Klein has hit the nail squarely on the head.

The ones who insist that the intervention in Iraq was justified, and who keep seeing light one friedman away down the tunnel, are as much part of the neo-con cheering section as the ones who write the policy papers.

The idea that criticising the neo-cons is anti-Semitic is one hell of a long stretch (among other things it seems to assume that such figures as Jeane Kirkpatrick and Condoleezza Rice are or were Jewish).

As a Jew, I find the whole antisemitism argument pathetic and insulting. It assumes that all Jews have a single political agenda*, and that the Neobarbs** speak for that agenda and all the Jews†.

* Protocols of the Elders of Zion, perhaps?
** It occurs to me I've been using that term for some time without explanation. It's probably obvious that I mean it derogatorily and derisively, I also use it in the sense that these fools are having an effect very like that of the barbarians who took over Rome and stripped it of everything they could carry, never mind that pulling down the only superpower is guaranteed to cause a power vacuum that will be filled with chaos.
† Yeah, right. In the first place, remember the old line about how if 3 Jews discuss a topic they'll have 4 opinions? In the second place, the whole idea of neo-Zionism is built around advantage to the interests of the Neobarbs, not the Jews. Nor is it the case that the interests of Israel and of Jews in general are identical or even roughly aligned. And in the fourth place, the control of Israeli politics and policy currently rests in the hands of a minority alliance many of whom are political or religious extremists.

Christopher Hitchens has a column online where he deals with the fact that his words influenced a young man, previously anti-war, who went to Iraq and died there.

These pro-war columnists and writers need to realize that they are complicit in this disaster, and that people they'll never know paid terrible consequences for their deluded and misguided punditry.

The link

Bruce @2:

Thank you, thank you, thank you! The whole anti-neocon=anti-semitic thing has been making me crazy, but I wasn't sure I could discuss it without getting sidetracked by a larger Jewgirl-in-the-diaspora discussion. Thank you for so succinctly laying it bare.

Klein: "what Roger Cohen feels does not matter"

I know a Roger Cohen. I've advised him to change his name.

Roger "Therapeutic Violence" Cohen doesn't even deserve the liberal hawk label. A liberal hawk is someone who advocates war and interventionism because they truly believe that doing so advances liberal causes human rights, democracy, or justice. (Nevermind the congnitive dissonance inherent in that statement.) Cohen's no liberal--he's just a scared, scared little man who wants to lash out against the world to make himself feel safer. He's swallowed the Republican "Only we can save you from the scary brown people!" bullshit hook, line, and sinker.

Heresiarch, your "Therapeutic Violence" link is to a Richard Cohen column.

"Baghdad is closer to Sarajevo than the left has allowed..."

I suppose a comment about the state of geography teaching in America would be out of place here? Yes, I thought so.

One of these days I'll have something useful to contribute...

Steven desJardins @ 7: er, ah, erm... *slumps in defeat*

Now I feel like I ought to apologize to Richard Cohen.

Here's the "theraputic violence."

#3 Sean Sakamoto: Christopher Hitchens has a column online where he deals with the fact that his words influenced a young man, previously anti-war, who went to Iraq and died there.

Thank you for linking to that. Reading it clarified something for me.

I've been an avid reader since I was a kid. I've written a lot of stuff, have two degrees in one sort of writing or another. I've made a modest (compared to the number of years I've been putting pen to paper, or fingertips to keyboards) amount of money from writing. Words are, pretty much, okay by me.

Nevertheless, for some time now I think I have secretly... hated writing.

No, I don't mean I hate having (or getting) to write something. And I'm not referring to hating a particular piece of writing, or writing by a particular author.

I mean hating the existence of writing itself.

How weird is that? I don't actually know how weird that is, but my guess is: pretty weird.

I imagine people will tell me, that's silly, that's like hating knives because somebody you know got stabbed to death by one. So I guess my response to that would be... What's wrong with admitting to yourself that part of you hates knives? It doesn't mean you'll stop using them for appropriate purposes. It doesn't mean you blame the knife that stabbed your friend to death. It just means that part of you hates the simple, factual existence of knives. The End.

And it's that Hitchens piece that allowed me to finally put a name to this thing I'd been secretly feeling for a while. Maybe that's pure happenstance. Or, you know, maybe it isn't.

Michael #11

I imagine feelings like that might be common - not necessarily about writing, but about feelings in general. Perhaps it's just the mind's way of dealing with things we have a lot of exposure to. We just need to get away for a while.

Hell, maybe that explains why Watterson quit Calvin & Hobbes - he just might have been sick of that kid and his tiger.

Fragano Ledgister @ #1

one friedman away down the tunnel

A unit of measurement that can only be expressed in imaginary numbers.

LMB @ 13: "One Friedman", in the left-blogosphere, equals six months, because of that pundit's frequent assurances that in the next six months we will really truly know whether Iraq is on the path to glorious democracy or truly and irretrievably fucked over.

I'd just like to point out that it is possible to support the military removal of Saddam and the Baathists without being a drooling Bushie.

The tendency of some anti-invasionists to paint all hawks with a too-broad brush is no more accurate, nor fair, than the tendency of the pro-invasionist cons to paint all anti-interventionists as America-hating or limp-wristed terror-lovers.

I supported the invasion. I supported the removal of Saddam and the destruction of the Baath regime. These were some nasty, nasty people and because America was already so tangled up in Iraq, due to our feeding resources to Saddam during the Cold War, and because of our failure to remove him during the first Gulf War, I think we owed it to Iraqis to finally go get the job done.

Does this mean I think everything has gone perfectly?

Hell no. Much of what has gone wrong has gone wrong precisely because we failed to remove Saddam in 1991, when we had for more manpower and a better political footing from which to project it. Rumsfeld didn't factor in how exhausted the Army and Marines would be. Bush and Rove used poor and weak logic in "selling" the invasion to the public. And of course, the Iraqis themselves have much to answer for. Those aren't Americans out there car-bombing markets filled with women and children.

But I digress. The so-called 'liberal hawk' stance deserves defending. Some people might not think so, but that doesn't automatically make all liberal hawks the moral or ethical equivalent of the seedier portion of the NeoCon populace.

Being a liberal hawk means believing that the U.S. armed forces must remain as a powerful interventionalist force in matters of dire humanitarian crisis. If we fault the cons for anything, maybe we should fault them for not prioritizing in the Middle East? (knock, knock, Darfur...)

If America turns its back on military interventionalism, as seems to be the want of many right now, the world will be a far less stable place for it.

Maybe lots of people could live with the U.S. being an isolationist.

But how do we explain an isolationist policy to the memories of those who fought in WWI or WWII? Korea?

These are questions that go far beyond Bush. America must still define itself in a post-Soviet world. Especially with the Chinese rising as the next (probable) superpower. What is our "job", as a nation, anyway? Do we just keep all the troops home and never again bother with a foreign military adventure?

If so, I think we will have all but handed "lone superpower" status to the Chinese. Would this be desireable?

I'm not saying I have all the answers. I am asking questions as a self-identified LibHawk who resents being tarred and feathered for Bush's mistakes and misdeeds.

@ #15 CommunityRadioVet: ...Being a liberal hawk means believing that the U.S. armed forces must remain as a powerful interventionalist force in matters of dire humanitarian crisis.

The problem for me is one of definition because my particular definition of a "liberal hawk", in this instance, is a liberal who supported the invasion of Iraq.

The problem I believe that people who meet my definition of "liberal hawk" have is that everything we have seen in Iraq since the invasion was predicted beforehand, by people who knew what the hell they were talking about. That being the case, in this instance I can see no practical or philosophical difference between a "liberal hawk" who disregarded those predictions and a "neo-con" who disregarded those predictions.

As for the notion that there may be times when the United States should for all sorts of moral and practical reasons exercise its military might on foreign shores, you don't have to be a "liberal hawk" or a "neo-con" to believe that. However, if you are actually going to go forward with such projects, you do need to be "a person with half-a-brain". That is, if people who know what they are talking about tell you that you are going to end up with something like we now have in Iraq, you should give their advice some *serious* consideration before you ride off to the rescue.

Lessons we have (supposedly) learned:

(1) Oppressed though a people may be, they often don't like having their country invaded and occupied. In fact, oppressed though they may be, they often despise you for coming to their rescue in this manner. See if there is something short of invasion you can do to help get things squared away.

(2) Imagine the worst way things can go, then if you must invade, prepare for the worst way things can go.

These two points are and were perfectly obvious *before* the invasion of Iraq. Next time, as a "liberal hawk" we will rely on you to hammer these points home before you support another fiasco like Iraq.

CRV (#15) --

To briefly reply:

I supported the invasion. I supported the removal of Saddam and the destruction of the Baath regime. These were some nasty, nasty people and because America was already so tangled up in Iraq, due to our feeding resources to Saddam during the Cold War, and because of our failure to remove him during the first Gulf War, I think we owed it to Iraqis to finally go get the job done.

Yes, the US was already involved in Iraq (as it is in many places). And yes, Saddam was brutal.

On the "why" of not removing Saddam in the first Gulf war, George H. W. Bush and Dick Cheney spoke at the time and afterward, making a case for not doing so. Given the benefit of hindsight their arguments are still persuasive and turned out to be accurate.

A military option should always be discussed. In the course of the discussion one must provide a) concrete victory condition(s), b) objective means for determining if those conditions have been met, c) a determination that the victory conditions are possible, and d) a determination that military force is the best way of achieving those victory conditions.

I don't believe that any of those four conditions were met prior to Gulf War II. A plan that includes "here a miracle occurs" is probably not a good plan. A plan that requires that everything go perfectly is probably not a good plan. Desperation could get you to go with a plan that requires you to roll snake-eyes five times in a row. I can't think of any other reason for going with a plan like that. We were not desperate at the time.

If America turns its back on military interventionalism, as seems to be the want of many right now, the world will be a far less stable place for it.

Maybe lots of people could live with the U.S. being an isolationist.

Please don't think drawing back from military interventionism is the same thing as isolationism. Military intervention is only one part of engagement in the world.

The credible threat of military force did make Saddam jump through every hoop we put in front of him. The actual use of that military force is what has placed us in the current sorry position where we can no longer credibly threaten military force elsewhere.

But how do we explain an isolationist policy to the memories of those who fought in WWI or WWII? Korea?

The dead of WWI, WWII, and Korea are "sunk costs." Nothing we do today will bring even one of them back to life.

Many have argued (Sir Winston Churchill among them) that the US intervention in WWI lengthened that war, increased the number of casualties, and made WWII inevitable. For WWII, the US was attacked directly by Japan, and Germany declared war on us (rather than the reverse). Korea was a UN action. I think that limiting ourselves to participation in UN actions from then on, and only in our own name if directly attacked, would have been a good plan.

By grinding down our forces, proving that the US military isn't invincible, and particularly by financing that grinding down by mortgaging America to the Chinese, the current intervention in Iraq is far more likely to lead to China emerging as the world's sole superpower than keeping our military ready at home to defend our home, and only sending them abroad only in response to UN mandate and as only one part of a UN force would have been.

Has there ever been a case where a long-term counter-insurgency ended well for the US?

A month or so ago, I heard that the Iraq war may best be compared to the occupation of the Philipines in the Spanish-American war. Weren't we there from 1898 to 1913?

Wars like this aren't as much lost as they are abandoned.

>>But how do we explain an isolationist policy to the memories of those who fought in WWI or WWII? Korea?

>The dead of WWI, WWII, and Korea are "sunk costs." Nothing we do today will bring even one of them back to life.

Exactly, Furthermore, the world CRV @15 is proposing "intervention" in is not the same as the world of WW1, WW2, or the Korean war.

Justifications for engagement back then were ideologically predicated on "making the world safe for democracy". They were rooted in an era when alternative ideologies were prevalent or threatening to become so, and rooted in the assumption that democracy was a revolutionary ideology that should be spread at gun-point, if necessary. But in today's world, representative democracy is the prevalent and normative form of government for most of the planet's population, with strong multilateral pressure towards its adoption by those states that don't yet conform. That excuse is sixty-two -- or sixteen -- years obsolete. Democracy won. So why the mania for invading foreign countries?

(Incidentally, I don't like the word "intervention". All too often it's used as a euphemism for waging aggressive war and committing mass murder -- by the same usage, Goebbels' ministry of propaganda could equally truthfully have described the Nazi invasions of Poland and Russia as "intervention intended to impose regime change on a despotic dictatorship".)

Personally, I find CRV's arguments to be reprehensible and weasel-minded. He's clearly been drinking from a poisoned fountain ... but I've got a business trip to pack for, and dissecting his case in detail will have to take second place to expedience.

In case I'm not being clear enough, I'd like to drop two thoughts into this stream:

1) If you're a hawk of any kind, be it liberal or otherwise, you are advocating policies that rely on the threat or realization of mass murder. End of story. There is blood on your hands, or the intention to shed blood, or at least the foolish idea that the other side's blood runs less red than your own. They don't see it that way. They will never see it that way. Which means you are doomed to a failure of discourse because you're never going to be able to engage in a meeting of minds with the other side.

2) The Iraq invasion was carried out without UN approval. This is the unpalatable fact that drove Tony Blair out of office, and it's going to come back to haunt the current and future US administrations -- because it's Waging Aggressive War, and that's what the Nazi top brass at Nuremberg were hanged for.

James MacDonald @ 10: That is, quite possibly, the very place that I first read that quote.

CRV @ 15: "because America was already so tangled up in Iraq, due to our feeding resources to Saddam during the Cold War, and because of our failure to remove him during the first Gulf War, I think we owed it to Iraqis to finally go get the job done."

There is an underlying assumption in this statement that seems worth teasing out. America owed it to the Iraqis to remove Saddam? Leaving aside the issue of who else we owe a leader-deposing to, you are making the assumption that removing Saddam could have been a good thing for the Iraqi people. This further implies that you think that a viable alternative to Saddam was democracy, and that only his presence was preventing it from coming forth.

I am not sure that is the case. All the evidence seems to suggest that the alternative to Saddam is, in fact, complete anarchy. That Saddam was, if nothing else, providing the sort of long-term stability that is crucial to the development of civil society which, in turn, supports democracy. Now that civil society has been shattered utterly, and Iraq has gone back to tribalism. I fail to see how that is doing them a favor.

Argh. Macdonald, of course.

LMB McAlister #13: As Seth Gordon has succinctly explained, a friedman is a period of six-months, by the end of which Iraq will be the earthly paradise.

#15 CommunityRadioVet "I'd just like to point out that it is possible to support the military removal of Saddam and the Baathists without being a drooling Bushie."

Well, no, because GW takes anything other than a "No!" to be a "Yes!" He immediately co-ops the middle and (relatively) "saner" voices to his extreme vision.

"These were some nasty, nasty people and because America was already so tangled up in Iraq"

I can, off the top of my head, list four other countries and regimes that are just as bad, and some of those are our closest allies in this war.

"due to our feeding resources to Saddam during the Cold War, and because of our failure to remove him during the first Gulf War, I think we owed it to Iraqis to finally go get the job done."

So is your argument that because of our guilt in complicity that we had a moral obligation to remove Saddam from power? While I agree here that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsefeld did promote this war as an attempt to assuage their souls of the damage done in the 80s, I don't feel that billions in treasure, 3800 of our souls, and 30,000+ Iraqi souls is an acceptable cost to esponge the guilt from two old men.

Please note, these conversations are all about Iraq (which was stupid adverturism/empire building). When the conversation shifts to Afghanistan, the equation changes. Gee, I wish we would have finished up in the Stan before we moved on. That whole "old guilt" thing might come up again.

#15 CommunityRadioVet "I'd just like to point out that it is possible to support the military removal of Saddam and the Baathists without being a drooling Bushie."

Except for the minor detail that a state has no legal way to attack and overthrow another state.
To attack another state simply because you disapprove of it is to launch a war of naked aggression.

The civilized nations of the world agreed a long time ago that launching a war of aggression is in itself a war crime: and that leaders who do such things are to be hanged when they can be brought to justice.

These are all very good, well thought out comments.

I appreciate them.

I suppose when I looked at Iraq in the run-up to the war in 2003, I saw a regime that we never really stopped being at war with, going all the way back to 1991. Our military never left the theatre, we still had occasional brushes with Saddam's forces, there was the no-fly zone... Invading just seemed like finishing something that had been started, and which never stopped.

Perhaps we as a nation need a watershed conversation, focusing on these topics:

1) What is the purpose of the United States in a 21st century, globalized society?
2) Based on this, what is the purpose of the U.S. military?
3) Should the U.S. always seek and get international approval before military action?
4) Should the active component be diminished or expanded?
5) What do we do with Iraq and Afghanistan, given events of 2001-2007?

Again, I'm not saying I have the answers. I'm a Reserve NCO and I see all that is going on with a sort of detached perspective. I go where they tell me to go, or a stay home because they tell me to stay home. I signed up in 2002 simply because, following 9/11/2001, it seemed like one of those times in U.S. history when the country would need men and women to step up a little and do their part in an era of armed conflict.

My plan is to be in the Reserve until death or retirement. Approx. 30 years, barring any unforseen event. (e.g: Thanks, CRV, but we're drawing down the Reserve by half, and you're in a non-critical MOS, here is your honorable discharge, your country appreciates your effort...) Much can happen in that time frame. A lot of action, if we go "muscular", or no action whatsoever, if we alter our mindset significantly and withdraw our forces from foreign soil.

Sometimes I think we'd be doing ourselves a favor if we brought everyone home; from Europe, from the Middle East, from everywhere that is not specifically U.S. soil. We;ve lived so long with our forces spread out abroad that it's strange to think of it being otherwise.

Many argue that it's suicide for the U.S. to abandon the role of World Police. Many also argue that the U.S. has a moral duty to remain as World Police, lest the nastier nations of the world do as they please, unchecked.

How much military force, exercised to a given level, is enough to truly defend the U.S. against aggression? Perhaps bringing the troops home from abroad, and shifting our focus to better internal security, is all we need to defend ourselves against the Islamist threat?

I will say one thing, regarding the United Nations. I used to believe in that body. Back in my 20's I had a U.N. flag and once told someone it was the only flag I'd ever want to fight under. I was in the depths of my Star Trek geekdom at that time, and being a Carl Sagan fan to boot, I thought it a waste of effort and resources that we, as a species, had not yet managed to do away with our international squabbles.

As I got older, and especially after 9/11/2001, I started to look at how the U.N. operates. One thing that really hit me is that the U.N. is an ostensibly democratic body that includes members from non-democratic nations. (e.g: we give votes to representatives of nations which deny their own people the vote!) Through this process, we basically allow countries whose interests and motives lay directly opposite to ours, a say in how and when and why the U.S. gets to use its military.

Now, especially after I joined up in 2002, I became very leary of us subordinating our military decisions to a body whose members might very much enjoy telling us to keep our military home, so that they can do as they please with their own militaries. Or, on the flip side, sending our military forces places we don't want them to be, because the U.N. told us to get out in front with that blue U.N. guidon, and march.

Again, I don't have all the answers. I'm more full of questions at this stage in our history, and am interested in what people think. Because what you all (and the rest of the country) thinks, will greatly determine where and when folks like me get deployed; and why.

To reiterate, I appreciate the thoughtful responses.

Bruce @ 2: Speaking as a Jew... I thought it was two Jews, three opinions. ;)

CRV@ #26:

Many also argue that the U.S. has a moral duty to remain as World Police, lest the nastier nations of the world do as they please, unchecked.

It may have escaped your notice, but the U.S. is fast becoming one of the "nastier nations of the world". Your government

- engages in wars of foreign aggression
- kidnaps citizens of other nations (Canada, Italy, Germany among them) and holds them without trial
- condones torture (fecal matter by any other name)
- engages in widespread gerrymandering and voting fraud
- has the world's largest nuclear, biological and chemical arsenal, and is the world's only nation to ever have used nuclear weapons in anger.

Leaving aside allegations of widespread corruption in the legislature, please tell me how, exactly, the U.S. can possibly lay claim to any sort of moral high ground?

The U.N. may not be perfect, but at least they operate under a stringent system of checks and balances. Which is partly why they are very slow to move, when they move at all, but it also means that clusterfucks like the invasion of Iraq (a war which is manifestly a war of foreign aggression, even if one does not go so far as to call it a neocolonialist adventure) don't happen under their aegis.

One thing that really hit me is that the U.N. is an ostensibly democratic body that includes members from non-democratic nations. (e.g: we give votes to representatives of nations which deny their own people the vote!) Through this process, we basically allow countries whose interests and motives lay directly opposite to ours, a say in how and when and why the U.S. gets to use its military.

You know, I don't have a problem with this. Here in the U.S., we give the vote to people who want to deny me my right to vote. We give the vote to people who want to deny me my right to bodily integrity. Barring actual felony, we give the vote to every citizen of age--I mean, when the machine is functioning correctly, of course. We don't pre-screen them to make sure they're in favor of a continuing democratic nation or even equal human rights for all citizens before allowing them to vote. Agreement on ideological matters as a prerequisite for voting would sort of defeat the purpose of putting things to a vote.

Likewise, in the U.N., all member countries get a vote, regardless of whether they share an ideology or a short-term interest. There are things that will a nation's membership in this body revoked, but I think they need to be more heinous then Not Being A Democratic Republic.

As for "a say in how and why the U.S. gets to use its military," that seems oversimplistic. I'm sure we don't need U. N. approval to use our military to defend ourselves in the case of invasion. What we need U.N. approval for is to take military action on someone else's soil. Because without that approval--without this association of nations getting together and saying, "Rogue nation X is doing unspeakable things and we agree they must be stopped"--we're just invaders. I don't see how being the invaders is A-OK for us but evil for others.

I think it's the U.N. that needs to be World Police, not the U.S.. If one country all by itself acts as unilateral World Police, to my mind that's just another way of saying Global Bully. And we might be using our Bully Superpowers for good today, but who can guarantee we won't use them for evil tomorrow? Superman makes a good story as long as the author compels him to be a hero; if he was real, I'd be scared shitless of him. If he were to get bored with upholding justice and saving lives, who could stop him robbing national treasuries and blowing up hospitals? He'd do what he wanted to, period. Likewise, if the U.S. insists that no other nation has the right to have any say in whether it invades a foreign nation, then the only moral principal guaranteed to guide U.S. military action is "The U.S. Wants Something." And the only guarantee that What The U.S. Wants is in fact a good thing is, "Trust us!" Why should anyone trust us to continue wanting what's right? Being the U.S. does not make our every action and intent sanctified. We're as capable of being Evil Invaders as the next vigilante.

Global power should not be centralized in the hands of a single nation to use and abuse as it will. It should instead be exercised by an agreement of many nations. I prefer a democratic U.N. in which even undemocratic nation get a vote, rather than a single democratic nation acting like a despot in the global theater.

And of course as Liz points out, the U.S. has already taken military action based on Wanting Something that isn't very good at all. We're already more like the Superman that got bored with being a good guy and saw no reason not to simply take whatever he wants. Our actions over the past 6 years are an eloquent argument against any nation being trusted to play the role of World Police all by itself.

Military action based on wanting something that isn't very good at all? A prime example of that would be, in my opinion, America's invasion of Afghanistan to secure our Strategic Opium Reserve. Record breaking bumper crops, Mission Accomplished!

Andrea @ 27

If you accept Richard Dawkins' theory of memes, then if you have three opinions, they'll find two Jews.

Sovereign nations are going to act like, well, sovereign nations whenever they (or more precisely, the admin in power) perceive it be in their best interests. Which does raise an issue - because of the damned Iraq mess, it's going to be that much harder for the US to take action under a Democratic admin than it used to be. Meaning if we see a Bosnia popping up, our leadership won't count for as much.

It's a good thing if it becomes harder to take unilateral military action, but it's not an unalloyed blessing - and it may cost lives in the future.

The US built up a little bit of moral capital after 9/11 - and we've squandered it.

CRV @ 26

we give votes to representatives of nations which deny their own people the vote!

I'm curious who you are denoting as "we" in this sentence. Are you saying that the authority of the UN derives from the US (and so from its citizens) and therefore should be wielded only in a manner approved by them?

You need to be very careful when making value and moral judgements about things that other people have done that are similar to those you have done (in your capacity as a citizen of the US from whom the power of the US flows - see the Constitution). The US has put in power and supported a number of very repressive, non-democratic regimes in many parts of the world; how does this give the US or any of its citizens the right to judge who may or may not rule in another country? Does this "right" stem from the power to do so? Does it stem from some higher power which has delegated to the US powers of judgement? Have we not, in the US, always held that we had the right to go our own way with no let or hindrance from outsiders? How then do we have the right to let or hinder others?

Liz @ #28,

I think that's a rather one-sided view of America over the last 65 years.

At the same time we used atomic weapons on two Japanese cities to end war in the Pacific, we also resurrected both the Japanese and the Western European economies, thanks to enormous cash, food, and material outlays at the end of the war, continuing through the 1950s. It would have taken both Europe and Japan far, far longer, all on their own, to rebuild their cities and their nations without U.S. foreign aid.

And without U.S. military might to act as an umbrella, it's almost a foregone conclusion that Western Europe and even Japan would have been annexed by the Soviet Union and/or Communist China; something both the Japanese and Western Europeans greatly feared, and for good reason.

I also think it's worth noting that while we have the largest WMD arsenal, we are the nation least likely to use them in modern times. We've also actively destroyed a huge amount of WMD stocks since the end of the Cold War. Besides, we're not the only ones who have these. All the major powers have them. If we have more than anybody else, maybe that's just a result of us being the biggest financial player in the world poker game; rich nations tend to accumulate more high-tech military hardware than poor nations.

As for torture and wars of aggression, we're getting into some debatable territory. I will say that what American forces do to extract information from captured enemy combatants is not the same as what many other nations (like Baathist Iraq) did; even to their own people. The U.S. does not put prisoners into plastic shredders. The U.S. does not tie a man to a chair and then slowly vivisect his wife and children in front of him, just because he happens to belong to the wrong religious sect or ethnic minority. Put more simply, the U.S. version of "torture" is on the weak, watered-down side of the forcible-extraction spectrum, whereas nations like Cuba and China still occupy the hard, ferocious side of the spectrum. Again, we in the U.S. don't flay a man's skin from his bones or nerve gas him just because he's from the wrong village, nor do we drag pregnant women from their homes and perform non-voluntary abortions as a form of state-policy birth control.

Maybe that doesn't matter to some people. Maybe it's black/white for some people, and as long as the U.S. uses "torture" to get info, the U.S. is just as evil and bad as all the rest. I think that's being too simplistic and not fair, but that's just me.

Nicole @ #29,

I still find it unsettling that a nation like Libya gets to chair a Human Rights organization at the U.N. That's like letting Ike Turner chair a committee on domestic violence. We're allowing representatives of non-democratic, often horribly authoritarian nations to have (more or less) equal say in international matters that affect open, free societies (like ours) on issues of great import.

I wouldn't mind if the U.S. entered into and abided by an international body that was composed strictly of nations that passed a democratic and freedoms litmus test. That I would not mind at all, and I would be more willing to agree with those who say we'd have to act within the bounds set for us by such a body.

But the U.N. is infested with autocrats and the handymen of autocrats; and whatever we might think of George Bush, he's gone in 18 months whether he likes it or not. How long has Quadaffi been "President" of his country? How about Castro? Mugabe? Are these men due to step down on account of term expiration and other limiters of executive power? Why do we, as a nation which binds itself to so many democratic-fostering rules, participate in any kind of international, democratic process, with people who would sooner starve or shoot their subjects, than give them freedom?

Food for thought.

Bruce @ #34,

"We" = The U.S., most of Western (and now some of Eastern) Europe, the U.K., Australia, Canada, Mexico, etc... Places where (more or less) democracy has existed and been practiced in stable form for at least a few decades.

As to the argument that the U.S. has the "right" to tell other nations how to order their affairs, again, a debatable piece of territory.

I think the real question is this:

Do free, democratic, Western nations have the "right" to go in and knock off despots, dictators, strongmen, and other autocrats, most of them in the Third World, as we see fit?

If an autocrat suppresses his own people, denies them even basic freedoms, is it not a foregone conclusion that those people neither approve of nor desire that strongman's form of government over their affairs? Or do we pretend that everyone in Iraq loved Saddam? Or that all Cubans think Castro is the bees knees?

Again, we need a watershed dialogue on these issues. Because half the country thinks we should intervene on behalf of suppressed peoples, while the other half thinks it's none of our business. Until we can come up with a policy consensus that is either one way or another, we're kind of screwing ourselves.

CommunityRadioVet #36: Mexico is a place where democracy has been stable for 'at least a few decades'? That's odd given that most people who know anything about the subject seem to think that Mexican democracy is a very recent thing, dating back to the 1990s.

And as for "If an autocrat suppresses his own people, denies them even basic freedoms, is it not a foregone (sic) conclusion that those people neither approve of nor desire that strongman's form of government over their affairs?" The answer's simple: No. The fact that a dictatorship exists and that it denies what you consider basic liberties does not mean that it is unpopular or hated by the people. It may, actually, be quite the opposite. You assume that everyone on the planet values liberty -- or what you consider liberty. That's an assumption that requires proof.

#36 CommunityRadioVet: Because half the country thinks we should intervene on behalf of suppressed peoples, while the other half thinks it's none of our business.

This is not what the two halves of the country think. Half (maybe) of the country thinks we should exercise our power morally and with intelligence. The other half (maybe) thinks we ought to kick the asses of our enemies.

I must tell you that I'm a little dubious about you. I apologize for feeling that way. Might I recommend that you tighten up your comments and be less full of theory and more full of the real world consequences of this "we must do good to the rest of the world" thing?

I think there are plenty of people here who could agree with you under some circumstances, if you would only get past the airy-fairy crap and get to the practical consequences of what you are saying.

Dialogue is good. Let's have a real one.

CRV:
Or do we pretend that everyone in Iraq loved Saddam? Or that all Cubans think Castro is the bees knees?

First of all, I don't think there's anyone , on this blog or elsewhere, who claims either of those things. But what gives the US the right to unilaterally decide who stays and who goes?

How do you think the rest of the world feels about the fact that certain American Administrations claim the right to remake the world in their own image? And they also think no-one can stop them (the current desert quagmire to the contrary). America has, in the eyes of many, gone from thinking of itself as First Among Equals to First At All Costs.

The UN is not perfect, but it represents the best chance for global consensus. The US, it seems to a lot of us out here, is only worried about shoring up its own interests and throwing its weight around.

(Also - just to lay my colours, here, Bush and his cronies didn't go in to Iraq to remove Saddam - they went in to remove non-existant WMDs, no wait, to secure oil supplies, or was it to start a sand exporting business? Certainly US business interests in the area are reaping rewards.)

Iraq was not a paradise, but it was stable and more moderate than its neighbours, despite Saddam or because of him. Darfur is still a hell hole, Zimbabwe is a basket case, and let's not even get started on Burma. What is the Global Policeman going to do? Invade all of them? Pick and choose? America has to start working with the rest of the world, rather than trying to work over it. (Or, depending on your point of view, working it over).

CommunityRadioVet #36: "Do free, democratic, Western nations have the "right" to go in and knock off despots, dictators, strongmen, and other autocrats, most of them in the Third World, as we see fit?"

The answer to that is, also, No.

You don't.

No amount of self-congratulation about being all "free" and "democratic" yourselves can excuse unprovoked aggression against another state.

There is only one occasion on which intervention can perhaps be justified, and that is to stop a current, ongoing mass slaughter. Even then, you have to weigh whether the last state of those you wish to help might not end by being worse than the first.

It is pretty clear by now that Iraqis were immensely better off under Saddam than they are now. For all his brutality, he maintained civil order, which is one of things, like air, where you don't fully understand how essential it is until you are deprived of it.

Not quite related, but if we're talking about how the US currently conducts itself abroad, this quote from Jim Hoagland's column in the Washington Post is illustrative, if nothing else:

Why has a secretive government addicted to power politics and flexing its military muscles abruptly turned to negotiations and peaceful compromise?

And why is North Korea doing the same?

Frankly, I'm with Erza Klein on this one. If one's motivations makes absolutely no detectable difference to the end result, did the motivation actually matter?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I'd wager a great deal that almost no one being waterboarded, sleep-deprived, or treated with electroshock (or being quietly disappeared to places where they do worse things) at the courtesy of the US is thinking "Well, at least I'm not being flayed or eviscerated."

I mean, Jesus Christ Almighty. How the fuck is it that we're still having this conversation?

CRV @ 36: "If an autocrat suppresses his own people, denies them even basic freedoms, is it not a foregone conclusion that those people neither approve of nor desire that strongman's form of government over their affairs? Or do we pretend that everyone in Iraq loved Saddam? Or that all Cubans think Castro is the bees knees?"

Well, for the record, I hate the Bush administration with the fiery passion of a thousand recently-bathed cats, I am disgusted with the inaction of the supposedly Democrat-controlled Congress, and I am utterly appalled at our nation's recent behavior, both domestically and internationally. Nonetheless, I'd be pretty fucking irate were the UN to invade and topple the U.S. government. These problems are our problems, not theirs. They are ours to deal with.

CommunityRadioVet @35:

I think that's being too simplistic and not fair, but that's just me.

Well, yes, I think you are being too simplistic and unfair. But it was big of you to say so.

More seriously, yes, I think you are being too simplistic and unfair. Accusing other people of being black & white in their opinions while stuffing straw opinions into the mouths of people you disagree with. Whoever said they didn't care about all the other injustices in the world? All the dead babies and raped children and the eviscerations and all the other crimes you mention? How does objecting to the crimes of one's countrymen equate to not caring about the criminal activities of others?

Are you one of those people who berates a traffic cop for not catching drug-dealers while he's giving you a speeding ticket? What happens when you do that? Does the blinding light of revelation come on in his eyes, does he drop the ticket and rush off to take down a drug king-pin? Or does he just sigh and finish the ticket? Maybe you goad him a little into studying harder for the detectives exam, but he still finishes the ticket.

You deal with what's in front of you, and save deeper plans for when you have a spare moment. If you never get a chance to implement anything deeper, at least you'll have done something.

Do free, democratic, Western nations have the "right" to go in and knock off despots, dictators, strongmen, and other autocrats, most of them in the Third World, as we see fit?

If the other free, democratic, Western nations decided that the United States had an undemocratic form of government, because the US Constitution (via the Senate and the Electoral College) gives disproportionate power to residents of small rural states, would they have the "right" to invade us and "knock off" our current government, replacing it with something that more closely approximates their democratic ideal?

CRV @ 35: "I still find it unsettling that a nation like Libya gets to chair a Human Rights organization at the U.N. That's like letting Ike Turner chair a committee on domestic violence. We're allowing representatives of non-democratic, often horribly authoritarian nations to have (more or less) equal say in international matters that affect open, free societies (like ours) on issues of great import."

We also let Republicans run for office in a government they've sworn to destroy. If your democracy isn't strong enough to encompass those who seek to destroy it, it has already failed.

Lovely. Because I think that the U.S. should not aspire to the role of Global Superman, or because I don't think the U.N. should be kicking nations out for not being sufficiently U.S.-like, I am apparently unconcerned with human rights violations worldwide.

Let's turn that around.

If the U.S. is supposed to play World Police Office Of One, then why did it go to Iraq instead of Darfur? Or the Congo? Is it because they care more about oil than genocide, murder, and rape? Whoever's doing Global 911 Triage has their priorities so out of whack that the whack is no longer recognizable as a whack.

Now that's an interesting thought.

How many of you would welcome a foreign military invasion if it meant Bush and the Republicans would be hung up by their toes?

My thoughts on this idea mirror those of Heresiarch(sp?)

Back to Saddam...

I think where Saddam is concerned, his menace did not restrict itself to internal matters alone. Especially not after the Iran-Iraq war, and the invasion of Kuwait.

Granted, lots of people see no difference between an American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, but this is where I think we get back to the power and value of motivation. Yes, it does matter what motivates people to take certain actions, because those motivations will often determine the long-term outcome.

Saddam invaded Kuwait for keeps. He had no intention, so far as we can tell, of letting Kuwait go without force being exerted against him.

And while many might argue that Bush also has no intention of ever letting go of Iraq, I think any arguments about cheap oil have long since been dashed on the rocks of reality, and in any case, Bush has term limits whereas Saddam did not. Even if Bush is determined to keep Iraq forever, it won't matter as of January 2009 because that won't be Bush's call any longer.

More thoughts...

Technically, the U.S. invasion and sacking of Germany during World War 2 was as "wrong" as invading Iraq. Certainly by the time we'd driven the Nazis back inside their borders, we'd accomplished everything necessary to win the war, right? The point had been made, correct? It was up to the Germans then to rid themselves of Hitler.

But who now, in 2007, can doubt that invading and sacking Germany was the right call at the time?

Dare we imagine the mess that would have resulted from leaving Hitler and the Reich in operational status in 1944?

Look, I understand people hate Bush. Based on numbers, most of the country dislikes Bush to some degree, at this stage.

But is hating Bush a good enough reason to let Saddam remain?

Moreover, here is another good question:

Assuming we did nothing with Iraq in 2003, what would have happened? What should have been done otherwise? How would this have helped the Iraqis? Do we just lift all the sanctions and let Saddam and the Baathists continue on about their business, rebuild their air force and army and possibly go to war (again) with Iran? Or Kuwait? Or us, for that matter? What about the Kurds?

Again, my basic premise: you can support invasion and removal of the Baathists without being a drooling Bushie.

SPECIAL DISCLAIMER: Just as I argue that you can support the invasion without being a Bushie, I also recognize that you can be opposed to the invasion without being a Saddam-lover.

A couple of people seem to think that I am implying that you can't be anti-invasion without turning your back on human rights issues.

I just want to clear things up on my end. I recognize the reasoning of the anti-invasion argument, as couched in the practical belief that a broken egg is a broken egg, regardless of how it got broke.

I just think Iraq is one of those cases where a job was left unfinished and, sooner or later, we'd have to go back in and get it done.

Yes, from a pure human rights perspective, a place like Darfur trumps Iraq. So in a sense the argument that Iraq is a human rights crusade rings hollow.

All the same, no nation, even ours, launches a huge military effort without there being secondary and tertiary, sometimes self-serving, motives.

Not a terrible thing. Just the reality of how the world, and wars, work.

The bottom line for me is this:

The horror of the invasion and occupation is finite. Sooner or later, the occupation will end. The troops will come home. The Iraqis will truly be free to chart their own course. Who knows? Maybe democracy survives. At least now there is a chance.

With Saddam in power, there was no chance. None. Even if he died, one of his sons would just assume his place. The Kurds would still be in danger of extinction. The Shiites would still be under the heel of the Sunni minority. Men would still be getting fed into plastic shredders. New mass graves would be opened for business.

When we balance a finite horror versus a near-infinite horror, I think we have to pick the lesser of the two evils: the finite horror.

This is, of course, my opinion. It might not be the one some people like. It's just mine.

Cheers. I am off to bed.

CRV @ 36

Do free, democratic, Western nations have the "right" to go in and knock off despots, dictators, strongmen, and other autocrats, most of them in the Third World, as we see fit?

I think you missed my point. I asked the question, "Does the United States, which has been responsible for creating (often by violence) dictatorial regimes in a number of foreign countries, have the right to declare that a foreign country's government is sufficiently evil to justify unilateral military action including invasion?"

How can we possibly have the moral right to object to non-democratic governments when we have fostered those governments all over the world for the last century? If you want a full list of those fosterings you'll have to wait a day or two until I have the time to research the ones I'm not sure of, but off the top of my head: the Phillipines, Nicaragua (twice that I'm aware of), Guatemala, Chile, Iran, South Vietnam, Saudi Arabia. There are at least a half-dozen more, but I'd have to check some facts to be sure which ones were American-driven and which were just home-grown nasties who managed to pull off some American support after the fact.

It seems to me that the moral high ground is not so easy to find in this situation as you seem to think.

Bruce: So we can only cast the first stone if we are without guilt? That sets a prohibitively high standard, doesn't it?
Honour killing in Syria? No comment because we have high school killings.
10,000 executions a year in China? No comment because we acquitted OJ.
Slavery still rife in sub-Saharan Africa? Well, have you seen the working conditions at Wal-Mart?

The Kurds and majority Shi'a were crying out for outside help to topple Saddam, as the monks in Burma are crying out for help now. Letting them down is no more moral, to my mind, than being the cop who won't intervene in domestic violence matters.

Multilateral approaches are ideal, but multilateralism, as practiced by the UN, is about lowest common denominator decision making and is no sure recipe, anyway, for getting it right: if the UN sanctioned the Holocaust it wouldn't be right; it's failure to sanction Tanzania's liberation of Uganda, Vietnam's of Cambodia, NATO's of Kosovo, Britain's of Sierra Leone weren't good calls.

For a preference utilitarian such as myself the key issue is to do a cost-benefit equation which, in the Iraq case wasn't helped by Saddam's very extensive bluff (taking in his own cabinet and every intelligence agency), the incompetence of the weapons inspectors (read Barton's book, The Weapons Inspector, about the dummy inspection he co-ordinated in which inspectors failed to find "the bomb", failed to interview "the scientists", failed to notice the existence of a very large basement, and left their confidential notes behind). And then there was Blix, the international lawyer, somehow believing there were additional angles from which Saddam could be attacked in order to make him fully compliant with Resolution 1441 (something Blix said he wasn't).

The take-home lesson of the failures of Iraq should NOT be to abandon humanitarian interventions and to always, as a matter of course, value incumbency and stability over change. Such thinking will cause more Holocausts. Americans (I'm not one) should be reassured that most of the reasons they (we) non-Americans "hate" you is because we misinterpret your role vis Israel, because you exert a cultural dominance we envy, and because some developments (shopping centres for instance) which politicised people often despise are attributed to the Americans when others are more significant.

Want someone to blame for 9/11? Blame Naomi Wolf for making it seem that global intervention was a way of impoverishing the periphery and enriching the core. Blame generations of academics who believe economic irrationalism is better than economic rationalism and that the moral outcomes created by socialism are somehow better than those created by neo-classical economics.

#48: Why don't the Iraqi people deserve the right of self-determination that you deserve?

I see that you've invoked Godwin's Law, then cowered behind the shield of "it's just my opinion" in successive posts. I feel like if I had the right card, I could shout "Bingo!" right about now. Taking a stand doesn't mean a whole lot if you constantly back away from the ramifications of that stand.

I think the "ticking time bomb" scenario is inaccurate. Even if invading Iraq were the correct thing to do, the US had great flexibility in terms of timing. The mere threat of war was doing wonders in getting Saddam to cooperate with UN inspectors. If the rationale was to find WMD, the inspectors, as we know now for certain, would have verified that Saddam was bluffing without the cost of a single human life. I don't find a single compelling reason, even if it were necessary, for the US to have invaded when it did. I don't see why the sole alternative to going to war was to remove all sanctions and allow Saddam to do whatever he pleased. There were more than two options at that point, including the option we were actually taking at the time.

The "his sons would have just taken over" line argues that there is no such thing as a successful homegrown revolution. I don't think history justifies that argument. What is the difference that makes a successful homegrown revolution impossible in Iraq, but possible in other countries?

Furthermore, this war has cost the US a lot of moral authority. (Take the international reaction to W's recent statements about Burma, for example.) This war has made the US far less effective in the role Global Policeman. If you think that's the right role for the US, it's hard to see why you'd think embarking on this war was a good thing, given the consensus at the time was that the results would be this dire.

Obviously, your opinion is "just your opinion." But the inconsistencies are puzzling.

#51:So we can only cast the first stone if we are without guilt?

Despina, surely this is an exaggeration of what Bruce said? His examples had to do with toppling some despotic regimes while simultaneously supporting others. Unless you literally can not tell the difference between slavery in sub-Saharan Africa, and working at Walmart, I don't see how your examples are reasonable ramifications of Bruce's argument. I don't see how the elimination of nuance is useful here.

John Chu: it is, you're right, sorry. It was almost a form response from me exploring some themes endless (wearyingly) replayed in debates here (Aus) and I shouldn't have posted it. I think, if this is more to the point, that we shouldn't be ashamed of having chosen in the past between the lesser of two evils (Saddam versus Khomeini; Stalin versus Hitler - though that, of course, proved wrong) or for responding to a dynamic situation by changing our alliances. I don't support extreme interventionism and internationalism but neither do I believe the nation states formed over the past century or so are entirely sacrosanct entities, nor do I think we can seriously talk of sovereignty residing with the kleptocratic, cruel despots of states such as Iraq, ruled by unelected leaders who sieze power and maintain it through fear. The death toll (partially) attributable to Saddam is what? 1 million in the Iran-Iraq war, 200,000 in the Anfal campaign, 40,000 maybe in the Kuwait campaign, maybe 300,000 as a result of the sanctions which followed his non-compliance with a UN sanctioned peace treaty. All the numbers are debatable - it's possible to find dramatically higher death tolls, or lower ones, from equally reputable sources. In counting the cost of the invasion, the anti-war movement have to figure what the alternative death tolls would have been if he were to remain in power, and what any likely succession would look like (Uday, Qusay, a military coup, a civilian uprising?) and also what, barring more repression, was going to prevent the country drifting into civil war. If Australian PM John Howard was responsible for a tenth as many deaths domestically, I'd hope for an international intervention.

Back at #2 when Bruce Cohen talked about Neobarbs, I'm tempted to stretch that analogy a bit further; many of the barbarians (Goths, Vandals, Burgundians etc.) actually wanted to be Romans - Romans had so much cool stuff! and it sure beat the hell out of being overrun by the Huns - but didn't want to mess about with the complex financial arrangements, paying taxes, the honouring of contracts, the (partial) rule of law. I'm assuming I don't need to tell anyone what happened next.

On the other hand, the Romans were busy abandoning these principles at the same time; I'm not sure whether this shows I've stratchd the analogy too far or not enough.

CRV, various: it seems to me your strategic thinking is flawed.

"I suppose when I looked at Iraq in the run-up to the war in 2003, I saw a regime that we never really stopped being at war with [...]"

This is, of course, exactly correct. The "sanctions" were the modern-day equivalent of a blockade, and without pressure from the European states, which allowed the oil-for-food program, Iraqis would have starved by the hundreds of thousands in the 1990s.

"I'd just like to point out that it is possible to support the military removal of Saddam and the Baathists without being a drooling Bushie."

Strategically it did not make sense. Yes, if we'd instituted a draft, and put enough boots on the ground soon enough, we could probably have accomplished nearly everything the W. Bush administration intended. And the strategic purpose of this would have been...? Nothing, apparently. Even with better theater strategies there were risks to the Iraqi people. From the US geo-strategic view Saddam was already contained, and it wasn't worth it. In terms of global strategy, we'd have done much better to put those resources into stablizing Afghanistan, and denying al-Qaeda its refuges.

But, of course, this was the W. Bush adminstration, Rummy strategy our specialty. More Iraqis, probably, are now dead than the entire population of Seattle (I believe you live in the Puget Sound area, yes?) On top of which we have succeeded in making al-Qaeda popular with many Muslims, especially young Muslim men (remember what I keep saying about masculinity?), we lost Usama bin Laden in Afghanistan, we have vastly weakened the USA internationally, and we have run up huge debts which we are about to have a great deal of trouble paying. Invading Iraq in the way the USA has done seems to have been one of the great strategic errors of history, on par with invading Russia in the winter. It was clearly that from the beginning; I'm here rehashing what I wrote during the run-up to the war. Why do you, even now, defend it?

#49: you can support the invasion without being a Bushie

Of course you can, but it doesn't matter. Whatever your (no doubt noble) motivations for supporting the War on Iraq, the reality is that they didn't matter. What mattered was why Bush wanted the war and how Bush would wage this war. Even if you're so naive to think that the war could've been a good thing if it had been waged otherwise, the reality is that you don't have control of how the war is waged and hence your support for the war is for the war that Bush wages, not the war in your head.

Despina @ 53 I think, if this is more to the point, that we shouldn't be ashamed of having chosen in the past between the lesser of two evils (Saddam versus Khomeini; Stalin versus Hitler - though that, of course, proved wrong)

Despina, are you arguing that we should have allied with Hitler against Stalin? If not, you should maybe take another look through your posts before you submit them.

I would not argue that picking Pinochet over Allende, or the Shah over Mossadegh, were picking the lesser of two evils. (But I know that others would.) I think we can agree that beating prisoners to death in Afghanistan can only be the lesser of two evils if you're imaginative.

Of course, I've learned in this thread that the inner beauty of supporting an autocratic leader is that it later justifies as many violent interventions as you'd like, until you get it "right".

The thing about invading people is that they don't like it. They like it even less when it's colonialism, and only a rarefied few appreciate incompetent colonialism.

If Australian PM John Howard was responsible for a tenth as many deaths domestically, I'd hope for an international intervention.

How many foreign deaths would he need to be responsible to justify an international intervention? Does that scale up for a larger country like the US or remain constant? Is it OK for authoritarian nations to participate in an intervention, or is that tacky?

#48 How many of you would welcome a foreign military invasion if it meant Bush and the Republicans would be hung up by their toes?

The answer is, probably, none of us.

If Grand Fenwick (say, for example), decided to put George Bush on trial for war crimes (which I think would be a splendid idea), and in order to do so invaded the USA and occupied it, I'd be out blowing up Fenwickian military vehicles, and, if I found an American citizen who was collaborating with the Fenwickian occupiers, that person would have a rotten final night.

Various other Republicans might also have problems for their roles in bringing about the invasion, and for turning collaborationist afterward.

After I'd dealt with the Fenwickian problem I'd turn back to finding George Bush and putting him on trial for war crimes.

The neocons forgot that other countries have conservatives too.

All this alternate history is fun, but how the hell do we get out? Partition the coountry? Go back to the UN and petition for a peacekeeping force? Point east, shout "Look, it's Elvis!" and sneak out?

Despina @ 51

I'm afraid you've missed my point as well. I am saying not that we're bad so we can't do anything; I don't believe that at all. I am saying that in this area of action, namely the choosing of forms of government for other countries; we have already and several times over, shown that we will not choose democracy for someone else when we don't feel like it. Given this, how can we have the moral standing, or even simple trust from others, that we won't put in place a worse government than the one we depose? And I'll repeat for emphasis, that we have done this before, so it's hardly an academic or hypothetical question.

(Stands up from his seat and applauds wildly for post #51)

Steve C. @ 59

How we get out depends on several things, among them: what level of civil disorder we're willing to leave behind us, and how badly we're willing to trash our own military capability in the process of extricating ourselves.

Incidentally, I'd like to point out that believing (as I do) that the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq was immoral, unwise, and executed with breathtaking incompetence at the policy and strategy levels, says absolutely nothing about one's beliefs about how to deal with the problems of baing there. I, for instance, do not advocate an immediate withdrawal of all forces, pretty much on the basis that Colin Powell gave for not invading in 1991: if you break Iraq, you buy it. We're at the buyers' remorse stage of that purchase.

Our fear-ridden leaders* have left us very few options for exiting Iraq with either honor or practicality, let alone both. It's pretty clear that their preference is to use the "Elvis Card", for values of Elvis = Iran. This is a really bad idea, about equivalent to pouring gasoline on a raging fire.

I am not a military strategist, nor a logistical analyst (IANAMSNALA), but it seems clear to me that we do need to start drawing down troop deployments in Iraq before lack of ready troops and matériel** forces us to do so much faster than is safe for our own forces. At the same time, we can't in good conscience leave the Iraqi people to the aftermath that would surely occur if no other force takes up the job of security and infrastructure reconstruction that we have failed so miserably at. The US must, like it or not, go hat in hand to organizations like the UN that could field such a force, and admit we've screwed things up and that we need help getting them straightened out. Then we need to somehow hold things together during the year or two that would be required for the UN, for example, to put such a force together.

While I'm on the subject of holding things together, I'll point out that, despite a much stronger moral position, and initially better results in Afghanistan, the US has allowed the situation there to deteriorate significantly, and shows little interest in putting in the effort to fix the problems. We have the same destruction and lack of repair of infrastructure, aggravated by a deadly earthquake for which aid was far too slow to arrive from just about anywhere, and a similar loss of control and security in outlying provinces, to the point where the government is seriously trying to treat with the Taliban in an attempt to slow down the fighting. So what do we do there? Despite our government's best efforts to deny the problem, I think we're going to be haunted by Afghanistan for at least as long as Iraq.

* Just to be clear, that's an allusion to Rocky and Bullwinkle, though it does have resonance with the real world, doesn't it?

** I use the French spelling in an attempt to avoid arguments about how to spell this word in English.

At NASFiC in 2005, a panel on warfare inevitably brought up Iraq. John G Hemry, who served in the Navy, didn't seem too happy about our having invaded another country. He said something to the effect that this is not who we are. What is the story that defines America? Someone was oppressing it so America threw it out after a great struggle.

Don't tell me it's different now. It most definitely is not.

Bruce Cohen #63

I tend to agree. Besides Afganistan, Pakistan is worrisome too. It's like having a dynamite factory next to a warehouse fire.

If a radical Islamist coup topples Musharraf, what would India do?

Despina #51: So what's the opinion of "preference utilitarians" such as yourself on the cost-benefits analysis of the almightly fratricidal clusterfuck that is Iraq today?

Want someone to blame for 9/11? Blame Naomi Wolf for making it seem that global intervention was a way of impoverishing the periphery and enriching the core. Blame generations of academics who believe economic irrationalism is better than economic rationalism and that the moral outcomes created by socialism are somehow better than those created by neo-classical economics.

W.T.F? Canadian journalists (and other assorted socialists) caused 9/11? There was me thinking it was blowback from the oh-so-socialist Ronnie Reagan shipping arms to Afghanistan and the notoriously liberal CIA training Bin Laden. I don't think flying planes into skyscrapers was some kind of oblique socialist critique - I think OBL is a murderous criminal lunatic.
But if you wanted to go down the blame route, how about blaming the US for 50 years of supporting brutally repressive dictatorships when it suited them - all in the name of freedom, of course.

Also, this argument makes it look like you're trying to use 9/11 as a valid pretext for invading Iraq. Which is, to put it politely, total and utter fucking nonsense.

The UN charter definitely allows for self-defence for all countries and this is not limited to on your own soil/airspace/territorial waters; attacking an airfield or military camp in another country that is attacking you would fall under self defence (although only maximialists on this issue would argue that invading another country that you're pretty sure has weapons of mass destruction that might possibly be used against your forces or maybe other people in the region or conceivably be given to terrorists etc. etc. comes under the self-defence doctorine.)

It reserves the use of offensive force to end a conflict to forces acting under a UN mandate; for examples see Korea, or Gulf War I. Would the invasion of Germany in 1945 be illegal under this system? I'm pretty sure you could get a Security Council Resolution and international consensus to support it; the occupation and rebuilding plans might have helped sway any dissenters.

Going further on than this, if the US is/was to be a World Policeman, then it needs the support of the world. Which is what the UN Security Council is about. Obviously this body won't always agree with the US position, but the good thing (for Americans) is that the US has a veto; you can be World Policeman, with a mandate to police the world, but you don't have to do anything about any situation you don't like.

Obviously the UN is a flawed institution, like just about everything built by people. But if we (and that's everyone in the UN who are reasonable, democratic, etc.) don't let other countries (unreasonable, undemocratic) play their parts, then we lose some of the carrots to try and improve the situations in those countries and so have to rely more on the stick. And I think that's where this thread came in.

Blame generations of academics who believe economic irrationalism is better than economic rationalism and that the moral outcomes created by socialism are somehow better than those created by neo-classical economics.

You aren't going to get 'economic rationalism', because people aren't really rational.

You can't have pure socialism or pure capitalism, because the people involve have, one the one hand, personal likes, dislikes, and desires, and on the other recognize that roads, government, etc are social in nature and can't be handled as anything else. - I'm assuming here that your 'neo-classical economics' is to be understood as capitalism.

Not to mention that most of the world doesn't know who those academics are, and would have a hard time caring less about them.

"Walk softly and carry a big stick."

John Chu @ #52: why is it cowardly to recognize that a) my opinions are still only mine and that b) right as I might think I am, I am sensible enough to recognize that I don't have all the answers? That's not "backing away", that's stating a position firmly, with a humility clause. Humility = cowardice?

(More applause for Despina at #53)

Serge @ #63: Your argument would make sense, if members of the Continental Army, in addition to taking out the Redcoats, also terrorized and killed a significant number of neutral or otherwise friendly colonists on a weekly basis; including women and children. The "freedom fighters" model doesn't seem to work in Iraq, because a terrific number of insurgents don't seem particularly interested in freedom. For anyone. Not even themselves. Unless suicide bombing a crowd of kids getting candy from GIs at a parked Stryker counts as being 'free'.

Martin @ #56: so what you're basically saying is that if I supported the military removal of Saddam, in any way or for any reason, then I have inevitably allowed myself to flow down a logical tributary into the NeoCon river, which runs inexorably to the Sea of Bushism? I am sorry, but that sounds too much like, "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists!!" Bush was wrong when he drew that artificial line in the sand, and I think Ezra Klein is similarly wrong in drawing his artificial line in the sand. Especially when we don't yet know the full outcome of the invasion; it has, after all, been only a little over four years.

Which brings me to a point I don't see made often enough in these sorts of discussions.

Why are we, as Western intellectuals, so ready and willing to conclude that a) the Iraqis were obviously better off with Saddam and that b) we have totally and thoroughly ruined that country beyond anything past a faint glimmer of hope for a better future?

As I noted above, it's barely been 4+ years since we invaded Iraq. We're still in the infancy of this thing. Even after the troops come home, there is still a ton of history that will have to be played out, before we on the outside can get a firm grasp on whether or not the invasion was the correct or incorrect call.

Granted, the TV news and the papers make it seem mighty grim. Death is death. And the deficit here in America cannot be ignored. But do we really think that if we went and got an honest poll of the Kurds, or the Shia, that they would openly welcome Saddam or his Baathists back into power? The only people that I believe truly miss Saddam are the Sunni and those who had positions of comfort or status in Saddam's autocracy.

For those who lost (or were losing) life, limb, or loved ones to the Saddam flesh-eating machine, I don't think even the worst chaos in postbellum Iraq can quite convince them that, yes, bad as he might have been, maniacal and murderous as he might have been, at least Saddam provided stable murder and predictable attrocity.

However comfortable we in the West might have been with Saddam's stable, predictable, and contained heinousness, I am disturbed that so many people (not necessarily on this thread, but in the West in general) have such an easy time consigning Iraqis to a fate with Saddam and his sick get in the driver's seat.

As I noted before, the horror of the postbellum is finite. The horror of Saddam, for all intents and purposes, was going to go on for a long, long, long time. Indeed, had been going on for a long time already.

Randolph @ #55: I defend it for the reasons stated above; namely that Iraq has not fully played itself out yet and that it's way too soon to be declaring the body cold when the heart is still pumping and the lungs are still taking in oxygen. Bad as Iraq might seem to us on the comfortable, detached outside, for Iraqis, this entire project is just getting started. I would like for us in the West, whether we think we bungled or not, to not abandon the Iraqis utterly simply because we, from our perspective, see no positives. And no, I am not saying the invasion and occupation have been run perfectly. Or even well. They have not. Certainly not the occupation anyway. But that's a whole thread all by itself.

Serge wrote -
"Walk softly and carry a big stick."

Wasn't that "Speak softly..."?

Walk softly and carry a big stick makes me think of ninjas armed with tetsubo(tetsubos? tetsubae?) but that could be too many years of anime speaking....

:-D

Scott Taylor @ 70... Oops.

CRV @ 69... This is not my blog and so Our Hosts may deem what I'm about to say inappropriate. It indeed isn't the most intellegent response, but smarter ones are pointless so here goes.

Go fuck yourself.

I shall now withdraw my presence from this thread.

#69: why is it cowardly to recognize that a) my opinions are still only mine and that b) right as I might think I am, I am sensible enough to recognize that I don't have all the answers? That's not "backing away", that's stating a position firmly, with a humility clause. Humility = cowardice?

Do you think that humility is the same as cowardice? If so, I have nothing to add. If not, why would you assume that I do? It's possible to make sense of my words without the absurd assumption.

When you have said provocative things with are inconsistent with the facts at hand, then end with "This, of course, is just my opinion" it reads like you are backing away from the ramifications of your stand. This construction is designed to inoculate yourself against those who disagree with you. Rather than meeting their arguments on their merits, you escape with "This, of course, is just my opinion." It also comes dangerously close to a flamer bingo tell.

You pull the same act when you question my use of the word "cower" rather than address the inconsistencies in your argument I pointed out in the same post. I do apologize, though, if the word "cower" stuck you the wrong way.

You keep suggesting that the horrors of Saddam are infinite with absolutely nothing to justify this. I find it hard to believe that you think native revolutions never happen. I mean, "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

PRV #69: As I noted before, the horror of the postbellum is finite.

Indeed - the internecine violence must stop once all the populace have fled abroad or been killed!

I don't know what the current estimated post-war death toll is; it's certainly in six figures. So how do you think someone who has lost someone to a Sunni car bomb or Shia death squad is going to feel when presented with a pious anecdote about how much worse things under Saddam were?

It is one thing to support the removal of Saddam; it is another to support the criminally incompetent way in which the post-invasion 'reconstruction' was handled. Which, given the competence of the bunch of goons in charge and the lack of planning, was entirely predictable.

via Firedoglake (7/23/07), an Iraqi speaks out:

Stop telling lies to yourself American. We know that your racist brutal murdering war criminal troops came from your society and reflect its values. we know that because we see how they behave and have to bury their victims. If you are stupid enough to think we feel anything but hatred and contempt for your soldiers and the country that sent them to make war on my people then you are a fool.

As to Saddam bad though he was your country is far worse.