Pie Fight

Yglesias v Brownie

Matt Yglesias takes on  Harry's Place vis-a-vis Iraq - or there logic, at least.

The real enemy

At Harry's Place, they've posted this:

The BBC have invited reactions from the public on the video statement made by London tube bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan who admitted his inspiration was Osama Bin Laden and who described the death of 52 people and the maiming of many more as "a slap to the policy of British Prime Minister Tony Blair".

Khan's stated rationale for his acts comes under attack on the site:

His comments would be easier to stomach if it weren't for the fact that his heroes Al Zarqawi and Bin Laden are the ones wreaking havoc on "his brothers and sisters" in Iraq.

Jonathan Roos, Cambridge, UK

Sidique Khan says that our democratically elected governments have been involved with the murder, bombing, gassing and torture of Muslims worldwide - but what, I wish I could ask him, was Saddam Hussain doing to his fellow Muslims for decades? Why was he never opposed by these people?

Kelvin Walker, Glos, UK

The problem with these comments is that, while they are correct, they don't address the real issue, or they pretend that a real issue doesn't exist. Yes, Muslims who moan about the evil west while not speaking out as vociferously against their own evil despots are hypocrites, but is pointing that out going to win you a pony? No, it just gives you a chance to vent. And it ignores soemthing much more germane: the  notion of "us and them", and how incredibly central this is to the whole problem. To a great many Muslims, interference from non-Muslim sources is clearly far worse than despotism practiced by Muslims against other Muslims.

Now, I think that people who feel this way are wrong, but me pointing that out isn't going to change their beliefs. The fact will still remain that a great many Muslims do believe this, and that some of the ones who believe this are prepared to kill because of it. This is the problem we face, and it's the reality of what we are contending with.

It's more than a little tricky. They don't want us to intervene in Muslim politics, yet ince Muslim politics do affect the larger world, we have to, at least to some degree. The key is to figure out how to do so not in a way that shows we're right and proves that those who disagree with us are hypocrites - the key is to do it in a way that works as best as possible. Iraq was clearly a fool's errand - even if many of those who are against the occupation are fools themselves.

I guess part of the problem is that we are used to thinking in terms of nationalism, but Islam transcends national borders in a way that socialism thought it would (but didn't) in the 20th century. This means that Muslims everywhere get pissed off about what the west does to Muslims anywhere. That's a tough situation to deal with, but it's the situation we're in. And shouting "hypocrite" over and over isn't going to change that.

If you go to war with the army you have, as Rummy famously said, it should also be pointed out that it helps to go to war against the enemy you have, not his shadow.

Optimistic, pessimistic, stay or go

Via CT, four options for Iraq:

  1) The U.S. beats back the insurgency and democracy flowers in Iraq (call this the “optimistic stay” scenario),
2) The U.S. digs in its heels, spends years fighting the insurgency, loses lots of troops, and years later withdraws, leading to a bloody and disastrous civil war (the “pessimistic stay” scenario);
3) The U.S. decides that it’s no longer worth it to stay in Iraq, pulls out relatively soon, and things in Iraq are about as best as you could hope for, perhaps leading to a decent amount of democracy (optimistic leave), and
4) The U.S. decides that it’s no longer worth it to stay in Iraq, pulls out soon, and plunges Iraq into a bloody and disastrous civil war with the bad guys assuming control eventually (pessimistic leave).

Speaking only for myself, I’m entirely confident that we could achieve outcome 4, believe that staying the course will continue to lead to outcome 2, and can scarcely imagine outcome 3. What about outcome 1? Is it achievable?

There's lots of talk along these lines right now. Even many of those who had turned against the war but felt we had to stay in order to prevent a descent into chaos and an eventual theocracy are now saying that that descent is going to happen whether we leave now or stay for another 20 years.

The so-called "mature left" is now free to say we should start planning a staged pullout, whereas six months ago that would have marked them out as kneejerk unthinking , hippyish anti-war types.

Stabbed in the back!

So the plan is to cut myself some slack in advance of graduate school. I've dropped the beloved 500-word-a-day demand for now, with the caveat that once I get my reading material for uni, I'll bump that up to 750 or possibly even 1,000. Or maybe I'll start out by staying at 500, who knows?

All that personal bunkum aside, here's a decent look at what Hitchens is already doing now, and thus what the rest of the pro-war left will be doing soon: blaming the anti-war types for the failure in Iraq. I'll resist quoting Hitchens, but here's some snips from the bitchslap he rightly receives in return:

I suspect we’re going to see more of this as time goes on. I predict the power and influence attributed to politically impotent, liberal, anti-war interest groups will increase at the exact same rate that our prospect for success in Iraq decreases. In other words, as the scope of our failure and colossal misjudgment becomes more clear, I expect that bitter pro-war advocates will place an increasing amount of the blame on liberal groups who opposed the war and had nothing to do with its launch or implementation.

...

I understand the emotional need to attack those who you don’t care for anyway. But the idea that the anti-war Left and the sister city program have one damned thing to do with our problems in Iraq is nothing short of full-blown delusion (though it is interesting from a psychological perspective). If Hitchens wants to blame someone, he should start with himself. If that won’t do, he might move on to the actual planners of the war.

...

Just to be clear, if we are unsuccessful in Iraq, the people to blame are the people who caused the war to happen, not the people who didn’t want it to happen. If we are unsuccessful, the leaders who executed the war are to blame, not the liberal groups who had exactly zero influence in the war planning and execution.

You may hate the Left so bad that you'd like to wring all their necks. But that hatred has exactly zero relevance to the larger truth that you may or may not be willing to confront - if this war is lost, then Bush lost it.

Pretending wrong is right

Yglesias has a very good post on the mechanisms of denial re Iraq, and makes a better point than any I've yet read regarding so-called liberal hopes that things will go wrong in Iraq so that the Bushies can be proved wrong. As he points out, things things don't have to go completely tits up in Iraq for the Bush rationale for war to be wrong wrong wrong. Almost no matter what happens, it ain't gonna be worth several hundred billion bucks and  a few thousand soldiers' lives.

Justin Logan wonders if there is any piling on of empirical evidence that could convince hawks that they have been proven wrong. The answer, clearly, is no, thanks to two useful mechanisms of denial.

First, and most annoyingly, is simple revisionism. "Everybody said there were WMD in Iraq." Well, no, they didn't, especially not at the time of the war when inspectors were in the country saying they couldn't find any WMD programs. Second, and more threateningly, is stab-in-the-back stuff. Insofar as things go badly in Iraq, the cause of the badness is the perfidy of the anti-war faction. By definition the hawks are correct, and the worse things get, the righter the hawks are proven to have been, because it simply demonstrates that the circle of America's enemies is wider than previously believed, and the need for irrational lashing out therefore is proportionately greater.

In this regard, it's also worth reading Julian's post on the shifting goalposts in Iraq. He makes the point that, quite rightly, even if things turn out well from here on out in Iraq that would hardly constitute a justification for having launched the war. I -- or he -- could no doubt produce a long argument to that regard, but the simple argument is just that there's a reason Bush didn't say, "I want to invade a country that poses no threat to the United States, spend hundreds of billions of dollas and get thousands of people killed, in order to build a nice Shiite democracy." On the one hand, this argument is a needed debunking of much hawk propaganda. On the other hand, keeping the argument in mind will help non-hawks avoid any hint of subconscious desire for things to go poorly in Iraq. We can -- and should -- hope things turn out for the best, without believing that things turning out well in any way undermines our point.

Plan X?

Kevin Drum has a good summing-up of Things So Far. Dire.

Opportunity costs

Matt Yglesias has a good response to those who ask the anti-war crowd "why [we] would rather have left Saddam in power". It's about opportunity costs: our $200 billion has had some positive effects - most specifically deposing Hussein. But for that amount of money, we could have done a whole hell of a lot more to make the world a better place.

So why are those who preferred to spend it all in Iraq objectively in favour of not pursuing Osama bin Laden, of having an unstable and Taliban-friendly Afghanistan, and of allowing tens of thousands to starve because of warfare in Africa?

Bitch slappin' David Aaronovitch

And everyone hits him in the Stalinists. Tasty.

Wednesday June 9, 2004
The Guardian

David Aaronovitch clearly finds it so humiliating to have to admit his political judgment was disastrously inept over the war in Iraq that he has to tear away at those of us who are still angry about the war (Show a little respect, George, G2, June 8).
Does he really have nothing critical at all to say about the BNP or Ukip or the Tories or even New Labour and the Lib Dems? Instead of doing or saying anything constructive, he'd rather trawl the Respect website for evidence to attack Respect candidates. Respect is a four-month-old coalition of all those who want the chance to vote against the war. It speaks volumes about the bitterness of this ex-Stalinist turned Blair fan who gets so upset with us leftist peace campaigners.
Ann Thomas
Bristol

If David Aaronovitch hates Respect so much, it must be worth voting for. On the other hand, perhaps this is all a subtle plot. Giving Respect publicity, through these attacks, will gain votes for the anti-war campaign and ensure that it will still be a subject for coverage after this election. Or is it just a (defected or defective) old Stalinist fulfiling his lifetime mission - bashing Trotskyists rather than confronting the ruling class?
John Nicholson
Manchester

What a strange decision it was to send the noted apologist for the Iraq war, David Aaronovitch, to cover a Respect meeting (Same old guff with an added ingredient, June 5). You will not have forgotten that Aaronovitch was proved 100% wrong on the war while Respect was 100% right. Is someone getting worried?
Ken Loach
London

There ARE atheists in foxholes

And American atheists, at that. Did you know that American troops are both better educated and less prone to religion than the general populace?

An argument I can't accept

Yesterday I cited an article disingenuously arguing that those who opposed the war implicity supported keeping Hussein in power. In the Telgraph, a letter arguing against that, but in a completely selfish, nationalistic way that I can't support:

Re: The reasons why Date: 2 June 2004 Sir - Sir John Keegan challenges those of us who have opposed an Anglo-American attack on Iraq from the time the project was first mooted in 2002 to "explain our reasons for wishing that Saddam Hussein should still be in power in Baghdad" (Opinion, June 1). I willingly do so.

First, the political and social condition of the Iraqis if Saddam had remained in power is of no relevance to foreigners like us and the Americans, or to the question raised by Keegan.

Second, Saddam had presented no international danger since he was soundly beaten in the 1991 Gulf war. He possessed no weapons of mass destruction (some of us never believed the case made by London and Washington in their "dodgy dossiers" in 2002-03); and he was subject to close Anglo-American surveillance of the "no-fly zone''.

Third, unlike the present confused and ineffective occupation regime, Saddam would have held Iraq in the same tight grip that he had for 35 years. There would have been no widespread disorder, and no new battle-front for al-Qa'eda to exploit. In fact, Saddam had provided a highly competent ally, if a tacit one, in the so-called "war against global terror". And, of course, were Saddam still ruling in Baghdad, there would be no steadily rising tally of British or American casualties.

In short, America, Britain, the Middle East and the wider world would be vastly better off in terms of peace and stability if Saddam were still gripping Iraq, and we were still gripping Saddam as we had been from 1991 to 2003.

From:
Correlli Barnett, East Carleton, Norfolk

Leaving Cap'n Correlli here aside, the peg that the Telegraph columnist seems to be hanging his peg on is that if you don't support the war then you support Hussein. By this rationale, most of America and the UK currently support Robert Mugabe, that people boiler in Uzbekistan, and any number of tyrranical regimes in Africa - because we're not going to war to depose them.