Iraq Deception Denial on the Right
Conservatives are going to have to face the facts about the marketing of the Iraq war one of these days, I think. But if this at Instapundit is any indication, the time has not yet come.
No time now to go through the Pohoretz piece in detail, but I will draw your attention to these two sentences that Insty quotes approvingly:
"Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed."
To review:
1. The one lie about Iraq that stands out above all others is not any of the lies told by the administration, but, rather (and roughly) the "lies" to the effect that the administration lied.
2. This lie merits this special status because there is not a deductively valid proof from indubitable premisses that conclusively proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that any of the obvious falsehoods the administration told us were known conclusively by George W. Bush himself to be false beyond any shadow of a doubt.
(note: slight intentional exaggeration above in order to make point.)
Jesus. This may be the single best example of grasping at straws I've every encountered. It is, of course, saddness-inducing because it reveals, yet again, the intellectual depths to which people will sink when defending a cherished belief.
On the other hand, it reveals how desperate the (small remaining) pro-Bush crowd has become. If that's all they've got--that we can't conclusively prove that he said something that he knew conclusively to be false--then I've got a brain in a vat to sell them.
This is one of the most common errors in reasoning, especially in politics: employing unreasonable and/or differential standards of proof. In this case, Podhoretz basically reveals that he holds Bush and his critics up to different standards. On the one hand, we are to conclude that Bush's claims are not to be considered lies unless he said something he knew conclusively to be false. On the other hand, Bush's critics are considered liars if there is any doubt, no matter how slight, that their conclusions are false.
Allow me to set such radically divergent standards of proof and I can "win" practically any debate.
[The right standard to use in each case seems rather obviously to be the preponderance of evidence standard, incidentally.]
Conservatives are going to have to face the facts about the marketing of the Iraq war one of these days, I think. But if this at Instapundit is any indication, the time has not yet come.
No time now to go through the Pohoretz piece in detail, but I will draw your attention to these two sentences that Insty quotes approvingly:
"Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed."
To review:
1. The one lie about Iraq that stands out above all others is not any of the lies told by the administration, but, rather (and roughly) the "lies" to the effect that the administration lied.
2. This lie merits this special status because there is not a deductively valid proof from indubitable premisses that conclusively proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that any of the obvious falsehoods the administration told us were known conclusively by George W. Bush himself to be false beyond any shadow of a doubt.
(note: slight intentional exaggeration above in order to make point.)
Jesus. This may be the single best example of grasping at straws I've every encountered. It is, of course, saddness-inducing because it reveals, yet again, the intellectual depths to which people will sink when defending a cherished belief.
On the other hand, it reveals how desperate the (small remaining) pro-Bush crowd has become. If that's all they've got--that we can't conclusively prove that he said something that he knew conclusively to be false--then I've got a brain in a vat to sell them.
This is one of the most common errors in reasoning, especially in politics: employing unreasonable and/or differential standards of proof. In this case, Podhoretz basically reveals that he holds Bush and his critics up to different standards. On the one hand, we are to conclude that Bush's claims are not to be considered lies unless he said something he knew conclusively to be false. On the other hand, Bush's critics are considered liars if there is any doubt, no matter how slight, that their conclusions are false.
Allow me to set such radically divergent standards of proof and I can "win" practically any debate.
[The right standard to use in each case seems rather obviously to be the preponderance of evidence standard, incidentally.]
posted by Winston Smith at
11:46 AM
25 Comments:
The preponderance of evidence was that Saddam had WMDs, accepted by everyone from the Clinton administration to France to Germany to Russia.
That Saddam would boot the inspectors in 1998 and use the occasion to secretly destroy his arsenal (which it seems he did) is a concept that even the most imaginative of reasonable men would reject.
Regardless, I meself have no doubt that at this very moment, Saddam's corrupt patrons the French (Oil For Food) would have got the sanctions lifted, Saddam would be rebuilding his arsenal, and he would (still) be openly harboring terrorists, like Abu Abbas, who pushed American Leon Klinghoffer over the side of a cruise ship. In his wheelchair.
Because, as Al Gore put it, "we all know that a leopard cannot change his stripes."
(And I think calling someone a liar requires more than a "preponderance." It is a word used far too loosely these days, IMO. Bill Clinton is a confessed liar, but to call him a liar everytime he opens his mouth is not a healthy thing for our polity.)
I would agree that the preponderance of evidence, at least available to me at the time, was that Saddam had WMDs. Then again, I was kept in the dark about all the caveats that were excluded from the public White Paper, as well as all the dissents and complaints about how the intelligence was being "fixed around the policy". Christian Westermann, Karen Kwiatkowski, Larry Johnson, Anthony Zinni, Scott Ritter and many others who had been privy to recent intelligence about Iraq all said at the time that the threat was being greatly exaggerated. Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice themselves said in February of 2001 that Saddam was "in a box" and well contained.
Moreover, there are two crucial other points.
One, that we were in the process of discovering that that 'preponderance' may have been tipping in the other direction when the inspections were prematurely extirpated. Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaredei, derided as they were by the proponents of war, were in a better position than anyone else to have an idea of what was really there.
Two, WMD was an artificial construct used to sell Andy Card's new product. The real concern was nukes, and in that regard the evidence was sorely lacking. The African uranium, the completely inappropriate tubes etc. just didn't warrant a rush to war no matter how you cut it, IMO. The administration's political case boiled down to the false dichotomy of attack Saddam now or look out for mushroom clouds.
Some day we'll know the truth, but based on the track record of our government, I fear that that day may be many years in the future.
I figgered Scott Ritter, et al., would come up, but there are lone wolves all over Newsmax and worldnetdaily. Some of them might be right, too. But jeez, even Louis Freeh can't get the time of day.
Lone wolves are like that.
It's true that the Iraq War has been narrowed to the WMD issue. This is partly the fault of the administration, which gave in to Powell and especially Blair, who needed the issue framed that way because of his particular constellation of political forces.
But I myself at that time saw toppling Saddam as an overdue prophylaxis, and Clinton was a slack dentist. It may be true that Saddam was contained, but the price of starving Iraqi children was not "worth it," despite Madeleine Albright's opinion that it was.
And as previously noted, the containment regime was doomed anyway, and the revelations about Oil For Food reinforce that daily. The scenario I outlined above as to what Saddam would be doing today is the core issue, IMHO.
Duhbya chose to go to war. Facts were irrelevant to his intent, as they are to his thinking in general. It's the factoids, urban legends, and old wives' tales that make propaganda work, and he was willing to mouth whatever it took to sell his war.
Truth? That's so old-fashioned.
Tom,
I can agree that your reasons for supporting the war may be different than those used to "sell" the war, and in fact each of the salesmen may have had their own distinct reasons. (For now I'll set aside the inherent dishonesty in not coming clean about their true motives - I mean lying about the true reasons and motivations for a war is still lying, right?)
However, I just don't see the cost-benefit analysis as being anywhere near worth it. If you can successfully rebut the arguments made here:
http://hrw.org/wr2k4/3.htm
you might have a decent argument. Thus far I've heard nothing to dissuade me from these guys' reasoning, which was very similar to mine.
If the containment regime was doomed, it was because of Bush's awful foreign policy. 9/11 gave us all the leverage needed to keep SH in his box, not that even that much was required, and not that the admin was interested in confronting much more serious issues.
Yeah, Tom, you pretty clearly seem to be confusing two distinct points:
1) Saddam had WMDs
and
2) Bush lied about the evidence about Saddam's alleged WMDs
I thought 1 was true at the time of the war, too. In fact I said to the mighty Armenius at that time that there was "no doubt in [my] mind" that he had 'em.
But Bush was clearly lying about them, and that's why I opposed the war, as I've noted here before. I thought that respect for OUR democracy demanded that we not allow ourselves to be manipulated, even though I agreed with the goal Bush was trying to manipulate us into achieving.
In fact, I actually STILL think that this was the BEST reason for opposing the war.
Bush should have been impeached for lying even if there HAD been "WMD"s (note: not an actual category) in Iraq, incidentally.
Oh, also:
There's a point in there about telling lies vs. being a liar.
I acknowledge the distinction and agree it's important. It's reasonably clear that Bush lied; it's not so clear that he's a liar. There IS a higher standard of proof for that charge.
I've seen the cost/benefit analysis before, but the ledger is still open, nor is every potential benefit factor acknowledged. Further, history does not reveal its alternatives, as in, maintaining the status quo could have led to far worse.
Where would Saddam be today? Based on his two decades of inhuman behavior, fascination with WMDs, and with his murderous sons in line to succeed him, I believe military intervention was inevitable.
The cost today or the cost in 5 years?
I just can't get behind the lying thing. Saddam had a few tons of uranium already. I do not believe he was fishing around in Niger looking for a good price on goat cheese, despite St. Joe's protestations. (He has been caught in certain, um, prevarications. Liar: yes, no, maybe so?)
If you google Blix, you'll see him admitting that Saddam was still uncooperative in the second round of inspections.
That was a violation of his peace treaty in itself, and after years of him breaking it, enough was enough.
Sorta like Terrell Owens, the Saddam Hussein of American football...
Maybe, maybe, maybe...this is still pretty much grasping at straws...yes, Saddam was evil, yes it's POSSIBLE that what we've done will have overall good consequences. We just can't say yet.
But none of that is relevant to the lying issue. There were some good reasons to invade Iraq, and some of those good reasons had to do with nukes. The administration then fabricated some more reasons. They spun and stretched and exaggerated and just plain made shit up.
The fact that they were also a few good reasons to believe the conclusion they were lying about doesn't change the fact that they lied about it.
Furthermore, if any Democratic president had undertaken a war on moral grounds the Republicans would have had him flayed alive in public. Their new-found love for spreading Democracy is just a fig-leaf. Carter and Clinton were both derided for pushing humanitarian causes that were far less costly than the current debacle.
Sorry, but I just can't sign onto the idea of war (the most extreme strategy) on the basis of ifs, maybes and other such speculation.
You can argue with my premise that war should be only a last resort, but I don't think you can make a good argument that all the other alternatives had been exhausted.
And re the liar thing, others that Winston left out are the whopper that war hadn't been decided upon until shortly before it began and the related one that the Congressional resolution was to help "avoid war" and "keep the peace". Both I and many others took Bush at his word on that, naively in retrospect.
Ironically, I actually thought Bush did a great job up until the invasion. He succeeded in getting inspectors back in, and most indications are that without the coercive effects of Bush's saber-rattling that would not have happened.
That being said, I could not see the justification for war at that point.
We're in Iraq and even Gen. Clark says we have to keep doing what we're doing there more or less.
My thoughts when the war commenced were that the probability of WMDs was one of a half-dozen factors, and contrary to today's revisionism, not the only one Bush pushed.
Mr. Carroll, one of those factors was that France was going around the world lining up opposition to dealing with Saddam when Bush & Blair pulled the trigger. Now that we see the depth of the depravity of Oil For Food, we know why.
I saw, and I believe Bush & Blair saw, that France would help Saddam strengthen his position both diplomatically and with the dropping of the sanctions, and the inevitable showdown with him would have been far more catastrophic both for the West and the Iraqis themselves.
We could not leave our counterbalancing troops in Saudi Arabia and let bin Laden continue to use them as a recruiting tool.
We could not continue to starve Iraqi children.
We could not let Saddam continue to openly defy his peace treaty, both with didling the inspectors and firing at our planes in the (UN-authorized) no-fly zone.
And worst, we could not let Israel retaliate against his continuing open support of terrorists and perhaps precipitate WWIII.
In that light, I do believe war was the last resort. No ifs or speculation. It was pay me now or pay me later.
(And WS, Clinton got some flak before the Balkan interventions, but after Dole and McCain got his back, not after. Ah, for the good old days...)
"Mr. Carroll, one of those factors was that France was going around the world lining up opposition to dealing with Saddam when Bush & Blair pulled the trigger. Now that we see the depth of the depravity of Oil For Food, we know why.
I saw, and I believe Bush & Blair saw, that France would help Saddam strengthen his position both diplomatically and with the dropping of the sanctions, and the inevitable showdown with him would have been far more catastrophic both for the West and the Iraqis themselves."
I see this as pure speculation. I don't think that supposition upon supposition is an adequate case for starting a war. Saddam was LESS of a threat in 2003 than he was any time previously, except perhaps right after GW I.
I don't really care what France was lining up, nor their motivations, which you seem to divine by mindreading. And about a program that never totalled more than a few billion dollars? I can also make a conjecture that Saddam's intent to start selling oil for Euros instead of dollars was the motivation for the Bush administration. I have about as much evidence for that theory as you do for yours.
The fact of the matter is that nobody knows the future, and any number of things could have happened that would have resulted in invasion NEVER being necessary. Perhaps Saddam could have been overthrown internally even. Happened to Palavi, Ceacescu, Sukarno and many others who ruled ruthlessly.
When the madness that is occurring now was predicted beforehand by experts, they were dismissed as unpatriotic Saddam apologists. I just don't see what gives us the right to conduct some sort of experiment (either 'fly paper' or 'reverse domino' or whatever) with the Iraqi people.
"We could not leave our counterbalancing troops in Saudi Arabia and let bin Laden continue to use them as a recruiting tool."
So instead we invade a Muslim country that posed minimal or no threat to us and had not attacked us, killing thousands of civilians in the process and proceed to torture and humiliate thousands of its citizens we've rounded up in massive sweeps. No recruting tool there.
All the while diverting the very resources that could have been used to capture or kill Bin Laden when we had the best chance.
Sorry but your case is just not very convincing. That's probably why most of the world didn't buy it.
Fisk away. But characterizing my remarks isn't discussing them.
And we were doing so well. :-(
(Perhaps you didn't know about France trotting about the world to round up diplomatic support to save Saddam. You could look it up. I'm finding all the work of posting links that aren't read or are summarily rejected just unfun, y'know? All I can assure you, Mr. Carroll, is that when I refer to something like that, I've researched it, and my source isn't the newsmax fever swamp.)
I'm sorry but I just can't take this argument seriously.
How were they going to "save" Saddam? What does that mean? And you know they were going to be successful? And, by the way, what's your evidence for this?
And granting all those ifs, so he was going to stay in power. As Anthony Zinni said in the article below: "There are worse things".
How was he not already "dealt with"? He was, as Powell and Rice said, 'in a box'. The guy couldn't fart without getting bombed. He could not project any power.
General Zinni, who as Central Commander was privy to the intel on Saddam, was pretty explicit:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22922-2003Dec22?language=printer
And the sanctions could not have been lifted without unanimous Security Council consent. How were they going to get that?
It just doesn't make sense.
I'm sorry, but I can't take your argument seriously, because you don't even have one.
I mean, have we come to this, Mr. Carroll?
If Saddam were still in power today, what would be happening? You take the burden of proof. It should be equally shared in any good faith discussion.
Tom,
Again, none of this is relevant to the lying issue.
I've not denied that there were some good (though perhaps not sufficient) reasons to go to war, and I'm not denying that you might have had different ones than the administration stated.
And I, too, thought that the Iraqis would be better off in the long run if we invaded. That's the ONLY reason I was pro-invasion off and on in the months preceding it.
But, again, none of that is AT ALL relevant to truth of the following proposition:
The administration lied.
Two points, semi-incidentally:
1. It turns out that, because we don't have or won't use more troops, we've actually made things worse--perhaps even in the long run--for Iraqis. I know a Kurd who has gone back to Baghdad a couple of times since the war and according to him Iraq is a disaster.
2. Dole and McCain got Clinton's back, but DeLay most of the rest continued to savage him as he conducted the only war in our history conducted for purely humanitarian reasons. *And he didn't lie us into it.*
Extra-special bonus point:
3. Carter was ridiculed mercilessly by the right, btw, for advocating democratization of the Middle East and energy independence. Care to admit that he was right all along?
I think y'all are missing Tom's point: Saddam was just plain EVIL and all this carping about what the Brave Little Cowboy did to clean up the tow..world is just pure ingraditudination. I mean, what's a few whoppers when you're fighting the Dark Lord of Mord..Baghdad.
heh heh...even Tom's gonna hafta admit THAT'S funny...I can actually hear the inflection on 'ingratitudination'...
Yah it was, but the cheap snark on the Cowboy and the "whoppers" diminishes the joke. Had the whole thing been written disingenuously, it would have worked. Tone must be consistent: Mort Sahl would not have erred so.
I most certainly do have an argument, and it goes like this:
There was no threat, or it was minimal at best, especially as compared to the one we should have been genuinely confronting: Al Qaeda and Bin Laden. You remember them, the guys who actually attacked us? When we had a chance to strike them hard, but Bush got sidetracked by his white whale.
Your case is premised upon a whole bunch of things which MIGHT happen in the future. And none of that can justify the death and maiming of thousands, which was entirely predictable, and was, in fact, predicted beforehand. As well as the assist to Bin Laden's recruiting and the substantial increase in worldwide terrorism.
That's the argument, and it's not genuinely mine. A whole lotta people who know more about this than us, like Zinni for example, or Richard Clarke or others predicted it as well.
http://globalsecurity.com/iraq/cia_warned.htm
It's a little long, but this piece I just found at Altercation is applicable too:
"The Bush Administration's Theory of Everything?"
by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon
A core part of the case that Bush and his advisers made was that Saddam might collude with terrorists because it would allow him to hurt the United States "without leaving fingerprints," but it appears that a large part of the reason Iraq—like Iran and Libya—stopped targeting the United States was the belief that it could not carry out an attack without detection. (Iran, under its newly elected president, Muhammad Khatami, may have also changed its policy after the Khobar Towers attack because terrorism was not advancing its goals. The Iranian regime appears to have supported the attack because of a desire to drive a wedge between the United States and Saudi Arabia, but the bombing’s only effect was to cause Washington to move the troops stationed in Saudi Arabia to a more secure location.) Since detection carries with it a strong likelihood of retaliation, as Iraq learned in 1993, when U.S. cruise missiles destroyed the country's intelligence headquarters, the calculus did not make sense—it was just no longer worth the risk to attack America. That cruise missile strike was derided by conservative critics of the Clinton administration as a “pinprick,” but Saddam seemed to have gotten the message.[i]
Beyond the matter of whether the Iraqi regime was likely to attempt a terrorist attack against the United States, the administration's argument raised the further question of whether Saddam Hussein and Usama bin Laden were likely to collaborate. In fact, Iraq and al Qaeda were anything but natural allies. A central tenet of Al Qaeda's jihadist ideology is that secular Muslim rulers and their regimes have oppressed the believers and have plunged Islam into a historic crisis. Hence, a paramount goal of Islamist revolutionaries for almost half a century has been the destruction of the regimes of such leaders as Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, President Hafez al-Assad of Syria, the military government in Algeria ,and the Saudi royal family. To contemporary jihadists, Saddam was another in a line of dangerous secularists, an enemy of the faith who refused to rule by Islamic law and who habitually murdered religious leaders in Iraq who might oppose his regime. Perhaps the best summation of the jihadist view of Saddam’s Iraq was given during the Persian Gulf War by Omar Abdel Rahman, the radical sheik now imprisoned in the United States. When he was asked what the punishment should be for those who supported the United States in the conflict, he answered, “Both those who are against and the ones who are with Iraq should be killed.”
The interests of Baathists and jihadists were too divergent for them to collaborate against America while Saddam was in power. But that does not mean they had no contact or did not at times sniff around each other to see if they might become allies. The Middle Eastern tradition of keeping tabs on all groups, friendly or not, persists, and the U.S. intelligence community was aware of a few meetings between bin Laden's men and Saddam's. Most of these contacts occurred in the first half of the 1990s, before al Qaeda's destructiveness had been demonstrated by the August 1998 Nairobi and Dar es Salaam bombings, though some meetings occurred as late as 1999. While bin Laden was still in Sudan, Hassan al-Turabi, the country's Islamist leader and bin Laden’s local patron, brokered a truce between al Qaeda and Saddam.[ii] But by the standards of state sponsors, there were few contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. In reality, Iran had many more contacts with the jihadists, but these too seemed to be aimed primarily at giving Tehran some insight into what al Qaeda was up to. The conclusion of the intelligence community in the 1990s was that neither country had a collaborative relationship with al Qaeda. In 1998, in an effort to ensure that the U.S. government was not becoming complacent in this judgment, Richard Clarke asked his staff to evaluate the available intelligence to see if these conclusions were justified. After reviewing a large amount of intelligence, they too endorsed the intelligence community's verdict. After a lengthy investigation of its own, the 9/11 Commission arrived at the same understanding in 2004 and noted in its final report, "We have seen no evidence that [the contacts] ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States."[iii]
The argument that all of our enemies will inevitably find common ground should always be treated with caution. This is the kind of thinking that prevented American policy makers from recognizing the Sino-Soviet rift in the 1960s, a period in which the Soviet Union and China were more likely to wage war against each other than against the United States. But if the claim that Iraq and al Qaeda had cooperated or might collaborate was questionable, the idea that Saddam Hussein would give a weapon of mass destruction to al Qaeda was even more dubious.
About the underlying premise of this argument—that Saddam had such weapons—there was little doubt among the security professionals in the West. [iv] Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iran in the brutal war of 1980-1988. He had also used them against his own people in the notorious case of the gassing of the Kurds of Halabja. He had failed to account for large stocks of nerve agents, such as VX, and biological weapons materials, such as anthrax, as required by the terms of his surrender in 1991 and subsequent UN resolutions.
Whether he had weapons of mass destruction was clearly an important question, but the crticial issue was whether he would use them. In a sense, the question was whether it was true that September 11 had changed everything. The attacks certainly showed that catastrophic terrorism on American soil had become a reality. But that is not the same as saying that anyone other than al Qaeda or terrorist groups like al Qaeda would carry out such attacks. In a 2004 interview, Douglas Feith explained that after September 11, the administration asked the question, “Was Iraq involved in 9/11? We found no hard link. What about Iraq-Al Qaeda links in general? Well, there were some, but that wasn't the essence of the Saddam Hussein threat. The danger of Saddam's providing W.M.D. to Al Qaeda or another terrorist group— there you had a real problem, because his record on W.M.D. was indisputable.” [v]
But was it? Did Saddam’s weapons pose a greater threat after September 11 than before? Did al Qaeda's attack tell us something new about Saddam Hussein's behavior? The answer to these questions is the same: no. Saddam is an execrable man and one of the most loathsome national leaders in a century in which there was plenty of competition. He had miscalculated badly on a number of occasions, most notably by invading Kuwait in August 1990. But he was not insane. He wanted to avoid obliteration. As far as the United States and its vital interests were concerned, he was deterred.
The “indisputable” record on WMD does not prove what Feith believed. In January 1991, during the runup to Operation Desert Storm, Secretary of State James Baker had sent Saddam a message. In a meeting in Geneva with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, Baker said bluntly:
If the conflict involves your use of chemical or biological weapons against our forces, . . . the American people will demand vengeance. We have the means to exact it . . . this is not a threat, it is a promise. If there is any use of weapons like that, our objective won’t just be the liberation of Kuwait, but the elimination of the current Iraqi regime, and anyone responsible for using those weapons would be held accountable. [vi]
At that time, Iraq possessed enormous stocks of chemical and biological weapons, but Saddam never used them during the war. In the twelve years thereafter, he never used them, although, characteristically, he implied that he might use chemical weapons against Israel.
There is also no record of his having given such weapons to any terrorist group. The Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had provided training to al Qaeda operatives in chemical and biological warfare has never been confirmed. When it was asserted, senior intelligence officials privately expressed discomfort with the report, suggesting that it was an overstatement. The 9/11 Commission noted that the source who made the most detailed allegations on this case later recanted them. Two top al Qaeda members who were subsequently captured—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubayda—also "adamantly" denied that there had been cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda.[vii] Before the war, CIA Director George Tenet publicly declared that only when Saddam believed he faced the end of his regime was he likely to use weapons of mass destruction or give them to terrorists. Saddam obviously believed that James Baker's threat about overwhelming retaliation was one that remained in force after Baker left office in 1992. That he declined to back al Qaeda or any other terrorist group in conspiracies against the United States indicates that he believed prudence was his best course. And he remained true to the unwritten rules of state sponsorship of terror: Never get involved with a group that cannot be controlled and may get you into much more trouble than you want; never give a weapon of mass destruction to terrorists who might one day use it against you.
The lesson is important: in an age of catastrophic terror, deterrence remains a viable means of keeping rogue states in check. There are, of course, no guarantees; statecraft is not a natural science with immutable laws. North Korea, for example, has a record of provocative behavior, including involvement with drug dealing and counterfeiting, blowing up South Korean airliners and killing South Korean cabinet members. It is hardly inconceivable that the Pyongyang regime, in its desperation for cash, might sell a nuclear device to al Qaeda. But the hypothesis that Iraq would do so was never a strong one.
Possibly the best explanation of what the Bush team did in developing its hypotheses about Iraq and al Qaeda collaborating in an attack with weapons of mass destruction is the one provided by the great historian of science Thomas Kuhn. He observed that when new data threaten established and strongly held theories, scientists tend to explain them away. Though the scientists “may begin to lose faith and then to consider alternatives, they do not renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis. They do not, that is, treat anomalies as counter-instances, though . . .that is what they are.” [viii] In other words, they try to shoehorn new facts into old ways of understanding. In the same manner, when President Bush and his advisers were faced with an unimaginable attack by a terrorist group that was more capable than most states, they determined that a state must have been behind it. They refused to allow the facts dent their strategic understanding.
Oh, man, I'm just not here to trade links from our respective echo chambers. You wanna talk to me, talk to me. If I wanna wade through the lefty fever swamp or fisk Kevin Drum or Altercation, I don't need you.
I asked you assume some burden of proof in your implied argument that we shouldn't have invaded.
What would Iraq be like today? Do not confuse your rejection of my arguments for a counterargument of your own. I'm not here to serve as a clay pigeon for you to shoot at unless you return the courtesy.
I accept the tears for the victims of the war as sincere, but their deaths are at least in the hope of a better future for the Iraqi people and for the world as a whole.
Saddam's victims, the victims of the American-led sanctions, and the continuing victims of the Islamist and Ba'athist terrorists are far more numerous, and deserve our deepest concern because they were and are innocents, and because their suffering was useless, in the cause of nothing.
Not as funny as Mort Sahl - wow, I'm devestated.
...their deaths are at least in the hope of a better future for the Iraqi people and for the world as a whole.
Our hope, but many have an equally sincere hope for a completely different, Islamicist future. Sincere hopes seem likely to lead to the same place as the proverbial good intentions.
On the subject of duelling lone wolves, I would propose that the threshold of evidence for starting a war is considerably higher than for waiting and seeing.
"On the subject of duelling lone wolves, I would propose that the threshold of evidence for starting a war is considerably higher than for waiting and seeing."
This is exactly right. Like the default position is that we should start a war. Ridiculous.
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