I'm idly curious, Patrick: Was that "idiot" judgement offered in a similar context?

This is a wonderful quote. I'm yoinking it.

*is actually quite clean*

Oh, there were whole heirarchies. The anti-war folks who weren't in the streets didn't want to be associated with the ones who were, the ones who were in the streets THIS time didn't want to be associated with anyone who'd been out for Afghanistan, the ones who'd been out for Afghanistan didn't want to be associated with anyone who'd been out for Seattle or Quebec, and NOBODY wanted to know the Quakers.

"We're not *shudder* PACIFISTS or LEFTIES or anything, we just don't like THIS war...". It ought to have been a march chant.

Made for some FASCINATING anti-war marches, what with everyone desperately trying to out-hawk each other so they'd be, I don't know, taken seriously.

It would have been funny, if it hadn't been so awful, watching all these people bend themselves into little twisted knots trying to look serious and sensible to people who didn't give a damn what anybody thought and who were going to say whatever they wanted to about us -- and everything else -- no matter what ...

and NOBODY wanted to know the Quakers

Not my experience from Britain - at the anti-war marches, the Quakers were picking up a lot of unaligned marchers who were happy to be seen as Quaker and extremely unhappy to be marching along side those cheering for the Intifada and Sharia Law or the various factions of Trots. The Quakers were the nice safe neutrals that everyone could respect and most could agree with. And this despite not having a megaphone between them.

A lot of the moderate left rediscovered why they dislike the far left more than the moderate right at those marches.

"...the ones who'd been out for Afghanistan didn't want to be associated with anyone who'd been out for Seattle or Quebec..."

Quebec? Okay, Marna, what's the place of my birth been up to again?

Eliciting consent for the morally indefensible is what the Cold War was all about, and the practice continues to this day. And yes, it is a highly industrial process.

Francis:

A lot of the moderate left rediscovered why they dislike the far left more than the moderate right at those marches.

Oh no, I assure you that as a moderate lefty ("moderate" meaning "not a Soviet" in this case), I dislike the moderate right far, far more than the far left.

The far left just annoys me. When the ISO took over the peace coalition at my college and made it about their agenda, it was annoying, but I realized that it was inevitable, since they were the most organized activist group on campus and it's not like the rest of us pushed back at all.

But the ISO has never driven me to fits of cursing rage, not even when they've been obnoxious at a peace march. The moderate right constantly drives me to such fits.

then shut the fuck up about Colin Powell and admit you were as wrong as it was possible to be

If this is how he would treat people he ostensibly wants as allies, no wonder they are in such short supply.

Ohellyes.

At the roots of my vehement reaction to prominent even-the-warhawk Mr. Drum is the part of his [everyone else] culpa where he acknowledged that he was wrong about the war, but explained that he was forced to support it by the seriousness of its supporters, in blinding contrast with the basic unseriousness of the hippies on the other side.

It's our fault, really, if only we would take responsibility and gracefully let the conventional wisdom weathervanes make all the decisions from now on.

No, Doug, I believe (since a lot of us feel this way and have spoken about it at some length and with some heat, frex most recently in a discussion started by tristero over at Hullabaloo) that what he wants is for the "respectable" liberal-ex-hawks - who are only ex, as we all well know, now that every one with more wits than wishthinkfulness can see this is quickly turning into a tossup between Tribune Crassus' Excellent Adventure (aka Why Real Estate Tycoon CEOs Shouldn't Run Foreign Policy) and Anabasis II with King Croesus of Lydia in the running for a three-way-tie - to stop pretending that they have any moral authority to speak for "the Left," and that they have somehow (even now) more moral authority and intellectual respectability, than those who opposed it from the start, whether from general Quaker principles, Clementian anti-Imperialism, or more specific wrong-war-wrong-place-wrong-time beliefs.

To "get out of the way, or get runned over" as the old song goes, IOW.

If I was not clear enough, Doug - we do not particularly want them as allies, so much as we want to remove their efficacy as adversaries. "Vichy Dems" and Quisling liberals are at least as disastrous to the causes of social justice and civilization, as any ranting blood-maddened Victor Davis Hanson.

Because at least you know what side Hanson is on, and what positions he is going to defend, and that he will attack you is not in question.

If you want to be reality based, you admit error.

You admit the possibility of error, too, and you privilege facts over desire and don't call it a fact just because someone has associated a number with an assertion.

If you're not reality based, you're not a liberal, more or less by definition.

The Right has always been marked by a greater commitment to desires than facts; in the absence of a disdain for facts, that's tolerable, if not itself laudable.

In the presence of a disdain for facts, which is itself contemptible, it's not tolerable at all. Allies like that are more trouble than they're worth.

How about people who supported invading Afghanistan? Lots of us did (including Patrick); if I recall correctly, Tom Tomorrow didn't, and I'm beginning to think he was right, if only because of the political capital that gave Bush to fuck up other things. Is Patrick a quisling too?

Speaking as a person thoroughly morally tainted by support for the Iraq war (unlike some ex-liberal-hawks I make no protest otherwise; I've been trying to figure out what my real reasons were and I don't think they were rational), I do think we have to figure out how to make common cause. Anyone who is not a robot is going to disagree with you about things, and sometimes those people are going to be enormously, fatally wrong; but even if you've been right all the time, limiting your movement to the sufficiently pure is not going to get you anywhere, any more than liberals ignoring antiwar lefties got them anywhere.

It's nice seeing some people come around, but it would have been nicer to have gotten an iota of support when it might have made a difference to, oh, about 2,000 Americans and some fifty times as many of those people we've been save-bombing. There's also been a lot of collateral damage of the type "Of course we have to pass this law giving your kids to an oil company! Don't you know There's A War On??"

Given how badly this screws all of us in the bottom 98 percent, I think a little swearing isn't out of line. Damn it.

Fully agreed; swear away.

...Here's the place I always come to when I think about this: I spend a lot of time wondering whether I deserve some sort of punishment, whether as an accessory to murder I really ought to be dead, whether I should live each moment of my life with the images of the maimed and killed in the front of my mind, etc., etc.,...

and then it's followed by "Fuck! The smug bastards who lied to me 24 hours a day for months on end and actually planned this thing are still there in Washington not feeling conflicted about it at all. Why am I wearing the hair shirt? I didn't even vote for the sons of bitches."

Caroline:

Can I check which side of the atlantic you are on please? If you mean American moderate right, I completely understand your position - from what I can tell, the Republican Party would be extreme right in Britain, and Clinton a Tory (or more probably "New Labour").

And when it comes to left vs right in Britain, Poly Toynbee (Guardian columnist) gets me at least as annoyed as Michael Gove (former Times columnist and new Tory MP) and idiots calling for Sharia Law (or called George Galloway) are almost as obnoxious as the BNP. (The British Libertarians can be safely ignored).

Funny thing; I was against Afghanistan because I thought that it would take ages, we would be bled dry, etc, but in the event it was much faster and much less bloody than I thought. And I was for Iraq because I thought that it would be fast and easy and thus not a distraction from the important work.

I know: now I look like a fool. But I was betting on Pathans being more warlike than town Arabs - the way it turned out was a hell of a surprise. I've reversed my positions on both since, naturally.

And making the link between Iraq, Afghanistan and Seattle (eh?) is just weird. It's like a Vietnam protester saying to another "Well, yeah, you're against Vietnam; but I remember you supporting the Korean War! And you said the Rosenbergs were probably guilty!"
Iraq's a (deep breath) different war from Afghanistan, folks! That's WHY it's a bad idea!

Mark Twain on the Philippines. I doubt he'd ever have considered himself as having greater moral authority than somebody who was against the invasion in the first place. But, on the other hand, realizing you were duped is an amazing motivator.

I recall Powell's breathtaking performance distinctly. He drew a long face, showed a fuzzy satellite photo of a building with trucks around it, another photo of the same building without trucks, then an artist's conception of what a weapons lab inside a truck might look like, and told the UN to go to war.

Suppose I were a lawyer, going in to court to make a case against an alleged bank robber:
Your Honor, we all know that bank robbers are people. And people live in houses. And bank robbers drive getaway cars. Well, here's a picture of a house with a car in the driveway! The person who lives there could be a bank robber! That car could be a getaway car! And here's another picture, of the very same house, without the car. And to top it off, here's a cartoon of a bank robber driving a car. I drew it myself, Your Honor! This man is guilty, I rest my case.

I'd be laughed out of court, but the same argument apparently convinced Congress...

My hope with the whole Plame investigation is that it will restart the talk about Bush faking the case for war. If people can start talking about Bush's hyping of false intelligence, it gives the war supporters political cover to change their tune.

"He lied! Of COURSE I wouldn't have supported a war if Bush had told the truth."

I had such long arguments with very well-educated friends about the war. I was called a "Soft bigot" because I didn't believe that we could export democracy on the tip of a Tomahawk missile. After all the names we anti-war people were called, "bigots" "appeasers" "cowards", it's hardly harsh to call the pro-war crowd dupes.

Admitting mistakes, as it has been pointed out, is part of moving forward. Some of us ex-Naderites have voiced our regrets. In fact, not admitting mistakes has been a hallmark of this administration and a huge obstacle to correcting the mistakes that have been made.

What's the difference between a liberal who supports (the) war and a conservative who supports (the) war?

And what is the difference between opposing any one particular war, and opposing war as a general principle?

Ajay:

The major difference is in the mission objectives. Both Iraq and Afghanistan were extremely fast to conquer (I think Afghanistan was slightly better at resisting). The difference is that the mission in Afghanistan was to kick over the Taliban (easy) and then not a lot, whereas in Iraq it was first to kick over Hussein (easy, should have happened in 1991) and then to rebuild (incredibly dificult, especially with a hostile populace) whereas there was very little of Afghanistan to rebuild and the soldiers don't go far from Khabul. A very different mission.

JohnD: I recall Powell's breathtaking performance distinctly.

Me too. And Powell's speech is what convinced me that they were lying.

I'm just old enough to remember Stevenson's 'Cuban Missile Crisis' speech to the UN. And Stevenson had actual pictures of actual missiles that were, you know, actually pointed at us. It was enough to convince the typical seven-year-old.

The BEST evidence Powell had - after forty years of improvements in intelligence-gathering - was an artist's rendition of what an Iraqi portable CBW lab might look like. (If it existed.) It was obviously a lie.

Even if by some chance it wasn't a lie, it begged the question: How was Saddam going to drive it here? Even if Powell's obvious lie was somehow true, Saddam's WMDs STILL constitututed no threat to the United States.

Wow, first time I've ever been mistaken for a dirty hippie, sigh.

"If you want to be reality based, you admit error."

And if you want to win elections in the USA, you claim infallibility, which is the sign of the blessing of the gods, er, god. Just like the Olde Days.

John D says it all: Powell's "proof" was insulting to the intelligence of anyone who was paying attention, and anyone who says that they found it convincing is admitting either that they are too stupid to be trusted to go to the store and come back with the right change, or that they were already receptive to the case he was making. To this day I'm not so sure he belived it himself-- I always thought he was smarter than that.

Bob and Bill: I remember thinking at the time, "How can I know that the building isn't a carpet warehouse in New Jersey or something?" After all, going places and leaving again is what trucks do, and buildings tend to look alike from above.

I still can't believe all he had to sell a war was two grubby photos and a drawing.

The mission in Afghanistan was, as I perceived it, to capture Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice, and if it could be better done without knocking over the Taliban, so be it.

We fell down on the principal objective -- indeed, I feel we lay down on the job: The Times headlines about our pulling out of Tora Bora before securing Osama because the mission was just about done infuriated me -- remember those?

I felt going in that we were going to make a hash of Afghanistan, and so couldn't support it. I don't feel time has proven me wrong.

I seem to remember a joke told by our side in the days of the buildup to war.

How do we know that Saddam has WMDs?
Because we still have the receipts.

Let's say you sit on the town council of a small, rural community that's evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Let's say, too, it's been the practice of this council, over the years, to not comment on state or federal actions that have no direct relationship to Town programs and policies. Let's say you personally opposed the war, but now that our military is in Iraq, you believe the options have become far more complex, and are no longer sure what the right -- the just -- action should be with regard to our involvement in that country. Let's say one of your fellow councilmembers has righteously decided to break prior practice and agendized, for the next council meeting, an antiwar resolution. What do you do when you're sitting at the dais and the resolution comes forward?

And I wish I could say this really is a hypothetical question...

There is quite a lot of Afghanistan to rebuild - not so much that we knocked down in '01, but lots that they knocked down themselves in '89-'00, and plenty more that the Sovs (and the muj) knocked down in '79-'89.

Ironically, I suspect, one of the reasons for our comparative success in governing the country as a colony - if not in catching UBL - is probably that we are forced to act with a light hand, because we are so short of troops. Putting 130,000 men on the ground and the world's supply of F-16s in the air would probably just turn the place into another Iraq, with far too many idiot green-army types thinking that you do urban policing work with JDAMs and 155mm shells.

At present it looks good; optimism reigns on the elections, the warlords are gradually being co-opted or (in the case of Ismael Khan) marginalised, and the violence is far, far less severe.

I reckon I'll be able to go back there (as a backpacker, this time) in ten years. I doubt I could say the same for Iraq.

If I can expose myself as an idiot here, I considered myself around the time of Mr. Powell's speech as a supporter of a UN-led invasion to enforce UN authority. I suspect that Mr. Powell's speech played a part in that. The photos were clearly just supporting evidence to the recordings (as we quickly found out, those were sketchy as well), but Mr. Powell, at least, put the matter to my taste. The agreement between the UN and the Ba'athist government was being flouted, and if it were not enforced, the UN may as well close up shop. Certainly just sticking with the restrictions and occasional abortive inspections didn't appeal to me at all. I still find that argument compelling, in some ways.

It wasn't until March 1 of that year that I declared myself anti-war, and that was not because I felt that the principle was wrong, but that it was clear that (as I put it) 'Bush has fully convinced me that if their plans (and I call them plans, but I don't trust that they are thought out well enough to seriously be called plans) are carried out, it will in fact be worse than continued sanctions.'

I'm not sure why I'm going through all this again. I suspect it's because Mr. Tomorrow (OK, Mr. Perkins) thinks I'm an idiot, and I think I was wrong, but not an idiot. Also, as we liberal interventionists eat our own livers, I'm not convinced that there are a lot of us who are blaming the whole thing on Mr. Powell's UN Speech. I think that's a straw man. I think there were a lot of people, particularly Senate Democrats, who were not prepared for the breadth of the lies coming from the White House, and who felt that there must be some kernel of truth at the middle of it. Exaggerations, rather than lies. Mr. Powell contributed a lot to that, and not just in the UN speech.

I'll also say, as a liberal interventionist, non-hippie, who felt and still feels that the case for intervention must be made on a case by case basis, grounded in good intelligence and good planning, that the anti-war street movement never seemed to want me on their side, never seemed interested in convincing me on anything like my terms, any more than it seems Mr. Perkins now wants me to do anything more than shut the fuck up. They all seemed to assume that Mr. Powell and all of Our Only President's cronies were lying—which they were—which always seemed to me to let them off the hook for the actual lies they tell.

Thanks,
-V.

You can possibly morally legitimately make an argument for Just Wars of Aggression.

I can't, any more; and I certainly can't for Afghanistan, and I couldn't six *years *ago when I had an inkling, no more than an inkling then (altho' that is not the case now) of how *heinously* we had used and betrayed and devasted Afghanistan and how this was indeed blowback, and how we owed them not more bombs but the Marshall Plan we had lied and failed to deliver them after using them as Russia's Vietnam - but someone ignorant of that might blamelessly believe and argue otherwise, at that juncture.

*Might.* Wilful ignorance is culpable; and when the truth is out there, how much ignorance is innocent? I still blame myself for being the Afghan-war cheerleading Reaganite 11-year-old, although how much arguably could a sheltered conservative 11-year-old pro-lifer who had never *heard* of the October Surprise be blamed, I grant it may be minimal.

But I *personally* knew by 9/13 at the outside latest, that they had no interest in anything but using it as a pretext for nailing Saddam, and I had watched them clamor for a "spiralling" missile shield program, blunder diplomacy with Russia & China as you would expect a bunch of old Cold Warriors to do, and wreck detente with NK destabilizing a friendly leader of an ally and satrap in the process (SK) and so had *no* room for any comforting self-delusion that House Bush & Cheneyburton might actually mean to do right *or* was capable of doing so. From the beginning I thought, and said privately to like-minded souls, that the definitive history of late 20th c American foreign policy would be titled Beyond All Recognition--

--Cold comfort, though.

Not my experience from Britain - at the anti-war marches, the Quakers were picking up a lot of unaligned marchers who were happy to be seen as Quaker and extremely unhappy to be marching along side those cheering for the Intifada and Sharia Law or the various factions of Trots. The Quakers were the nice safe neutrals that everyone could respect and most could agree with. And this despite not having a megaphone between them.

A lot of the moderate left rediscovered why they dislike the far left more than the moderate right at those marches.

That's why I didn't march. I may not have ever supported the war* but I do rather like capitalism and I am vehemently not anti-Israel.

*My husband did, and we went round and round about it. He thought that it would be done in a pragmatic long-term nation-building sort of way, and I considered that to be something of a spherical cow.

"How about people who supported invading Afghanistan? Lots of us did (including Patrick); if I recall correctly, Tom Tomorrow didn't, and I'm beginning to think he was right, if only because of the political capital that gave Bush to fuck up other things. Is Patrick a quisling too?"

The war on Afghanistan was much more defensible than the war on Iraq ever was. It was still wrong however and Afghanistan only looks good because Iraq is such a mess. Even then it was clear that even if you did believe in justifiable wars, Bush was not the right person to wage them and nothing good would come of it

At the time I seem to remember I was very angry with Patrick in rec.arts.sf.fandom for his stance on the war; in retrospect too angry, for which I'd like to apologise.

I still blame myself for being the Afghan-war cheerleading Reaganite 11-year-old

Much is explained.

Matt McIrvin writes: ...I make no protest otherwise; I've been trying to figure out what my real reasons were and I don't think they were rational...

Sounds like you've done what Tom Tomorrow says you ought to have done, i.e. "shut the fuck up about Colin Powell and admit you were as wrong as it was possible to be."

Welcome to the anti-imperialist movement, Matt. Here's your copy of The War Prayer, by Mark Twain.

I did indeed support the intervention in Afghanistan. I was wrong and Martin Wisse was right. It's very gracious of him to apologize for being heated toward me in those long-ago Usenet articles, but in fact I apologize to him for being equally heated and, in addition, wrong.

I'm tempted by the position that it was fundamentally a good idea for us to invade Afghanistan but who could have known the Bush regime would make such a mess of it. However, my actual position is that both Afghanistan and Iraq have made me much more dubious about the merit of any such adventures, under any imaginable American administration. I'm not a pacifist or categorically an isolationist (insert standard disclaimer yadda yadda) but I don't think the lessons of Afghanistan or Iraq boil down only to the insight that this administration is incompetent.

I do want to say that I'm not actually trying to excommunicate anyone from being part of political argument. I'm just pointing to the fact that even after the hippie peaceniks were proved right and the centrist "reasonable" pundits wrong, the world has gone on as if nothing happened. It's enough to make you believe there might actually be a class system. (Shhhhh.)

Vardibidian writes: ...the anti-war street movement never seemed to want me on their side, never seemed interested in convincing me on anything like my terms...

A lot of us who marched on February 15, 2003 were acutely aware that the Bush administration had sabotaged UNMOVIC by openly admitting they had penetrated the inspection teams with American intelligence assets. This was a clear message to Saddam Hussein that UNMOVIC was actually a battlefield preparation operation, not a counter-proliferation operation. It was intended to provoke the Iraqi government into refusing to cooperate wit UNMOVIC and thereby provide a pretext for an invasion.

In other words, the U.S. burned a real counter-proliferation effort— does that sound familiar?— in order to gather intelligence for the coming war.

I distinctly remember bringing well-researched and credible citations for the evidence of this to my "liberal interventionist" friends, and I clearly remember their response. They told me I was "objectively pro-Saddam" for offering an argument that involved asking them to see matters from Saddam's perspective. Seriously.

This didn't get any better when Saddam Hussein opted to cooperate with UNMOVIC even though he knew they were only gathering intelligence for the war and were not interested in finding nuclear weapons. At that point, the liberal interventionists didn't give a flip that the inspection teams had completely free run of the country, could go anywhere and look at anything they wanted, and were saying they were almost convinced there would be no nuclear weapons related program activities to find, and that all they needed were a few more weeks and they would have enough proof to settle the matter once and for all— no, at that point, the liberal interventionists were still convinced that war, instead of continued inspections, was absolutely necessary.

We "dirty hippies" brought you an argument. On your terms. You rejected it. Why?

Why— when UNMOVIC had free run of the country and Saddam Hussein couldn't stop them from going anywhere and looking into anything they wanted— why did you want the inspectors pulled out of Iraq so the ground war could begin?

Why did the liberal interventionists not want the United Nations to be able to do its job?

(My apologies: it finally dawned on me that there are two of us who were posting with just the first name 'Michael', and as *I* am not the archangel, I guess appending my family name might not be a bad idea).

FWIW I have the utmost respect for anybody who admits they were wrong to support the war. We all make mistakes, and we all go through a learning process. To me, it was obvious on the face of it that invading Iraq was both wrong and stupid, but I have the advantage of being one of those Quaker hippies everybody apparently loves to hate, and, during the period in question, not having cable television. Keeps the brain clean, you see.

My sister, though, was in the Iraq-war-as-catharsis group. She doesn't talk about it much lately, but she voted for Kerry last time, and her a registered Republican, in Indiana. She hasn't explicitly come out and said she was wrong. But in our dysfunctional way, we both know that she's tacitly admitted it. And I respect her for that growth.

But really -- I've found it difficult all along to understand how anybody could believe that this Administration had America's best interests at heart in starting either of these wars. It's made me a very bitter person over the last years, seeing so many people I thought I respected, being so very thoroughly duped into supporting an incompetent lack of morality. Come on. Bombing Afghanistan to smithereens to find OBL? Stupid. Just stupid. Especially when it was obvious that Rumsfeld just wanted to blow shit up, then Bush would let Afghanistan down. But then Iraq? Blatantly stupid.

On September 11, 2001, I walked into the Indiana University Student Union and saw some pretty damned cool footage on the big-screen TV, and my first thought -- ask my wife, she was there -- was "Reichstag". It was fricking obvious. And for the last four years I've made sure the passports are in order (fortunately things didn't end up degrading that far, but the time to leave is when you still can, you see) and I've avoided talking to people who've been drinking the Kool-Ade. And now, now that people are starting to realize that they were FUCKING MORONS, sorry, blood pressure and four years of enduring this crap will out, anyway, now people are starting to pretend they knew it all along, or they were reluctant to embrace the war.

They weren't reluctant. They wanted to feel that vicarious ability to kill, that's all. I don't even mind it, especially if people can be honest about it. I admit I felt the same, sure, even though on the *policy* level I knew that war was a mistake, and said so, repeatedly. But being told I hate America because I love American ideals, that shit just rankles. And the worst of it is the people that realize they were had and *still* say I hate America. That's just too moronic for words.

God. I love America. But I do hate about 70% of Americans now, yes I do.

Well. *That* was an emotionally conflicted post. Take it as you will. I still respect anybody who can admit they were wrong about the whole thing. Which was my original reason for posting. Thank you, I'll be here all week and don't forget to visit the snack bar!

Just read Veribidian's post -- I find myself agreeing with him. The rabid anti-war types *do* turn on their nominal allies awfully easily. I've always considered peace something that starts at home, and I get along with my neighbors even if they have Bush/Cheney bumper stickers. And if somebody doesn't loathe me on sight for "hating America" everybody's happy.

That is to say -- it wasn't the policy division that got to me. It was the fact that civility itself was considered, you know, vaguely quaint. Republican thuggism was the New Thing.

Of course, living in Indiana probably made it all look different. Sigh. And now I don't. Largely due to all this, actually.

In re:

"On September 11, 2001, I walked into the Indiana University Student Union and saw some pretty damned cool footage on the big-screen TV, and my first thought -- ask my wife, she was there -- was "Reichstag"."

Michael, I think we're generally in agreement about the Iraq war being a crappy idea and the Bush administration being a bunch of jerks--but I'm honestly quite dubious about the proposition that the U.S. gov't had any hand in the events of 9/11.

I will certainly concede that there are people in the USA nutty enough to contemplate such a crime against their own citizens. Further, I don't doubt that there are people possessing the requisite level of ethical bankruptcy in the current administration. But--serious question--do you think it's realistic to think that a plan on the scale of 9/11 could actually have been implemented in secret by the U.S. gov't?

In support of my skepticism, let me cite Oliver North and Gordon Liddy as representative examples of the type of personality one might expect to see involved in such a scheme. Neither of them strikes me as the martyr type.

Please understand, I'm not defending the decency of the government, I'm attacking its competence.

Lately I've heard a number of people giving this same basic idea serious consideration. I'm curious what the consensus is. Anyone care to chime in?

(answering in haste, from the wife's computer)

Matt: I'm with you. That was my one and only rant -- well, more of a long deep sigh -- re: how all that played out and I'm done.

Serge: Quebec City, 2001, Summit of the Americas.

And just to be clear, I understand that there were people legitimately were in all of those categories.

The decision to stick them out front where the photogs could see them and pretend that that was 'the new face of the anti war movement...' I get why it happened. At the time, I even thought it might work, in which case, roll on the humble pie.

Just -- can we remember it didn't and not waste too much more time trying to look 'credible' and 'serious' based on a standard set by people who would just as soon see us driven into the ocean?

The extreme left has always driven me batshit, as has the extreme right. And the 'extreme middle' of people who insist that what they're selling is just 'common sense.'

Actually, almost everyone drives me insane, so I'm a bad one to comment, there.

Someone once told me that if your coalition doesn't drive you batshit, it's probably not broad enough, and I find this helpful to remember.

Getting a distaste for the far left isn't hard. They're the ones who show up at every protest, regardless of what it's for, with the LEGALIZE POT banners and the tie-died Che Guevara T-shirts.

The moderate right is much easier to deal with simply because, as moderates, there are other things they can talk about besides politics, and actually be interested in them too.

I was less than thrilled with the invasion of Afghanistan, but I wasn't going to protest it either. I simply wished Bush would go about capturing Bin Laden a bit more efficiently. (Still wishing. Isn't working.) Iraq I protested, both times, simply because if a country isn't attacking us, we don't have any business invading.

As for WMDs, any time someone comes up with a trendy new acronym, not only are they selling something, but they're also trying to hide something. As happened after the invasion, where Bush was trying to claim that they'd found Weapon of Mass Destruction Processed Cheese Food Product Programs (in development).

This:

I do want to say that I'm not actually trying to excommunicate anyone from being part of political argument. I'm just pointing to the fact that even after the hippie peaceniks were proved right and the centrist "reasonable" pundits wrong, the world has gone on as if nothing happened.

is quite a long way from this:

shut the fuck up about Colin Powell and admit you were as wrong as it was possible to be

which is why I read Patrick's blog and not, generally, Tom Tomorrow.

This:

Someone once told me that if your coalition doesn't drive you batshit, it's probably not broad enough, and I find this helpful to remember.

also strikes me as quite good.

bellatrys, you seem to be arguing for an opposition to Republican rule that is comprised entirely of the pure and the righteous. I submit that this is not a majority and that the effect of your approach will be permanent Republican rule. Is that what you want?

(Incidentally, Vichy and Quisling are pretty strong to be tossed around in what is presumably meant to be a civilized debate. From where I sit, twenty minutes by boxcar from Dachau, your comparison is wildly out of proportion.)

In re "Reichstag" -- on 9/11 I thought "Reichstag" in the sense of something damned useful for Bush and his people -- and in that I was borne out. I have to admit I want to resist the tinfoil, the charges set in the building theory, etc. -- but the fact that there was no fire-safety investigation done, that all the metal was shipped to China as scrap, leads me to think there was *something* covered up there.

No, I think they didn't expect the damned buildings to fall down. They wanted a big bang, 50 dead, let's attack Iraq. Instead everything fell down, 3000 dead, and they'd grabbed the tiger and were trying to ride it. And they've managed to avoid getting eaten for four years. I like to think the tiger isn't toothless and stupid, and they'll get eaten soon. But I've stopped believing it, because I've been too hopeful too often that rationality would reassert itself. To the point where I now think that the rational, good America I grew up loving was a pipe dream all along. Doesn't that suck? I really, really hate having to think that "we hold these truths to be self-evident" now identifies me as an America-hating, terrorist-loving, appeasing hippie.

Yeah, I'm mad. Still. For years now. It's basically ruining my life. But at least Washington hasn't tried to liberate me yet, and I can still walk on my two legs and see my children and work to support myself when not obsessing about atrocities.

I knew Powell was lying. The UN had inspectors in Iraq -- if the US had such good documentation of where the buildings and trucks were, they could have notified the inspectors. With our spy satellites, it wouldn't matter how mobile the "platforms" were -- we could track them from space and provide a minute-by-minute GPS update on their position.

We didn't. Because we couldn't. That told me this was just another lie.

"I knew Powell was lying. The UN had inspectors in Iraq -- if the US had such good documentation of where the buildings and trucks were, they could have notified the inspectors."

In January 2003, Hans Blix was publicly complaining that U.S. intelligence agencies were not sharing the supposedly reliable information they claimed to possess, which we now know to have been completely fabricated bullshit, that purported to indicate where the weapons of mass destruction could be found.

In February, we marched in the streets around the world.

In March, the UNMOVIC inspectors— who still had found nothing— bugged out of Iraq mere days before the American and British invasion.

In October, the Iraq Survey Group issued a preliminary report— later confirmed in the final report— that there was no evidence of the "weapons of mass destruction related program activities" that were used to justify the invasion.

Tell me again why liberal interventionists wanted to stop the UNMOVIC inspections and invade— because it's clear to me that it was never about Colin Powell's speech and the weapons of mass destruction.

Vardibidian makes an interesting point in saying, "I think there were a lot of people, particularly Senate Democrats, who were not prepared for the breadth of the lies coming from the White House, and who felt that there must be some kernel of truth at the middle of it."

I think that the majority of people in the country were (and probably are) unwilling to accept that our government is being run by the worst kind of thugs. They stole the election in 2000, and we have closed our eyes to that, and to just about everything else they have done since, in the foolish belief that Bush, Cheney, and the rest of them are, at a minimum, acting out of the good faith belief that what they are doing is in the best interests of the US and the world. We just don't want to admit that we have been so stupid as to have turned the controls over to a group of criminals who, on a world historical basis, can be number with the worst of all time.

And guess what? They are consolidating their position. By mocking dissent, they have neuralized the ability of the opposition to even critique their policies.

I'm a liberal. I'm a peacenik. And I accurately predicted what would happen if we invaded Iraq (may verify by Googling Usenet).

I think pot and a lot of other drugs should be legal.

I'm wearing a tie dye shirt, but no Che Guevara because I know what he did.

I'd still be marching except that I don't walk very well anymore and the doctors don't want me to use a wheelchair yet.

I don't do/believe all this because it's somehow fashionable. I believe it's the right thing to do/believe.

Francis:

Sorry; I was offline for a while.

I'm on the U.S. side of the Atlantic, and in the Southern U.S. at that. This explains a lot about our respective perspectives.

I supported the invasion of Afghanistan and the destruction of the Taliban regime, and the involvement of my country's troops. It seemed then, and still seems, to be worthwhile in itself. That regime was an offence to humanity. That which replaced it seems a little better. Maybe it will be a lot better.

I supported the invasion of Iraq, and my own country's involvement in it. I was willing to countenance a limited war against an odious regime because I thought then, and think now, that the use by any regime, or by jihadists, of the weapons I was assured were present, would touch off a far wider, far worse, and far more destructive war.

I still cannot express regret at the demise of the Ba'athist regime in Iraq, though I confess that this good outcome has been dwarfed by other evil outcomes. But that is not the point.

For there were no weapons, and no means of producing them, nor any likelihood that such means existed. What I thought were facts - what were presented to me as facts - were not facts. I now think it likely that they were deliberate untruths. Lies.

I was wrong. At least I never voted for them, and I never denigrated those who dissented. But I never protested. Because of that, I am part of the consensus. I regret that.

So now what? I now know that I should never have consented, but I have to ask Lenin's question: What is to be done?

And if the answer is Lenin's answer, I will recognise the bitter justice of it, but I will not consent to that, either, despite everything.

Dave Luckett writes: What is to be done?

You have to ask? (Sigh.)

An investigation into whether there are grounds for articles of impeachment. That's what.

That's what has been left undone for going on three years now, while reactionaries and their liberal interventionist enablers have hoped against hope that it would never be necessary to conduct such an investigation.

Scott H, it's generally agreed that the Reichstag fire was probably not deliberate, but that doesn't mean the Reich didn't use it for everything they could.

So, yes, 9/11 was our Reichstag fire. It was my first thought, too.

This is all identity politics. It's useless.

I see a lot of it among republicans. There are honest republicans today who're trying desperately to pretend that there's some reasonable explanation for the whole iraq thing. Because they have so much of their identity tied up into being republicans that they can't look at anything else, so attacks on a republican get automatically discredited because they're attacks on a republicsn.

The splitting among anti-war groups is more identity politics. Each little group of good-guys who agree against all the others. Useless except to reaffirm identity.

The issue at each step is what specific goal are we attempting, and who can help, and will they help.

Here are some possible goals:

Goal 1. Get the troops out of iraq. Continue whatever economic support we can reasonably do, and try to persuade iraqis they benefit from international reporters reporting whatever they find.

What can we do: Aproach A: Get Bush/Cheney out, replaced by somebody who'd get the troops out.

Approach B: Get the groundwork prepared for a military exit in early 2009.

Goal 2: Get Bush/Cheney's records set read/only followed by their removal from office.

Approach A: Persuade republicans that Bush is a powerful threat to the GOP. Republican legislators then require Bush/Cheney to resign or be impeached.

Approach B: Attempt to take the House, gain Senate seats in 2006. Impeachment soon after. Get support from republicans who want to win the presidency in 2008 etc.

Approach C: What would it take for the Administration medical staff to declare them both medically unfit for duty?

Approach D: A partial general strike. Get as many people as possible to swear they will not do business with the Bush administration. A partial boycot of those who do. If enough people and businesses participate then Bush's chef has to pay for his pastry flour with his own account and get it delivered to his own home because nobody wants to sell pastry flour to Bush. His Secret Service guys stop for a donut at their usual place and have to lie about who they are to get served. Etc. It worked on Batista and on Marcos. If there's enough of a consensus it could work on Bush.

Goal 3: Destruction of the politicians who brought us this.

Approach A: Get rid of incumbents unless they have a good excuse. Primary fight for every incumbent who voted for the war, unless they have extremely stromg redeeming virtues. Support for democrat facing any republican incumbent.

If you really want to vote for a republican, tell him, "I like your ideas. I'll vote for you, and contribute money, and volunteer for your campaign -- if you run as an independent. Or a Libertarian. I have to oppose you while you're owned by the GOP."

Approach B: Support for libertarian candidates, particularly electible republicans who run as libertarians. If within 3 elections or so the libertarians become the second-largest party, the GOP will disband. They can't survive as a third party.

Goal 4: Election reform.

Approach A: Work toward a credible system with recounts. There are various technical approaches to have accountability with a touch-screen system. Find out what it takes to make this change and do what you can to further it.

Approach B: Work toward a way to avoid gerrymandering. Look over the various proposals for creating voting districts that allow little or no human input. Work to get one of them used in your state.

Approach C: Work toward Instant Runoff Voting. There are other systems that are a little better but this is good enough and easy to explain. Work to get it accepted locally, for local elections or for your state. Or for Democratic primaries. It's a natural for democrats. Candidates are rewarded for avoiding negative campaigning against each other. If the winner gets 92% of the vote (counting everybody who voted for him in any slot) and the first runner-up gets 86%, there needn't be hard feelings among the campaigners and they can all work hard to support the winner. And for the presidency, early primaries aren't such a big deal. Now the New Hampshire winner has a big boost. If the NH winner got 89% and the first runner-up got 83% it wouldn't look so impressive.

IRV would tend to produce electable candidates. And if it worked for democrats then other parties would use it, and it wouldn't take nearly as long before we were ready to use it for the actual elections.

I don't care about your politics. If you're with me on any of my goals, then I'll work with you on that goal.

You want a libertarian to win? I'll gladly help you get him on the ballot. I'll sing his praises to my republican friends. If I think he's more electable than the democrat I'll campaign for him. I have a lot of disagreements with libertarians but I'd far rather argue out an honest difference of opinion with you than put up with what I've gotten from republicans for the last 5 years. I'm not 100% with you but let's work together whenever we agree.

I think that the anger of Tom Tomorrow's rant is entirely justified.

I personally really don't care for a lot of the tropes of left activist culture. But when people keep being right about things I was wrong about, then if I'm serious about this whole "reality-based" thing, then it's time for me to tell my taste to go shut up so my reason can listen to them. If and when I manage to be as consistently right on a matter of national and global importance, then I will feel at liberty to dictate to them about fashion and all the rest.

Prose fandoms affect to care more about meanings than superficial trappings. As usual, this seems not to apply to our own tastes, even when it's really important. I wish I didn't have such an internal struggle to pay attention to people who actually do have things to tell me that I need to know to do my civic duties. But at least, I tell myself, I'm learning some and making some progress. I commend the exercise to others.

Remember:

When you're wrong, get yourself right before you start dictating too much to the people who were right all along.

Michael Roberts:

I now think that the rational, good America I grew up loving was a pipe dream all along. Doesn't that suck? I really, really hate having to think that "we hold these truths to be self-evident" now identifies me as an America-hating, terrorist-loving, appeasing hippie.

I personally really don't care for a lot of the tropes of left activist culture. But when people keep being right about things I was wrong about, then if I'm serious about this whole "reality-based" thing, then it's time for me to tell my taste to go shut up so my reason can listen to them. If and when I manage to be as consistently right on a matter of national and global importance, then I will feel at liberty to dictate to them about fashion and all the rest. [...]

Remember:

When you're wrong, get yourself right before you start dictating too much to the people who were right all along.

I was really in two minds about the war in Afghanistan. I was against it in principle but couldn't work up much passion to oppose it. I did think that toppling the Talibans was probably a good side effect anyway, even if the death and devastation it would entail would certainly by hard to justify.

I'm not sure how I judge the outcome of the Afghanistan war. The Talibans are gone, but apart from Kabul, much of the country in the grip of the same thugs as it was before.

I do think that the Talibans, as well as a lot of other endearing qualities, were also actively supporting international terrorism and, even worse in my view, fanatical fundamentalist ideology. Of course the same can be said of much of Pakistan, and couldn't be said of Iraq.

(Waving desperatly and ducking back into my Internet-deprived London life after this, alas)

The problem, Anna, is that the Taliban were the natural reaction to the war-wracked chaos that we created by provoking the Russians to invade in '79, playing proxy-war there for years, with all that involves of destruction of civilization and order and substituting armies of young men who have known nothing else, and then abandoning them after pledging reconstruction.

--Think about that: people initially welcomed the Taliban as the party of law and order, because things were so bad: our various proxy-warlords were fighting a ruinous civil war, for one. (I know that even the CNN anchors were unaware of this, at the start of our invasion, but it *was* pretty widely available information.)

Yes, they were puritan assholes, but they were putting the brakes on the libertarian assholes - ie drug-dealing gunslinging warlords, who had prior to that been the biggest threat, since the breakdown of the secular government in '79.

So now we have disrupted - not destroyed, mind you, the survivors have simply regrouped in the countryside - the Taliban; and created again the same situtation that was there before, that made the Taliban the best of all bad alternatives that we left them with before.

After - and never forget this, when judging the Afghanis - wrecking their country not even for the crass but at least honest motive of conquest, as with Musslini and Ethiopia, nor even wink-wink conquest as "liberation" - but secretly, by catspaw, to make a briar patch for the Soviet Union.

Which was, again, Evildum vs. Evildee, initially the plan of a Democratic administration. (As far as I know, Carter's NSA has never apologized for it, even post 9/11, either, though maybe Zbig has, somewhere.)

Then there's the problem that we, as in the US govt, were happily using the Taliban, too, until we sandbagged them: they were, after all, useful allies in the War on Drugs, which has all gone down the tubes with their downfall, as the desperate farmers and warlords alike ramp up opium production again; and then there were negotiations going on between various Oil/Gas interests, as well. "People like us, people we can do business with," was the Hegemony's attitude, before they decided that they *had* to go to war against them in the face of overwhelming popular opinion, that they couldn't do the thing they really wanted - invade Iraq, and start the Plan - until they dealt with (coffcoff) Osama and the Taliban.

Not that hard of a sacrifice, either. What's one wog satrap more or less, particularly in such a backwater? It wasn't like they ever intended to tie up any significant amount of their financial or military resources there, and they haven't.

The afghan war was run as a sideshow from the start, which let it do minimal damage by comparison.

I try to make sense of the news reports, and while suffering a bout of metaphoric deformation I get....

Imagine it's a long time from now, say 15 years. The US economy is doing very very badly. The US army has mostly disbanded for lack of funds, and various parts of the country are run by various militias. Rough democracy -- one gun, one vote. The country is nominally run by a coalition of republicans, with a platform of christian values. Convicted abortionists are executed and there are lots of stories about suspected abortionists getting summary execution. Women who are caught looking for abortion are publicly humiliated in various ways, head shaved, the usual. The civilised world thinks we're crazy but they don't care as much as they did when we were a superpower.

The chinese decide the republicans have to go, for international reasons that most americans have paid no attention to and don't understand. The chinese pay large sums of money to militias that are willing to fight republicans. Quickly there is a libertarian majority attacking, and the republicans melt away. The chinese occupy Washington, DC but not much else. There are a number of incidents that give some idea of it -- like, some chinese intelligence guys are visiting Virginia governor John Warner when Ollie North and his regiment come in the gates. The chinese find out about it and demand that North be arrested as he isn't a libertarian at all but a goddamn republican. Warner shrugs and announces that North and his men are in custody. The chinese insist on interrogating them and Warner again shrugs and thrusts the agents into a room full of armed North guys. The chinese army winds up attacking and before it's over Warner's Governor's Compound has been thoroughly bombed. General hilarity among all uninvolved.

Virginians don't particularly mind having the chinese next door, because the ban on tobacco farming has been unofficially lifted and some money is finally circulating. A few moralists are bothered that nicotine is one of the most addictive drugs known, but hey, caveat emptor, we need the money.

The chinese make lofty promises about restoring socialism and social services of all kinds, but they don't do much about it and neither do the libertarian warlords, many of whom switched from being republicans when they saw where the profits were. Most people voted in the recent national elections, perhaps partly because of the rumor that places with a high voter turnout were less likely to get airstrikes in the coming year. And partly because each militia (who supervised the vote in its own area) ran a vigorous get-out-the-vote campaign. The noted libertarian Alan Greenspan, still vigorous at his age, won overwhelmingly. Greenspan announced that once the various regions pledged allegiance to him and were unified under a central command, we could start a massive road-building project to restore the interstates, and restore Social Security, and also we'd get a national health insurance system. And a large professional standing army and navy. When asked to comment on this last, the chinese ambassador to the USA General Lin Shu said, "We welcome the day when the USA becomes a free communist nation that no longer requires foreign assistance."

I supported the war in Afghanistan because the Taliban wouldn't turn over Osama bin Laden when asked. It seems to me that if one of your private citizens is waging war on a foreign power, you either deal with that citizen, or prepare to face the foreign power. (I still think this is a pretty good principle in a world where killing a hundred million people is only getting easier.)

The war in Iraq was a whole different matter. Sure, I was in favor of Saddam getting the boot--and even rebuilding the country had a certain appeal--but such things can only be done from morally-unimpeachable high ground. Clearly the Bush administration was playing a crooked game. Else, why not give the inspectors another two weeks?

The potential downsides of the war were obvious at the time. Civil war, prolonged occupation, and long-term blowback were all very real possibilities. And considering Bush's track record, how could anyone have expected him to do a good job? My litmus test: We should only go in if the Iraqis would be thanking us in 5 years. And I never had that kind of faith in Bush.

The anti-war movement didn't really influence my decision, because, well, I could never tell if their message was "This war is incredibily dumb," or "We should never go to war." In retrospect, I should have been out there marching--perhaps I wouldn't have needed to go canvasing in below-zero weather a year later.

For a while after the invasion, I believed in the Pottery Barn theory: We broke it, we bought it. But then I spent some more time reading about Vietnam (hey, I wan't born when it happened), and concluded that if you can't fix it, you might as well go home.

I was listening to the radio with my boss--a liberal retired military guy--when we heard that the president had just reinvaded Fallujah, and was gearing up for action in Najaf. We looked at each other, and said, "It's over, isn't it? We just went off the edge."

My biggest lesson from all this: Policy is never about grand ideological debates in your own mind over interventionalism, or personal responsibility, or whatnot. It's about whether specific people are going to die if you do some specific thing.

And oh, yeah: The moderate Republican party of Eisenhower and all those quintessentially grown-up New England Republicans is dead, dead, dead. The Democrats may be corrupt spineless fools, but they're the only game in town.

Here endeth the confession.

I recollect that when we ordered the Taliban to turn over Osama, they asked where's your evidence that he masterminded 9/11? And we said you can't have it. Am I wrong about this? Can that info be such a secret?

And in reply to Scott H way up there, I (who some folks here know worked in the WTC) felt from the afternoon of 9/11 that no way did what happen happen without some complicity on the part of someone, possibly military, possibly civilian. Nothing that has emerged since then has dispelled my gut instinct on that point.

The anti-war movement didn't really influence my decision, because, well, I could never tell if their message was "This war is incredibily dumb," or "We should never go to war."

That is a good statement of the topic of this thread. It sounds to me like, the anti-war folks turned out to be right, but it just didn't feel right, to certain people, to support them.

It is frustrating.

I'm not afraid to call myself a pacifist, although I am wondering what the generally accepted definition of "pacifist" is, and what exactly is wrong with being a pacifist.

Maybe the pacifist position is more like "Most wars are incredibly dumb, which is a good reason to avoid going to war."

"I supported the war in Afghanistan because the Taliban wouldn't turn over Osama bin Laden when asked. It seems to me that if one of your private citizens is waging war on a foreign power, you either deal with that citizen, or prepare to face the foreign power."

I agree they should have turned bin Ladin over, or at the least given him a short time to sneak out of the country.

The thing is, when you've accepted a guest under your roof you don't just turn him over to his enemies. We should have had anthropologists helping us on this. How we ask, how we explain our needs, how much time to give them, would it be enough they turn him out and we catch him across the border or do they have to give him a running start ....

Give them some time and thay might have worked it out. They had an absolute duty to protect their guest. Osama had an absolute duty to leave rather than see his host destroyerd.

We might have gotten something a lot better than an invasion that failed to catch bin Ladin, if we'd tried. I'm no anthropologist but it looked to me at the time like we might have had expert advice on how to state our demands to be sure they refused, so we could invade.

As I recall, the Taliban's best counter-offer was to put Osama before an Islamic tribunal. Personally, I would have settled quite happily for the ICC or any other UN war crimes getup. And if the Bush administration had been more competent, perhaps this could have been achieved.

I do feel our leaders bear significant responsibility for 9/11: The administration harbored PNAC nutters who were waiting for "a new Pearl Harbor." The administration never made a significant effort to combat terrorism. And, rather damningly, civilians with cellphones responded to the attacks faster than our air defense.

The hawks in the administration publically admitted a major terrorist strike would benefit their agenda. And they did amazingly little to prevent one. In my book, this is an open and shut case of depraved indifference.

The inability of "moderate" Republicans to see these problems--in 2004, when it mattered--is why I hold them in the highest contempt. That includes you, McCain, and don't think I've forgotton Hillary's cheerleading, either.

Patrick writes: ...the process by which viewpoints which have been pre-defined as “radical” get marginalized even when by all reasonable standards of evidence they’ve been proved correct.

It would help if— when our friends among the liberal interventionists decide they were "as wrong as it is possible to be" about the War™ in Iraq— they didn't continue to marginalize the views of those of us who weren't.

It's like they're saying, "Yes, I was wrong. But, at least I wasn't a dirty hippie." Blech. This is why they continue to ask "what is to be done?" rather than step up and join with us to demand justice and restitution.

p.s. I use War™ with a trademark symbol, because it's not at all clear to me, given the open issues in U.S. law on the subject, how it can be a War— rather than merely a delegation of war powers to an executive branch that remains conflicted about whether a "state of war" exists, or it's just enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions.

j h, what do you see as "justice and restitution"?

If it helps any, they fooled me on WMDs and I was still against the war, because I thought they were friggin' idiots.

Except for thinking that the administration would be merely lying, and not despicably and stunningly venal, I've pretty accurately predicted the run of this war.

At a minimum, articles of impeachment, real criminal investigations, and a withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from Iraq, followed by about five hundred billion unconditional dollars in reconstruction funds to be administered by whatever government the United Nations recognizes with a seat in the assembly.

Where people stood a year ago and what they said then is less important than where they stand today and what they do today and tomorrow.

You know, I'm baffled by all these people who think pacifism is widespread among non-hawks. Between the hawks and the relatively tiny number of pacifists, there are the vast majority of us who actually need a good reason before going to war.

Someone tells me some impossible bollacks about Saddam being able to launch a nuclear strike on us before Christmas when he's never tested a nuke and has no delivery systems, I know I'm being shined.

It's pretty simple. If you don't have a good reason to go to war, you don't go to war. And you were never given a good reason. End of story.

There are really not all that many pacifists around, even in the left - but many of those who objected to the invasion weren't even in the left. Brent Scocroft is hardly in the left, for example.

So why was it so easy to believe that pacifism had all that much to do with it?

"So why was it so easy to believe that pacifism had all that much to do with it?"

Because pacifism is weak. Pacifism is unAmerican. Pacifists are cowards who wouldn't stand up to Hitler and Tojo. Pacifists are snivellers who would let Stalin take over the world with godless Bolshevism. No real American wants to be a weak, cowardly, unAmerican enabler of Bolshevism.

Not that I think these things are true, but there are an awful lot of people in this country who feel that way. It's a frame many of us were raised with, and it's a hard one to step away from. It's possible to suggest a better one, such as "Before I beat up my neighbor for kicking my dog, I want to be sure the dog was kicked, he's the one who did it, and that I've got a good chance of beating him up, instead of him beating me up. If the answer to any of these is NO, I need another plan."

While I don't agree with everything James Webb wrote in his combination of family memoir and informal study of the Scotch-Irish in America, Born Fighting, there's a certain amount of that hillbilly intransigence* he identifies at work here, and it's been manipulated and played to with magnificent and malign skill by this administration, and by those using this administration as their tool, as they used Reagan as their tool. One of the basics of that creed is: You don't back down from a fight, especially if you think the other guy started it. Closely examining how the fight really got started, as well as trifling details like who is set up to benefit from it, and whether honest men have been dragged into it by people with ulterior motives that can't stand the sight of daylight is likely to be despised not as a prudent caveat but as a cowardly attempt to back down.

*I am a hillbilly, and I'm prepared to admit it--there's a strain of self-destructive hard-headedness we have in spades, and which we have bequeathed to the rest of the country. It causes trouble, and the trouble isn't very pretty, all too often. You can't back down; backing down is weak. You can't not fight; people will take advantage of you if you won't. Even when changing your mind and doing something different is entirely to your benefit--changing your mind and doing something different means you're weak.

I said it was self-destructive.

Machismo. Bleh.

I've been trying to figure this out,and I pretty much agree with fidelio.

Also, you know, those hippies couldn't possibly have had rational objections to the war, because they're all too stoned to think straight. Cool-headed, objective people analyzed the situation and said, "Yep, invading Iraq is the right choice here." Or something.

I'm just startled by how many people don't seem to have read Shirer on the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

I didn't get out and march against the Iraq invasion because I'm a pacifist -- I did it because the framing of the rhetoric coming out of the White House was indistinguishable from Goebbels' effusions in the summer of '39. There's a particular stench that rises to the surface when a government is psyching up its people for an unjustified war of aggression -- all sizzle and no steak. The media coverage of US government statements on Iraq from September 12th onwards stank of coordinated agitprop. It was glaringly clear that the arguments presented were going to be used to justify an invasion, so why did they all fade into vapour whenever I started looking for concrete evidence to support them?

The pattern was: present an assertion, draw in a sketch of what supporting evidence ought to look like, mumble darkly about how awful it would be if the nay-sayers were proven wrong, then move on to a fresh assertion of evil. Never stay on the topic long enough to let the other side pick holes in it. If you let them start to dig, they'll find out that there's nothing there, and you'll be back to square one -- but if you can keep moving on, you can build skyscrapers of propaganda on foundations of fluff.

The demonization of the enemy, carrying the faintly sulpherous whiff of racism, didn't help either, but as I said, the main anti-war tipping point for me was the propagandization of public policy. Because if it was justified, why not simply tell us the truth? The act of lying tells us that something is wrong, and we're complicit in the lie if we refuse to pay attention.

Charlie: You got that one right. I remember a person at my getting-on-the-train station who said that all the Middle-Easterners in the US should be locked up (shades of 1942!), and I looked at him, and said "You want to be careful saying things like that. you look pretty Middle Eastern yourself." He shut up. That was on 9/12.

I called all the justifications coming out of DC the "excuse of the month club". The conditions for not-going-to-war sounded way too much like "I dare you", repeat until the other guy gets mad and takes a swing at you: provocation trying to hide under diplomacy and not doing it well.

I was a proud career member of the US military.

I was in the Personnel Reliability Program (I don't know as that means much to most folks, but those who know what it means will understand).

I had a Top Secret clearance, based on background investigation.

My belief was (and is) that the best defense is a strong and confident military response to any attack.

I supported the war in Afghanistan (though my objectives might have been different -- more on that in a minute).

I opposed the war in Iraq, as long-time readers of Electrolite will recall, based on several factors, many of which turned out to be accurate predictions. One was that there were no WMDs in Iraq. I based this (I had not given nor received a classified briefing in around fifteen years at that time) on open sources.

My loyalty is still to the US armed forces.

Had I been President on 11 September 2005, I would have called in my cabinet, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the House and Senate majority and minority leaders, and said:

Ladies and gentlemen. We cannot stop surprise attacks against the United States. But we can make those who carry them out wish to God that they had never tried.

Here's what I want to have happen:

Capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

Using the minimum level of force necessary, take Afghanistan.

Rebuild Afghanistan. Local labor shall be used. Trade unions shall be established and supported.

Within the next century the following things shall become true: Every town shall be connected to every other with a hard-surface road. Every house shall have: Running water, electricity, and a phone. Every town shall have: A church or mosque, a town hall, a school, a medical clinic, a police station, and a fire station, all fully staffed.

Kabul shall be linked to every adjacent capital and to a warm-water port by a rail line.

There shall be a world-class national university.

There shall be a world-class national airport.

There shall be a national self-defense force sufficient to deter any aggression by their neighbors.

The constituion of Afghanistan shall be the United States Constitution, as amended.

The national language shall be English.

We will haul down the flag and turn over our last military base on 12 September 2101, when the smallest baby born there today will have already died of old age and Afghanistan as it was has passed out of living memory.

For every mile of road that we build in Afghanistan, we shall build or refurbish a mile in the United States. For every clinic we build in Afghanistan, we shall build or refurbish a clinic here. And so on, building for building, mile for mile, person for person.

I'm going to start calling the presidents, prime ministers, and kings of the nations of the earth to let them know our plans and ask their help.

Ladies and gentlemen, make it happen.

PJ, I'm still banned from the About Beading forum because after 9/11, I argued against interning Arabs in the US.

Marilee: Good for you!

James D. MacDonald writes: My loyalty is still to the US armed forces.

Mine is to the U.S. Constitution.

Had I been President on 11 September 2005, I would have called in my cabinet, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the House and Senate majority and minority leaders, and said [a lot of perfectly reasonable things that no sane person would have expected George W. Bush to have ever considered saying].

Interesting. My first inclination when deliberating about What Is To Be Done in response to a hostile threat to national security is not to imagine what I would do if I were President, but rather how I would vote (and what I would say to my colleagues) if I were a member of Congress. Call me weird, if you must. It's how I think about national politics.

If I had been a member of the 108th Congress, I might have dug in my heels and refused to vote for military action in Afghanistan unless it were explicitly tied to some or all of the conditions James enumerated in his comment above. I would have been branded a radical, called "objectively pro-terrorist" and probably forced to resign under a cloud of suspicion.

I wonder if all that shows is how there is something fundamentally broken about my personality. Oh well... I'd never win an election anyway. Not even in San Francisco, where I live.

I recall Powell's breathtaking performance distinctly. He drew a long face, showed a fuzzy satellite photo of a building with trucks around it, another photo of the same building without trucks, then an artist's conception of what a weapons lab inside a truck might look like, and told the UN to go to war.

Props to JohnD for that. I, too, remember watching Powell's 'performance' with a friend and both of us actually laughed. No, I mean really: "Look! There were some trucks there -- and now THEY'RE GONE!!"
Jeebus.

James D. MacDonald writes: My loyalty is still to the US armed forces.

Mine is to the U.S. Constitution.

That isn't fundamentally different. As a military man, my oath is "To support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

The same applies to all my comrades in arms. We are all sworn to defend the Constitution. That is where I place my loyality: With those who are so sworn.

(For those who were wondering where I fit in the great scheme of Making Light: I am far, far to the right of Miss Teresa and Mr. Patrick.)

j h woodyatt: This is why they continue to ask "what is to be done?" rather than step up and join with us to demand justice and restitution.

I asked "what is to be done", not because I am in any doubt about what I should do, but because I wanted to hear your answer, and that of others.

I wondered if I would get Lenin's answer to Lenin's question. I asked it, I suppose, out of purely academic curiosity of no particular practical application. Please accept it in the spirit that you appear to have done: as an invitation to tell me what you think.

Please understand also that I am not entitled to any opinion as to the impeachment of a President of the United States, and for the purposes of this discussion, have none.