“Why I Am No Longer A Republican”: It Has A Lot To Do With The Iraq War
This week has been filled with Iraq War recriminations and re-evaluations. While official Washington was strangely silent about the 10th anniversary of the start of the conflict, journalists and intellectuals have been (predictably) more vocal. Prominent neocons have reaffirmed, with minor caveats, their support for the war. Some (erstwhile) liberal hawks have issued full-throated mea culpas. Other liberals, meanwhile, have tried to have it both ways, denouncing the war they once supported while praising its outcome. And of course, lots of people who opposed the war from the beginning, on the right and left, have declared vindication.
My own position on the war fits into none of these categories. Ten years ago, I was working as an editor at First Things, a monthly magazine that’s aptly been described as the New York Review of Books of the religious right. (And no, that’s not oxymoronic.) The magazine strongly supported George W. Bush’s original conception of the War on Terror, and so did I. In his speech to Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001, Bush stated that the United States would seek to decimate al Qaeda as well as every other terrorist groups of global reach. To this day I remain committed to that goal and willing to support aggressive military action (including the use of drone strikes) to achieve it. But thanks in large part to the Iraq War, I no longer consider myself a Republican or a man of the right.
The reason I continue (like President Obama) to support the original vision of the War on Terror is that it was and is based on a correct judgment of the fundamental difference between (stateless) terrorists and traditional (state-based) military opponents. Even the most bloodthirsty tyrant will invariably temper his actions in war out of a concern for how his adversary will respond, and he will likewise act out of a concern for maintaining and maximizing his own power. Political leaders can thus be deterred by actions (and threats of action) by other states. Members of al-Qaeda-like groups, by contrast, seek in all cases to inflict the maximum possible number of indiscriminate deaths on their enemies and demonstrate no concern about the lives of their members. They are therefore undeterrable, which means that the only way to combat them is to destroy them.
Unfortunately, the right began to disregard the crucial distinction between terrorists and states right around the time of the January 2002 State of the Union speech, when President Bush broadened the scope of the War on Terror to include an “axis of evil” consisting of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. After that, the mood among conservatives began to grow fierce. Some columnists denied the effectiveness of deterrence against states and advocated unilateral preventive war to overthrow hostile regimes instead. Others openly promoted American imperialism. Still others explicitly proposed that the United States act to topple the governments of a series of sovereign nations in the Muslim Middle East, including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.
And these were the intellectually respectable suggestions, published in mainstream newspapers and long-established journals of opinion. Farther down the media hierarchy, on cable news, websites, and blogs, conservatives of all stripes closed ranks, unleashing a verbal barrage on any and all who dissented from a united front in favor of unapologetic American military muscle. The participants in this endless pep rally were insistent on open-ended war, overtly hostile to dissent, and thoroughly unforgiving of the slightest criticism of the United States abroad. Self-congratulation and self-righteousness ruled the day.
Alarmed by the transformation on the right and in the magazine’s offices, I wrote a lengthy email in October 2002 to a number of my fellow conservatives, explaining why I thought it would be a serious mistake to turn Iraq into the next front in the War on Terror. My reasons had nothing to do with the administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction; like all commentators on the right, most independent observers, and large numbers of intelligence agencies around the world, I assumed that Hussein either possessed or was actively working to acquire such weapons. Neither was I overly concerned about worldwide public opinion. I objected to what I judged to be three erroneous assumptions on the part of conservatives inside and outside the Bush administration.
First, I believed the administration was wrong to claim that Hussein could not be deterred. In fact, he already had been. In the first Gulf War, Hussein refrained from using chemical weapons against our troops on the battlefield and against Israel in his inept Scud-missile attacks on Tel Aviv. Why? Because before the start of the war James Baker and Dick Cheney sent messages through diplomatic channels to the Iraqi dictator, informing him that we would respond to any use of WMD with a nuclear strike. Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Arens made similar threats. And they worked. Yes, Hussein was a brutal dictator, but he could be deterred.
Second, it was foolish to believe (as Paul Wolfowitz and others on the right apparently did) that overthrowing Hussein would lead to the creation of a liberal democracy in Iraq that would, in turn, inspire democratic reforms throughout the Middle East. This view displayed an ignorance of (or, more likely, indifference toward) the competing ethnic and religious forces that prevailed in different regions of Iraq as well as a typically American optimism about the spontaneous capacity of all human beings in all times, places, and cultures for self-government. Rather than inspiring the formation of liberal democracies throughout the region, an Iraqi invasion could very well empower the very forces of radical Islam that the War on Terror rightly aimed to destroy.
Third, the right was making a serious mistake in assuming that doing nothing about Iraq was inevitably more dangerous than doing something. The U.S. got caught with its pants down on 9/11, and the fear of it happening again was leading the Bush administration to formulate policies based entirely on negative evidence. The super-hawks advocating preventive war seemed more persuasive than those urging a more cautious approach because the former placed an ominous black box at the core of their deliberations — a black box containing all the horrors of our worst post-September 11 nightmares. But reasoning on that basis could be used to justify absolutely anything, and so, I concluded, it was a reckless guide to action.
None of my friends and colleagues on the right responded to the arguments in my email, and few even acknowledged receiving it. By breaking from the right-wing consensus in favor of unconditional bellicosity, I had gone rogue. Over the next year and a half, as the victorious invasion became a bloody mess of an occupation and these same friends and colleagues refused to admit — to me or to themselves, let alone to the public — that they had made a massive mistake, I drifted away from the right and never looked back. (There were other factors, too.)
My dissent had nothing to do with principles; it was a matter of prudence or judgment. On foreign policy, Republicans had become the stupid party. And so it remains 10 years later.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, March 22, 2013
“The Siren Song Of War”: Why Pundits Beat The Drums For Iraq
Pundits like to imagine that they take political positions only after a careful consideration of the merits — listening to arguments, studying position papers, weighing the pros and cons, and coming to a decision.
But politics is not necessarily so rational, and never was irrationality more plainly on display than in the months leading up to the Iraq War. Ten years later, it is worth exploring why so many opinion-makers – including those who were otherwise critical of the Bush administration — passionately advocated war.
For at least some leading pundits, their position seems to have been shaped less by “reason” or “ideas” than something more primal and even tribal, reflecting their fantasies about who they imagined themselves to be. What follows is a taxonomy of certain pundits on the center and the left who, to their eternal shame, beat the drums of war — hard.
First let’s consider the contrarians. Young Matthew Yglesias, who was in college at the time and thus deserves to be excused, wrote a refreshingly honest piece that noted the seductions of contrarianism: “Being for the war was a way to simultaneously be a free-thinking dissident in the context of a college campus and also be on the side of the country’s power elite.” It was easy to feel the glow of being an utterly unique snowflake, and yet at the same time to join the establishment. How special!
What Yglesias calls the“fake-dissident posture” held a powerful allure for war supporter Dan Savage as well. Reading between the lines of his stridently pro-war 2003 column, it’s clear that the anti-war types worked his last nerve. Everything about them is uncool — their posters are “sad-looking” and their slogans are cheesy. True, the left can be deeply irritating. Protests are great, but why can’t the organizers come up with better music? Yet that’s a stunningly shallow reason to support a brutal war that left over 100,000 people dead.
Next up are those heroic journalists – sometimes dubbed the “Keyboard Commandos” — who wanted to re-fight World War II in Iraq. This crew saw Islam as a noxious, world-conquering ideology akin to Nazism: Islamofascism, as the late Christopher Hitchens once coined it. He and Andrew Sullivan flattered themselves as intellectual heirs of George Orwell, saving the world from both fascism and left-wing appeasers. Sullivan’s smearing of war opponents as a “fifth column” made that abundantly clear.
Paul Berman was another journalist who tirelessly refought the good war from his armchair. As he explained in a roundtable, Iraq was important because it provided an opportunity for intellectuals to “speak up.” How lovely for them! Admittedly, says Berman, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were “counterproductive in some respects,” because “for a while, they appeared to discredit the notion of liberal democracy, which was dreadful. This, apart from the deaths and suffering.” [emphasis added].
On the tape, writer David Rieff is aghast: “All this to raise the issue of liberal democracy? My God, man!” My God, indeed.
Let’s not neglect the pundits of the so-called “decent left.” Obsessed with preserving the martial virtue of the Democratic Party, these types zealously advocated a militaristic version of liberalism. Peter Beinart, then editor of The New Republic, figured prominently in this group. To Beinart, opponents of the Iraq War were guilty of “abject pacifism”, and he all but advocated purging them from the Democratic Party, Cold War-style. They might be liberals, but wanted the world to know they were respectable thinkers– not filthy hippies.
Finally, there’s the most powerful, if most deeply buried justification of all: Iraq provided an opportunity for dweebish, pasty, desk-bound dudes to indulge in macho daydreams. Throughout history, men have asserted masculine dominance through imperial adventures. While few liberal female pundits were pro-war, many centrist and liberal men were unable to resist the war’s siren call.
The most infamous example of such macho knucklehead punditry is Thomas Friedman’s 2003 appearance on The Charlie Rose Show. The war, he said then, was “unquestionably worth doing” so we could tell the Iraqis to “suck on this.” Commentary so inane and puerile would sound outrageous coming out of the mouth of Friedman’s fictional look-alike Ron Burgundy; that an actual, Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times columnist said it simply boggles the mind.
By 2011, writing as the last American troops pulled out of Iraq, Friedman’s macho swagger had completely vanished. Was the war a wise choice? “My answer is twofold: ‘No’ and ‘Maybe, sort of, we’ll see.’ ” Weasel words don’t get any more weaselly. This week he said merely that America “paid too much” for the war.
Writing this week in The New Yorker, Packer admits “the war was a disaster for Iraq and the U.S. alike. It was conceived in deceit and born in hubris.” Note the passive voice — he takes no personal responsibility for helping to foment the media stampede into war.
For what it’s worth, Beinart eventually saw the war as a tragic mistake. But his repentance came far too late. But Berman clearly has learned nothing and has no regrets. He wrote in The New Republic this week that “the isolationist alternative” to the war was “fantastical nonsense.”
Sullivan eventually denounced the war as tragically wrong – but in the early days, when it actually mattered, he was among its most obnoxious cheerleaders. His buddy Hitchens died in 2011, without ever having second thoughts about Iraq.
As for Dan Savage, his position grew more ambivalent within six months after that highly belligerent column — but he doesn’t seem to have written a word about Iraq since then.
The inability of these pundits to think straight may simply be a symptom of narcissism poisoning. For them, invasion and war were all about presenting their preferred face to the world — and to themselves. Henry James once wrote that a writer should be “one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” For these pundits, everything was lost — everything, that is, but their own overgrown egos.
By: Kathleen Geier, The National Memo, March 22, 2013
“Bombs Over Baghdad”: Ten Years On, Iraq War Skeptics Have A Right To Say “I Told You So”
Possibly you remember “Shock and Awe.” No, that’s not the title of a Rolling Stones concert tour, but of the United States’ bombs-over-Baghdad campaign that began exactly 10 years ago. American soldiers went pounding into Iraq accompanied by scores of “embedded” journalists seemingly eager to prove their patriotism and courage.
A skeptic couldn’t help but be reminded of spectators who rode from Washington in horse-drawn carriages to witness the battle of Bull Run in July of 1861. They too expected a short, decisive conflict. Even on NPR, invading Iraq was treated like the world’s largest Boy Scout Jamboree, instead of what it turned into: arguably the worst military and foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.
Skepticism, however, was in short supply. Spooked by 9/11 and intimidated by the intellectual bullies of the Bush administration, American journalists largely abandoned that professional virtue in favor of propaganda and groupthink.
Among scores of examples, the one that’s stuck in my craw was allegedly liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. Reacting to Gen. Colin Powell’s anti-Saddam speech to the United Nations General Assembly—since repudiated by its author—Cohen wrote that “Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool—or possibly a Frenchman—could conclude otherwise.”
“War fever, catch it,” this fool wrote.
I added that to anybody capable of remembering past intelligence hoaxes, it wasn’t clear that Powell’s presentation answered any of the objections put forward by doubters like George H.W. Bush’s national security advisor, Gen. Brent Scowcroft.
“To any skeptic with a computer modem, moreover, it became quite clear why Powell’s speech failed to convert many at the UN,” my Feb. 5, 2003 column continued.
“Key parts of [his] presentation were dubious on their face. That alleged al Qaeda base in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq? If it’s what Powell says, why hasn’t it been bombed to smithereens? British and U.S. jets have been conducting sorties in the no-fly zone for months. Because it’s a dusty outpost not worth bombing, reporters for The Observer who visited the place quickly saw.
“The mobile bio-war death labs? Please. Even if [UN inspector] Hans Blix hadn’t told The Guardian that U.S. tips had guided inspectors to mobile food inspection facilities, anybody who’s dodged herds of camels, goats and sheep and maniacal drivers on bumpy Middle Eastern highways had to laugh. Bio-war experts told Newsweek the idea was preposterous. ‘U.S. intelligence,’ it reported ‘after years of looking for them, has never found even one.’
“Then there was the embarrassing fact that key elements of a British intelligence document cited by Powell turned out to have been plagiarized from magazine articles and a California grad student’s M.A. thesis based upon 12-year-old evidence.”
I could go on. In fact, I did.
“This isn’t conservatism,” I concluded. “It’s utopian folly and a prescription for endless war.” Although the short-term outcome wasn’t in doubt and Americans could be counted upon to rally around the troops, it struck me as almost mad to imagine that the U.S. could convert Iraq into a Middle Eastern Switzerland by force of arms.
That was basically the Frenchman’s conclusion too. Conservative Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said that although “we all share the same priority—that of fighting terrorism mercilessly,” invading Iraq without just cause would likely “exacerbate the divisions between societies, cultures and peoples, divisions that nurture terrorism.”
If it were up to me, the Post columnist’s byline would read like a prizefighter’s robe: Richard “Only a Fool or a Frenchman” Cohen. However, there are no penalties in Washington journalism for being proven dramatically wrong.
The safest place during a stampede is always the middle of the herd.
My own reward was getting Dixie Chicked out of a part-time teaching job halfway through a series of columns about Iraq. Supposedly, Hendrix College ran out of money to pay me. My most popular offering had been a course about George Orwell. Oh well.
But the purpose here isn’t to blow my own horn. (OK, maybe a little.) It’s to point out that not everybody got buffaloed. Many thousands of American and European citizens took to the streets to protest what they saw as imperialist folly.
I was also very far from being the only journalist to notice that the Bush administration’s case for Saddam Hussein’s imaginary “weapons of mass destruction” didn’t add up. Anybody reading the astringent dispatches of Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) reporters Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, John Walcott and Joe Galloway couldn’t help but know the score.
But the prediction I’m proudest of was a cynical observation I made after morons began smashing Dixie Chicks CDs and renaming fried potatoes “Freedom Fries.”
A former Hendrix student emailed me proof: a photo of a vending machine in a rural Arkansas truckstop.
Sold only for the prevention of disease: “Freedom Ticklers.”
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, March 20, 2013
“Lasting Consequences”: The Folly Of Iraq Invasion Needs More Public Scrutiny
Ten years ago, on March 20, 2003, the administration of George W. Bush launched its disastrous invasion of Iraq. It’s a war most Americans — including many Republicans who enthusiastically supported it — are working assiduously to forget.
Not so fast. An examination of the lies, the hypocrisy and the power-mongering that led us into that act of grand folly may help us to avoid similar impulses in the coming decades. Besides, there are lasting consequences that cannot be shoved into history’s dustbin.
Yes, Saddam Hussein is dead. So are an estimated 100,000 Iraqis and more than 4,400 Americans. Countless other Americans are forever maimed, some of them suffering mental traumas from which they will never fully recover.
That’s the human toll. It doesn’t include the billions of dollars that were wasted. While the official calculations of the cost to the Treasury are in the $800 billion range, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has put the cost to the U.S. economy at $3 trillion. That’s why it’s quite laughable now to listen to the Fox News crew blast President Obama over the budget deficit. They all cheered for Bush’s dumb war, which he prosecuted while cutting taxes.
But the most disastrous long-term consequence of the war may be its effect on Iran. The United States gave Saddam nominal support for years because he served as a check on Iran, his bitter enemy. Now Shiites run Iraq, as they do Iran, and Tehran has great influence in Baghdad.
So how is it that so many cheered the invasion? Why did so few voice any dissent? Why was it that those who did argue against the war were vilified as traitors?
I vividly recall the months leading to the war because I was among those who insisted at the outset that the drive to oust Saddam was foolish. (At first, I assumed Bush was merely posturing. Even he, I thought, wouldn’t do something that stupid.) For my trouble, I was denounced as a fifth columnist, an appeaser, a liberal bed-wetter, etc.
Among those attacking my anti-invasion stance were comfortable, affluent professionals whose sons and daughters would never have considered volunteering for military service. I was dumbfounded by the nonchalance — and hypocrisy — with which they endorsed a war that would be fought by young men and women largely from the working classes.
I was also deeply disappointed — taken aback, actually — by the complicity of the major news media, whose supposedly intrepid journalists, instead of ferreting out official dishonesty, caved before it. The nation’s best newspapers ran numerous front-page stories trumpeting the Bush administration’s lies about Saddam, his alleged WMDs and his supposed collusion with Osama bin Laden. There were no similarly placed stories about the Project for the New American Century, the group of neo-cons pushing for Saddam’s ouster years before 9/11.
Andrew Bacevich, a well-respected foreign policy scholar and early opponent of the war, lists a misplaced faith in the U.S. military as among several reasons for the lack of critical questioning from the media or political leaders.
“It was taken for granted that we would win and we would win easily,” Bacevich, a Boston University professor and retired military officer, told me. “For anyone to question the effectiveness of the U.S. military in those days was tantamount to failing to support the troops, and no politician or person who cared about their public reputation dared do anything that would suggest failure to support the troops.”
Bacevich also points out that, unlike the war in Vietnam, which was also fueled by official dishonesty, few public figures who led the nation into Iraq have paid any price. Not only was Lyndon Johnson’s career cut short and legacy diminished, but his leading foreign policy strategists were also forced into public contrition.
Not so with Bush’s minions. Vice President Darth – ah – Dick Cheney remains adamant that Saddam was in league with anti-U.S. terrorists, even though all credible intelligence officials have said otherwise. John McCain, for his part, bludgeoned Chuck Hagel recently because Hagel came to oppose the war.
It’s much too early to forget the folly of Iraq. Too few of us have learned any lessons from it.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, March 18, 2013
“The Iraq War, Ten Years Later”: The Next Time Our Government Wants To Rush Us Into A War, Dissenters Need To Be Listened To
Ten years ago, as President George W. Bush took the final, fateful steps to launch the United States’ invasion of Iraq, Christopher Cerf and I were pulling all-nighters, feverishly putting the final touches on our anthology The Iraq War Reader. Having done a previous well-received anthology on the Gulf War, the campaign led by Bush Senior to push Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait back in 1991, we felt we had no choice but to offer a sequel. After all, we joked to ourselves, if Junior thought he had to “finish the job,” we did too.
Both of our books were designed to be comprehensive, readable guides to the history, documents and opinions that swirled around these events. We took care to provide a fair and balanced mix of points of view, to let readers make up their own minds about what they thought about the wisdom and justice of these wars.
But truth be told, both Chris and I were deeply skeptical of the proponents of war, having seen with our own research how often government and military officials lie. And so we made sure to include in our second book plenty of evidence from the first Gulf War of how we had been lied to about things as small as the supposed efficacy of the Patriot Missile (it mostly failed to shoot down Scuds) to the monstrous and false claim that Saddam’s troops had ripped babies out of Kuwaiti hospital incubators.
But 10 years ago, it was not a good time to be a war skeptic in America. It rarely is. The vast majority of “smart” and “serious” people had convinced themselves that in the face of Saddam Hussein’s alleged stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, the prudent thing to do was to go to war to remove him from power.
Skeptics who tried to argue that it was better to let UN weapons inspectors continue monitoring his efforts while maintaining sanctions that hemmed in his regime were deemed foolish and naïve. Regional experts who warned of the danger that a post-Saddam Iraq would collapse into civil war, that Iran would be strengthened, or that any American occupation would be costly and futile, were dismissed as worrying about hypotheticals. Those were seen as abstractions compared to the “reality” that Iraq was on the verge of getting a nuclear bomb, presumably against us.
Later that spring, as we sent the book to all its contributors, I took some consolation as I inscribed each copy with words to the effect of: “To a full and vibrant debate. Let’s see in 10 years who was right.”
Looking back now, it’s easy to see who was wrong about the need to invade Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Judith Miller, Kenneth Pollack, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, George Will, Ann Coulter, Peggy Noonan, Andrew Sullivan, William Safire, Fouad Ajami, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Gephardt, Tom DeLay, George Tenet, John McCain and of course Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush: You were all wrong about this.
Not only that, you were all wrong about the war’s likely aftermath. There were no “kites and boomboxes” greeting American troops in Baghdad and Basra, as Ajami predicted. Just sectarian riots and suicide bombers. (This disastrous prediction hasn’t stopped CNN from continuing to rely on Ajami as a regular expert commentator.)
A few prominent pundits, like Christopher Hitchens and Thomas Friedman, at least admitted that while they favored going to war, they recognized the aftermath would be complicated and that it would not be a success if it didn’t produce a “liberated Iraq” (Friedman) that would be “better and safer” for Iraqis and Kurds (Hitchens). These hopes, obviously, were also wishful thinking. Bur remember, in the topsy-turvy times of 10 years ago, men of action were deemed prudent, while counsels of caution were considered crackpots.
A few Democratic centrists, like Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi, fell for the false intel about Iraq’s weapons programs, unfortunately helping to legitimize Bush’s casus belli. But at least they argued against pre-emptive and unilateral war, sought to buy time for more inspections and sanctions, and insisted that an occupation of Iraq would be terribly costly.
Who got Iraq right in our book? The honor role, in order of their appearance in our pages, includes Noam Chomsky, Ron Paul, Patrick Buchanan, Arianna Huffington, Robert Byrd, John Mearshimer, Stephen Walt, John le Carre, Edward Said, Terry Jones, Jonathan Schell, James Fallows, Mohamed El Baradei (the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency), and the governments of Russia, France and Germany (who tried to block Bush’s rush to war in the Security Council).
Sadly, too many of the people who got Iraq wrong have never really admitted their mistakes and are still treated as respected voices of opinion. When you read them or see them on TV, there ought to be an asterisk next to their names reading: “Caution — Wrong about the Iraq War.” And too few of the war’s skeptics have been rewarded for being right.
But hopefully, the next time our government tries to rush us into a war, the dissenters will be treated with more respect, and the proponents with less. Many lives will depend on it.
By: Micah Sifry, The National Memo, March 15, 2013
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