Why I Was So Totally Wrong About Iraq

In response to a snarky aside in this CT post, some commenters are rightly asking, why were you so wrong about Iraq, and what do you think now? This is a bit off the top of my head, and it's a subject which deserves some thought, but here is a first stab at it. (I'd just like to note, too, that while I may have been deluded I was not sneering about the loony, pacifist left all the time.)

UPDATE: this post was actually posted by Belle Waring; I had to log in as John to fix something on the site and then forgot...I'll see if we can fix this but I'll wreck incoming links.

1. This is the most personally embarassing reason, but it has to be said: in the aftermath of 9/11 I lost my head a bit and wanted to take some decisive action. I realize that attacking party B after being attacked by party A shouldn't be satisfying to the vengeful-minded, because it doesn't make any sense. But, having just been in the odd position of agreeing with the Bush administration on a war (vs. Afghanistan), I somehow found the next war more appealing than I should have. Somewhere in here there must alse be a kernel of "let's smash something to show how powerful we are." This is really poor reasoning and reflects badly on me personally. Nothing much I can say about it in my defense.

2. I had long thought our current Iraq strategy was very bad. The sanctions were harming innocent Iraqis rather than Saddam, but there was no substantive reason to lift the sanctions from the point of view of Saddam's compliance. I supported the first Gulf War, unlike all my college friends, and I was dismayed by its denoument. I thought we had failed to finish what we started and had condemned many people to death after encouraging them to rise up against Saddam.

3. Saddam Hussein really was a particularly brutal dictator. Iraqis weren't suffering as badly as North Koreans, or southern Sudanese people, but it was pretty bad. I thought that any new government would have to be a better government. But we don't just go around deposing every dictator in the world, do we? Well...

4. We were in a unique position with regard to Saddam under international law. He had agreed to do certain things in his surrender, and he wasn't doing them. I felt this gave the whole conflict a different status than a sudden drive to unseat, say, Robert Mugabe would have.

5. I couldn't believe that Saddam had actually destroyed his stocks of banned weapons and his records of having done so. I still find it very strange that he did this. I thought, if he were only willing to destroy these weapons programs openly, he surely could have gotten the majority of the Security Council on his side for a lifting of sanctions. Clinton might have gone for it. Why not take the chance? I can only suppose that the sanctions regime was somewhat to his liking, giving him total control of the country's revenues, and he thought it was better to be under sanctions but be thought (by his neighbors) to have WMD than to be free from sanctions but known to be unarmed. Or everyone was lying to him. Or he was crazy.

6. I thought my government was both more competent and more honest than it actually was. This is going to sound stupid, but I genuinely thought that if all those guys, and Colin Powell and everyone, really thought Iraq posed a possible nuclear threat, then they knew something I didn't. Now, I was on the fence about the nuclear aspect (and let's be honest, that's the real threat. Saddam wasn't going to give mustard gas to al-Qaeda for them to lug around, and Japan's experience with the sarin bombers makes clear that chemical weapons just aren't all that effective. Bioterrorism, OK, scarier, but nukes are the real threat.) I was on the fence because there was a good bit of evidence that Iraq had shut down its nuclear program. On the other hand, they were much further along with it than anyone had thought in 1992. And hey, remember those aluminum tubes? OK, I am a sucker. But honestly, I thought that the government had access to all manner of secret stuff I didn't know about, and that they genuinely thought the threat was real. I didn't think my President would bald-faced lie to me about something so vital to our nation's security. I didn't take into account the extent to which Bush's administration just had a hard-on for Iraq from the day they came into office, and were willing to grasp at any straw, play up the sketchiest information, rely on the most patent forgeries, to get people on board.

7. I grossly underestimated the extent to which gearing up to invade Iraq would vitiate our efforts in Afghanistan. This is almost the one I feel stupidest about, because it's really very obvious. If we had spent 200 billion and concentrated our armed forces on Afghanistan rather than diverting both elite units and foot-soldiers to Iraq, we might have Osama now. Certainly, the Pakistan/Afghanistan border regions would not be the hotbed of Taliban supporters and foreign jihadis that they clearly are right now. And where is the real nuclear proliferation threat, anyway? Pakistan, as it turns out. And we are doing what about that? Nothing.

8. I thought the administration would do a better job. I didn't know we would guard only the oil Ministry and let looting and chaos engulf Baghdad after we took control. I didn't know that ideological conformity would count for everything in the CPA, and actual expertise for nothing. I didn't know the men in charge would ignore the advice of our own State Department about what conditions might be like following the war. I didn't know that Rumsfeld was willing to gamble the sucess of this venture in order to score points in an intra-Defense Department battle over troop strength. I can't weasel out of this by pretending it's all the Bushies fault for making such a mess of the post-war period, but man, did they fuck up bad, in every area. I should have let partisan opposition to Republicans guide my thinking more than I did. My mom, for example, said that even if I was right and the invasion was a good idea, that these bastards would screw it up. I guess I was lost in some post 9/11, spanning the political divide bullshit haze.

9. Finally, I was committed, to some degree, to the "Oxblog Fallacy." I thought that because I could think of some good, humanitarian, democracy-promoting reasons to go to war, that I ought to support the actual, real-life war on offer from the Bush administration.

What should I have been thinking, and what have I learned? Containment actually works. (Hey, maybe we should try that on Communism!) In general, if you have two options before you, and one involves fighting a war of choice, you should almost certainly pick the other one, even if it is not very appealing taken on its own. Also, even though it's true that any government would be better than Saddam's, it's also true that no government -- that is, anarchy and civil war -- is worse than even the worst goverment. I clearly underestimated the chances of this happening. Finally, just because it sounds hippy to say "war is not the answer" doesn't mean it's not true. War is a serious, awful, bloody business, and now many people are dead who would have been alive if the wrong policy I favored hadn't prevailed. There is really no one to apologize to for that, but God am I sorry.

Comments

[AlanB.]

I'm sure lots of other people are sorry too, but you may be putting too much on yourself. My reasons for my half-hearted support for the war are a lot like yours, but also include a desire to accentuate the positive in a war that was going to happen whatever I said and whatever arguements were made against it.

Yes, a lot of the justifications are crap (pretty much just like you said it) but Saddam is one of the worst dictators on earth, and getting rid of him would be a really good thing. Plus while they will have more problems making Iraq a beacon of democracy then they seem to think they will have to do it. It's not impossible to midwife the birth of a better society in Iraq, and we have good people in the Government who are capable of seeing and correcting mistakes. Plus politically they have to make the tough choices, spend the cash and humble themselves before reality. There is no way on earth Bush will get re-elected if he fucks this up. My fellow citizens will not ignore, much less reward, total incompetence. So while I probably would not do it if I were president, this president is going to do it, and there is a real possibility things will come out well. Well, well-ish.

So that's about how I thought at the time. Obviously I was wrong, but I think it mostly comes down to a failure to anticipate total incompetence on the part of the administration. I realized things could go bad, but that we could screw up every single thing so badly I just could not imagine. Frankly, being the optimist that I am if you had told me that things would go this badly I probably would have said that we would then obviously re-think our whole approach to the war on terror and try something else. Not only are we incompetents, we are cowards. This war is really depressing me. So is this post.

[Ray Davis]

What one imagines should be done has to come to terms with what can in fact be done. I can understand why jes' reg'lar folks might indulge in "This is bad, so we should stop it" thinking -- Americans are pretty much trained from birth not to take note of reality, no matter what the consequences -- but it's the government's job to keep it in mind.

So you shouldn't castigate yourself too much. Save it for the people who didn't do their job. (Or who viewed their job as maintenance of personal power and indulgence of personal fantasies.)

[C. Schuyler]

I don't know if it's much consolation, but I initially supported the war for reasons very similar to yours. I recall reading a pre-war tabulation of the evidence for Saddam's weapons programs in THE SCOTSMAN, and being particularly impressed by reports of active work on nukes and other WMDs from defectors. I didn't know that many (all?) of these defectors were stooges of Ahmed Chalabi. Was that something the significance of which I could have figured out at the time, given more digging? I don't know. I know now that the Bush Administration should have discounted (or at the very least distrusted) Chalabi as a source of intelligence, and did not. I also know that my mistake is one I'm unlikely ever to make again. Not much consolation, to be sure. One more thing: rightly or wrongly, I don't think I'm an idiot, and you would be one among many other non-idiots I know of who were snookered as thoroughly as I was. I have gained a much stronger sense of how easy it is for even intelligent people to be led astray. That's worth knowing, I suppose.

[Russell Arben Fox]

Thanks for writing this Belle; it's straightforward, thoughtful, specific, and wise. I came to realize that I had a fair amount of crow to eat regarding the war in Iraq several months ago; unfortunately, since my (tentative) support for the war was almost wholly a product of what you very smartly label the "Oxblog Fallacy," getting myself clear on what I'd gotten wrong, and how and why, mostly involved a lot of (arguably pretentious) theoretical labor. You can read it all on my old blog here; I can't say it's really any good, but hey, I do at least make use of Alan Moore's Watchmen in my argument, and that's got to count for something.

[Dutch]

I couldn't believe that Saddam had actually destroyed his stocks of banned weapons and his records of having done so. I still find it very strange that he did this.

That "destroyed records" part is a leftover from the propaganda war.

Try reading this salon.com interview with Scott Ritter from before the war (March 19, 2002). It made sense then, and it still does. It is more right than almost anyone believed at that time.

[LizardBreath]

Belle-

I'm sure you've read this Daniel Davies post: http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/ on why he was right about the war while so many other sensible people were wrong, but anyone who hasn't should. It's a perfect, clear summary of a couple of rules of thumb for evaluating arguments that would have kept you from making the reasonable errors you made.

[phg]

My first visit to the site and I am impressed. Although I did not share your pre-war views, many people who I know did. I spent long nights debating the issues with them, being called anti-American or even worse a liberal. Reading your self-analysis is closest I have (and probably ever will)come to hearing them admit their mistake.

[bob mcmanus]

Thanks Belle,#8 was my biggest surprise. On most cynical appraisal of Bushco, I thought greater long-term profits would be achieved by a much more competent reconstruction than they even attempted. I have my own explanation of why they blew it, which is considerably more evil than anyone else's. I think they wanted to implicate their young adults, like Ledeen's daughter, in war crimes, so as to be able to control them later.

On point #1. I am still hawkish. I love my country, but I do consider America and Americans different, and have a terror of what America would become and what America would do after a series of terrorist attacks. Not necessarily nukes, but Arabic and Islamic culture would become the stuff of history books and theme parks. That fear, if anything has been reinforced since 9/11.

1) We must prevent further attacks at almost any cost. Eliminating al Qaeda is insufficient.
2) We must remove Bush at almost any cost.

[SusanG]

As someone who opposed the war from the very beginning, I suppose I should be taking pleasure in the mea culpas and explanations of illogical thinking that led to positions of support for the invasion.

But I'm not. I'm just very sad about it all.

The best response to the honest re-examinations I've seen comes -- believe it or not -- from Michael Moore, after Howard Stern publicly apologized for berating Moore in the run-up to the war.

Moore simply said: That's the problem, isn't it? We should NEVER have to apologize for believing our president.

[Brian]

6 and 8 are what got me. I supported the war in a rather queasy "I hope these guys know what they're doing" way. Well, we know how that turned out. I remain astonished that we invaded a country with no real plan as to the aftermath other than hope and fantasies that it would all somehow be ok.

I always thought Bush was dim and Rumsfeld a crank but having people support the war who I don't think are insane like Powell and Tony Blair was part of it too.

[Neville]

As another who was swayed marginally to the pro-war side eighteen months ago by those arguments, the one argument that continually nagged at me and which in retrospect was unequivocally right was Dsquared's question

"can anyone... give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
2. It was significant enough in scale that I'd have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
3. It wasn't in some important way completely fucked up during the execution."

As far as I'm concerned, he has every right to be smug.

[Yukoner]

Great post. One small nit to pick on #5 though.

he thought it was better to be under sanctions but be thought (by his neighbors) to have WMD than to be free from sanctions but known to be unarmed. Or everyone was lying to him. Or he was crazy.

Even the most ruthless of dictators must maintain a base of political support within his country. It seems likely that one of Saddam's ways of keeping the needed support was to keep his supporters (e.g. Sunni tribal leaders etc.) convinced that he continued to have chemical and biological weapons and was therefore strong etc. Nothing crazy about it.

[grytpype]

people support the war who I don't think are insane like Powell and Tony Blair

They were both shanghaied into "supporting" the war. They were both told Bush had made up his mind, the war was going to happen, and that they had better get with the program. And they did, and it destroyed them, like anyone who trusts Bush.

[Barbara]

Though I didn't pound the streets, I am one of those people who thought it transparently obvious that the chance that the war would do more harm than good was about 9:1, and that the reality of the harm being avoided -- however you defined it -- was either (1) fabricated or (2) not likely to get better as a result of intervention; or (3) just out and out crazy theorizing. And we had other options, not perfect, but then, letting the better become the enemy of the best is always a dangerous mindset -- and uncertainty should prevent you from ever declaring something better or best in advance of its execution.

There was a far greater likelihood that the "afterward" would more closely model the break-up of Yugoslavia than the post-WWII experience of Japan and Germany and our power to avoid that was very limited and short lived, as we lack any cultural affinity whatsoever for any of the groups involved.

I don't think you should apologize for trusting that you were not being lied to, or that there was a plan in place to maximize the chance of a good result, but I do not forgive so-called reputable members of the press for the same mistakes. No doubt they were instrumental in helping you to shape your opinion.

But I guess, saying this as gently as I can, I do think supporters should feel some amount of shame for having supported this war. I feel shame and I didn't support it. There are just too many dead people for me to overlook the fact that someone did this in my name or for my theoretical benefit. It makes me ill every time I think about it.

[pjs]

Your point about "I should have let partisan opposition to Republicans guide my thinking more than I did." strikes me as exactly right. I think I jumped ship on the war before you did (in January, I believe), but, up until that point, my desire not to let my dislike of Bush cloud my judgment on this war ended up, ironically, clouding my judgment in favor of the war.

I think, moreover, that it is precisely that phenomenon which underlies the willingness of liberals who got this war wrong to nonetheless still feel superior to liberals who got it right. (Here, I'm thinking of the TNR and Slate crowd, not you.) They believe that, even if their judgment turned out to be mistaken, at least they were putting the good of the world above petty partisan loyalties. But as you point out, being loyal to a political party isn't like being loyal to a sports team. In the political case, that loyalty serves an epistomological function, not just an emotional one, and thus it is legitimate to let it guide your judgment about factual matters.

Anyhow, great post.

[babyblue]

Belle, I agree with you that the administration is filled with incompetent liars. But the problem is that there is a difference - which everyone seems to overlook - between never embarking on a policy and embarking on it and then giving it up. That is, it would have been one thing if we all decided at the outset that containment was working and we should not stir things up, but in going to the Security Council we threw that policy up in the air, and there is no reason to believe that it would have continued as before if the US had issued a threat that it did not act on. It seems pretty clear to me, at least, that what would have happened is that there would have been inspections for a while, which, finding nothing, would lead to a movement for ending sanctions, sponsored by France and Russia. And what would have stood in the way, if the US had shot its threats was & Iraq was shown to have no WMD? So containment policy, even if it had worked up to that point, would cease to work. What then?

I'm happy to agree that Bush has messed up, that we should not have embarked on this policy in the first place. But it seems to me that is different than saying that we should have backed down in the Security Council. And yet everyone seems to conflate those two positions. I must say I find it frustrating.

[WeSaferThemHealthier]

Hello Belle, glad to see you followed my advice.

This thread has a bit of the "She used to be a sinner and now she's been saved, let's hug" feel to it. : )

"why were you so wrong about Iraq, and what do you think now?"

The why has been answered somewhat. I think a more pertinent question for the second part is not "what" but "how" you think. If you change the "how", this means that the next time a similar situation comes up, you will not make the same mistakes. That too has been answered to some degree. Maybe I can't see it clearly because it hasn't been stated formally enough. Also, I realise that meta-cognition and then changing paradigms can be difficult and painful.

Central paragraph: If, say, 10 years from now, someone proposed to go to war, what are the criteria, the tests that the proposition/people would have to satisfy for you to agree?

You've identified a few things to watch out for like the Oxblog fallacy and thinking it must somehow makes sense because the govt knows more than you do. Are there others? I ask this of other readers too. Let's inter-subjectivelly improve our heuristics.

It's only fair that I should shortly expose how I came to my conclusion before the war:
I was 2/3 against it and 1/3 for it. I was 1/3 for it because I thought it *might* work.
I was 2/3 against it because I thought it was more likely not to work than work and then who knows what the consequences would be?

Reasons to be against:
1The people in charge cared more about electoral domestic success than foreign strategic success.
2If the people in charge had the option to implement a project that was a small loss to them but a great gain to others, they wouldn't do it.
3The people in charge didn't want a democracy, they wanted a client.

There are other reasons to have opposed it, I could name others but I'm not sure if they came to me before or after the war. Those three I clearly remember thinking in the central room of my college.

[Tom]

Great post. There's also point #10; we'd invested so much diplomatic and political capital, that backing out of a war would weaken the US's appearance of strength; and point #11: as I expected WMDs to be found, I expected all the anti-war folks to look like dicks. They're not good reasons, but those, and the reasons you gave above, were why I was a reluctant hawk. However, I didn't see why we were in such a hurry to get Blix out of there so the bombings could start.

In retrospect, I see the major Rove-ian reason for the exercise (as well as the supposed strategic reasons) as being to weaken the Democrats in the 2002 elections, and thus get control of the Senate, and to strategically cripple the Democrats by splitting them into pro- and anti- war wings.

[Heywood Jablomie]

I'm with you. We should have stayed out of Iraq. After all, it's ok for government agents to rape women and girls. And making political prisoners out of eight year old kids is good too.

The UN could have handled Iraq, just like they are handling Darfur.

The benevolent Iraqi government was framed by the sneaky US Government that imported all of those skeletons for the mass graves.

There was no reason to be concerned that Saddam was offering $25k to the families of martyred terrorists. He was just trying to be helpful.

And it was ok that Saddam was executing thousands of citizens per year (month?)- Although that's probably because they have darker skin than you and don't live in your
neighborhood.

[Ted H.]

It is difficult to hang onto one's wits in a discussion like this -- where the topic is exactly how much shame one should feel for having made a mistake in judgment.

One has to be clear exactly which judgment was mistaken. In my case, and perhaps Belle's (in light of her 8), it's this: that the administration could be trusted to execute their policy with competence.

Now anyone who believed that back in the spring of 2003 was wrong -- yes, abjectly wrong. And anyone who disagreed with that proposition back then was right.

And you can pose the same issue for specific other propositions (e.g. were Scott Ritter's polemics really credible in the context of the pre-war, or would believing him then have involved a degree of recklessness?) Specific proposition, specific debate -- conducted with reference to the evidence then available.

Unfortunately, that isn't how this debate is going. Everyone seems to assume that there are two positions, pro-war and anti-war, and that if one of these positions is wrong then the other must be right. Well, my view all along was that neither was right, since insofar as either is a position it's entirely reactionary (whether Bush-loving or Bush-hating).

Despite her self-understanding, Belle wasn't simply 'pro-war' in the spring of 2003. That epithet doesn't begin to capture the position of a reflective person who felt some confidence that the intervention -- an event then completely beyond our control -- would lead to more good than bad (and was in other respects permissible). So why should the alternative for her, now that she has come to regret some of her earlier judgments, be an 'anti-war' stance?

What the debate was over then were specific points, points that can still be debated. It's difficult to resist the urge to confess one's sins, I know, since I've done lots of it too. But the idea that as a citizen one simply has to 'take a side' on a matter like this and then be either triumphant or shamed as things turn out is really insidious. It undermines collective deliberation and ultimately citizenship itself.

Look, during the six months that I was 'pro-war' I was racked with (much-blogged) worry that I wasn't doing justice to the best arguments against the war. Since I went 'anti-war' last fall I've been racked with (much-blogged) worry that I wasn't doing justice to the best arguments for the war. And that, I think, is as it should be.

We who are not party to any actual policy-making should be discussing specific arguments, not making a fetish of 'positions.' That's the best way to keep in touch with reality -- and to genuinely learn something. That will make us more intelligent political agents (in the voting booth and elsewhere), and make it more likely that our voices have the right sort of indirect impact on those who do make these decisions.

[babyblue]

About that #10 above - weakening the US's appearance of strength - if in the wake of the US backing down there was a big movement to end sanctions, and we did end sanctions, then that would be actual weakening, not just the appearance of it.

Also I'd like to add there was a middle position here, offered by the British government, not to attack UNLESS iraq was shown to be in violation during inspections. This would have kept the teeth in sanctions in tact, but not have led to war if no WMD were found. And this position was not rejected by the Americans, but by the French. "No automaticity" being their phrase.

I happen to remember that because it was my own position, so I recall clearly that Bush & co were willing to bend for Blair, it was Chirac who did not agree to this compromise.

[NPCurmudgeon]

Since the mood here is already so introspective, I should say that -- pre-war -- I withheld my support until I could reasonably guess the answer to a couple of basic questions:

(1) If the US overthrows Saddam's dictatorship, what is the likelihood that a democracy can be established rapidly in a culture that has never shown any real aptitude for it?
(2) Would an Iraqi democracy be secular? Pro-women? Pro-US?

I never got anywhere with the answers, so I never supported the war. Note that I was not looking for definitive theses that provided answers that were "beyond a reasonable doubt," but rather some sort of "preponderance of evidence" that the net result of such a radical proposition had a better-than-average likelihood of being positive.

I should admit that when I first saw the reports in the newspaper that Bush had his eye on Saddam, I was completely mystified because we weren't "done" with Afghanistan, and Saddam had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on 9/11. So, I was predisposed to skepticism, rather than prescient.

[WeSaferThemHealthier]

Oh, one thing I forgot for Belle,
What was the straw that broke the camel's back? When did you start to change your views, what were the steps, what evidence convinced you to change? This, again, applies to anyone here who used to be pro-war. I'm genuinely interested about what changes people's minds, how they make decisions and how they improve their decision making process.

Babyblue,

If the British policy on when to invade had been adopted, do you think that Fallujah would likely be under coalition control? Would the militias be disarmed? Would Iraq be exporting more oil than it did before the war? Would Sadr have remained a minor figure? Would Iraq lean more heavily towards the Japan-at-best and Turkey-at-worst pole than the Egypt-at-best and 70sLebanon-at-worst?

The reason the war was wrong has nothing to do with the UN or international law, it has to do with the consequences we can realistically expect from that action; the gains, the costs, the opportunities it opens/closes and the liabilities it opens/hedges, the options it opens up and the ones it puts beyond the pale.

[Carlos]

I'll offer $25K to the first person to present me with one of Mr. Jablomie's internal organs. Prizes will also be awarded for a limb (not a digit), two continuous square feet of skin, an eye, a gonad or other genital unit, or thirty pounds of current body fat. Appendices, tonsils, gall and kidney stones, cysts and tumors will not be considered for prizes.

C.

[snarkey]

Just one point about johnny-come-lately mea culpas here and elsewhere: Over 1000 US soldiers are dead because you supported this war in the first place. Their blood is on your hands. Period.

Go peddle your apologies to their mothers.