There's Just Two Kinds of People: Those Who Draw Simplistic Dichotomies, and Those Who Don't
Julian Sanchez | October 19, 2006, 3:38pm
Over in the L.A. Times, Jonah Goldberg gets around to conceding that the Iraq war was a mistake, and goes on to make a sound point, with an illustration that underscores his point nicely—but not in the way he intended:
In the dumbed-down debate we're having, there are only two sides: Pro-war and antiwar. This is silly. First, very few folks who favored the Iraq invasion are abstractly pro-war. Second, the antiwar types aren't really pacifists. They favor military intervention when it comes to stopping genocide in Darfur or starvation in Somalia or doing whatever that was President Clinton did in Haiti. In other words, their objection isn't to war per se. It's to wars that advance U.S. interests (or, allegedly, President Bush's or Israel's or ExxonMobil's interests). I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side.
He is, of course, right that it's silly to speak of "pro-war" and "antiwar" folks as undifferentiated blobs. Which makes it curious that he's so eager to generalize in sweeping ways about what sorts of interventions "antiwar types" support, and what kinds of arguments they make.
Of course, this is in large part a function of an unfortunate institutional fact about opposition to war: It's groups like the execrable ANSWER who have the infrastructure in place to take the lead organizing protests and rallies. So the antiwar position gets associated with—and for once I can use the word without hyperbole—Stalinist positions that I suspect are not shared by the large chunk of the American public that opposed the war even back in 2003. This is part of the reason that, as I argued two years ago, protests are so often counterproductive, pushing the few people they do influence away from the position of the protesters. I've no doubt that at least a few folks who were "liberal hawks" in the run-up to the war were more eager to dissociate themselves from the "all-a-Halliburton-conspiracy" wing of war opposition than they were actually enthusiastic about the prospects for creating a happy little liberal democracy in Mesopotamia.
Still, it's a while since the giant papier-mâché puppets were put away, and there's little enough excuse at this point for pretending to believe—let alone actually believing—that this contingent is representative of the majority of Americans who could now be described as "antiwar." There were plenty of war critics who were making perfectly reasonable arguments back in 2003 and have now been proved largely correct—and I say "largely" only because it now seems that even some of the critics were too sanguine about the war. Making fun of the craziest possible subset of people on the other side of a binary divide is fun—I do it all the time. But Goldberg seems to have offered an inadvertent case study in the dangers of confusing your own entertainment with serious thinking about an issue. [Cross-posted @ NftL]
William Hallowell | October 19, 2006, 4:27pm | #
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joe | October 19, 2006, 5:12pm | #
nutcase,
"We had the power to stop that, we used that power. Am I missing something here?"
You are missing a hard-headed analysis of the likelihood of success, and the responsibility to make every effort to ensure that all of the blood you are causing other people to spill is going to accomplish something. These have been fundamental considerations in Just War Theory for about 600 years of western civilization.
Once upon a time, I considered the question of whether to invade Iraq to be a tough call, because Saddam Hussein really was that bad. He wasn't just another tin-horn dictator, he was one of the great monsters in the world, with maybe a million deaths to answer for.
I wanted to liberate the people of Iraq, I really did, but I just couldn't escape the conclusion that the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld troika was going to screw it up, and make things even worse for the Iraqis.
Good intentions only take you so far. You can say, "The execution was poor...," but you've got a responsibility to take the likelihood of success into account before you start a war, not just hope for the best and congratulate yourself for wanting to end oppression.
I came to this realization about this crew before 2002 even ended. "Bush Derangement Syndrome," they used to call it. Because I'm such a deluded partisan, I thought the Republicans would screw this up.
It would be funny, it it weren't for all the dead people.
Dave | October 19, 2006, 5:55pm | #
"Support the troops - send them to die because it will really piss of the liberals."
Come on. This is not the argument he is making. It would be more fairly presented as "Support the war because, for all its faults, nobody seems to have a better solution".
Whether or not that's good thinking is debateable, but he certainly wasn't saying he supported the war because it would be fun to piss off liberals.
This is the same reason many people, myself included, voted for Bush last time even though we had issues with the way he was handling things. Because what was the alternative? What was John Kerry's plan for Iraq? I'll wait......
Don't feel bad, he doesn't remember either. The biggest, in some ways, the ONLY issue of that election, and nobody really knows what the other guy was planning to do instead of what we have now.
So here's your chance, Democrats. What should we do now, and how should we deal with the way the world will be when we take that course of action? I want to hear some real answers. And sitting around blaming Bush doesn't get to be one of them. You are in power, you have to make the decision...what do you do? Iran is about to build a nuke...what do you do? We withdraw from Iraq and it degenerates into all out civil war; the Sunni region becomes a major al qaeda base....what do you do? Pakistan may be sheltering Bin Laden, but we don't want to go to war with them...what do you do? Real answers that don't start and end with "Bush messed everything up". Come on, let's hear it. I'm being sincere here. Change my mind.
PS If your answer to anything is "Diplomacy", please remember that diplomacy is not a course of action, but a method of taking that course of action. Therefore you must include what that "diplomacy" would specifically be pushing for, and what force would be backing up that push.
Stevo Darkly | October 19, 2006, 5:57pm | #
"This is part of the reason that, as I argued two years ago, protests are so often counterproductive, pushing the few people they do influence away from the position of the protesters."
Well, in this case considering that now very few Americans think the Iraqi war is a good idea, I'd say war protestors have succeeded in their goal of swaying public opinion.
No, the war did that. (Or maybe the reporting on the war, pro-war people would say.) Not the protesters.
I do think the gooniness of many of the anti-war protesters did in fact do far more do sabotage the early-stage anti-war movement than help it.
Contra Goldberg, it wasn't the "shabbiness of their arguments" as it was that often no coherent argument was made at all.
Seeing protestors with signs like "No to war!/Reparations now!" didn't make many people think, "Hey, these guys have a point" so much as make people think wonder whether they had a point about the war at all, or were just using the war as an attention-getting device on which to tack on their favorite, but unrelated, lefty causes. Indeed, so much of the fringe left jumped the tiny raft of the early anti-war movement that they capsized it with the sheer weight of their dumbfuckery.
It's not so much being pro-war in order to "piss off the liberals," as being pro-war by default because some of the most visible "anti-war" folks early on obscured the real, reasonable anti-war arguments.
For the most part, the protestors I saw did not help the anti-war movement, they distracted from it. They swamped it. They drowned it. They killed. The only reasonable and persuasive anti-war arguments that I saw were in libertarian websites and publications -- and we can guess how much of the American public saw them.
rob | October 19, 2006, 6:15pm | #
Dave - joe actually has a plan for how to fix all of this, with timetables and all sorts of other non-workable but reasonable-sounding moving parts. He has posted it before and I'm sure he can post it again.
But joe's plan is just as unworkable as the current plan, which is simply an adaptation of previous courses of action by the current administration. The other side can introduce change for change's sake, but it wouldn't change a thing.
The realpolitik answer is the one that would actually work. That answer is the same now as it was when we invaded. The answer is not to stick around trying to make the world a better place for the Iraqis or the Afghanis.
The appropriate course of action was to go there, kill/capture as many of the guys who were involved in creating problems for the U.S., declare victory and leave. Maybe hang a big banner that said "Mission Accomplished. Don't Make Us Come Back." Maybe with a note posted in the United Nations that says "If anyone attacks us again, we'll flatten them as well. If it's one of the same countries, we'll flatten what we were kind enough not to flatten the last time."
The "you broke it, you bought it" idea that we have to turn these countries into functioning nations is just a bad idea.
I think that pulling Manuel Noriega or Saddam Hussein out of their rat holes and anyone associated with them and chucking them under a rock at Gitmo without trial for eternity is an acceptable solution to an unacceptable situation. I feel the same way about the guys we haven't gotten around to yet - Osama bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, or even Hugo Chavez for that matter.
But sticking around in these places to make them wonderful beacons for the rest of the world is just not my idea of enlightened self-interest.
Of course, joe and his pals don't even have enlightened self-interest going for them - they think Kosovo was a brilliant idea because it was Clinton's violation of international law and the UN charter rather than a Republican's.
joe | October 19, 2006, 6:26pm | #
Dave,
"Come on. This is not the argument he is making."
No, it's not the argument he's making. It's the mindset that allowed him to believe all the incredibly weak arguments and shoddy evidence that were put forth before the war.
Chris O,
"...and seemed by all accounts to have an active WMD program." Not by the accounts of the people we sent to determine whether he had such a program. They reported back that he didn't appear to have one.
"It can be said with great certainty that the Saddam Hussein regime no longer poses a WMD threat to the world." That could have been said by the Spring of 2003 without a single drop of blood being spilled. The administration began this war when they did in order to get it started before that information became widely known.
"I would argue that post-Hussein Iraq was doomed to civil war regardless of how he was dethroned." Not all conflict has to become civil war and ethnic cleansing. Everyone points to Yugoslavia, but remember, there was a fanatical nationalist tyrant who was determined to stoke ethnic conflict in order to expand his, and his nation's, power. When you see a war, blame the politicians, not the people.
"Problem is, I see no pleasant alternatives." The only option I can think of that has even a remote possibility of avoiding catastrophe is the Northern Ireland option. We link our standing down and withdrawing to political negotiations among the Coalition, the various Iraqi factions, and the insurgents. Those insurgents who have refused to join the political process because of the occupation become neutrals, or even allies, of the government. This splits the insurgency, removes a great deal of the popular support that insurgents depend on, and leaves the hard core opposition and the foreign jihadis as hunted men, even by their former comrades.
There is not military victory possible, only a political solution. Our continuing presence makes that political solution impossible. We need to pull out of Iraq, not in order to leave the Iraqi government fighting the same war with fewer resources, but as a tool to help end the civil war, which would make the Iraqis' war against foreign jihadists relatively easy for them to win on their own.
joe | October 19, 2006, 6:35pm | #
Yes, I've posted these ideas before, rob.
Neither you nor anyone else has been able to offer any reasons why it can't work. Except that, since I'm not working from your preferred ideology, I can't possibly be right.
"Of course, joe and his pals don't even have enlightened self-interest going for them - they think Kosovo was a brilliant idea because it was Clinton's violation of international law and the UN charter rather than a Republican's."
Kosovo was a good idea because:
1. the military mission was aimed at stopping a military action - Operation Horseshoe, the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo by Serbian military and militias.
2. the mission was sufficiently circumscribed that we had an excellent chance of achieving it.
3. we had locals on our side, as we did in Afghanistan, on both the political and military end of things, allowing for genuine security in the liberated areas and the establishment of a political order that the public considered legitimate.
4. the communities we ended up patrolling and defending were genuinely supportive of us, and of the operation.
But, hey, if it makes you feel better to tell yourself that I don't have realistic ideas about what to do now, or that I base my beliefs purely on partisanship, have at it. It's been a pretty rough couple of years for you, politically, so you should take your relief where you find it.
joe | October 20, 2006, 9:34am | #
Josh,
"For a guy who's spent the last three years knocking down strawmen about how easy the neocons predicted Iraq would be, this seems like a pretty flippant remark."
I deserved that. That was a poorly-written sentence, and expresses much more confidence than I actually feel. As I wrote at the beginning of that post, I think the Northern Ireland option is "The only option I can think of that has even a remote possibility of avoiding catastrophe."
I don't have a great deal of confidence that such a plan would succeed in bringing about a political settlement comparable to that in Northern Ireland. However, if such a settlement were reached, I am confident that the Iraqis would have little difficulty putting an end to the jihadist terror campaign.
Andrew, "...and "joe", who gets his scripts from them."
First, I was criticizing this war when a majority of Democratic Senators voted to authorize it, and haven't let up since.
Second, Goldberg is still not "anti-war" in any meaningful sense, and is still well to the right of most Democrats, who are calling for a withdrawal of one form or another.
Third, I just put forth an Iraq proposal that zero (0) Democratic politicians have been talking about. You, on the other hand, have yet to come up with an original thought on the matter. Project much?
Chad, "There can be no doubt that Iraq has a reconstituted nuclear weapons program."
"Saddam Hussein kicked the inspectors out."
"War is not inevitable."
"The commanders on the ground tell me that they have enough troops to complete the mission."
Chalupa,
"Maybe those who opposed the war from the left were foolish..."
Too simplistic. While there was really only one anti-war argument from the right - the one shared by the odd triple of Justin Raimondo, Brent Scowcroft and Pat Buchanan - there were many different arguments from the left. ANSWER's position was not Howard Dean's.
joe | October 20, 2006, 10:31am | #
I was never for the war, Andrew. The archives are readily available - shall we go back to 2002/2003 and take a look? I'm game, how about you?
"it was Bush-bashing"
Yes, the demonstrable dishonesty, irresponsibility, and incompetance that have always characterized the Bush administration was one of the largest reasons why I opposed their invasion of Iraq. Not that you'd have any way of knowing, but having your judgement vindicated on such an important question feels good.
"Curiously, you thought Gore-Lieberman would have done a good job of it"...no, not really, if "it" refers to waging the same type of war in the same manner. They would have done so more competantly, but there were much larger problems with this war than its execution. As I've explained.
"Your "original" thoughts are just a synopsis of DNC straddles - summits and partial withdrawls and timetables..." Your incapacity to recognize the differences among ideas that aren't your own does not mean those ideas are all the same. It just means you are either unable to unwilling to honestely consider what is being discussed.
"how does that keep 60 guys from dying next month?" It doesn't. This war has screwed us so badly that we're forced to accept such costs for the time being, in order to avoid even larger problems. Thanks, hawks!
"The position of the Democratic Party..." It's fallacious to claim that there is a position of the Democratic Party. They are not the Republicans, and thus, do not march in lockstep on this or most other issues.
"...is that their self-identifying base (to their credit) opposed the war from before it began..." Yes, we did. My offer to go into archives still stands. You up for it?
"...but their leadership caucus has followed in the wake of the Administration." Ted Kennedy didn't, Evan Bayh did. Nancy Pelosi didn't, Dick Gephardt did. And, of course, John Kerry tried to chart a middle course.
"As for that base joe - you may speak TO them...but you don't speak FOR them."
I can only speak for myself.
ChrisO | October 20, 2006, 11:44am | #
"...and seemed by all accounts to have an active WMD program." Not by the accounts of the people we sent to determine whether he had such a program. They reported back that he didn't appear to have one.
That's a bunch of post-hocery, joe. What there was before the war was uncomfortable uncertainty on that question. Saddam's own actions were highly suspicious (he was clearly bluffing to make folks think he had WMDs), and three different U.S. administrations, as well as most major foreign intelligence services, suspected that Iraq had an active WMD program. Bush had to make a tough choice based on incomplete, but not inconsiderable, intelligence. I personally don't think he can be faulted for making the choice that he did, based on the info that he had available. Now what came after the war, *that* can be laid at Bush's feet.
"It can be said with great certainty that the Saddam Hussein regime no longer poses a WMD threat to the world." That could have been said by the Spring of 2003 without a single drop of blood being spilled. The administration began this war when they did in order to get it started before that information became widely known.
Joe, that's just a bunch of conspiracy-theory bullshit, and I expect better of you. Without Russian and Chinese cooperation, we had little effective hope of reigning in Saddam through diplomatic means. The sanctions regime was already crumbling. We had no leverage.
"I would argue that post-Hussein Iraq was doomed to civil war regardless of how he was dethroned." Not all conflict has to become civil war and ethnic cleansing. Everyone points to Yugoslavia, but remember, there was a fanatical nationalist tyrant who was determined to stoke ethnic conflict in order to expand his, and his nation's, power. When you see a war, blame the politicians, not the people.
The problem is, Yugoslavia is *exactly* on point and you don't want to see it. Politicians are rarely anything but a reflection of the people they govern, for good and bad. Both states were cobbled together by outside powers at about the same time, albeit not in exactly similar ways. Such fake states are almost universally doomed to failure because they don't reflect longstanding cultural distinctions/boundaries. The '90s bloodbath there wasn't imposed from above. If anything, it bubbled up from the bottom. Milosevic encouraged it, but I think he leapt on a bandwagon that was already moving.
Nothing is inevitable, I suppose, but I don't think it's a reach to say that such fake states can only be kept together by an iron fist. The real question is whether we want to be/have the balls to be that iron fist. I don't think so. If Iraqis want to fight it out amongst themselves, I don't think we can prevent it--certainly not by the half-measures the Bush Administration has taken.
"Problem is, I see no pleasant alternatives." The only option I can think of that has even a remote possibility of avoiding catastrophe is the Northern Ireland option.
Ulster is a tiny pissing match compared to Iraq, and it took 80 years for that shit to wind down to its current whimper. I suspect Euro-atheism probably had more to do with the end of "the troubles" than anything else. When the young people are mostly atheists and the churches half-empty on Sunday, who cares about a bunch of ancient Catholic/Anglican bullshit? I don't think Tony Blair magically made it all end with a bunch of clever political moves.
There is not military victory possible, only a political solution. Our continuing presence makes that political solution impossible. We need to pull out of Iraq, not in order to leave the Iraqi government fighting the same war with fewer resources, but as a tool to help end the civil war, which would make the Iraqis' war against foreign jihadists relatively easy for them to win on their own.
I think you're engaging in wishful thinking here, joe. Not everybody in Iraq wants a partition, but from what I read recently, the "Al Qaeda in Iraq" stuff is mostly history, and what you have now is largely undercover Iranian intervention on the side of the Shi'ite militias, which are supported by sections of the current government. They are playing a waiting game--once we leave, the battle for Iraq starts. It would generations of harsh U.S. occupation to alter the reality of what is about to occur in Iraq. We *will* mostly pull out of Iraq--I'm guessing as a Bush 'October Surprise' in 2008, and that's when things get interesting (in a sad way).
rob | October 20, 2006, 11:56am | #
"No, it's not the argument he's making. It's the mindset that allowed him to believe all the incredibly weak arguments and shoddy evidence that were put forth before the war." - joe
You seem to think that this somehow excuses your nonsensical attack, but I can't see why. If it's not the argument he's making, it's just the mindset you attribute to him. Stop arguing with the libertarian in your head, joe.
"'...and seemed by all accounts to have an active WMD program.' Not by the accounts of the people we sent to determine whether he had such a program. They reported back that he didn't appear to have one." - joe
Uh, no. They reported back that they couldn't tell if he had one or not because the Baathist regime wouldn't fully cooperate with inspections.
"'It can be said with great certainty that the Saddam Hussein regime no longer poses a WMD threat to the world.' [1] That could have been said by the Spring of 2003 without a single drop of blood being spilled. [2] The administration began this war when they did in order to get it started before that information became widely known." - joe
Again, no. 1) Not true, because Saddam's Baathist regime would not comply with inspectors. 2) Not true, because the administration went to war after getting the authority to do so via a Congressional resolution with bi-partisan support. You can read the resolution here:
www.c-span.org/resources/pdf/hjres114.pdf
Just a little further FYI on the votes for the resolution: 81 of the 208 Democrats supported the resolution in the House of Representatives and 19 of 44 Democrats in the Senate - including Kerry and Edwards, the Democratic Party's presidential campaign ticket.
"'I would argue that post-Hussein Iraq was doomed to civil war regardless of how he was dethroned.' Not all conflict has to become civil war and ethnic cleansing. Everyone points to Yugoslavia, but remember, there was a fanatical nationalist tyrant who was determined to stoke ethnic conflict in order to expand his, and his nation's, power."
Yugoslavia IS a perfect example, joe. Just like in Iraq, as you point out, there was "a fanatical nationalist tyrant who was determined to stoke ethnic conflict in order to expand his, and his nation's, power."
The primary difference being, of course, that Hussein had already actually tried to expand his and his nation's power by conquering another country (Kuwait). You've made a great case for why intervening in Yugoslavia made no sense and intervening in Iraq was just finishing off a megalomaniac who was still routinely shooting at U.S. aircraft enforcing the no-fly zone. Shooting yourself in the foot hurts, doesn't it?
"Same as in Iraq, When you see a war, blame the politicians, not the people." - joe
With platitudes like that, I can't believe you actually support the Democrats. Of course, you only mean that when you're referring to wars during Republican administrations. At least libertarian
