Warhawk Dead-Enders
Instapundit links approvingly to this at Protein Wisdom.
I'm trying to be objective about this, but I guess my first reaction is: this just goes to show that in politics you never, ever, ever have to admit you were wrong, no matter how unequivocal the evidence.
What am I missing here?
On the face of it, the strategy here seems to be to collect up every "justification" (read: rationalization) used in support of the war, and then argue that only most of them have been conclusively proven to be false or stupid.
Thus leaving a (shameful) rhetorical back door open through which people who can't admit when they're wrong can sneak out.
Because, see, saving face is more important than advancing the public dialog.
Please tell me I'm missing something.
Instapundit links approvingly to this at Protein Wisdom.
I'm trying to be objective about this, but I guess my first reaction is: this just goes to show that in politics you never, ever, ever have to admit you were wrong, no matter how unequivocal the evidence.
What am I missing here?
On the face of it, the strategy here seems to be to collect up every "justification" (read: rationalization) used in support of the war, and then argue that only most of them have been conclusively proven to be false or stupid.
Thus leaving a (shameful) rhetorical back door open through which people who can't admit when they're wrong can sneak out.
Because, see, saving face is more important than advancing the public dialog.
Please tell me I'm missing something.
posted by Winston Smith at
5:44 PM
7 Comments:
Excellent essay by Goldstein. Nobody laid a glove on his arguments.
I think I might be in cautious agreement with you, Tom, because I have a very hard time figuring out what precisely Goldstein is arguing. Campos' point appears pretty clear from the excerpts: the predictions made by people who were opposed to the war have been more accurate than those made by people who supported the war. Who precisely those "people" are isn't wholly clear, and picking just on Kristol, if in fact that's what he does in the full pieces, might not be wholly persuasive, but still, that's an argument.
Goldstein's response, on the other hand, is rather elusive. He seems at first to be saying that Campos' observations about the state of affairs in 2002/03 (that is, Iraq's WMD capability and the degree of military threat it posed) were irrelevant to the actual casus belli. I (cynically) believe this to be true, as far as it goes. But Campos isn't re-fighting that particular battle -- rather, he's saying that the anti-war people, who argued that Saddam's possession of WMD was quite uncertain and that Iraq was not a military threat, made a factual prediction which turned out to be far closer to the truth than the contrary predictions made by war supporters. And when one takes a closer look, Goldstein concedes both of these points, apparently because he wants to reargue why we went to war, which, again, has nothing to do with what Campos is saying. So his argument here isn't really a counterargument (and is unsupported by any detailed discussion or facts -- his first substantive paragraph has a few out-and-out errors, e.g. "knowing for sure" that his regime was involved in talks with Al Qaeda).
Then we move on to the elements that are quite clearly factual predictions: factional bloodshed, inutility of democracy-at-gunpoint, etc. Goldstein raises a weak objection, in the form of a rhetorical question insinuiating that the factional bloodshed is not quite as bad as all that, but mostly seems to be arguing that factional bloodshed wasn't *inevitable*. Of course, if things were really inevitable, we'd presumably be less worried about accuracy of prediction -- the ability of a pundit correctly to assess an outcome that in retrospect *wasn't* guaranteed to turn out that way makes them look more foresighted, not less.
Then we get an ad hominem accusing Campos of wanting the war in Iraq to end badly (or just believing that it has). This isn't an argument.
Then he appears to admit that right now, at least to the "untrained eye," Campos' factual predictions *do* appear more correct than those made by war supporters (though he once again raises a weak objection to the prediction that Iraq will end in disaster by citing the opinion of some other pundit that maybe it won't. Logically, this *at best* amounts to an argument from authority that Campos has not yet been proved to have been right, which is pretty weak beer).
His final point (which misuses the term of art "beg the question" while linking to a proper definition of the phrase, which should qualify him for some kind of award) is similarly off in the ether: maybe it's true that some predictions tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies, but this has very little to do with evaluating whose predictions have been overall more accurate. Again, at best it amounts to the claim that just because Campos seems to have been proven right in his prediction of failure in Iraq, we should give that less weight than we otherwise might, since that correctness is less probative of foresight than of a particular dynamic associated with a certain kind of prediction.
Goldstein's got a bunch of invective about what a bad person Campos is, but this, to my mind, doesn't amount to much of an argument. And the arguments that he does make (briefly, that we had to go to war because there was a nonzero possibility that Saddam could have given WMD to terrorists, and that those who oppose a war through the democratic process are to blame for the war's failure) are basically unsupported and made by assertion, and to my memory at least have been pretty thoroughly discussed at many levels of American society and media.
At any rate, I agree that it's hard to lay a glove on his arguments, but only because they're nebulous to the point of nonexistence.
I realize this is a bit snarky, but I truly do fail to see the excellence of this post -- or even its coherence. I do think that some of the anti-war "see, I was right!" triumphalism is overblown, but Goldstein hardly does anything to rebut the position, as best I can determine.
Well, Mike, by way of preamble, please permit me to express my customary appreciation for your customary thoroughness and intellectual honesty. Since I have my own blog to write on, I am obliged to forgo the monologue and put out a feeler to see if any worthwhile discussion is to be had.
When the discussion is good here under WS' roof, it is very good. That we have agreed there is a certain ether about the opening salvo(s), let's continue, and again with your permission, I'll defend my own thoughts on the issue rather than someone else's, in this case Goldstein's.
(Per Orwell, though, let's take time out for Two Minutes Hate on Goldstein here, and that means you, Winston Smith...)
Ah. That felt good. Cathartic.
To what I think are your strongest substantive objections, Mike (please apprise me if you feel I glossed over anything):
---There was a non-aggression understanding between Saddam and al-Qaeda, unearthed during the Clinton years. A few al-Qaeders were also in residence in Iraq. This isn't to say that there was a substantial connection, only that Goldstein isn't factually incorrect.
---We have a huge epistemological problem with the predictions from both the anti- and pro-war factions. I find the position of the former, that Saddam's possession of actual WMDs was unconfirmed and therefore he posed no direct threat to the US, and that war was unjustified at that time entirely defensible.
I also find the latter's position, that Saddam's possession of actual WMDs was unconfirmed but likely, and that the sanctions regime would soon collapse and Saddam would soon be back in the WMD business (per the Duelfer Report) entirely defensible as well.
---As for predicting the outcome of toppling Saddam, and that his and his sadistic sons' brutal but admirably effective systematic culling of the Iraqi herd was preferable to the likely (current) fratricide and the Iraqi people's incapability of living in peace with each other, well, I just don't recall that argument as pervasive. That the Iraqis would be driven by their culture into such wanton slaughter would be an offense against multiculturalism, for starters.
---I must offer that "the opinion of some other pundit" that Iraq is still winnable comes from one Michael Yon, who is on the ground in Iraq for like the third or fourth time, at his own expense.
He may be wrong, but he is no mere pundit, and has earned his stripes to opine on this.
(We may, if you choose, examine the reporting from the traditional media, on whose word it appears both you and Prof. Campos have formed your opinions about the day-to-day reality of Iraq.)
---As to whatever ad hominem you perceive in Goldstein's assesment of Campos, I won't dispute it, as that would be form and not content. (We all should be willing to plead guilty of it at some point or another. It's a human thang.)
Whether Prof. Campos wants the Iraq adventure to end badly, I do not know. Whether he wants it to end well, and what his definition of "well" might be, I don't know or care. However, of almost all who "predicted" that Iraq would turn out lousy, I think it was on general sentiments and not specific analysis, and being "right" was the luck of the draw. Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires, presented an equally if not more daunting challenge in the specific, yet is going as well as reasonable expectations would permit.
Absent the Iraq invasion, it's my opinion---opinion, mind you---that right now the sanctions would be gone, the heinously corrupt French (Oil for Food) would be Iraq's diplomatic protector, and the unholy trinity of Saddam, Uday and Attila would be back at their WMD obsession, cuisinarting their dissidents, and continuing to reward the families of Islamic suicide bombers, with no regime change anywhere in sight for at least a generation.
Many or most of the rest of the pro-war predictions have proved wrong, at least in the long run. But I hold to that one, and coupled with the unsustainable status quo of the sanctions regime and the untenable US/UK military presence in the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia, I think it was the best call based on what we knew then, not now.
Heh! Once again tricked other people into doing the hard thinking for me...
All I gotta do around here is say "Hey, WTF is up with this [link]?" and *voila*!
Tom, thanks very much for the kind words (and I do continually express the intention to check more regularly on your blog, but always manage to fail to follow through. I've just added it to my bookmarks in hopes of breaking the pattern. New year and all that). I think your response hits the high points of my post (similarly, if you think I'm ducking your point in what follows, I hope you'll correct me), so by all means, let's move on to what we actually think, rather than what we think about what other people think!
First of all, I think the argument over whether the Iraqis are better or worse off today than they would be had we not invaded is a very difficult one to evaluate, as it's so conterfactual and so likely implicate our cognitive biases. I also think it's mostly unrelated, though it might be the case that people whose predictions as to what would happen if we invaded have turned out to be right are more likely to have made correct predictions about what would have happened had we not invaded, and therefore we should trust their judgment more. At any rate, I think it's more fruitful to stick with comparing predictions against what actually happened, since that makes the inquiry much more concrete. I recognize this might look like an attempt to duck your argument, but I'll return to it in a couple hundred words...
I take your point on Yon, who does have a fair claim to persuasiveness, but while I'm not especially convinced by his optimism, I'm more than willing to leave aside scorecarding how well the traditional media have done on reporting on the Iraq war (though while we're on the subject, I found this Guardian article on the change in orientation in the Sunni insurgency both credible and alarming). I agree that the question of whether Iraq will have a "good" result (whatever that means when one gets right down to it) has yet to be resolved, and that one can make credible arguments for both positions. I suspect that my own view on this diverges from yours, but I will admit that my first response to the recent UN report that some 34,000 people died from violence last year in Iraq was "really, that few?" (though I suspect this reaction is mainly the fruit of having spent too much time studying genocide and war crimes -- one's threshold of horror does inflate). And I'll further admit that while I think in principle Iraq might still be "winnable," I have no very strong ideas as to what strategies would increase the likelihood of that happening (with the single exception of offering to relieve international pressure directed at Iran's nuclear program in exchange for robust assistance in quieting down Iraq -- but while I think this has a reasonable possibility of success on its terms, it would be very hard to orchestrate and the tradeoffs are almost certainly not worth it). So this could well be biasing my perception of things -- since I perceive no clear action the U.S. could take to achieve a positive result, I'm more likely to think that the positive result is unlikely to happen.
I also agree that holding ad hominems against someone is generally poor form, so long as one's acting within reason. We all do it to a greater or lesser degree -- I freely admit my previous post contained far more bitchiness than necessary -- and while excessively corrosive discourse is a very bad thing, we should allow ourselves and our opponents room for sarcasm and self-perceived cleverness. I noted the ad hominem aspect of Goldstein's piece simply to point out that some of his prose wasn't actually an argument. So I think we're in agreement there as well.
Your point on Afghanistan is also well-taken -- many in the anti-war left did make grandiose predictions of disaster that failed to materialize. However, my impression is that the set of people arguing against the Iraq war was different to -- and substantially larger than -- those who argued against Afghanistan, so I think its persuasive force is muted. Further, I have a very strong recollection that many who opposed the Iraq war (including U.S. military officials) argued, even in 2002 and 2003, that pulling troops out of Afghanistan would jeapordize the stability of that country and allow the Taliban to regroup, a prediction which, as far as I can tell, has largely come to pass. But without taking a more exact look at opponents of the two wars, this point doesn't have much force.
Anyway, I think your overall point that those who predicted Iraq would turn out badly generally did so in a fuzzy way is correct -- my recollection is that most of the opposition was to the rationale for war as such (i.e., focused on the WMD question), and only made passing mention of the likely bad consequences, relying on general formulations about the difficulty of imposing democracy and so on. Now, I do think that those who were anti-war generally made more correct predictions as to the state of Hussein's WMD program than did the pro-war folks (I'm thinking specifically of the centrifuge, yellowcake, and drone disagreements), but strictly speaking that has little to do with accuracy of prediction as to the post-war stability of the country (the former set of issues are basically ones of technical intelligence, while the latter have more to do with military theory, sociological analysis, etc.), and I do agree that in February of 2003, the zone of disagreement on the status of the WMD program was quite large (though, again, I'd argue that the best analysis would have pointed towards possession of fewer WMD). To the extent people said "sectarian bloodbath," though, there were strong reasons to think this would be the case (the history of Sunni oppression, the likelihood of Iranian influence, and the set of exiles we had cued up to help run the show). Against this, it's important to note that all of those reasons turned out to be that important in practice (I don't think that, for all his faults, one can lay the death squads and such at his door), and not everybody who made the point actually pointed to them.
But my memory of the "it'll go well" predictions is that a) they wound up to be less correct and b) they were based on much faultier reasoning. The persistent inability of our political class to understand the difference between Shiite and Sunni reflects the fact that pre-invasion, lots of people didn't even know there was such a division inside of Iraq. To my memory, the "greeted as liberators" line wasn't premised so much on arguments that sectarian divisions could be overcome as on a failure to acknowledge or engage with the problems posed by said divisions. So overall, I think that the current trend of saying "we anti-war folk were totally right" is very much overblown -- there were . But at the same time, as a massive generalization I think that the anti-war crowd can fairly claim to have made better predictions, both in terms of eventually being borne out and of being based on better arguments and facts, than did the pro-war camp.
Now, to return to your opinion on what would have happened had we not invaded -- I can't disagree that that's a plausible scenario. If the weapons inspections had continued to turn up no evidence of WMD, the sanctions regime would have been increasingly difficult to maintain, and many of them likely would have been repealed. Al Qaeda calls to jihad would have been continued to be aimed at U.S. troop presence near Mecca, rather than the occupation of Iraq (though on this point, I think the latter makes for more effective propaganda, and the training ground Iraq provides should also be weighed in the balance). The no-fly zones would have continued in force, I think, decreasing the likelihood of mass atrocities against the southern Shiites and the Kurds, but Hussein's regime would have undoubtedly found a way to keep busy. And I do agree that regime change would not have been on the horizon, and the stipends paid to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers would have continued, although given the rise of Hamas and the Lebanon war, I'm not sure how large of an effect said stipends would have had on fueling the conflict in Israel/Palestine (which isn't to say they weren't morally reprehensible). I think I am more optimistic than you on the possibility of keeping Hussein from reconstituting a WMD program, even without overly robust sanctions -- with the roll-up of the Khan network, the relevant technology is very much less up for grabs. Though I suppose one can construct (to my mind impmlausible) scenarios in which Iran and Iraq reach some form of detente...
Based on all of that, though, I do think that it was a judgment call whether invasion was the best thing or not in 03. I thought it was a bad idea; some people I respected (and respect) made the opposite call. One can say that personal impressions about the ability of the Bush Administration should enter in as a tie-breaker, but I think the "competence dodge" functions more to obscure the tough questions than illuminate them. I should also say that I am personally a proponent of humanitarian intervention in certain, reasonably narrow, circumstances (which doesn't necessarily include UN approval), so I do think that adoption of a blanket anti-intervention, it'll-never-work attitude would be harmful and unsupportable solely on the evidence of what's happened in Iraq.
Anyway, that's a bit meandering, but I think we're generally in agreement on which predictions were inaccurate, which were too vague to take seriously, and where the zones of uncertainty are broad enough that contrary opinions and judgment calls are both reasonable and necessary, even if our specific positions within those zones don't line up (which isn't to say that it's not worth arguing those opinions, but I don't think this is the post to do it!)
Cheers, mate. It seems few had a real appreciation for the nuances of Islam going in. (That some still don't is another matter.
The Guardian article, on how the Sunni jihad has apparently changed its focus from Americans to wantonly killing Shi'a, gets to something that hasn't been in the general public discussion of the metrics of morality: that a regime change in Iraq, whether 4 years ago or a hundred years from now would have inevitably precipitated this sort of mess.
If so, and if the price is adjudged too high by the standards of the West, it means that any naughty government can hold us morally hostage if its people are nuts enough.
The argument can be made (and it is) that US/UK mismanagement of the interregnum caused this, but I would not agree that Iraqi society underwent a fundamental change of character in a couple of years as a result of the invasion.
Of course the casualty figures are troubling because there are innocents involved, but the death squads kill each other, and we're killing a lot of bad guys ourselves. As for the innocents, it's tempting to accept responsibility for them, and even more tempting to blame one's partisan opponents.
Thanks for the discussion, Mike. I never got far enough in one before to ever make the above arguments let alone develop them, and the whole deal never made it into one of my monologues.
As for my groupblog, I do hope you'll stop by. I and the fellows got the fascist part covered; we could really use a commie or two.
(PS---To two factual points you make, I agree less rather than more WMDs were likely; it was Saddam's historical fascination with them that was the worry.
And it's my best opinion, based on a sketchy knowledge of contemporary Islam, that crusaders in the holy land (mentioned in bin Laden's 1996 declaration of war) pissed off world Islam, whereas Yanks in Iraq only seems to bother Arabs, and not all that much, I think.)
First, props to Mike and Tom for a civil, rational, and informative discussion.
I find myself in antecedent agreement with Mike on many points and persuaded by his arguments on others, and that means that I'm also in agreement with Tom on a good bit of this.
Short on time, but here's one quick point: something that emerges in Mike's post (and I've wondered about this before in an inchoate way) is this:
Since, when we get serious about getting to the bottom of these issues, we have to go back an re-evaluate the arguments anyway... what good does it do to focus on claims about the accuracy/track record of the people who made the predictions?
E.g. W, Richard Perle, and Bill Kristol made many bad arguments in the lead-up to the war. They were obviously bad arguments then, they're obviously bad arguments now. The only difference is that their conclusions turned out to be false. But even good arguments sometimes have false conslusions.
So...seems like the falsehood of their conclusions give us some weak probabilistic evidence that their arguments were bad (but we already knew that...but some additional weak evidence)... But the falsehood of their conclusions doesn't tell us as much about their arguments as many anti-war types seem to think.
Of course there were bad arguments on the anti-war side as well (e.g. the laughable "you can't impose democracy at the point of a gun" argument), though the errors on that side were less egregious than those onthe pro-war side.
Soooo...again, why focus on the reasoners instead of the reasonings? (Note: genuine, non-rhetorical question.)
Now, I say this as someone who has been (largely, no doubt, by luck), right about most of the major points, so far as I know.
Here's what I got right:
1. There was no significant link b/w Saddam and al Qaeda
2. We should focus on Afghanistan, kick copious ass, and rebuild the place.
3. Though Saddam was an evil f*cker and I wanted him dead, dead, dead, we should not invade.
4. If we did invade, we should use overwhelming force.
5. Things have been going bad in Iraq for a long time.
6. The administration was lying and bullshitting us in many important ways all along.
What I got wrong:
1. I thought Saddam had some bio-chem weapons.
2. I thought the invasion would succeed even though it was ill-advised.
2'. I thought that the administration could competently conduct the invasion.
3. Probably some more stuff.
So I'd give myself a B or maybe even a B+ on all this (b/c almost *every* reasonable person thought Saddam had some biochem weapons, so that's not a big error. And who knew that the administration was *this* incompetent?)
Soooo...what does this mean? That my judgment is better than Bill Kristol's in such matters?
Well, I started out thinking I was going to deny that proposition...but maybe it's true...
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