War is the perfect example of how difficult it is to set the record straight. On virtually every dimension, the vast majority of commentators were wrong. Hussein didn’t have WMD, there was no al Qaeda-Iraq link, the atrocities Saddam committed were largely in the 1980s, we were only briefly greeted as liberators, not enough troops were used, there was no domino effect, Afghanistan suffered because of a lack of troops etc. etc.
And, as the war progresses, there are all kinds of conflicting and contingent claims about it that require such a deep understanding of what’s going on and how to separate the BS from fact. Add to that the fact that nearly all reporting in Iraq is done by western journalists embedded or under heavy guard for their own security.
The utter complexity of it all, however, is not, to my mind, an invitation to try-and-try-again per McArdle’s analogy that wars are like banktruptcies.
This is Hayek on steroids. And while Hayek has much much much more to say about complex societies, he basically boils down to this when it comes to proposing government action: Don’t.
Comment by charlie —
March 27, 2008 @ 11:37 am
Thoreau,
I don’t see why you should strike-through your comment about McArdle’s being wrong about foreign policy and yet still getting a prized spot as a professional pundit. She has written about the war — a lot — and she has shown no capacity to understand the facts leading up to the war. Instead, she’d rather explain away her support and write off all of us who thought the war was immoral and illegal from the start as being opposed for all the “wrong” reasons. Meanwhile, she, the respectable and serious professional pundit, was presumably wrong — yes — but for all the “right” reasons.
It shouldn’t matter whether she primarily blogs about the war or whether she primarily blogs about her kittens — she is a pundit that the Atlantic has deemed insightful enough that they pay her to blog (a pretty sweet gig if you can get it). She’s fair game for criticism, and her arguing that she shouldn’t be criticized on her the war because, well, she doesn’t write about it exclusively is just an attempt to avoid people pointing out just how wrong — and how ignorant — her views on what you appropriately call the most significant issue of our time. Her not being a foreign policy expert has certainly not stopped her from writing about it publicly and continuing to be ignorant of why we actually went to war (from her post: the US is one of “the best meaning occupiers in human history.” I feel no comment is necessary).
As Jonathan Schwarz pointed out in post yesterday, McArdle continues to write about the war while ignoring any evidence that conflicts with her already established world view.
And, by the way, someone who writes primarily about economics shouldn’t be able to claim that that absolves them from having any knowledge about foreign policy. Considering the three trillion dollar price tag of the war and the ensuing deficits it has run up, being ignorant of foreign policy pretty much makes you a bad economist.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 27, 2008 @ 11:38 am
Guys, go easy on KWK. I know him in real life. He’s one of the good ones.
KWK-
I don’t actually know what sorts of general statements I’m willing to make about war. I mentioned protecting allies as a possible policy that falls short of widespread interventionism but is less drastic than preventive war.
What do I support? I don’t know. My general instincts are isolationist, but I’m not quite willing to make that a general iron-clad rule. My thought on humanitarian intervention is that it’s easier for America to assimilate refugees (we have centuries of experience in getting that one right) than it is to remove and replace governments (experience? not so good).
At the very least, if we’re going to defend an ally, we should wait for somebody to actually attack the ally, or mass troops on the ally’s border. Just saying “He’s looking at our ally funny, better invade as a preventive measure” is not good enough.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 27, 2008 @ 11:42 am
charlie-
I’m not saying it’s OK for her to be wrong. I’m saying that if she was evaluated primarily for her economic writings, and if that’s what she mostly does in her paid print pieces, then I will withdraw any insinuation that she is a beneficiary of systematic pro-war bias.
Comment by charlie —
March 27, 2008 @ 12:42 pm
Thoreau,
I still think you’re being too polite. She is is a beneficiary of a systematic establishment bias present in much of the mainstream media, The Atlantic included. And she does such a good job of illustrating that point in her post, there is only a very narrow range of acceptable opinion in the U.S. establishment. Oh, you can say the Iraq war was a mistake, but you can’t say that it was just part and parcel of an unquestioned (and immoral) imperial foreign policy that has been perpetuated by both Democratic and Republican politicians for the past 100 or so years. As McArdle might say, that would be the “wrong” reason to be right on the Iraq war.
And though she may be paid primarily to write on economics, again, I think you really can’t separate that from foreign policy if you’re writing in these here United States. Look at the Defense budget. Look at the deficit spending. They’re inextricably linked. And McArdle is paid precisely because she does not include a thorough critique of the U.S. war economy that draws that connection. She’s safe, respectable, and incredibly dull.
Anyway, rather than blather on, I’ll just go with “what Ioz said.”
Comment by Johnathan Pearce —
March 27, 2008 @ 1:11 pm
“Hitler would have never come to power but for WWI, which was emphatically not caused by isolationism. So, what you’re really arguing here is that if the world had suddenly gone isolationist in 1920, Hitler would have had a freer hand. Just so. Of course, then he would not have attacked the West; he’d have gone straight East first, which is what he wanted to do all along.”
Ah, so those warmongering, neocons like Winston C. and FDR should have minded their own business. How naive. Hitler would have headed west eventually, particularly if he had pulled off a successful occupation of the East. He came damn close to succeeding, remember.
Comment by KWK —
March 27, 2008 @ 1:39 pm
Thoreau admonishes:
“Guys, go easy on KWK. I know him in real life. He’s one of the good ones.”
Thanks for trying, but I wonder if it’ll work. Or will it just get me beat up more, like when the little kid’s mom tells the other third graders to go easy on her son?
Thoreau again:
“Just saying ‘He’s looking at our ally funny, better invade as a preventive measure’ is not good enough.”
I agree; engaging in pre-emptive war for such reasons is just like arresting people for pre-crime. But my question was with regards to Saddam’s actual crimes. Which brings me to the comments of The Modesto Kid, who also straightforwardly engaged with my ideas rather than cavalierly dismissing them:
I also agree with this, but the question then becomes, at what point does US infliction of misery outweigh Saddam’s (past or present) infliction of misery? And there we are in the throes of an actual legitimate public policy debate, where more than one side may have valid points. The acknowledgement of which is what I’m not hearing from those who are purporting to have cornered the market on logical, reasoned argument.
Given the current state of Iraq, I can understand why many believe it would have been better off still under Saddam. But how does one know that such would be the outcome ahead of time? Hence my comment earlier about the distinction between just causes for a declaration of war and just execution of that war. This has also gone largely unaddressed, which leads me to think that perhaps people are conflating two distinct issues and are therefore often talking past each other. That seems (at this point at least) like a more reasonable conclusion than that the other side is ignorant, stupid, or wicked.
Just to clarify, I do think the war as it was actually engaged in was unjust, but I think a war that was not unjust prima facie perhaps could have been waged solely on humanitarian grounds, had there not been wanton deception (self- and otherwise) from the Executive, abdication of moral responsibility from the Legistlature, and propounding of selfish national interests on the part of numerous countries with a stake in Iraq.
I suppose this clarification will just mean that I get flamed by both sides now, rather than just one.
Comment by quasibill —
March 27, 2008 @ 2:00 pm
is a question that can’t be answered by anyone other than those doing the suffering under each scenario (subjective valuation). And even presuming some form of objective valuation, you have no way, ex ante, of knowing the answer when you are talking about large-scale coordinated violence. The process is far to complicated and uncontrollable to ever be able to “know”.
And that’s all ignoring the moral agency issue, which is, to me, the most important.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
March 27, 2008 @ 2:02 pm
I tend to regard talk like “bringing them to justice” about the leaders of other nations with some skepticism. I would personally like a stronger network of international law than we’ve got. But taking what we have…I don’t find many advocates of the transnational-justice justification for the Iraq War making a reliable principle of it. In particular, they pretty much never seem to recognize the validity of other nations trying to do the same thing to us - it seems to be taken for granted that of course we’d resist an effort to grab past or present Presidents for war crimes and crimes against humanity, just as we’d resist an effort to take over our government and impose national health care and other services ubiquitous in the non-US industrialized world. Nor, so nearly as I can tell, would they be in favor of Russian citizens levying torts against the U of Chicago economics department for losses suffered in the post-Soviet era. And on and on like that.
I know some genuine globalists. But not many. An an argument that only ever comes into play when it’s in my favor isn’t really an argument at all, it’s just an excuse.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
March 27, 2008 @ 2:19 pm
KWK, as I recall it, part of the just justification for war in just-war theory is the ability to show why the outcome is likely to be good. This is part of why a lot of people open in principle to intervention opposed this war: it was clear that the administration couldn’t, and was in fact hostile to any discussion of outcome practicalities - allocation of resources to security, infrrastructure, and the like, availability of people to staff key positions who knew the culture and language, plans to deal with factions known to be present likely to be important in the post-war environment, all that stuff was actively dismissed and people bringing it up attacked.
It’s one important set of reasons that the effort was in fact doomed and couldn’t turn out well except by pure luck, and a reason the initial effort wasn’t just.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 27, 2008 @ 2:27 pm
KWK, you might want to tag on some “for the sake of argument” or “as an intellectual exercise” stuff here. I know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, but nobody else here knows you, and you aren’t saying what you’re doing.
Guys, I know for a fact that he is taking up the contrarian side because nobody else is arguing it and he thinks some of the arguments that are being offered here are weak. So he’s trying to probe the limits of our arguments, and ask under what circumstances we might have to change our minds.
Now be clearer about that, KWK, or I’ll have no choice but to take pictures at your bachelor party and release them to your in-laws!
:)
Comment by The Modesto Kid —
March 27, 2008 @ 3:03 pm
release them to your in-laws
Is this in reference to how you come to know KWK irl?
Comment by Joe Strummer —
March 27, 2008 @ 3:10 pm
KWK makes some decent points for the sake of the argument, and I have to say that I have been doing more venting than actual arguing. It’s not as if I haven’t done the arguing/discussing part, it’s just that in the context of what I consider condescending and galling remarks, I think it’s fair enough to just vent back if only to make the point that enough is enough.
I’ll just briefly respond to one point, as I run off to class:
I also agree with this, but the question then becomes, at what point does US infliction of misery outweigh Saddam’s (past or present) infliction of misery? And there we are in the throes of an actual legitimate public policy debate, where more than one side may have valid points.
I don’t think there is any precise balancing to be had, and do think the balancing itself misses the point. It isn’t just about numbers of people dying, but it is also about who is causing the dying. I’m not a moral monster who can look at 100,000 dead in the 1980s in Iraq, and say, well, too bad for them. But I do think, as hard as it is to live in a world with misery, that there’s something to be said for restraint, particularly when it comes to government’s warmaking.
I’m not complicit in my government’s actions. But there’s a moral responsibility that attaches to me in some way as a citizen of this country.
So - who does the killing matters.
Second, war is never even an approximate balancing of war dead vs. numbers of dead if we refrained from war. So I’m not sure how those numbers even get processed ex ante.
I’d say more, but class is starting.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 27, 2008 @ 3:11 pm
I’ve known KWK for more than a decade. We took all of our physics classes together. Right now I’m planning his bachelor party.
Comment by sglover —
March 27, 2008 @ 3:48 pm
So here we have a McArdle remark that combines foreign policy and the realm that she “knows”, economics — and she’s flat-out wrong and ignorant. It’s certainly true that American supplies (particularly trucks and food) greatly aided the immense Soviet offensives of 1944-45. But the fact is that by then Soviet industry had pretty much won the production contest, even after large segments of their production capacity were relocated and re-assembled.
I don’t bother with McArdle much, but whenever I do see her scribblings, she always seems to follow this same pattern: She burns through paragraphs asserting her special competence, and in the process she says stuff that makes her at even dumber and less honest than she did before.
Y’know, I can remember — it wasn’t all that long ago — when the Atlantic was actually worth paying for. Nowadays its editors seem to think that being the next Slate is a sensible goal. I’ll put it in language McArdle can understand: Would you want to invest in a company with that kind of management?
Comment by First Little Pig —
March 27, 2008 @ 4:47 pm
First of all, Leonard should write for The Atlantic.
Second, those of us who opposed the war had many more valid reasons for doing so than the pro-war camp had. Unless one were to count reasons (like oil) that the pro-war camp disavowed it has to be something like a 10 to one advantage for we peaceniks.
But what really galls me is when people, like Ms. McArdle (whose blog I gave up on long ago (I just learned that it was shuttered)) give so little credence to those of us who either A) did not believe the “evidence” provided as reason for war or B) had the foresight of hindsight to know that invading and occupying a middle-eastern nation was never going to be a cakewalk.
THEY should be the ones who need to justify why they believed the administration’s obvious BS about Saddam role in 9/11 / the threat of attacks by model airplanes / stockpiles of WMD that no one could find in spite of ongoing inspection / any other supposed threat that Iraq posed AND why they ignored the historical facts of the region, the experience of British control, the divisions in Iraqi society etc etc etc.
And they need to apologize profusely for being wrong.