A long post on Iraq war retrospection and the virtues of intuition

Slate is now running a series of essays by prominent neocons who supported invading Iraq and now regret it. They are worth reading. And I want to say that I truly appreciate the thoughtfulness and brutal candor that went into these. They got me thinking about the most fatal misjudgments the Bush enablers made in the run up to war.

1. Thinking Bush and Co. follow the same moral rules as the rest of us; lacking an immediate negative gut reaction to the notion of giving these people war powers

Andrew Sullivan's essay is headlined, "How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I seriously misjudged Bush's sense of morality."

...my biggest misreading was not about competence. Wars are often marked by incompetence. It was a fatal misjudgment of Bush's sense of morality. I had no idea he was so complacent—even glib—about the evil that good intentions can enable. I truly did not believe that Bush would use 9/11 to tear up the Geneva Conventions.

In my view, that misjudgment was the central failure of neocons and liberal hawks leading up to the war. They focused on the facts more than the personalities involved--and call me cynical, but in politics that is never a good idea.

The facts: Saddam Hussein is a real asshole and the world would be better off without him. He has WMDs, or at the very least is going to get them as soon as he can (as far as we knew at the time). And he is a ticking time bomb in the middle of a region that we, the US, need to stabilize.

--->OK, now let intuition step in here. That all makes some sense, even ignoring the bogus Iraq-al Qaeda connection. But wait. We're going to go to war...against Iraq again?...at the urging of this guy and his pack?

That's where it all breaks down. There are some people that just should not be behind the wheel of a vehicle like the focused might of an invading American military, and George W. Bush is one of those people. That's because he's not like us. Guy might run down a pedestrian if it fits his kooky world view. Do you really want to be part of that?

There's a reason we have political reflexes. They keep you from getting burned, as when you pull your hand away from a hot stove, and I trust them a good deal of the time.

Tragically, as Sullivan points out, the knee-jerk reaction of many liberals to the prospect of war with Iraq may have only helped push prominent neocons into the pro-war camp. He writes,

When I heard the usual complaints from the left about how we had no right to intervene, how Bush was the real terrorist, how war was always wrong, my trained ears heard the same cries that I had heard in the 1980s. So, I saw the opposition to the war as another example of a faulty Vietnam Syndrome, associated it entirely with the far left—or boomer nostalgia—and was revolted by the anti-war marches I saw in Washington. I wasn't wrong about some of this. Some of those reflexes were at work (which is why I find Obama's far more pragmatic opposition so striking in retrospect). I became much too concerned with fighting that old internal ideological battle and failed to think freshly or realistically about what the consequences of intervention could be.

Morality is one thing--competence at waging war is another. Sullivan seems to disagree, but I am completely with Jeffrey Goldberg in his own misjudgment about the wisdom of giving the Bush administration the OK to fight Iraq. I would never have expected this level of clusterfuck either, much as I hate those guys.

If one of my mistakes was to trust men like August Hanning, another larger mistake was to put my trust in the Bush administration, not so much on matters of intelligence—faulty intelligence was a near-universal phenomenon—but on matters of basic competence. I will admit to a prejudice here: I believed—note the tense, please—that Republicans were by nature ruthless, unsentimental, efficient, and, most of all, preoccupied with winning. It simply never occurred to me that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney would allow themselves to lose a war. Which is what they have very nearly done.

2. Buying into the idea of opportunistic democratic state-building in the Middle East

Besides who was making the case to attack Iraq, the whats of the situation set intuitive alarm bells dinging for people like me. Not being the most dedicated student of U.S middle east policy, I admit, I can only call the connection between the following things a little fishy.

a) The U.S. and particularly, we may speculate, the Bush family, have a well-earned grudge against Saddam Hussein. Some of our friends (?) in the region also have a problem with him.
b) All of a sudden, after 9/11, we invaded Afghanistan. A move, by the way, that I supported then and still do. The clear tie between al Qaeda and the Taliban seemed to justify this invasion.
c) Then, all of a sudden, not only do we discover that Saddam Hussein has WMDs, but also that he has been supporting al Qaeda. We have to go in there. It just seems a little...I dunno...too convenient.

Neocons like Richard Cohen not only failed to hear the alarm bells. They agreed that this was a convenient excuse to invade Iraq, another great misjudgment that helped drive us toward this war. Cohen writes,

[After 9/11] I wanted to go to "them," whoever "they" were, grab them by the neck, and get them before they could get us....Saddam was a sociopath, a uniformed button man, Luca Brasi of Arabia. He was a nasty little fascist, and he needed to be dealt with.

That, more or less, is how I made my decision to support the war in Iraq. It did not take me all that long, however, to have second thoughts—and I expressed them in my column. It was clear that Saddam was unconnected to Osama Bin Laden...So, the only justification left was, really, what the neocons had started with: a war to reorder the Middle East. This had a certain appeal, since the region was unstable, undemocratic, repressive, and downright dangerous.

3. Failing to consider the full potential costs of war

And finally, the misjudgment that is acknowledged in almost all of these essays: underestimating the potential costs, in blood and treasure, as they say, of the Iraq project. Ooops.

Andrew Sullivan:

...what I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster, and unless one weighs all the possibly evil consequences of an abstractly moral act, one hasn't really engaged in a truly serious moral argument. I saw war's unknowable consequences far too glibly.

Jacob Weisberg:

...if I'm going to advocate occupying another country, I'd damned well better learn something about its history and culture. Were I part of the generation that lived through Vietnam, I might have avoided this blunder.

Josef Joffe:

By destroying Saddam's armies, the United States flattened the strongest bulwark against Iranian expansion. By empowering the Shiites, it opened the way to an ideological alliance between Najaf and Qum, the two centers of the faith on either side of the Iraq-Iran border. And by entangling itself in an open-ended war in Iraq, the United States squandered precisely those military assets that would have kept Iran in awe. Would the Ahmadinejad regime grasp so boldly for nuclear weapons if U.S. power and credibility were still intact?

We may be there forever

(WP)

Five years is a long time.

The day the war started, I remember watching Operation Shock and Awe at my office. Then going home and making a mix CD that captured my feelings. I believe it included some jazzy cover of "Suicide is Painless," some U2, and the Smiths' "Please Let Me Get What I Want This Time."

I often feel as if we have all fallen asleep and woken up in some slightly-tweaked alternate reality--the type of thing that would be classified as "speculative fiction" because it is crazy but not quite crazy enough to be "science fiction." More like Philip Roth's The Plot Against America than something by Harry Turtledove. The feeling started on that truly weird night in November, 2000, and it is beginning to get old.

Marine puppy-tossing incident getting nearly as much press as Marine Haditha incident

Here's a representative story from ABC news.

Click here to view all 376 stories about the puppy video as collected by Google.

If authentic, this is pretty sick. If not, this guy is still a jackass. Killing innocent puppies is not going to earn us friends on the world stage, is it.

The title of this post is not totally meant to be flippant. If we are going to put our young military service members into high-stress, high-stakes situations, we'd better be making sure they are as emotionally prepared as they are physically and mentally prepared. The puppy doesn't seem like such a big deal until you think about the line that has been crossed.

WTF is going on out there in the Wild Wild Mideast?

A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave. (ABC News)

These allegations have not been proven--although apparently Army doctors determined she had been raped--but I'm pretty inclined to believe them. Would the same type of people who would mow down innocent civilians blink an eye at drugging and gang raping a woman in a situation where no laws really apply?

Memo to whackjob Blackwater defenders

When you are leaving ridiculous comments on news and opinion articles in support of Blackwater USA, please note that the firm's private mercenaries are not actually "our troops." It is also a bit of a stretch to refer to them as "our guys." [For a delightful sampling of the whackjobs' opinions, see the comments on this recent column from Carl Hiassen.]

The coolest thing about a troop surge...

...is that later on, you get to talk up your planned troop drawdown [to pre-surge levels...] (WP)

So, there you go, Gen. Petraeus! You still win the prize for neatest military name ever--with a name like that, you should be fighting in the Punic Wars, not the Gulf Wars.

One of many Obama questions

I don't get it.

If elected president, Barack Obama could see invading Pakistan--a state that actually does have WMD, by the way--to root out terrorists.

...and Hillary Clinton is "Bush-Cheney light"?

Wag the axis of evil

Glenn Kessler and Peter Baker make a good point in the WP today: "Nearly five years after President Bush introduced the concept of an 'axis of evil' comprising Iraq, Iran and North Korea, the administration has reached a crisis point with each nation." The article analyzes how the U.S.'s relations with any one of the axis countries tend to impact its relations with the other two. That's interesting, but here's an analysis I want to see:

Is the blossoming of the axis of evil in the last five years more an indication of the Bush administration's prescience, or of its commitment to follow through on its own long-held plans for balls-out nation-building? Was the axis of evil speech a self-fulfilling prophecy or self-fulfilling propaganda? It's unclear to me how much influence or control the administration has really had over North Korea's nuclear ambitions. But it's by no means certain that Iraq would have exploded/imploded had the U.S. never invaded. And the hamfisted occupation of Iraq has almost certainly played a role in Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's stewing homicidal rage. So I say, that makes the Bush administration itself the agent of crisis in at least 2 of the 3 axis of evil nations.

There are those--including, reportedly, Bush himself--who see the invasion of Iraq as part of our divinely foreordained march towards the Apocalypse. (Alternet) Perhaps it's true and the President is an instrument of the Lord. Y'know, my mother always said, "God helps those who help themselves."

Maybe this is how Halliburton did it

To: [yours truly]
From: Thomas Saleem
Subject: Re: Various supplies
Date: October 5, 2006

Dear Sir,

Glo Contract Consultants Uk is a specialised procurement consultancy based in the UK and with substantial expertise in sourcing, contract negotiation and cost reduction programmes. We have worked in Saudi, UAE and Jordan as well as the majority of other major global business centres.

I am Thomas Saleem, Business Development Manager and I handle all Middle East business matters with government and non governmental agencies.

I am initiating contact with you regarding an urgent contract invitation from Iraq.

...

Boy genius

"Rove Blames Iraq War for Low Bush Numbers" (AP): Noting that Bush's likeability ratings are much higher than his approval ratings, Rove said today that "People like this president...They're just sour right now on the war.''

The war...the banner policy of Bush's presidency.

This is sort of like saying, "my ex still likes me...she just disapproves of my performance as a boyfriend, and that's only because she caught me in bed with her best friend right after I totaled her car."

The real sadness and irony here is that Rove is probably onto something when he suggests that likeability matters more than job approval.