The Assassins' Gate (p. 87)
"My most heated and confounding arguments over the war occurred when there was no one else around. I would run down the many compelling reasons why a war would be unwise, only to find at the end that Saddam was still in power, tormenting his people and defying the world. The administration's war was not my war--it was rushed, dishonest, unforgivably partisan, and destructive of alliances--but objecting to the authors and their methods didn't seem reason enough to stand in the way. One doesn't get one's choice of wars. To give my position a label, I belonged to the tiny, insignificant camp of ambivalently prowar liberals, who supported a war by about the same margin that the voting public had supported Al Gore."
Although I ultimately came down against the war, my reasoning was almost identical to Packer's, and I have infinitely more respect for him and pro-invasion liberals like him than I have for the strident, dogmatic sector of the anti-war crowd.
As I've said before, ultimately I came to think that the methods and intentions of the administration did matter--that their divisive and anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic) lies were too harmful to American democracy and international law to be supported. If we had had an even minimally honest, minimally competent administration moving judiciously towards a humanitarian intervention, I would have been an eager supporter. But that, of course, was not the case.
One of the best things about Packer's book so far is that he does a good job of conveying how agonizing it was to be a liberal interventionist in the lead-up to the war. I had nothing but contempt for people who dismissed Saddam's crimes and didn't even feel the urge to take him out. It's hard to imagine how cold and heartless--or out of touch with reality--one would have to be to not even feel the allure of that possibility.
On the other hand, knowing that conservatives weren't really moved by humanitarian concerns, and having come to distrust them in large part for that reason, liberal hawks suspected that we shouldn't be allying ourselves with them. We suspected--and it turns out that we were right--that they could not be trusted to do the job right.
But in the end, as I've said, I opposed the war in large part because I thought that America had to put its collective foot down. We had to show that we could not be lied to and frightened into submission and herded like sheep. The actual cost to American democracy was, I thought, too great. It was too high a price to pay to purchase merely potential democracy in Iraq.
Well, you've heard that all before.
Just go read Packer!
"My most heated and confounding arguments over the war occurred when there was no one else around. I would run down the many compelling reasons why a war would be unwise, only to find at the end that Saddam was still in power, tormenting his people and defying the world. The administration's war was not my war--it was rushed, dishonest, unforgivably partisan, and destructive of alliances--but objecting to the authors and their methods didn't seem reason enough to stand in the way. One doesn't get one's choice of wars. To give my position a label, I belonged to the tiny, insignificant camp of ambivalently prowar liberals, who supported a war by about the same margin that the voting public had supported Al Gore."
Although I ultimately came down against the war, my reasoning was almost identical to Packer's, and I have infinitely more respect for him and pro-invasion liberals like him than I have for the strident, dogmatic sector of the anti-war crowd.
As I've said before, ultimately I came to think that the methods and intentions of the administration did matter--that their divisive and anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic) lies were too harmful to American democracy and international law to be supported. If we had had an even minimally honest, minimally competent administration moving judiciously towards a humanitarian intervention, I would have been an eager supporter. But that, of course, was not the case.
One of the best things about Packer's book so far is that he does a good job of conveying how agonizing it was to be a liberal interventionist in the lead-up to the war. I had nothing but contempt for people who dismissed Saddam's crimes and didn't even feel the urge to take him out. It's hard to imagine how cold and heartless--or out of touch with reality--one would have to be to not even feel the allure of that possibility.
On the other hand, knowing that conservatives weren't really moved by humanitarian concerns, and having come to distrust them in large part for that reason, liberal hawks suspected that we shouldn't be allying ourselves with them. We suspected--and it turns out that we were right--that they could not be trusted to do the job right.
But in the end, as I've said, I opposed the war in large part because I thought that America had to put its collective foot down. We had to show that we could not be lied to and frightened into submission and herded like sheep. The actual cost to American democracy was, I thought, too great. It was too high a price to pay to purchase merely potential democracy in Iraq.
Well, you've heard that all before.
Just go read Packer!
posted by Winston Smith at
7:54 AM
15 Comments:
"who supported a war by about the same margin that the voting public had supported Al Gore."
E.g., 500,000 votes?
"One doesn't get one's choice of wars."
I.e., blurgel-urgel.
A friend writes, "My neighbor across the street is organizing a raid on a jewelry store. I want a necklace for my wife, and though I don't approve of my neighbor or his methods, that doesn't seem reason enough to stand in the way. Oh, except I'm not so much not standing in the way as cheering him on. You don't get your choice of raids."
I have infinitely more respect for my friend and his reasoned decision than I have for the strident, dogmatic sector of the anti-pillage crowd.
"I had nothing but contempt for people who dismissed Saddam's crimes and didn't even feel the urge to take him out."
Yep, all two of them. Ramsey Clarke and, uhh, well no doubt someone prominent and non-medicated.
"how agonizing it was to be a liberal interventionist in the lead-up to the war."
It may have been agonizing to be a strident, dogmatic liberal interventionist, but for me the only agony was knowing that my policy position was being coopted by a cynical incompetent admin with the help of confused, naive, stupid, or dogmatic members of my group.
Say I'm in favor of surgery for back pain. Some people advocate exercise, weight loss, and assorted behavioral therapies, but it's a policy question and I have my view. I know a guy in pain - it's really hurting his job performance, and his family really needs the paycheck. He's doing the other stuff and the problem is in check for now, but it would be great to see the problem cured at its root. And as it happens there's a doctor eager to do the operation. His name's Frist. Some say, but he's a heart doctor! And something of a partisan quack! And he used to oppose this sort of treatment! And he scheduled surgery based on his hospital's quarterly report and the impending golf season! To which stridency I reply, "One doesn't get one's choice of operation."
And then afterwards: So the patient may walk again without physical therapists holding his arms. He may even be pain-free when the incision and secondary infections heal and the unavoidable nerve damage is compensated for. And we'll worry about the bills later.
And then: I just read this great book about the operation and how agonizing the decision to do it was for us back-surgery supporters. It pretty much agrees with everything I think, though I finally came out on the no-knife side this time. It gets into all the reasons back pain sucks and how badly Frist bungled things, the point maybe being that the author was right to have been in favor of the intervention, since if it had been done better the results surely would have been better and maybe even good, and anyway things still may turn out ok. And like Kevin Drum says, the knee-jerk anti-operation folks need to get over themselves.
I think you need to write this argument out in one of your syllogism posts, because I agree with azael about a lack of actual analysis on your part here.
Winston, I think you'd benefit from reading this post at Crooked Timber about the Packer book:
There were two particular arguments that D. Dennett(?) used prewar:
1. Every major project the Bush administration has undertaken has ended in a disaster.
2. When people use lies to justify something, it is probably because they cannot use the truth as justification.
sorry forgot the link
crookedtimber.org/2005/09/07/packer-and-iraq/
Come to think of it all the crooked timber posts on the Packer book are must reads.
Winston,
I've been thinking a lot about the liberal hawk position and how to respond to it in a non-ideological way, because I've got significant ideological problems with the point of view, but I know that such arguments don't really mean much in this kind of discussion.
So I've boiled the ideology out of the myriad reasons that I was completely opposed to the war before it started, and phrase it in ethical terms. I think that military intervention in another country for a humanitarian goal is justified in only two instances: 1. during genocidal emergencies (Rwanda, Darfur) and 2. in cases where humanitarianism is the SOLE or at very least FULLY PRIMARY motivation for intervention. I use this formula for a simple reason: "military intervention" is a nice, clinical word for "war" and "war" is really short for "massive, largely-undirected assault against soft, vulnerable human tissue with bullets, mines, cluster bombs, high explosive shells, gellied gasoline, white phosporous, depleated uranium, and fire...lots and lots of fire." We like to think that all this white-hot metal flying through the air is magically directed towards bad people, but in reality, it tends to shred innocent and guilty flesh with equal efficiency. I don't really care if that sounds melodramatic, because it's this sort of thinking that seems to completely dissapear from lib-hawk discussions of the use of "force." The terminology is always clinical, the assumption being that, since the war would be fought for good purposes, it would somehow be less horrible of a war. That's just incorrect. If we keep in mind exactly what war entails, we will, necessarily, become more relucant to use it, and more likely, if we're of the "lib-hawk" persuasion, to consider applications that could result in unamibigious good in the world. Such thinking would automatically disqualify something like the Iraq war: I mean, knocking over a tin pot dictator whose greatest crimes were over a decade old instead of, say intervening in the war in the Congo that killed somewhere north of two MILLION people during the late ninties (and where the fuck were Packer and co. on THAT one?)?
And because of the innate awfulness of war, a humanitarian intervention would have to be executed for exclusively humanitarian motivations. That excludes something like the Iraq war, in which humanitarian concerns were rarely stressed until after the WMD failed to turn up: it was discussed in national security terms almost exclusivel. That should have been enough, right there, to make lib-hawks reject the war. In order to make a "humanitarian" war worthwhile (that is, for it to save and improve more lives than it would kill and ruin), such a war would have to be fought by humanitarian principals. In effect, you'd have to fight with one hand tied behind your back: no carpet bombing, no razing of cities via remote artillery, no fucking cluster bombs. If you're fighting with realpolitik motives foremost in your planning, then you end up cutting corners that get a lot of people killed, thus degrading the war from a humanitarian point of view. If you're say, more interested in preserving the integrity of a countries oil infrastructure than its people (saving the Oil Ministry in Baghdad while letting the rest of the city burn) or, say, validating a half-cocked theory of small force invasion (Rumsfeld), you end up ignoring the whole "rebuilding" thing, the thing that is supposed to improve the lives of the people you bombed and validate the invasion as a humanitarian undertaking. Taking any war that it offered to you by a pack of demonstrably corrupt and cynical profiteers because it offers you a far-outside chance to feel the thrill of vicarious moral triumphalism does not constitute an ethical approach to the use of force.
Remarkably, I think almost everything in matthew christman's comment is wrong.
Jewelry stores, smelly Frenchmen, wolves, back surgery, ripening fruit, and my nominee for elegant metaphor of the year---adding sewage to wine.
Man, there oughta be a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Analogies.
do the job right - is this a sense without a possible referent?
What is this "cruise missile left" you like to refer to, azael?
TVD, I bet the original analogy was not "adding sewage to" but "pissing in".
Perhaps you meant to linkto this (the top google hit)? If Michael Berube is part of the CML, they can't be that bad. If you agree with the above link that "[t]he [true] left considers the United States a dangerous and aggressive imperial power", then I think we're going to disagree a great deal.
dudes,
Am in nyc without easy net access (left my laptop at home), and only read the first 5 posts or so, but:
Man, some really, really lame arguments there.
Seriously, guys, I suggest:
1. Re-reading my post
and
2. taking a deep breath and evaluating your own arguments.
More in a few days when i get back.
The Packer book is still rocking the house, incidentally.
I bet the original analogy was not "adding sewage to" but "pissing in".
Ah. Thanks for clearing that up, Rilkefan. That would take us from simple cruelty to outright torture. Besides the offense to aesthetics, I do not know what the "wine" could possibly be.
See, I've been giving the Cruise Missle Left a lot more credit than the Bloodless Sanctions Left (and, it should be said, Right), who killed somewhere between 20,000 (UNICEF) and a million and a half (Ramsey Clark) innocent Iraqi women and children.
Likely more than Bush killed with his war (30,000 [?], including lots of bad guys), not to mention the 300,000 slaughtered by that Saddam fellow.
Well Winston, I respectfully disagree very strongly. I took your advice, and I re-read this part:
?Although I ultimately came down against the war, my reasoning was almost identical to Packer's, and I have infinitely more respect for him and pro-invasion liberals like him than I have for the strident, dogmatic sector of the anti-war crowd."
I was anti-war, apparently you agree with me in the end, but only after you had righteous feelings of punishment, fire, and invasion that were only set aside upon self-reflection, a character trait unique to you and not to anit-war pussies like me. So you agree with me now, but you don't like it, and you are careful to say that you agreed with me before the war started,, but it wasn't because I was right, it was because I was strident, and the fact that I wasn't pro-invasion before I wasn't means that I didn't think seriously about this war (which, by the way, has killed a lot of people and cost a lot of money).
I like blow-jobs, fast cars, guns, and blowing shit up (amongs other "manly" pursuits). I don't like war and shredding flesh from bones, regardless of who is on the receiving end. We can do better as a species. I don't like terrorists, and yes, they do frighten me, but if I get killed by a terrorist, I will end my days with my wits about me and my sense of dignity and freedom intact. War is almost always wrong, and I am not a genius because I figured from the get-go that Iraq was a cock-up with no reason, no plan, and no purpose. The incompetence was a sympton, not the cause. Folks who salivate and get wood thinking about killing people have issues, if you know what I mean.
As far as I am concerned, I skipped the bullshit and got to the point...this war was fucking stupid, a giant mistake, and its human and other costs were, are, and continue to be horrendous. This thought process, according to me, makes me smarter than your normal "interventionist" who, as far as I can tell, opposes war with his mind, but still likes the cock-stroking titillation of thinking about blowing up truly bad guys.
So forgive me for being more than a bit disgusted that you, along with Marshall Whitmann and others (and I apologize if that grouping isn't fair) seem to feel the need to tout your "ass kicking" credentials while at the same time actually knowing in your heart that strident anti-war pussies like myself have been right from the start, and will continue to be. Iraq is not Kosovo, it is not WWII, it isn't even the fucking war on terror, which is much more mundane, much to the war-pornographers dismay.
As far as taking out bad guys. It is fun to think about, it is hard to do. Just like most things that mature adults like myself figured out when we were, oh, about 19, 23 at the latest (when Cindy Crawford got married, or insert whatever fantasy-killer you choose).
I have responded to your emotional outburst with my own. The ball is in your court, and I hope you take this in the spirit of lively exchange. All personal attacks, actual or implied, are of course meant to further discussion, and that is the truth.
What the liberal hawks ignore, and Abject Funk addresses, is the probability side of the decision matrix.
Specifically, we are treated to justification for the war based on the best possible outcome of fighting vs. the worst possible outcome of not doing it.
Sure, a harmonious, western-style democracy with respect for human rights and an ability to provide for its people would be a boon for the Iraqi people. And sure if Saddam were to begin a killing spree akin to the crushing of the 1991 uprising it would be a tragedy for the Iraqi people.
Nobody doubts the goodness and badness of these two modalities.
However, what Abject Funk brings up is the CERTAINTY (or near certainty - certainly widely predicted) that the war was going to result in the deaths of thousands of innocents, the stimulation of Al Qaeda and the alienation of our allies. Whereas the counterfactual conjecture of continued life (at least for the time being) with Saddam in power would have been at least tolerable - or less bad than the alternative.
As far as humanitarianism goes, the cost-benefit analysis is far more attractive in the cases of a Rwanda or a Darfur, both because of the lower probability of ancillary damage to US interests and the better likelihood of a satisfactory outcome. This latter point is true because the alternative fate of the innocents in the conflict was near certain death anyway. In other words, I'm pretty confident that the victims of genocide or ethnic cleansing were at least as likely to be killed by mass murder as they were to be in a military intervention. This cannot be said of the Iraqi people before our invasion.
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