David Rieff Responds II
David has sent me the following post. But first, let me weigh in just briefly on the progress debate.The most important point for me is how it intersects with Dan K's (and others') point about how folks like me may have let hope triumph over rational expectations in the run-up to Iraq, which in turn rests on deeper attitudes of optimism and pessimism in looking at the present and imagining the future. To move out of the purely theoretical realm here, this debate has two very concrete applications: 1) the American people respond far better to optimism than pessimism (remember Carter's malaise followed by Reagan's "It's morning in America"?); but 2)hoping for the best cannot mean not accepting and preparing for the possibility of the worst. In Iraq, fully internalizing that second point might well, as Dan K suggests, have led many of us (or at least me) to reach a different judgment. That is also what I think David is concerned about, but judge for yourselves.
"I'm sorry to have rekindled Anne-Marie's unpleasant memories of her leftist interlocutors at Harvard Law. I do not consider myself a leftist, though biographically speaking I suppose that I did imbibe some of the gloomier analyses of the Frankfurt School with my mother's milk. But the point I was trying to make about progress was not Marxist at all. Instead, it was to claim that historical pessimism is not incompatible with liberalism, or, more precisely, that one can practice liberal politics without believing there is much chance things will work out very well for our civilization. To subscribe to a Greek or cyclical view of history (or,if Professor Ober prefers, a Thucidydean view) is not to say progress is impossible. Anne-Marie has erected a straw man here.But it is to say that progress, like civilizations, wax and wane, are impermanent, in short, are mortal.
Kierkegaard said that life must be lived prospectively but can only be
understood retrospectively. If that's right, and surely it is, then one can act on behalf of liberal ideals and principles even if one suspects that in the long run things will not work out. Is this gloomy? Sure. But illiberal? I hardly think so. Having said all that, I don't know that Anne-Marie and my differences on this point are all that important, and if she prefers to think of me as a realist (though I would hope in Reinhold Niebuhr's sense, not Henry
Kissinger's) rather than a liberal, that need not further detain us.
In fact, like Anne-Marie, I too think the real issue is the distinction between so-called humanitarian intervention and democracy promotion, whether by moral suasion, economic and political pressure, or force of arms. Anne-Marie mischaracterizes my argument. I do not
claim that humanitarian interventions always make matters worse.
Having been in Rwanda while the genocide was still going on and having been in Freetown when the British squaddies arrived, I know full well that an intervention can do a great deal of good and non-intervention can do a great deal of harm.What worries me is the way in which such exceptional humanitarian interventions (and I applaud the threshold Anne-Marie sets in her post, and, of course, defer to her on the legal issues about which I am simply not competent enough to have the right to an
opinion) seem to have been conflated with democracy promotion not only in the minds of neo-conservatives but liberals. Ivo Daalder's arguments both on `America Abroad' and in his other writings provide a good example of this conflation, it seems to me.
It is one thing to intervene in exceptional cases to stop an ongoing genocide. I support that every bit as much as Anne-Marie does. But it is quite another to try to impose democracy by force or even economic sanctions. There, in my view, interventionists, whether neo-conservative or liberal, risk falling into the trap, if they haven't already, of what Niebuhr once bitterly described as the American illusion that we can be "tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection."
David's absolutely right, and so is Niebuhr.
Ann-Marie talks of optimism and pessimism. As a marketing strategy, sure, optimism will always trump pessimism in the minds of Americans. But as a way of understanding one's options in foreign policy, both are utterly mistaken.
As the truism goes, hope is not a plan, and like many truisms it has quite a bit of truth in it. One cannot "hope" that Bush/Iraq might succeed. One must have a rational, coldly-calculated assessment of the probability. Now, had Ann-Marie actually sat down and done that, she never would have reason to bring up her "hope" for the best right now. To be blunt: You don't risk the lives of your neighbor's children based on your hopes. You take risks, especially mortal ones, based on reason.
That's not the Powell doctrine open to the give and take of serious debate, that's Moral Behavior 101. Reason must always trump hope and other emotions when making the decision to wage war.
Of course, pessimism is also a kind of hope, the negative kind, the a priori judgment that thngs can never work for the best no matter what. That, too, is unrealistic and needs to be ignored when considering foreign policy.
Now, while foreign affairs, international relations, and similar concerns are famously resistant to formal quantitative analyses, sensible decisions are often not that difficult to reach. And there is much to help us in both simple and wrenchingly difficult decisions, among them:
1. There are thousands of years of human history over which we can search for analogs - Thucydides is just one.
2. There is the consensus of the full spectrum of informed, disinterested, contemporary opinion. One of the mistakes made in the run up to war was that liberal hawks joined their conservative colleagues in refusing to entertain seriously the very serious and carefully considered objections of those they branded as liberals or appeasers and therefore hors de combat of the Iraq debate. As a result, the number of genuine options available pre-March 2003 was artificially constrained (as the neocons in the Bush administration hoped they would be).
3. There is the extensive personal experience of those involved in earlier administrations. Again, many of those - Powell, Scowcroft, Schlesinger, Sorenson, and so on - were simply brushed aside. As Cheney said in a different context, "Now, it's our turn." Well, it isn't. You never send my child into harm's way so that a foolish, immature men like Cheney can have a "fair chance"to play at war with the big boys.
What so many liberal hawks fell for in re: Iraq was the seductive notion that "we" could do good, rather than prevent a terrible evil from getting far worse. Oh, the evil that has resulted from good people trying to make the world a better place!
Ann-Marie, the best way to "do good in the world" is to make *yourself* better, it is a personal struggle that will trigger this kind of progressivism, the growth you seek.
But in the aggregate, neither the US nor anyone else can force this kind of progress, especially at gunpoint. One cannot "inflict" democracy, except in the rarest of circumstances, circumstances that were in no way applicable to Iraq.
Finally, I note, A-M, that this is a lesson that you needed to learn but most of the world did not - most of us knew that Bush/Iraq was an inevitable catastrophe but you thought otherwise. Why? You're a smart person, surely you knew better. What caused this temporary lapse of judgment?
This is not asked accusingly, but rather in an almost existential fashion. I cannot for the life of me understand what happened to the professional thinkers and ponderers in the US during 2002/2003. How they could be so obviously, spectacularly mistaken?
I suspect I will spend the rest of my life trying to understand that period. It was, without a doubt the weirdest and most dismaying time American history I have lived through. And that includes the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Reagan, the Clinton impeachment, the stolen 2000 election, and 9/11. I never want to endure anything like 2002/2003 again, and so I am compelled to ask, why did you think it could work? How did you arrive at your decision? Did you study carefully the arguments of those against the war? What caused you to dismiss them?
November 8, 2005 6:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
hoping for the best cannot mean not accepting and preparing for the possibility of the worst. In Iraq, fully internalizing that second point might well, as Dan K suggests, have led many of us (or at least me) to reach a different judgment.
The liberal dove-hawk debate about Iraq is occuring at two separate levels precisely because there are profound ideological differences between doves and hawks.
I read Dan's post, and the first half (the trash analogy) is spot on: part of the debate about Iraq must focus on the specific facts and misrepresentations that led the US to war - including the Senate Democrats and liberal hawks. The factual issues regarding Iraq cannot be ignored: WMD, inspections, sanctions, Saddam, terrorism, etc.
And I think at this time most liberal hawks agree with the doves that, as of mid-February 2003, Iraq was a bad idea. But the reason we keep coming back to the more abstract debates about intervention is that hawks and doves want to draw two very different conclusions about the debacle.
Hawks want to conclude that Iraq merely shows that poorly executed and administered unilateral interventions are bad, but that many other interventions could be good in the future. Some hawks even try to argue that THIS intervention could have been successful, had it been done competently and multilaterally.
Doves, by contrast, want to conclude that Iraq proves ALL interventions (or nearly all) are bad.
And that is a conclusion that hawks will never agree to. For most hawks, such a conclusion is part of the "it's a Halliburton plot to steal the oil" fringe idiocy: wrong, foolish, naive, conspiratorial, and completely discrediting. It's the left-wing equivalent of UN black helicopters and restore-the-gold-standard wingnuttery.
Further, because hawks think that some interventions may be good, the distortion of intelligence was critical for them because it changed the calculus for intervention from No to Yes. As such, based on the publicly available information, hawk support for the Administration was appropriate in August 2002 because Bush needed to be able to bluff or intimidate Saddam into restarting inspections. I suspect most liberal hawks have trouble with their support for the war only when they think back to Feb-March 2003, after the truth of Saddam's lack of WMD was exposed. Then, the decision was much tougher - and Bush's lies and deception all the more central to the problem.
For doves, by contrast, these narrow considerations of fact were never an issue: intervention should have been opposed in August 2002 and in March 2003 and today as well. Doves seem to regard the factual questions as so much nitpicking because those facts were largely unimportant to their positions.
So we continue to have debates about Iraq on both levels: the factual and the theoretical, and the former is a screen for the latter because doves want to use Iraq to prove a general theoretical truth, while hawks want to distingush it because of the specific facts.
As a last observation, the truest argument turns out to have been incompetence: "they're a bunch of idiots and they screw everything up". And, strangely, that's an argument that the usual hawk-and-dove combatants try to avoid. Because it implies that this intervention COULD have been conducted more successfully - threatening the dove theory - but also that trusting Bush with anything so important was madness - threatening the hawk theory. As John Kerry said, "I didn't expect him to fuck it up!"November 8, 2005 7:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Are we liberals so far gone that we cannot talk optimistically about diplomacy and peace to the American people?
November 8, 2005 7:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
I cannot for the life of me understand what happened to the professional thinkers and ponderers in the US during 2002/2003. Tristero
Of course you can. They're all Wannabee Players, and "regime change" in Iraq was the only Game in town.
November 8, 2005 7:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
Silent E, Good point. I would argue that both positions are foolish, and I think in a more sophisticated way, that is what Rieff is saying. Ultimately, each situation needs to be evaluated on its own, from a study of all the avaliable information and options.
However, I would also argue that attempts to impose democracy by force have historically failed far more often than they've succeeded. I would also argue that the unplanned contingencies of the havoc of war are so great, and usually so awful, that military intervention in another country should be considered, a priori, the least desirable option.
*Never* intervene? No, but it is never desirable. And in the case of Bush/Iraq, it was first and foremost illegal and immoral to do so. There was no intellectually defensible case for a humanitarian intervention that would single out Saddam's regime over those, say, in Zimbabwe or in many of the Stans.
November 8, 2005 7:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen,
Partly true, yes. Entirely true? I doubt it. I honestly don't think that all the liberal hawks, or even most of them, are so utterly callous or ignorant of what war does as to put their understandable opportunism first, above violations of international law and morality, not to mention the needless death and carnage.
It doesn't seem likely to me as the only or even main reason they were willing to support the war, even with the rationalizations they surely employed, that a "little death" equals less death later, and other strategies.
November 8, 2005 7:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
most of us knew that Bush/Iraq was an inevitable catastrophe but you thought otherwise
This is not asked accusingly, but rather in an almost existential fashion. I cannot for the life of me understand what happened to the professional thinkers and ponderers in the US during 2002/2003. How they could be so obviously, spectacularly mistaken?
tristero, why did you "know" it? And when? If you reject intervention a priori, then there's no hope of a debate. In that case, the gulf between liberal hawks and doves is much greater than the gulf between liberal hawks and conservatives - at least conservatives agree that intervention is an option and merely disagree on the facts.
Did you KNOW there were no WMD? How did you know that, when most Western intelligence services thought otherwise before February 2003? Did you KNOW that all interventions are always bad - including Afghanistan and Kosovo? Did you KNOW that this was just another conspiratorial oil grab? Did you KNOW that Bush was lying because election-thieving Republicans can never be trusted for anything? Because if those are the sources of your knowledge, well, then theres no decision rule - no discriminator to tell the good cases from the bad. And then, really, the anti-war left becomes a stopped clock answering "Don't do it" whenever the intervention question arises.
Or do you mean that you knew it was a catastrophe only in March 2003, after the lack of WMD was exposed? Finally, when you say "most of us", most of who? Most Americans supported the invasion, after all.
November 8, 2005 7:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
1. TRUST - In March 2003, Liberal hawk pundits trusted that when Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and Powell (especially Powell) said "we've still got really good evidence of weapons, but its too secret to show it to anyone," they were telling the truth. Maybe not about nukes, but about bio and chem weapons.
2. BELIEF - That if Saddam were left to himself, even if he didn't have WMD, he'd get them eventually. The French and the Russians would subvert the sanctions, end the inspections, and let Saddam out of his cage. And then Saddam would go back to building his nuclear weapons.
3. CHANGE - Containing Saddam and supporting the embargo were terrible policies that constrained US efforts in the M.E. Yet as long as Saddam was there, we couldn't abandon our Saudi bases and we couldn't deal with Syria or Iran because we needed them to contain Saddam.
4. LAST CHANCE - We needed to do something about Saddam eventually, and this was the opportunity. Of course, we should have ignored him in 2002 instead of beating the war drums, but Bush foolishly made that choice and there was no turning back. The WMD arguments were weak at best, but if we didn't do it in March 2003 after all the sabre rattling and build-up, Saddam would win this round and we'd never be able to go back and do it again.
I think 2 and 4 are the big ones.
November 8, 2005 7:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen's point is excellent. Of course Tristero you are right to qualify it; I am sure many of the liberal war hawk pundits (amply on display at TPM Cafe) were not consciously advancing themselves by buying into the Iraq set-up; when you feed off government and government sponsored academia as these fellows do, it is a way of life to start with the given premises and then work from there. It is really amusing to see Slaughter set up the Rieff strawman and argue how his cyclical view of history prevents him from having her liberal optimism that enabled her to support Iraq. "After all think of Rwanda." (The current liberal warhawks who use this example repetitively to justify military/imperial adventures like Iraq were notably quiet when Rwanda was occurring. Remember they then had the ear of the Clinton administration.) What this prevents of course is any consideration of how limited the military option is; or dealing with how "optimism on human progress" and determination not to permit Rwanda recur morphs into support for an Iraq abomination. Instead of playing their silly strawman games it would be great if they dealt with the phenomenon of the very thoughtful "Daalder/Ikenberry/Slaughter" grouping following the lemmings to the edge of the cliff and then spending the next few years justifying a failed mindset, instead of dealing with the serious problems therein.
November 8, 2005 8:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
Silent E: "Did you KNOW there were no WMD? How did you know that, when most Western intelligence services thought otherwise before February 2003? Did you KNOW that all interventions are always bad - including Afghanistan and Kosovo? Did you KNOW that this was just another conspiratorial oil grab? Did you KNOW that Bush was lying because election-thieving Republicans can never be trusted for anything? Because if those are the sources of your knowledge, well, then theres no decision rule - no discriminator to tell the good cases from the bad. And then, really, the anti-war left becomes a stopped clock answering "Don't do it" whenever the intervention question arises."
I'm not Tristero, but having shared his bewilderment back in 2003, I thought I'd respond anyways. I did not claim to "know" any of the things you suggest. Moreover, I think that imagining that the only possible objections to the war involved e.g. being against intervention per se, or thinking it was "another conspiratorial oil grab", is exactly the sort of thinking that Tristero was talking about -- in which the serious objections of serious people are brushed aside in favor of straw men.
I did not support the war for a number of reasons. First, I think that the burden is always on supporters of a war to justify it, both because wars are awful and because they tend to be destabilizing, and to have huge unanticipated consequences, often bad. (And if anyone feels like responding, but the Middle East is dreadful anyways, so how bad can destabilizing it be?, I would reply: very bad. Use your imagination.)
Second, I saw absolutely no reason to think that Saddam Hussein had any significant connection to al Qaeda, and a lot of reasons to be skeptical on this point. The main ones are (a) that they are ideological opposites, and (b) that Saddam was a paranoid control freak, and al Qaeda is uncontrollable. I therefore saw the Iraq war as a huge distraction from what I took to be the task at hand, namely al Qaeda.
Third, I thought that there were WMD until sometime around Jan. 2003, when it became clear that Blix wasn't finding any. I thought: it would be very much in the Bush administration's interest for him to find some. Feeding him information would also allow us to test our intelligence, on the basis of which we were considering going to war. I had to believe that we were telling Blix where to look, therefore, and when he didn't find anything, I concluded that our intel was not nearly as good as the administration was saying.
Fourth, I did not think that the fact of Saddam having WMD was enough to show that we should go to war, especially if the WMD in question did not include nuclear weapons. He did not have the capacity to threaten us with it. He had no delivery systems remotely capable of hitting us. Having spent my formative years with many more WMDs in the hands of a hateful country trained at our cities, I did not think that Saddam's mere possession of them (assuming he did) meant war. War is serious business and has serious consequences, and you need much more detailed reasons than that.
Fifth, it was absolutely clear that invading Iraq was a very risky thing to do. It risked lives, of course, but also dreadful things like a regional war. For this reason I thought that it would be irresponsible to invade Iraq if we were not going to do a very good job keeping these things from happening. Since the Bush administration had already not done a good job with the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan, I saw no reason at all for confidence here.
Sixth, I also think that when international opinion is clearly against a war, that raises the bar that the case for war has to meet. This is so for lots of reasons, most obviously because straining our relationships with others imposes direct costs on cooperation on other fronts, including the fight against al Qaeda.
I do not oppose intervention per se. I supported the first Gulf War, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, and would have supported intervening in Rwanda. I don't have any of the idiotic views Silent E describes. That Silent E can't think of any others is as good an illustration of Tristero's basic point as I can imagine.
November 8, 2005 8:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
Silent E:
I really think your questions are besides the point. The real question is this: How did the liberal hawks get it so wrong? Nevertheless, I will answer your questions as I've answered similar ones. To follow up over what I assume will be your further questions, please go to my blog and to Hullabaloo where you will find most them already discussed, and at great length and detail.
Then, I'd like you to answer my questions above, please. After all, I was right in my assessment. The liberal hawks were wrong and it is they who have to answer questions about their arrogance and faulty reasoning, not me and other responsible critics of the Bush/Iraq war.
Why did I know? I knew because if Bush/Iraq were to succeed everything that I knew about how the world works would have to be wrong. I sincerely doubted that was possible. Among other things, it required that I would have to seriously entertain other crackpot ideas, like Lemay's suggestion to attack Cuba and the Soviet Union during the Missile Crisis, suggestions quickly rejected by a far more sensible Kennedy. I also knew because of the strange way Bush was pushing the invasion, with a sense of urgency that clearly was manufactured as no one seriously suggested Saddam was in cahoots with al Qaeda regarding 9/11. It was unlike anything I had ever encountered.
When did I know? From early 2002, when Bush/Iraq started to get floated around, I knew that it was an idea that should have been greeted with ridicule and derision. I was horrified to see that by late spring/early summer, the invasion of Iraq was not only being treated as a serious notion, but as a fait accompli by Bush that would happen regardless of whether the US Congress went along, or the UN. (Scowcroft's op-ed was in response to that perception of inevitability that Bush projected.)
I don't reject intervention a priori but, as mentioned, a priori, it's usually a rotten idea. I reject the notion that military intervention is ever a desirable option. It may be the only option. That is another issue.
Yes, I absolutely knew there was no evidence of nuclear wmd. I knew this because I carefully studied the original available public evidence - testimonies and papers - and the way in which that evidence was presented. I believe I even said so before the war began on my blog. (Sorry, I don't have time to search for it. If it's necessary that I "prove" my knowledge prior to the war, I'll go look for it, but I hope you will trust that I am being as honest as I can be and that my recollection is fairly good.)
Regarding bio/chem wmd, I was pretty sure they had something, based upon studying the testimony of one of three experts to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. That is because he mentioned specific places and dates - the other two experts were entirely too vague to conclude anything from their testimony. In looking at that testimony after the war, however, I recognized that his testimony had been subtly worded as to conceal the fact he didn't quite know if these weapons still existed. But I did believe he possessed some bio/chem.
In other words, I looked at all the available publci evidence I could get my hands on and concluded that Saddam was no threat to the US and did not posess the capability of launching a serious wmd assault anywhere. I also concluded that I didn't need anyone, least of all men the caliber of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, to tell me how awful Saddam was. I knew that back when Rumsfeld was shaking the man's hand!
Afghanistan has been a disaster, as I knew it would be. The US failed at their main mission, namely to capture bin Laden, al Zawahiri, and Omar. Toppling the Taliban was not the reason to invade Afghanistan. Grabbing the 9/11 killers was. The US failed. I'll concede this much: it's a marginally better place for some Afghans than it was before the American invasion, but that is saying next to nothing as it is marginally worse for other Afghans before the invasion.
Important: I also knew that the invasion of Afghanistan was inevitable. No administration would have acted otherwise. That didn't make it a sensible idea, just an unavoidable one. And as usual even after only some 9 months of presidency, Bush made a mess of it.
As I knew he would. After all, I knew it was the negligence of his administration that permitted 9/11 to slip past the FBI, CIA, et al. And, like Richard Clarke, I understood that on 9/11. Why did I know , since I don't have security clearance? Because it stands to reason they were negligent. A plot that complicated can't be hidden that well, and it wasn't. That's not leftist paranoia about The Man, just plain commonsense, which was in short supply on 9/11 and in the months afterwards.
I don't know enough about Kosovo to comment. I don't think Bush/Iraq was a conspiratorial oil grab. In fact, I have no idea what it was about, other than Bush believes God told him to invade and his advisers, for many, many reasons including oil, agreed. (Not that Bush is insane, rather he's somewhat... challenged when it comes to the exercise of reason and relies on his gut, or in this case his God.)
True, election-thieving Republicans can't be trusted. You think they can? Would please give three examples? Non-election-thieving Republicans are a different story.
My sources for what strikes you, wrongly, as knee-jerk leftism and strikes George Packer foolishly as "clairvoyance" and "second-rate thinking" is a combination of things that have informed my worldview. Very little is that unusual, as I said, most of the world came to the same conclusion I did long before the invasion.
One rather unusual bit of knowledge for this context, however, is that I had been carefully studying the Cuban Missile Crisis for years.I read the entire transcript of the EXCOM tapes when they were released and a lot of the books about the Crisis. That gave me, perhaps, a little bit of insight into how wide a variety of options are available when a threat is actually imminent. In fact, some of the missiles were operational when Kennedy issued his quarantine. Had Kennedy known this, it would have simply reinforced how correct his decision was. (Had the president been Bush, no doubt the US would have attacked Cuba and a lot of the East Coast of the US would resemble Hiroshima right now.)
I strongly reccommend you study the Cuban Missile Crisis in light of the Bush/Iraq invasion. By the way, many of the participants claim that the reason nuclear war was averted was sheer luck rather than careful crisis management. With all due respect to people I deeply admire - they saved my life - if you read the EXCOM transcripts, you realize that luck plus some very, very intelligent decision-making averted catastrophe. The latter is very much absent today.
"Don't do it" should be the default answer for any proposal for military intervention. Not because it's "left," but because it's sane. Iraq War opposers Sorenson and Schlesinger (both involved in the Missile Crisis) are hardly leftists unless you define the left as everyone who isn't as far right as Louis XIV!
Military intervention rarely does anything but make matters worse. It only rarely establishes democracy and never in circumstances remotely like Iraq. That data was published by December 2002 if not earlier on the website of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Should miltary intervention NEVER be on the table? No. But the US is never in a position where military intervention is the ONLY option. We are too strong for that to be the case. But that is what Bush led us to believe, with the help of the liberal hawks. It is simply mistaken, badly mistaken.
By March 2003, it was obvious to anyone who cared to look that the Bush/Iraq invasion was happening under false pretenses. Liberal hawks were waking up in droves. But by then it was too late, and I knew it. War was inevitable. The stupidest mistake ever made in the history of American foreign policy.
Now, I have given you only a small fraction of the reasons why I came to the conclusions I did so early. I've also not mentioned the tens of thousands of pages of books I've read, from all "sides" of the subject of intervention, of the numerous people in government and elsewhere I've taken the trouble to speak to, some of whom I strongly disagree with.
Therefore, I sincerely hope that you will refrain from trying to dismiss my argumentation, which is carefully thought out and researched simply because it is strongly expressed. It is strongly expressed BECAUSE it has been carefully thought out and researched.
I am truly sorry that the war's proponents didn't bother to do the same. But they didn't and that is obvious. If they had, they would have quickly reached the same conclusion I did: the war was an inevitable disaster, morally and strategically. The evidence for that assertion was overwhelmingly available, at the latest, by November, 2002 but in fact was plain to anyone willing to keep an open mind in the face of Bush's propaganda assault from the beginning.
In fact most of the world knew that, and that is what I meant. Only a few people thought otherwise. They, unfortunately, were at the head of our government. And in our press. And they, through ignorance or malice or both, snookered about 60% of the American public, but virtually no one else.
And so the question winds back:
How did the liberal hawks get it so wrong, when they should have known better because it was so patently obvious?
November 8, 2005 8:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, I agree with you almost completely - I'd dispute only your #4. I'd agree that in general, possession of WMD does not warrant intervention, but in the case of Saddam, he was already under UN direction to eliminate those programs. I think its important that if the UN says "Iraq has to disarm" then Iraq has to disarm - if collective security and multilateralism are worth anything, they have to have teeth. But even then, it's absurd to try to uphold UN authority by ignoring the will of the UN.
My point about those "strawmen" is that the vast majority on the anti-war left were NOT as pro-intervention as you. They opposed the intervention based on principles that most liberal hawks reject. As such, their efforts to use Iraq as a support for their views is opposed by liberal hawks, even if both sides agree on the specific facts of the case: that the Iraq war has been botched, and was probably a mistake from the inception.
Again, see my four hawk rationales...
November 8, 2005 8:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know about that, Damek, but this thread could sure use an editor.
November 8, 2005 9:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Diplomacy and peace aren't the issues.
The incredible failure by liberal hawks to recognize that diplomacy and peace invariably make more sense than armed military intervention is the issue. Not because of Cumbayah, but because it's sane and it's sane because it is a sensible alternative in a dangerous, interconnected world.
(Except in extreme circumstances, and Iraq was never an example.)
November 8, 2005 10:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
It is one thing to intervene in exceptional cases to stop an ongoing genocide. I support that every bit as much as Anne-Marie does. But it is quite another to try to impose democracy by force or even economic sanctions. There, in my view, interventionists, whether neo-conservative or liberal, risk falling into the trap, if they haven't already, of what Niebuhr once bitterly described as the American illusion that we can be "tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection."
I wish Rieff would have condensed both his posts to that sole paragraph which actually said something. The rest was entirely superfluous sophistry.
What good does it do anyone harping on the entirely obvious point that societies may decline? Is there anyone who needs reminding of that who isn’t destined for a Darwin award anyway? Rome and it’s famed roads anyone?
Knowing civilization may decline is obvious, knowing when or what actions to take in the meanwhile is not. That’s where the discussion belongs. I object to people like Rieff taking this important discussion off into pseudo-intellectual wankery as an excuse to discuss the issue in sophisticated prose, cite Greek scholars, and basically say a lot of nothing. It’s trite nonsense best reserved for college freshmen, hippies, and yuppies with postmodernist hipster tendencies.
This discussion reminds me of a favorite saying: “Of course I believe in free will, I have no choice.”
November 8, 2005 10:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
Diplomacy is better than war. And peace is better than war. However, that doesn't mean war is never ultimately the option of choice. I do not really understand how people who call themselves liberal, and I acknowledge there are many here, can support the leaving of Saddem Hussein in place.
I am curious what if Iraq works out? Despite the immense ineptitude of the Bush Adminstration there is now a constitution and further elections coming. If the result is something like a stable function Iraq what do all the critics say then?
What makes the debate over Iraq so difficult is that Bush chose when to go to war before he had to. He then conducted the war terribly. That does not negate the benefits to the Iraqis and the rest of the world of being rid of Saddem and his sons.
November 8, 2005 11:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Now one ever suggested leaving Saddam in place and you know it.
November 8, 2005 11:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
On the contrary that is exactly what most people here advocate unless you think he was going to resign out of the good of his heart. It may not be your argument but I gather from reading post after post is that we don't want to get our hands dirty. Or a variant that the United States is a bigger problem than Saddem.
November 8, 2005 11:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
In short, this outcome was predictable. What's worse, people far more knowledgeable than me, within the administration itself, actually predicted it and were ignored.
Right, the majority of Americans also believed Saddam was involved in 9/11 because the most vocal and visible members of their government repeated it over and over, despite evidence to the contrary -- like the FBI showing that Mohammed Atta couldn't have been in Prague for the infamous meeting w/ Iraqi intelligence when phone records and credit cards records showed he was here, making purchases and phone calls -- which thanks to a complicit media was underreported.And, IIRC that "support" of which you speak was conditional on the presence of WMD and UN approval. Please recall, there was neither (no WMD because he didn't have them, no UN approval because we wouldn't let the inspectors continue their work and spoil our war plans).
November 8, 2005 12:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Greenbaum is so far from reality that he may want to join the Bush fantasy-world-tour. The Iraqi people are better off? With the Anglo-American torturers/chemical weapons users ? With permanent American bases; an Islamic constitution that puts women back 75 years? With the country dividing into tribalism? With the delivery of basic services way behind the Saddam years? With their oil and industry privatized and under control of the multinationals? I think 80 perc ent of the Iraqis polled by the British military want the AngloAmerican occupiers out immediately and a plurality support insurgent attacks on the occupiers. But Mr. Greenbaum has decided they're better off now. When you decide how to make me better off, please let me know in advance.
November 8, 2005 12:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
The debate on Iraq is obviously important, and inspires a lot of passion. But I'm not sure that it belongs here in this discussion.
That is to say, if what is being debated is the legitimacy or practical efficacy of humanitarian interventions, my first reaction to the commentary in this thread is that Iraq wasn't an HI by any reasonable definition. Iraq was a war, plain and simple. And while the supposed humanitarian beneifts of deposing Hussein may have enthralled some of us interventionists, that was never the purpose of the invasion. In the lead-up, I think we all knew that.
The difference between interventionists and non-interventionists, as I understand it, concerns our changing understanding of the nature of sovereignty, and is defined by asking under what circumstances it is permissible for a country or the international community to use their troops to quell violence occurring within a soverign state. The non-trivial part of this debate, as its played out at the Cafe, concerns whether or not unilateral intervention is ever justified.
In this sense, too, the use of the hawk/dove distinction in this context I think is misleading. Intervention does not by definition mean invasion, as the case of Liberia shows. The purpose of humanitarian intervention is to use a military presence to encourage stability and quell intra-state conflict. This might involve an invasion (in the sense of making a hostile entry into a country that seeks to repel your advance), but very often it will not - in the case of a failed state, for example, there may be no infrastructure to offer a full-scale military resistance.
Intervention thus puts our soldiers at risk, and incurs the risk that civilians and others will be killed by our troops. But one thing to note is that while the risk is there, interventions seek to avoid lethality, and are undermined to the degree that deaths occur. Wars by contrast seek to use killing to acheive policy ends. The difference between the interventionist and the hawk is just this difference. One might almost be both a pacifist and an interventionist without contradiction.
On another note, I think that the differences between Reiff and at least me, as an interventionist, are not that great, and that exaggerating the differences between us exaggerates the similarity between interventionism with neo-conservatism. I doubt that many interventionists believe in promoting democracy by force. It's a stupid idea. What we believe in is projecting the potential use of force to protect the basic human rights of groups that are systematically endangered, and even then, only in relatively extreme circumstances. Democracy by the gun, that's someone else's hobby, not ours.
November 8, 2005 12:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
I do not really understand how people who call themselves liberal, and I acknowledge there are many here, can support the leaving of Saddem Hussein in place.
Really? To refresh your memory here's part of this conversation the last time you had it way back in the distant mists of last week. (But there were many other reasoned responses, why not reread those in the hope of developing such an understanding?)
Daniel (Nov 1):
No one at the Cafe has yet to make a really cogent case for leaving Saddem in place to torture his own people and ultimately invade other neighbors.
Me:
To those who us who hold respect for the rule of law, that's a little like pointing out that no one here has yet made a cogent case for releasing sex offenders from prison for them to rape and murder children in the future.
The fact is that no one wants sex offenders to leave prison and rape children, (whatever Bill O'Reilly might tell us) - and thus no-one has attempted to make that argument. However, unfortunately, within the imperfect system of laws and liberties that we have this can sometimes happen.
In the same way no one wants Saddam Hussein torturing his own people (which would inevitably have continued) or invading other countries (something much less likely than you seem to be assuming). However, in the same way that our domestic system of laws does not allow us to imprison every one-time sex offender for his entire life, our international system of laws also does not allow us to invade other countries without very establishing a very clear and complelling reason for doing so under the UN Charter.
And while, you may not consider a belief in the importance of an adherence to the rule of law to be a "cogent" argument against illegal invasions, many of us will continue to believe otherwise.
November 8, 2005 1:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
And like I said, I think you know it and are deliberately creating a straw man, trying to link liberals with Islamist extremists and Baathists with which, almost by definition, liberals have nothing in common.
Everyone here supported regime change in Iraq. The issue was always methods, and ONLY methods despite the sleazy propaganda of the Rambos In Name Only. The goal of all of us was identical: to change the regime in Iraq, even though we knew it had nothing to do with the "war on terror."
Now, among the methods available in 2002/03 pre invasion were inspections, coerced inspections, sanctions, smart sanctions, covert action leading to a coup, bribing Saddam into exile, and invasion. Of them all, the absoute dumbest was invasion. And the best was a regiment of carefully targeted sanctions combined with coerced inspections.
Leave it to Bush to pick the worst.
November 8, 2005 1:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Devon,
Well, no. Not really.
First of all, the "new product" - the Iraq War - was marketed to different people in different ways, the same way you market Coca-Cola.
To the yahoos, it was sold as a way to get back at the 9/11 terrorists. To "thoughtful" liberals, Wolfowitz and his fellow "geniuses" pulled out all the stops in tweaking the bleeding heartsrings of liberals and neocons. This was combined with some exceedingly nasty smears of opponents of the war. Those of us who were pro-sanity (my chosen designation for the anti-Iraq War liberal position) were called worst than al Qaeda. We still are.
So like it or not, Iraq was sold partly as an interventionist action. Need an example? Tom Friedman.
Now, the notion of when and how to deploy multilateral non-military interventions -say UN sponsored- may be an interesting discussion, but I don't see it as terribly controversial or relevant to what I understand Rieff's objections are. Those stem from Bush/Iraq. And therefore, that is what needs to be discussed.
As for unilateral intervention, involving a large deployment of troops from one or only a few nations, I fail to see how that substantially differs from invasion and war. After all, Saddam "liberated" Kuwait, or at least that's what he claimed.
So let's get specific. Darfur. Anyone opposed to some kind of intervention to ameliorate the horrors? No. Military invasion a good idea? Absolutely not. UN involvement? Very good idea. What's the problem? Well, for one thing the credibility of the US is completely shot. Why? The iraq intervent...excuse me, war.
Therefore, Rieff.
November 8, 2005 1:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think that there is an emotional component to the HI position, and what the administration did, cunningly or by accident, was play upon that to garner support from the bleeding hearted camp. Once you've gone down the road towards interventionism, you're probably more susceptible to that kind of marketing than you might otherwise be.
But as a policy position, I don't think that interventionism implies support for invading Iraq. First of all, you're right that not all situations that call for an intervention are practical (Darfur is probalby an example, inasmuch as the Sudanese government would take it to be an act of war). Sometimes, you have no choice but to stand by, and I think most interventionists recognize this. If you thought of Iraq in the same way as you think of Rwanda (and you might), that doesn't necessarily mean that you think that we should send in the troops.
But really, as much as the marketing may have been HI in my neighborhood, everyone knew what the product was, and it wasn't the product on offer in Darfur (damn, that's a creepy way to be putting the point). It was all pretty clear, from the moment in 2001 where reports that Wolfowitz wanted to go to Bagdad came out, what the administration was up to, and it had nothing to do with what HI advocates support. There's a humanitarian crisis in Congo, but just because adjacent countries have sent their troops in doesn't mean I'm going to stand behind them waving a set of pom poms.
I suspect that there were plenty of people who would identify themselves as interventionists who were opposed to invading Iraq. For my part, the emotional component pulled me a bit in the direction of 'fine, go ahead and invade, asshole.' But rationally, I was opposed to it (because I thought there were WMDs, among other things). And I certainly didn't see it as of a piece with what the British did in Liberia by any stretch.
All I'm saying here is that the Iraq question and the interventionism question cut across one another - some HI advocates supported the war, and others opposed it, just as some Iraq war supporters are HI folks and others are very much not. To the degree that interventionism is tarred with Iraq, important dimensions of both issues are going to go unexplored.
November 8, 2005 2:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Interventionism may not necessarily imply support for Iraq, but many liberal hawks are saying that just because Bush screwed it up doesn't mean you should condemn interventionism. As if the two are, in fact related. And that is only one of the many enormously egregiously awful assumptions in that line of argument.
November 8, 2005 2:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think that's right: just because Bush screwed it up doesn't mean that you should condemn interventionism per se. But condemning interventionists who supported the Iraq war is fair game, I figure. To my mind, this is just the same as saying that if I'm a Buddhist and an embezzler, when I get indicted for embezzlement it's not an indictment of Buddhism - the two are distinct. But this is where we disagree.
November 8, 2005 2:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
You know, I didn't entirely see what you were saying when I first replied (after fighting with torture apologists most of yesterday, I'm kind of flying off the handle sometimes).
It's true that liberal hawks and interventionists are making this argument, but whether it really links HI and Iraq depends on why they are making it. One reason might be because they did see Iraq as part of the interventionist program, and so need to salvage their position (and perhaps more importantly, their reputation) from that debacle. In that case (and I'm sure there are some of those), it is an unambiguous linkage of HI and Iraq.
On the other hand, another reason to make the argument that Iraq doesn't show the futility of interventionism is that HI has been so linked in the popular imagination on the left that the FUBARedness of Iraq threatens to turn liberals against intervention when intervention is necessary. In this case, that is, the reason for making this argument isn't that we view Iraq and HI as linked, but that your side does.
So I don't know if this linkage in argument means much. I suspect that both motives are in play, since there's some of us in both of these quandries.
Incidentally, if I wanted to mock interventionism, I'd really grab onto the acronym I keep using - HI! My name is Devon!
November 8, 2005 4:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think some one who governs by murder is not an improvement over the situation now. I do not think the use of torture rooms for ordinary Iraqis is an improvement. Saddem invaded Iran and Kuwait and gas his own people. So yes not only do I think the Iraqis are better off right now I also think they have a chance at a better life than ever. Your condescenion may make yourself feel bette but I do not think you have a true picture of the world.
November 8, 2005 5:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here is the question I would like an answer to:
Many, though not all, of the supporters of the war expected a much better outcome. Many of the opponents of the war predicted a bad outcome instead. What did the latter understand that the former did not?
I won't say much about this question at this time other than to say that I reject one commonly heard hypothesis: I doubt it would have made much of a difference if the war was fought by a Democratic administration rather than the Bush administration. I say this because it seems to me that both pro-war Democrats and pro-war Republicans suffered from the same underlying iilusions about what kind of place Iraq is, and about the forces that would be released by removing Saddam's regime.
And I don't see this as an issue about whether one has a generally optimistic or pessimistic disposition. My question is about one particular place - Iraq - and about what it was rational to expect prior to the war.
November 8, 2005 7:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
These are very good questions. I think that it's reasonable to think that under a Democratic administraion (or a different Republican one), things would probably have gone somewhat better, because cooler heads might have actually planned for post-war chaos (given the assumptions about candy and flowers raining down on our troops, I assume that the post-war plan that we did go to war with involved sufficient supplies of dental floss). But I also think that good planning would have probably made things only marginally better. While not firing the entire military might have provided less fuel for the insurgency, for example, the post-war challenges were just too complex and too intractable to my mind for good planning to do anything but manage them a bit, rather than let them burn out of control.
What I wonder is are there any out-and-out supporters of the war who thought that things would go badly, and how that affected their justification for it. What motivated the pro-war pessimists?
November 9, 2005 3:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
Great post!
And, frankly, I think you know the answer to your question already.
When did I know? From early 2002, when Bush/Iraq started to get floated around, I knew that it was an idea that should have been greeted with ridicule and derision. I was horrified to see that by late spring/early summer, the invasion of Iraq was not only being treated as a serious notion, but as a fait accompli by Bush that would happen regardless of whether the US Congress went along, or the UN. (Scowcroft's op-ed was in response to that perception of inevitability that Bush projected.)
Regarding bio/chem wmd, I was pretty sure they had something...
By March 2003, it was obvious to anyone who cared to look that the Bush/Iraq invasion was happening under false pretenses. Liberal hawks were waking up in droves. But by then it was too late, and I knew it. War was inevitable. The stupidest mistake ever made in the history of American foreign policy.
Inevitability. Bush wanted to do it (God alone knows why) - and so he was going to do it. And a 9-11 enraged America (and compliant media) let him.
Could it have been stopped? I really don't think so. I don't say that because I want to absolve hawks (and myself) for poor judgment, but rather because Senate Democrats could not oppose Bush on this issue. Opposition would have required a thoughtful debate, a real consideration of the intelligence, and an effort to make a decision in the nation's best interest outside politics. Instead, Bush distorted and withheld the intelligence, stifled all debate by questioning the patriotism of Democrats and trying to tie Saddam to 9-11, and made his decision in the best interests of the GOP alone.
Senate Democrats got crucified as it was in 2002 - had they mounted an all-out effort to block the war (they still had control of the Senate), they would have gone down just as hard. With hindsight we can say that such an effort would have made no difference - it would have been hard to lose more seats - but that was not obvious at the time. Instead, it was clear at the time that blocking Bush was a certain path to defeat. Moreover, it was clear that too many moderate Dems were already willing to cross over and support Bush.
Bush's willingess to abuse and destroy the processes and the institutions of our democracy caused the war. War should not be inevitable. But the intense politicization, following so closely on the heels of national tragedy, made dissent politically untenable.
And, having been forced to roll over on Iraq, Democrats and liberal hawks were left with rationalizations: we might do some good; Saddam is really bad; we need to be able to bluff Saddam; backing down and losing face to Saddam is worse than war; there really ARE some weapons; Saddam would be a future threat when sanctions are lifted so if we can get him now, maybe it's not so bad...
So, really, you already know the answer: liberal hawks were forced to accept that this would happen. By Feb-March 2003, when they started to"wake up", it was too late.
Why did they support it earlier?
In part, because it was something that many liberal hawks had advocated before: TNR, for example, had been a regime change cheerleader for quite a while. So when Bush says, "well, then let's do it", it becomes unseemingly partisan to say, "well, actually, it's a good idea but I just don't trust you to do it. Let's wait another two years until you're gone."
In part, also, because if that's where the "center" of American politics has moved, you can't hope to win elections or influence policy if you're too far outside it. A common accusation in 2002 was that Kerry, Edwards, and others had voted for (or against) the war because they were worried about the 2004 primary or general races. I think a good measure of the support was thought to be necessary just to keep a place at the table - to be able to restrain the idiots in the future. Something about being able to do more good by standing inside the tent and pissing out, than vice versa.
November 9, 2005 7:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
More Iraqis are dead in the last two years as a result of the invasion than would have been killed by Saddam's regime in that period. More Americans, Brits, Italians, Japanese, Nepalese, Philippinos, Poles, and dozens of other nationalities are dead as a result of the invasion. More Iraqis are joining terrorist organizations than would have otherwise. And OBL got away...
Death is not a liberal value.
If the result is something like a stable function Iraq what do all the critics say then?
Saddam's regime was "something like a stable function Iraq." If that's all we succeed in creating, I want my 2000 Americans and $500 bn back.
November 9, 2005 7:54 AM | Reply | Permalink