The “How Dare They” Iraq Fallacy
Even though the public has turned against the war, it obviously hasn’t done so decisively enough for its escalation to be politically unfeasible. One reason for this merely lukewarm antiwar sentiment is the fact that antiwar elected officials still often speak uncertainly (evading the topic) or stridently (evading many of the relevant details). To an extent, I think Glenn Greenwald, typifying the left antiwar argument, falls into this trap in what is generally an important, valuable post written in his usual hard-hitting style.
Glenn puts forth the “how dare they” argument -- as in, How dare they question our patriotism, or our interest in fighting terrorists? But while hawks phrase their point in rather demagogic terms, there is also substance to their concern that ending the war will have consequences for al Qaeda's perception of the military viability of attacking Americans or American forces. Bin Laden’s reasoning on the issue, drawing on such incidents as the 1993 Mogadishu withdrawal, prior to Sept. 11 is well-known. This phenomenon has become something of a Republican talking point, but that’s because it raises a real issue. Glenn’s post really doesn’t speak to it.
To evade this issue is catastrophic in both political and policy terms. We need to earn voters’ trust on national security in future elections and we cannot wish the issue away or rely for much longer on Bush as a foil to avoid our own reckonings with defense crises. We need specifically to be able to argue to the voters that any strategic advantage al Qaeda gains from US disengagement will be outweighed by the strategic advantage we gain from doing so. The most prominent arguments we’ve managed so far when we broach the issue are that the Iraq war has been a recruitment aid for terrorism and that it’s diverted resources from Afghanistan and other fronts. The first point is important, but rhetorically it’s rather weak tea -- removing a recruitment tool from the other side is not the same thing as doing something to actively harm them. The second point has been made in detail by Russ Feingold and recently by Hillary Clinton. It needs more elaboration and exposure, but it too may not be enough. In any event, we need as much as possible to bring into the common parlance of national politics a progressive vision of what it means to protect ourselves in an globalized world, a vision that does not restrict itself to homeland security funding.
Soft power is among the most important components of such a vision, but we can’t argue for it in the abstract, as John Kerry did, without risking looking ridiculous, thereby losing the argument and the opportunity to produce a change in policy. (I might note that even though we finally managed to leave Vietnam, the public elected Ronald Reagan less than a decade later.) The Iraq debate provides an important test of our ability to articulate the relative merits of various alternatives and to address strategic contingencies seriously and unsentimentally, in addition to asserting our economic and humanitarian concerns about a war that shows no sign of ending.
I am less concerned about how Al Qaeda perceives us than I am about removing, from harms way, soldiers who were gulled into a war by a squadron of accomplished liars.
Actions have consequences. Starting this war will have consequences. Finishing it will also have consequences, and not all of them good.
But if your argument is that we should continue to serve up our (mostly) boys to the Iraq charnel house until us liberals come up with a solid plan to extricate ourselves from the mess with minimal consequences, I call bullshit. I reject, utterly, that it is incumbent on us to "solve" this mess. There is NO solution. Do you people understand that? Sometimes you JUST LOSE.
The American people seem to have realized this. They don't need to be argued into that position. And they also know what you do when you lose:
you go home, and you prepare yourself to deal with the consequences of that loss, and try and figure out what to do next time.
January 26, 2007 10:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
I rated your piece a 5 but it didn't register. That said, great and not-so-great military leaders know that you win a few and lose a few - hopefully not half and half. When you're losing, you withdraw your troops. You don't send in more to have them lie dead among their fallen comrades on the field. (Of course we are not at war with Iraq so the above is a waste of computer screen.)
January 26, 2007 10:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Kether, your "if" is wrong. I complained at the end of my post that this war "shows no sign of ending". I want rapid withdrawal, with the timetable's being dictated by the safety requirements of our forces and by the degree to which there are things we can realistically do to protect Iraqi civilians. I am arguing that we cannot win this debate without stronger anti-war sentiment among the public, many of whom are only mildly antiwar or are really just anti-Bush because he isn't prosecuting it successfully. We need to argue to build stronger antiwar sentiment. As you know, hawks have long had more hold over the public imagination and the trend of the debate than either national defense or the reality of this war could justify.
January 27, 2007 9:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
I reject, utterly, that it is incumbent on us to "solve" this mess. There is NO solution. Do you people understand that? Sometimes you JUST LOSE.
Sure, but there's losing and then there's losing. And there is responsibility and there is responsibility.
It's not incumbent on, say, you, me, the Democratic Party, etc. to solve it, in one sense - it's not a mess of our creation. It's not incumbent upon us as a nation to solve it, if it really is insoluble (and it certainly starts to look that way). But however badly it goes, as Americans, some blood is on our hands, and being Americans in opposition to the Iraq war doesn't, to my mind, wash that off.
More importantly, I think we all can agree, now, that things are probably not going to go well after we leave. But how bad they go is something that will be impacted by how we withdraw, and I think that everyone should be in the business of hashing that out - a national conversation on how to minimize the toll in human misery (forgetting U.S. strategic interests) is a first step to living up to our moral responsibility here.
January 27, 2007 10:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
So bin Laden's perception of the military viability of attacking Americans or American forces is? What is it? We retaliate but when the going gets tough - we're getting killed - we retreat with our tails between our legs? Well he's right.
If we're going to go around colonizing this or that country, which is how the Muslim world sees us, then we'd better be prepared to have to stomach slaughtering by the droves anybody who takes offense. Historically, that's what colonizers do.
The American people must be told that if the country they call home wants to colonize parts of the world because we need their natural resources among other things and to do it effectively we're going to have to kill and be prepared to get killed, they'll be faced with having to make a decision. Are they on the side of the "colonizers" or the side of the "nons."
The way it is now the American people are being lied to and what is probably worse, the people lying to us are even lying to themselves. We're taking out this or that dictator? We're "spreading democracy?" We're "freeing" the poor and downtrodden? Bull pucky. It's time to tell the truth.
January 26, 2007 11:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think you're not giving bin Laden credit for having known, for a long time (as many pragmatic Americans have known) that our military is ready to fight only old-fashioned wars, not terrorism. Terrorism essentially requires first-rate, lean and mean intelligence and police action. The problem is police action (domestic or international) doesn't guarantee huge profits to the defense industry that military action does. Change will come to the Pentagon about as fast as it has to auto manufacturers, and for about the same reason: greed. Corporations and their government partners like those corrupt, wildly profitable old ways of doing things. They can't think outside of that box.
As so often happens the enemy has known our weaknesses long before we're willing to admit them, bin Laden included. Withdrawing from Iraq will cause enormous pain to our leadership, military and civilian -- the ones that got us in there, I mean. But not to the troops, not to their families, not to those who have doubted the wisdom of the Iraq invasion from the get-go, not to the smart, and evidently not to the Iraqis. Al Qaeda would rather we stay. We do their recruiting for them even as we provide less of what's needed along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
As for the national security issue, it's the noise machine which has created the notion that the right is better at national security than the left. Reality tells us just the opposite. The left knows how to negotiate, isn't castrated by the process, and has enough testosterone left over to fight if necessary. So the question becomes, how to reorient our focus and that of our redstate neighbors towards reality,.
Certainly not by continuing to misstate or downplay reality -- or allowing it to be misstated: "while hawks phrase their point in rather demagogic terms," for example. Rather? Rather? Isn't demagogy what we should be fighting against, in whatever form it crops up? Cheney and bin Laden are more alike than they are unalike.
January 26, 2007 12:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with many of your points. By the way I used "rather demagogic" because of space and time constraints against a more differentiated description of hawks' language. But Cheney is not similar to bin Laden. Cheney is an arrogant, torture-promoting warmonger, while bin Laden is a terrorist. Even unjust wars like this one are not the same thing as terrorism. When you think about it, this point is obvious. There are better ways to oppose unjust wars than falsely to conflate them with terrorism.
January 27, 2007 9:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is essentially the dilemma of Vietnam, when Nixon felt the war protestors undercut national security. He argued that since our credibility as a defender of our allies was at stake, showing uncertainty weakened the effect. He was right in a limited way, but wrong in thinking a democracy could bluff. If people felt it was a loser, that would come out, and the high-stakes poker Nixon was playing was not sustainable.
We have mixed feelings about our approach to national security when things are complicated--tough. It is not going to happen that we all fall into line. So it is incumbent on our leaders to make a persuasive case.
The way out is to accept that Bin Laden is right, as pointed out above. Even an evil asshole can be right about the facts. We should be proud that we don't automatically join in lockstep while marching to war. If we did we'd be like the others we hope to distinguish ourselves from.
How about bringing in the business model so favored by conservatives? A money loser doesn't get loyalty, it gets bankruptcy. The merciless nature of the market is supposedly its virtue. Trying to preserve credibility gets you Enron.
January 26, 2007 12:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I caught a news segment on TV recently showing Taliban fighters, all four of them, training, launching a very small something and sticking nails in what appeared to be a "roadside" bomb. I flashed to the much touted, rightly so, American military machine, the zillions of sophisticated weapons, the ships, the planes, the helicopters... plus the thousands of personnel manning it all and the billions of bucks waiting in the wings to fund more of it.
I thought, well, David did do in Goliath with a sling-shot - or so the story goes. Two things: The behemoth should have learned how to duck: The behemoth should have learned how to combat slingshots. Conclusion: Big means nothing if you're stupid.
January 26, 2007 2:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Before the Democrats can begin to offer a strategy for active harm, they first need to redefine the targets.
For example, Al-Qaeda needs to be separated from other groups, such as Hamas and Hizbullah, which are not threats to American interests. Likewise, the GWOT lumps non-state entities in the same category as states trying to acquire WMD. Preemptive use of military force is not an effective strategy for either threat. Rather, credible deterrence should be substituted for preemptive invasion for rogue states. State terrorism, such as Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, is generally not a threat to the US and also should not be conflated with the threat posed by Al-Qaeda.
In other words, the current GWOT needs to be re-designed to focus only on Al-Qaeda. Such a concentrated focus brings the list of enemies down to a manageable number-one. Then Democrats must show that as a networked, decentralized and transnational political organization that does not field a military force, it is impossible to defeat Al-Qaeda with a conventional military force. For each terrorist that is captured or killed, another is joining up as a replacement. And history shows that the use of overwhelming military force alone is not the best method to achieve US goals. The US did not bring down communism because it attacked the fUSSR. Rather, the military served as a credible back-up to US diplomatic, political, containment and deterrent efforts. Those are the actions that cause harm to the entire organization, rather than just one terrorist (or the #3 guy) at a time.
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. Douglas Adams
January 26, 2007 5:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
The argument that withdrawal from Iraq gives a victory to al-Qaeda is a red herring, or sheer speculation.
It is more reasonable to believe that Iran will gain influence, and that fractious Shia will unite, with Iranian help, to win the civil war. In which al-Qaeda will be on a loosing side.
This scenario is judged to be scary with "they are all the same" argument. Which is false. People who raise that argument are often simultaenously concerned about the fate of Israel. This allows me to turned the table on penandneedle:
as this link may undermine the support of Israel itself, while doing nothing to avert the debacle in Iraq.
January 27, 2007 1:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
The reasoning that America has a duty to "solve" the Iraq "problem" denies the most unpalatable part of the scenario. Remember, 16 U.S. intelligence agencies reported the U.S. was exacerbating the problem : translation - the U.S. is causing more damage than it is solving/preventing.
The conclusion that leaving will save American lives is buttressed by another : it will give the locals control of the situation. Nobody in their right mind shits on their own doorstep because they are p.o.'d.
The U.S. is busy supporting a failed state because it is considered in its national interest to be able to rip off Iraqi oil. That's pretty much the Arab view and I see no compelling reason to disagree.
January 28, 2007 9:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Take it further to control of Persian Gulf oil. Iraq was just supposed to be the easiest. And with American bases now set up in Iraq, it's easier to see how Cheney considers the American efforts there as "enormous successes".
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. Douglas Adams
January 28, 2007 11:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
The conclusion that leaving will save American lives is buttressed by another : it will give the locals control of the situation. Nobody in their right mind shits on their own doorstep because they are p.o.'d.
You're not serious about this part, are you? Human history is full of instances of people, in their right mind or not, doing just that. The past 20 years have half a dozen examples, from the Balkans to the Great Lakes region of Africa.
This doesn't constitute an argument for staying - it may be that the giving control of the situation to the locals initiates a hideous bloodbath, and at the same time that doing so is the right thing to do. It may also be that we'll leave and things will get better rather than worse. But it's certainly possible that they will be worse, and we shouldn't predicate our leaving on the happy idea that things will definitely be better upon our exit - that is just the reverse of Richard Perleian assumption that they will throw flowers at our feet.
January 28, 2007 2:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Greenwald has been an excellent critic of the war and the administration’s power-mongering. He is hard hitting, as you say, but is cautious and reasoned in tone and that is one of the things that make his arguments palatable to many. He generally doesn’t advance arguments that do not have positive proof behind them. Also, I believe he has addressed this canard before.
Leaving Iraq where our invasion and occupation has advanced Bin Laden's cause does not mean we are leaving Afghanistan. Afghanistan, you recall, was Bin Laden’s home away from home- his base of operations. No one is calling for the U.S. to give it back to the Taliban. And we’ve been in Iraq for three to four years now. We’ve lost over 3000 soldiers with about 70,000 maimed or mentally afflicted. Exactly how does Bin Laden read that as America being afraid to get a soldier killed as in Mogadishu?
Democrats don’t need to counter every Republican rationalization for escalating in Iraq. The point has tipped and the American people can see through the deceit.
January 28, 2007 11:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
The struggle within Islam between moderate forces and extremists will not be decided in Iraq .Any US influence on this will require a much broader effort than anyone anywhere has yet proposed but our managed withdrawal and rebuilding effort (300 billion to begin) will be a start.
January 28, 2007 11:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
"We need specifically to be able to argue to the voters that any strategic advantage al Qaeda gains from US disengagement will be outweighed by the strategic advantage we gain from doing so."
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Disagree. We need to point out that Al Qaeda in 2007 is a bunch of bullshit used to justify Bush's wars.
January 28, 2007 11:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Cheney is an arrogant, torture-promoting warmonger, while bin Laden is a terrorist. Even unjust wars like this one are not the same thing as terrorism."
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I severely question any tangible or meaningful difference here.
January 28, 2007 11:27 PM | Reply | Permalink