Accountability
In today's Times, David Brooks has a column entitled "Winning in Iraq." You have to be kidding me. In it, he proposes a massive troop build-up in Iraq to create "safe havens" in which to reconstruct the country and win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese, er, I mean Iraqis. But why should we listen to a guy who has been wrong so many times about so much, when it comes to the war? (Brooks says that this strategy has worked in the past--for the Brits in Malaya in the 1950s. Hmm. That's probably a viable analogy . . .) And doesn't the same Bill O'Reilly "shut up" go far all the war hawks, as Harold Meyerson argues in this recent piece?
Meyerson's conclusion:
The point here is not just that the pundits’ predictions were wrong -- or, in the case, of Friedman, right, but he chose to ignore them -- or their post-facto justifications pathetic. The point is that in the sway of ideology, or historical imperative, or loyalty to the administration’s hawks, they misrepresented supposition as fact, excused the misconduct of administration officials, and neglected to consider the predictable consequences of the war they promoted. If we truly lived in the culture of consequences that conservatives profess to support, the role of these pundits in our national conversation would be greatly, and justly, diminished.
I'm just tired of hearing these guys--Kristol, Friedman, Krauthammer, Brooks. (Meyerson also mentions Hitchens--but really, hasn't that guy just lost his mind?) They sold this war, and now they've been making excuses for it for years. But as Iraq drifts into a civil war, any person with a semblance of human decency would stop already. Editors would say, "Look, we can't run this crap any more."
While I'm at it, the Democrats in Washington have some work to do, too. Frank Rich makes the excellent point that:
As another politician from the Vietnam era, Gary Hart, observed last week, the Democrats are too cowardly to admit they made a mistake three years ago, when fear of midterm elections drove them to surrender to the administration's rushed and manipulative Iraq-war sales pitch. So now they are compounding the original error as the same hucksters frantically try to repackage the old damaged goods.
Indeed--"too cowardly to admit they made a mistake." The irony here is that they made the mistake because they were cowardly then, too.
At this point, the only folks with credibility on this war are those who didn't buy the snake oil in the first place. And it doesn't matter why you bought the snake oil.
Mid-day update: Wolcott has a great post on the chickenhawks.
posted by Number Three @ 6:40 AM
2 Comments:
In spite of the foregoing, you have to agree that a general consensus exists, both conservative and liberal, that the war is regrettable. Regardless, we entered it, and that can't be changed. I don't agree with the commentator, but doesn't it seem like withdrawing troops now, while we're up to our bootstraps in Iraqi sand, will merely facilitate a civil war?
By the by, if Saddam Hussein was the only man standing in the way of civil war, can you really be so eager to say that one evil outweighs the other? If you could choose, wouldn't you be choosing from imponderables-- quality of life versus quantity of lives? While I'm no proponent of bloodshed, it seems to me that if Iraqi civil war had erupted in a vacuum, absent foreign involvment, both sides of the ideological spectrum would have viewed it as a positive development. Obviously, then, it cannot be the "consequence," civil war, that is objectionable. Our objection must be the cost of producing that war. Framed in those terms, the societal debate would be more useful.
Finally, as an aside, and again with the disclaimer that I am not a bloodthirsty maniac, doesn't history suggest that civil war is integral to the forging (or ongoing evolution, if you will) of national character?
I can't find anything concrete to respond to in the CL comment. It seems like one long non sequitur. Sure, people have been wrong about things in the past. And, in general, being terribly wrong about something usually does deprive one of a platform for quite a time. I can't think of a single proponent of old-fashioned welfare programs who could get on tv today, for example. CL mentions Sargent Shriver (?); but besides being dead (?), even if he were alive (?), I don't think he'd be a member of the Fox News Sunday roundtable every week, like Kristol. Even if the issue were welfare.
I've been wrong about things before, sure. But I'm not a policy-maker, and I'm not a talking head. And I'm not out trying to convince people to support a particular policy, like the rightwing pundits were--and are.
Why is American Beauty relevant here? Because I liked it, and CL didn't, so I'm the one who's wrong? Maybe I'm wrong about that one movie . . . but the Iraq War is not a film review.
Neither is it some book on World War III, written in 1979. Huh?
Think about this: Paul Wolfowitz said the war would cost $ 2 B, maybe even pay for itself with oil revenue. He objected to General Shinseki's statement that occupying Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops. The V.P. said that we would be greeted with roses as liberators. The president declared "Mission Accomplished" in May (?) 2003, the end of major combat operations. Recently, the V.P. said that the insurgency is in its "last throes."
We've heard time and again that we're turning the corner, that there's light at the end of tunnel. I've heard every conservative pundit say that things in Iraq are better than reported, and that we're making progress. But things are worse in terms of electricity, security, etc.
So what I see is, on one side, conservative talking heads saying "everything is going in the right direction," and, on the other, every objective indicator pointing in the other direction. In my view, it's time for the conservative pundits to shut up. They're either stupid or purposively lying (again, in my view).
As for Steph's comments, I'm not sure that a civil war at this point serves the cause of History. One of the basic lessons of statecraft seems to be a version of the serenity prayer: know what you can do and what you can't do, and then temporize with the problems that you can't deal with. Containment is a version of the latter phenomenon. Btw, I remember an email b/w CL and me before the war, in which I said that Saddam was contained, and thus the war was a bad idea, and he said that Saddam couldn't be trusted, that he was a madman, etc. It turns out that both of us were wrong. Saddam was much more contained than I thought; he didn't have any weapons of mass destruction, so he wasn't contained because he wasn't much of a threat to be contained. But CL was even more wrong; he thought Saddam was something of a threat, even to the U.S.
The situation in Iraq was one where we should have temporized, in the sense of waiting for things to change, hopefully for the better. (Btw, this is really what we're doing in North Korea and Iran, and I don't hear credible calls for another strategy.) Saddam wasn't going to live forever. What would have happened when he died? We'll never know now.
So I don't buy the Saddam as the one standing b/w Iraqis and a civil war is equivalent to the situation we're in now. For one thing, the U.S. wasn't responsible for Saddam's regime; we weren't responsible for his acts (with the possible exception of the Shia and Kurds killed in 1991). But we are responsible for the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed in this war (the WP puts the figure at 20,000; if I had to guess, the real figure is higher). We are responsible for Abu Ghraib, which appears to have been more than a few bad apples. And so on. Lots of bad things happen in the world--Darfur, the Soviet gulags, the Cultural Revolution, etc. We can't do much about those things, most of the time. But we can try not to make things worse by our actions.
There's also something to say for self-help. If the Iraqi people had rebelled, that might have been a positive development. But that isn't what happened.
Civil wars don't always move the ball forward. The Russian Revolution, for example, and the civil war that followed, was just a colossal disaster for the people of the Russian empire and, eventually, all of eastern Europe. The Chinese people have suffered for a very long time under the results of their civil war. A civil war can end in a better state of affairs, or a worse.
Who knows what will happen? I'm not predicting the worst-case scenario, although I think a civil war is very probable. But I'm tired of hearing the crap spewed out by rightwingers on the Iraq war. They've lost any credibility they should have, with reasonable people.
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