Some Conditionals About Staying in Iraq Revisited.
I'm going to keep harping on this until you guys answer.
I'm going to keep harping on this until you guys answer.
posted by Winston Smith at
4:38 PM
Monday, October 23, 2006
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26 Comments:
[1] If we'll make the world a worse place in the long run by staying in Iraq, then we should leave.
True. If we make the world, including Iraq and the US, worse off then we have a moral duty to leave.
[2] If we'll make things worse for the Iraqis in the long run by staying in Iraq, then we should leave.
True. If we make Iraq and not the US or the world worse off, we should leave. We are the aggressors, we are there to assert our power in the region. Even if everyone else but the Iraqis benefit it remains an immoral act.
[3] If we'll make things worse for the U.S. in the long run by staying in Iraq, then we should leave.
True. Why should we act against our own self interest? None the less, if it were to benefit the whole world but ourselves we still should leave. No one asked us to be there. We do not have the moral right to act for everyone's benefit (even if it were a sacrifice on our part) without their permission.
Well said, Noen. You'd have made a fine Republican, circa 1935.
So now that Saddam is behind bars and can no longer = Hitler, who is it in Iraq that ='s Hitler today? al-Sadr? that dude who suceeded Zarqawi? Bueller?
The U.S. troops are currently doing little to actually stem violence in Iraq,instead they're doing the opposite: stoking violence, delegitimizing the Iraqi government and, let's not forget, committing their own crimes against civilians on a daily basis. But we've got to stay the course, or Osama gets his Caliphate...or the Shi'ite majorities of Lebanon Iraq and Iran form a Voltron of Jew-hating...or Saddam breaks out of jail and unleashes an army of cloned, zombie Udays...or something.
Sorry about that last part, curse my deep unseriousness!
Ouch, Winston, answering rhetorical questions is no fun. How can you answer 'no' to a question like the 3 you posted?
To complete the set, I'd like to add one more:
[4] If we leave Iraq, will the US no longer be a nation of its word?
This is the Colin Powell 'you broke it, you buy it' thesis, and it's fundamentally at the root of the Republican 'stay the course' meme. That it's simultaneously the root of our current catch 22 is apparently something not mentioned in polite circles.
And Tom - I don't see how the America Firsters of '35 have much to do with the current secret plan for victory in Viet N^H^H^H^H^H^H Iraq. Fighting Osama in Afghanistan--that was the equivalent of WWII vs the Nazis.
Going after Saddam in Iraq ... that's more like following War Plan Green during World War II. In BIll Lind's memorable words, Iraq remains a 'strategically curious war.'
So, the question remains, at what point do questions 1-3 become more important than question 4? Reagan, Clinton, and Nixon had different answers on this. In all cases, it seems that declaring victory and going home has acceptible outcomes, so long as you are willing to stick things out in places where you didn't fuck things up in the first place. (Greece, Korea, Kosovo, Grenada...)
- mac
PS to blogger/google: S/STRIKE should be an allowed tag in comments.
When talking about reality, either-or and ceteris paribus are useless, so I won't bother to dimly misinterpret your propositions as if they are ceteris paribus. Still, WS, you need to get into degrees of worse.
[1]What proportion of suffering of US and Iraqi people to improvement of the world would justify staying in Iraq?
Etc.
Of course, that's a very utilitarian restatement of the question. Are there trumping rights and moral principles? (Should we just go home because our president is a war criminal? [No.])
Normally, I would agree to your #3 and your #1. No one expects a nation to act against its own interests. My problem with the war in the first place was that it was a war of choice with disaster written all over it (sorry you didn't see that) and very unlikely to make any part of the world larger than some of Saddam's torture chambers a better place. And then we screwed that one up, too, or really muddied it up with a few bad apples - in the Pentagon (Rummy) and the White House (Duhbya, Gonzo, Darth Cheney).
Clarification: Duhbya's criminality is not a decisive reason to leave, but there are others.
ll,
That's the first important point of clarification I was trying to force out. Now each case basically splits into three:
minorly worse
mediumly worse
awfully worse
or whatever.
I agree that Dubya's criminality is not a reason to leave--though I think it WAS a reason not to go.
I DIDN'T forsee that this had 'disaster' written all over it...but I wasn't really interested in consequences so much as I was in process. Also, I don't think anyone forsaw that it would be this disastrous. I mean, some people were talking disaster from the very beginning, but I don't think they knew what they were talking about. They were just talking. And mad.
Winston --
I think you are mistaken about early assessments of disaster. (I think you are using the term as a synonym for 'armed occupation.')
There were a lot of criticisms coming from Tom's 'circa 1935 Republicans' before the war. What they were saying wasn't unique; it simply demonstrates that the view towards possible calamity was widespread and not mearly whistling in the dark.
See for example:
- Michael Lind on the 'strategically curious war.'
- Van Riper war game
- Warnings from the War College on the nonexistence of a postinvasion plan.
- James Webb, 2002, on a long term occupation with no exit strategy. (A long term armed occupation is just a more specific name for disaster, by and large.)
Google returns 20,000 hits from as early as 2002 for the terms 'Iraq Tuchman folly.' It hardly took a Nostradamus...
-mac
Well, mac, I think they were whistling in the dark. I heard nobody say that Iraq's Muslims are irretrievably wack, blowing themselves up just to get at each other, which is the real problem at this point.
Doom was predicted for Clinton's Kosovo adventure, too. The only difference was that after Clinton bombed the shit out of everything Serbian in sight, they just gave in.
I do want to add that altho history finds them wrong, the isolationist movement of the 1930s wasn't wrong viewed by its own lights. If anyone followed the link I provided (doubtful), it reflects that WWI was perhaps the most bullshit war of all time and the US got roped into it.
In the short run, had the US permitted Imperial Japan's hegemony in Asia, we may never had gone to war with them. It's doubtful they ever would have had the means to invate the continental US.
So, too, we probably could have bought a separate peace with Hitler, perhaps even saving the UK.
Which is a long way of saying that everything short-term about Iraq sucks, but altho we pride ourselves in seeing the future (and alternative histories), we can't, not a one of us.
After visiting this blog regularly there is one thing I can safely predict. That is, when presented with the incompetence, mendacity and utter depravity of the Bush administration's abortion in Iraq, Tom Van Dyke will respond with a reference to something Clinton. It's like a reflex or a proto-Tourette's tic, if you will (h/t Dick Cheney). It really can't be helped, can it Tom?
But on to the substance. Anyone feeling a little down, a little blue, could cheer himself up by taking a gander at this little gem from Tom comparing Iraq to Kosovo:
"Doom was predicted for Clinton's Kosovo adventure, too. The only difference was that after Clinton bombed everything Serb in sight, they just gave in."
If by *only difference*, you mean that there were also 1.5 million people about to be ethnically cleansed in Iraq then I guess you're right. And if by *only difference*, you mean that the ankle-biting uber-political Republicans in Congress were the equivalent analysts of the situation that James Webb, Wesley Clark (someone who was literally THERE for Kosovo), Brent Scowcroft, Thomas Hammes and many other experts were, then I guess you're right. And if by *only difference*, you mean that we had a bad reputation of imperialism in the Balkans which generated a great deal of distrust of us (especially our past support of the tyrant, when convenient), then I guess you're right. And if by *only difference*, you mean that the project of deposition of Milosevic and occupation of Kosovo had been explicitly assessed by experts in the previous two administrations as extremely dangerous and likely to lead to a wide conflagration and civil war, then I guess you're right. And if by *only difference*, you mean that NATO, and especially its contingent countries with the largest armed forces, participated in OIF, then I guess you're right. And if, by *only difference*, you mean the administration of Iraq would be run by competent military managers and logisticians rather than cronies chosen for their loyalty to Dear Leader and his administration-approved ideology, then I guess you're right.
But all of that pales in comparison to a link to some fringe site that implies, of all tired memes, a wag-the-dog type motivation for Kosovo.
Yes, indeed, my compliments for that bit of comic relief.
Tom, there was one big difference in Kosovo: there was already a war on. (The same was true in Afghanistan.)
From Van Riper's simulation, it was clear that it would take a whole lot of things going right for the invasion to succeed, and it wouldn't take a lot for a guerrilla opponent to fubar the whole thing. Sure, Van Riper got some things wrong, because Iraq wasn't Iran. There was no assault by suicide navy, and there was a surprising shortage of MANPAD attacks in the initial defense. And the enemy couriers don't use motorcycles; they use beat up old automobiles, which are a lot more anonymous.
As for nobody predicting them blowing each other up: it happened in the previous occupation in the 20's, and it happened to the French in Algiers. That was a required movie for the brass going into Iraq for God's sake. Did they think it was fiction???
-mac
I would also add the judgment of people like Eric Shinseki were largely ignored, with the implicit prediction being that Rumsfeld's testing of his pet theories about warfare would result in disaster, when no such blinkered planning took place in the Balkans. But I guess, to channel a famous liar, nobody could have predicted that insufficient troops to prevent looting, secure ammo dumps and maintian general order would result in the clusterfuck we have today.
Also, the fact that right up until the invasion Bush was first learning that there were such things as Sunni and Shia with a long history of acrimony in Iraq was not exactly something that inspired confidence.
So the mere fact of prediction of doom by naysayers in one case (Kosovo) was in no way equivalent with the informed predictions of experts in the other (Iraq).
I doubt there were no experts predicting doom for Clinton's Kosovo adventure. There's always an expert on any side of any issue. Since history proved them wrong, they are silent and forgotten.
I do often bring Clinton in. It's the only useful comparison. That said, remember that I'm not terribly down on Clinton.
But perhaps I should use Truman, who committed us to a far more ghastly and bloody conflict. He ended up saving half of Korea. If we end up delivering only 1/3 of Iraq from Saddam's bloody boot, the Kurds, I'm A-OK with that.
There will always be details as to why x isn't comparable to y. But it is relevant and not a bit ironic to read the CounterPunch piece, which contains many of the same criticisms and "predictions" for Kosovo made later on Iraq. If one reads it.
And if you do read it and the irony escapes you, what can I say?
I find this debate tiresome, because I have posted links in the past (which no one read) to Clinton's ruthlessness in bombing, and the fact that of the zillions of bodies the administration predicted, only about 2000 VMDs (victims of mass destruction) turned up. I don't fault Clinton for that, but since it conflicts with the narrative that Clinton was moral and competent, I do fault those who are content with hagiography.
And no, the Sunni-Shia issue was not among the cases made by opponents of invading Iraq. These nuts are off the scale. It's not even about politics, it's about killing. If Clinton regretted not intervening in Rwanda, well, all we have to do is leave Iraq and we might have another one.
Tom writes:
> If we end up delivering only 1/3 of Iraq from Saddam's
> bloody boot, the Kurds, I'm A-OK with that.
I thought Kurdistan was already mostly out from under 'Saddam's bloody boot' before the war began? The issue is whether they can keep it with the rest of Iraq in chaos, and Turkey stirring the pot...
Yeah, there's something to that, anon. Turkey is the only somewhat reasonable and progressive Muslim nation on this earth, and they don't want an independent Kurdistan.
Realpolitik, idealism, freedom, justice.
It gives me a headache too.
First of all, Clinton isn't the only useful comparison, since in his case there was a clear reason for the intervention, which was stated at the beginning, sought throughout, and ultimately achieved. In the case of Iraq, I still don't know why the hell we started the war in the first place. What's the current reason of the month?
As for "I doubt there were no experts predicting doom for Clinton's Kosovo adventure", that's up there with "some people say..." as vacuous statements go. Show me someone who knew what the hell they were talking about and adduced cogent reasons why the thing would be a disaster, for them and for us, then we can talk; until then, you really should keep that stuff out of the paint.
And the comparison to Truman in Korea is laughable, because that was confronting an expansionist enemy with considerably more firepower, who wasn't at an immense strategic and military disadvantage. Saddam couldn't fart without being bombed senseless. Hence, the point about Kurd safety and autonomy.
The main point is that the alternative to NOT doing something in Kosovo would most likely have been an outcome like Rwanda (where Clinton can certainly be criticized for doing nothing), so the standards for instrumental violence are different. If you don't believe me, read Samantha Powers's book.
In Iraq, however, a Rwanda-like outcome at this point would leave us largely culpable, since despite Saddam's heinousness no such thing was taking place beforehand. Iraq was a functioning place for the typical Iraqi prior to the invasion and, as predicted by MANY, for the reasons predicted by MANY, it's now an orgy of death and misery.
If it had been worth it to Iraqis to risk their lives to get out from under 'Saddam's bloody boot', they would have done it themselves, as did the Romanians, Iranians, Ugandans, Indonesians and many others. I wont' arrogate to myself the right to decide that for someone else; if you can't see the difference between that and the Kosovars or Rwandans with guns pointed at their heads at the time of consideration, then we have nothing to talk about.
Anonymous,
I agree whole-heartedly with your "*only difference*" post above.
Though with the last point in the last post, not so much. Sometimes we have to decide such things for others. It's analogous the the following situtation: suppose Bad Guy has a family tied up in their home. We wouldn't say "well, we can't send in the SWAT team, b/c we might kill them and have no right to decide for them."
In the Iraq case in particular, Bush made the wrong decision. But that doesn't mean that all similar humanitarian interventions are wrong. But I recognize that you agree with the general point, since you've cited Kosovo.
Winston,
I see your point, and perhaps I was a bit sloppy in my formulation.
The distinction I was attempting to make was that Saddam wasn't the Bad Guy with the family tied up in his home. He was the Bad Guy who had killed families in the past by tying them up in his home, and now we propose to firebomb the neighborhood to root out the Bad Guy, despite the fact that it might kill many of Bad Guy's neighbors.
To me, Milosevic was the Bad Guy with the family tied up in his home, which is why I had no problem with the intervention. So you're right, that's why I agree with the general point, as illustrated with Kosovo.
In this corner, we have the hot pursuit theory, weighing in with concern for human rights through the rule of law. To quote the AG who puts the 'general' back into 'attorney general', How quaint!
And in this corner, we have Minority Report with a fanciful fact basis but some killer preemption. Honest, the psychics liked being waterboarded!
Anon, even according to Clinton hagiographer Sidney Blumenthal, Clinton was planning to use ground troops, and the Pentagon was opposed. (In fact they were opposed to Clinton using Apache helicopters because they were akin to ground troops; they were deployed, but never used in combat.)
And BTW, still-JCS chair Colin Powell as well as Les Aspin and Tony Lake opposed Clinton doing anything about Bosnia some years before.
I'm sorry such things are not of interest in your paint. But that you aren't interested in such things is not a refutation and doesn't entitle you to a victory dance.
And altho the Serbs caved in Kosovo after the bombing and the Russian swing against them, how many did the bombings kill? Didn't the bombing precipitate, not end, a humanitarian disaster?
Nobody cares. It doesn't fit the narrative that everything was clean and hunky-dory. Nor do they care about the innocent lives the Iraq sanctions cost.
Keep in mind I'm not down on Clinton. But every peace has its price and Clinton paid one just like everybody else. My interest isn't in dragging him down where many put Bush, but to point out that pedestals are very shaky things.
"Nobody cares. It doesn't fit the narrative that everything was clean and hunky-dory. Nor do they care about the innocent lives the Iraq sanctions cost."
Heckuva straw man you built there. Of course I care. Everyone should care. But when the benefit is the prevention of genocide, the swallowable costs are pretty damn high.
And when the alternative to the sanctions (which were improved at the insistence of Carol Bellamy, and could have been improved further) was the carnage and chaos in Iraq now (predicted beforehand), it's clear it was nowhere near worth it. As an acid test, perhaps you don't approve of the pending sanctions against North Korea?
You've also failed to adduce any evidence of substance for your original claim of equivalence between the predictions of doom for the two wars.
Of course I did. You ignored it. So did Bill Clinton. Good on him.
If you study up on Yugoslavia, you might find that the evidence for "genocide" (VMDs) was not found. Neither are you willing to consider the collateral damage.
As previously noted, I'm not down on Clinton, but a poke through the facts shows that the administration oversold the graveness of the situation.
Was the carnage in Iraq "worth it"? I dunno that's a settled matter yet. But I have previously voiced my disagreement with Madame Albright that the 30,000 (low estimate) to 500,000 (Albright's admission, and bin Laden's propaganda tool, and a figure largely accepted today by the Muslim world) women and children who died as a result of the sanctions was not "worth it," as it achieved only a holding action.
I do agree with lovable liberal that there are degrees of worse. When everything's a 1 or a 10, there is no discussion, only verbal combat. Your engagement of my arguments is cursory; you use them only for a jumping off point for your next rant. And there is no evidence that you've checked my links to CounterPunch, Powell's book, or my reference to Blumenthal.
That is your right, but it's also mine to find this boring. Our work is finished here: Declare yourself the winner and do a victory dance if you want. This exchange has become entirely too hostile.
You did have two good points which have become useless to discuss, since this is not a discussion: One, that unlike my comparisons, Iraq was not in mid-slaughter. My answer is that Saddam broke his peace treaty and Gulf War 2 must be viewed in a continuum with the first one, and also that his ongoing butchery was more subtle. (CNN confessed to softballing the situation so as to not get thrown out of the country.
Your second was a challenge re sanctions on North Korea. My understanding is that they are embargoing only weapons and luxury goods, so I'm OK with that. But we have seen, and Albright's Iraq is an example, insane leaders don't give a damn what happens to their civilian population, so I'm not good with blanket sanctions.
And, BTW, I do hear that 12 of Iraq's 18 provinces are quite mellow at this time. Since all you show evidence of knowing is what you read in the papers and nothing but, this proposition might not have made it across your mental transom. If I had to roll the dice, I'd rather be an Iraqi civilian than a North Korean one.
Cheers, anonymous, whoever you are.
Harry Frankfurt has a word for what you're trying to pass off as a comparison between the two wars vis-a-vis predictions of doom. I did in fact read ALL of your links COMPLETELY, and the only thing that even remotely resembles a prediction of doom for the Kosovo intervention by anyone with a modicum of credibility is this quote about Powell:
"This is the man who quarrelled with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, arguing that the Serbian army was as powerful and formidable as the Vietnamese."
And that's supposed to somehow stand in for the litany of predictions by those in the know that OIF would be a clusterfuck for the Iraqis and ourselves, all of which has come to pass? That doesn't even pass the smell test.
And as I said before, if a population is going to be set up for carnage, I'll leave it up to them to decide if it's *worth it*. A gun to the head is a different situation. You want to unleash bloody hell on Saddam before the Anfal campaign, be my guest. Just don't go playing vigilante after the fact. They didn't even try to get an indictment in the ICC to embarrass and/or stir the international community to action. Instead, they laid the scare tactics on heavy to the gullible domestic audience to, as Richard Clarke so accurately put it, "test out their theories".
At a time when we really needed friends (and had a lot of them, including even the Iranians who offered help in toppling the Taliban), we embarked on a course that's creating enemies faster than we can count. Bloody mindless.
Re sanctions and NK, you actually bring up a good point. I never understood why we didn't just send the Iraqis food and medicine. That's what China does for NK, so even an import embargo on other things wouldn't result in the starving of the population.
As I said before, Carol Bellamy insisted upon the refinement of the sanctions to allow more humanitarian goods. I would agree that putting the sustenance screws to the Iraqis in an effort to get them to turn on Saddam is reprehensible. Better to just make the best of a really bad situation by making sure food and medicine get delivered.
Well, that was the idea behind Oil For Peace, which is another subject, but whose corruption and perversion thereof should not be ignored.
Sanctions are pretty much a new idea I think, altho starving out your adversaries is an age-old idea: guns and butter, the equation being that money spent for the populace's butter cannot be spent on guns.
On the whole, even the tyrants of history would give in when confronted with the starvation of their people, if only because they would revolt against the regime.
(Altho I of course despise Castro, it's to his credit that he spread the misery fairly equally. He is not Saddam or Kim Jung-Il.)
Which brings us to technology, I suppose. True totalitarianism is now possible: one can fully suppress one's own people with the advent of the ultimate superiority of the machine gun against swords, clubs and spears, even hands.
Which, unfortunately, leaves us only with war if a totalitarian regime chooses to isolate itself from the rest of humanity. These are some really fucked-up times.
(And thanks for allowing a point or two. Only a brute would take advantage. Indeed, it was you who brought up North Korea, which is quite relevant. We are powerless against true totalitarianism and nihilism.
Even the entirely nuts samarai Empire of Japan yielded after our slaughter of their civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But in the 21st century, we're in a whole new ballgame. And even as a student of history, I have no comparison to what we're faced with right now, where the dying is more important than the killing.)
I can't believe that you guys are still trying to reason with Tom about the Kosovo/Iraq comparison.
No offense, Tom, but so far as I can tell you were shown to be wrong on this point more than a year ago. You just keep saying words, but the case is closed so far as I can tell.
I'm not trying to step in and shut you up by fiat, but I just don't see the point in spilling any more ink (or electrons) on this one.
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