A Trip Down Memory Lane

Don't you sometimes wonder what I was thinking way back when when I thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq? I sure do. My apologia from September 2004: Why I Was So Totally Wrong About Iraq. I ain't feeling a whole lot righter, I'll tell you that. It still seems to me, even now, that war supporters on the left, even those who now basically agree that the whole thing was a bad idea, still cling to some weird sense of moral superiority [cough, Euston manifesto, cough]. Like, "at least I wasn't some big hippie who didn't seriously grapple with the issues." The thing is, those people, hippies or not, were completely right, and many of them were right because they had seriously considered the issue and decided (correctly, mind you) that it was a bad idea.

(The moral of the story: my mom is always right about everything, and the government actually is always lying to you. I feel compelled to note here that my mom is not a hippie. She never regarded herself as a hippie because she thought hippies were irritating poser suburban kids who were "tripping out" in San Francisco. OTOH, living in a VW van at a commune called The Curch of The Five Star? Mmmmm. I give it 8/10 hippie. Sorry mom.)

Still, there seems to be some sense floating around the pundit class that those on the left who were wrong about invading Iraq were wrong in an interesting, morally meaningful way; wrong in the manner of a wrong Winston Churchill, or something. But one who turned out to be totally wrong, as I may have mentioned. That's just total bullshit and any of these people who is now going on to advocate war with Iran should be roundly ignored. No, they should be laughed at, and then ignored. And then maybe someone should pistol-whip them a little.

Comments

[yabonn]

Ah yes. Makes me sick each time i see it floating around : "it was the mistake of the reasonable, decent people".

Bluerg.

[almostinfamous]

ah the clueless manifesto. what a wonderful piece of historical fiction.

just because a few million people took to the streets to oppose a war that was phony (if not from the get-go, then soon afterwards) doesn't mean that these people were wrong. oh no. on the other hand, if the few million people had just been able to protest harder this war wouldn't have taken place at all!

[Timothy Burke]

I do see a difference between Wolfowitz and Cheney, and therefore similarly between Berman/Geras and some of the assclown warbloggers who changed the logic of their argument for Iraq every five seconds.

In many ways, it's one of those differences that makes no difference, and it's not as if most of the "reasonable, decent" prowar people have all meaningfully rethought their support--as long as they continue to say, "Well, I had a moral point, and it was just the Bush Administration screwing it up", they still really don't get even a half-credit for reasonableness. Because the screwing-it-up part was in fact one of the things that many reasonable critics were observing was wrong about the war, that to go to war under the wrong circumstances at the wrong time with the wrong leadership in the wrong way with a wrong plan IS MORALLY WRONG. You can't say, "Well, I have a moral principle about this war which trumps the innumerable bad premises" any more than you can be only partially pregnant. You go to war in the wrong way, you've got a wrong war.

But I wouldn't want that point to obscure substantively different intellectual and institutional histories that informed different parts of the support for the war. The landscape that George Packer picks through carefully, for example, matters at various points both for understanding the war and for understanding its aftermath or consequences. Even for understanding how to oppose it politically. But it doesn't cancel out that people who were wrong, were fucking wrong, and that most of them, especially the reasonable, decent sorts, still lack the decency to cop to the totality of their wrongness. Which makes their claim of decency sort of silly on its face.

[bob mcmanus]

My current and past response to the human-right abuses like Gitmo has been to yell and scream and call for Bush's immediate impeachment and trip to Brussels. Others more calmly gather information and provide legal services.

The war was going to happen. A better outcome might have been achieved with support of Shinseki, oversight of the reconstruction,etc. No one with the starting position of "Bush war evil" would have had any influence.

Similarly anyone who argues against the nuking of Iran on moral grounds will be irrelevant. Righteous, but irrelevant. The question is how to get the attention of our mad boy-king. Millions of lives may depend on tactics chosen. If you are on record as calling the Iraq war illegal, immoral, and really really stupid you will not exist to those with their fingers on the triggers.

This is one reason the generals are attacking Rumsfeld not Bush.

[bob mcmanus]

I have for years been nibbling at the ankles of Yglesias and Klein on this. "Liberal hawks" were first damaged in the late forties and finally almost destroyed in the aftermath of Vietnam. This did not lead to generations of liberal dovishness and a sane internationalism but Republican control of foreign policy and electoral ascendancy. Ezra is clearest on this, apparently believing the hawkish left was not adequately smashed and humiliated. Yglesias would turn us into serfs and rent-a-wombs in order to feel self-righteous about war.

I am really tired of the smug and useless left.

[Andy Vance]

I wonder if it would help if hippies learned to talk like smart-ass British economists (D-squared, call your office).

A Pareto-optimal policy configuration is said to be efficient. A Pareto-sub-optimal configuration is said to be inefficient, or in technical jargon stupid. It is quite objectively in the national interest to select only efficient policy sets (which one you choose depends on the relative values of the objectives) and conversely to avoid stupid ones.

The second Gulf War is a clear instance of a stupid policy: it has consumed large policy resources, and many lives, for no gain whatever in US prosperity, security, or honour - in fact considerable loss.

Put that on yer protest puppet placard.

[Doug]

Let's do reserve the horse-whipping for the people actually driving the policy...

[Uncle Kvetch]

Brava, Belle. An excellent post.

[zeke]

Ah, for one , admit to reading a Hitchens essay occasionally with some sympathy. The liberal hawks are correct in pointing out the real dangers of Islamicism, and the real dangers of theocracy across the board. And they avoid the automatic anti-Americanism of a Chomsky or the academic cafe-marxist types (can you say Long Slumday?). But Hitchenistas and the liberal hawks' have errored in refusing to address the mispresentations of BushCo and the mistakes/heavy-handedness of the US military, or the corporate involvement (i.e. after the army takes out the cities, Halliburton contractors , etc. build 'em back up at some millions per year); and they have not really acknowledged the deaths of 40,000+ iraqi civilians. Consequentialism 101; the chapels of dixie decorated with pictures of the dead.

[Saheli]

I was always squarely against the invasion of Iraq, though sadly I have no blog archive from then to prove it. Once the bombs started falling I bit my lips and hoped and prayed that I was wrong and it wouldn't be botched, and that I was wrong. . .well, we can see where that bit of noncynicism went.

But I was, actually, also very uncomfortable with the protest movement's methods. I remember looking around in the Streets of San Francisco, probably that big February protest, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people I agreed with, and feeling very profoundly alone and useless. I think if we could have figured out how to at least convince the Belles and Matts of the world of our cause, I would have felt better. That we failed at even that has profoundly shaken and weakened any faith in activism.

I fantasized about the non-hippie protest--no dancers, no puppets, no crazy costumes. People in serious clothes and sensible shoes, all armed with notepads and clipboards and folders of facts and statistics and visual aids, each one ready and articulate to march through the streets--not all in one street, fan out through the city and suburbia--and buttonhole and intelligently argue with every single pro-war person they ever met.

Fairyland, I know.

[Doctor Memory]

Saheli, you profoundly misunderstand the purpose of mass protests. They are not there to convince anyone of anything. They are a demonstration of force. Each pair of feet on the ground is a vote (and worse yet, the kind of person who's likely to go out on election day and suggest voting to other people), and the one thing a politician knows how to do is count. Contrariwise, each pair of feet that stays home because they're too embarrassed by the whole thing is a vote that the politicians know they don't need to worry about.

King Gyanendra isn't reinstating the Nepalese parliament because he's suddenly decided he no longer believes in being king. He's doing it because he knows he's outnumbered.

If you're embarrassed by the bread-and-puppet crowd, if you're mortified by the "that cloud in the sky reminds me of why we must show solidarity with the Palestinians" obsessives, next time consider showing up and helping outnumber them.

[dsquared]

I fantasized about the non-hippie protest--no dancers, no puppets, no crazy costumes. People in serious clothes and sensible shoes, all armed with notepads and clipboards and folders of facts and statistics and visual aids, each one ready and articulate to march through the streets--not all in one street, fan out through the city and suburbia--and buttonhole and intelligently argue with every single pro-war person they ever met.

wouldn't have worked either. WHen someone wants a war, they want a war. As Doug Henwood pointed out, what's reasonable is defined by what's unreasonable; if you get rid of the lunatic fringe from your protest movement, then *you're* the lunatic fringe. Martin Luther King was considered a commie subversive revolutionary until Malcolm got started up, then suddenly he's the saintly man of god, so unlike those dangerous radicals. (Both King and X knew this and independently said so).

Meanwhile in the world of Decency, the Euston Manifesto crowd are spinning it all the other way; apparently they were all against the war when it was being fought, but were driven away out of sheer disgust at our craven love for dictators. Quite why this means that they now want more wars is unclear to me.

[Doctor Memory]

Bah, just re-read your second para, and it sounds like you did show up. If so, consider me instantly chastened. And embarrassed.

I'll re-state the point less obnoxiously: the antics of a few college kids are not the problem. As long as Bill O'Reilly gets paid millions of dollars a year to have apoplectic attacks on camera, the left has nothing to apologize for in terms of presentational tactics.

[David Moles]

Except, perhaps, ineffectiveness.

[Adam Kotsko]

When we really should have been out in the streets shutting the fucking country down was when Bush stole the 2000 election in the first place. Instead, everyone was all timid and procedural and claiming how "this showed the system worked" -- when in fact it worked wrong.

[Nell]

I live in a small, conservative, southern college town. We mounted a determined, sizable, and energetic opposition to the war much earlier than most places, and with all the seriousness asked by Bah above.

- collected hundreds of signatures in July and August on a petition to our Congressional rep and Senators that featured pragmatic as well as moral reasons for why not an Iraq war.

- joined 30 other Virginians in meeting with the staffs of our Senators at their Richmond offices in August 2002. Huge collection of serious, factual arguments on why invading Iraq was bad idea.

- locally, had fifty people on sidelines of annual Labor Day parade (a mandatory stop for statewide pols) asking Warner to oppose the war, and thanking him for holding hearings. Hearings which heard from at least one general opposed to war (Hoar) and got ZERO media coverage.

- sent small delegation to Washington in late September to meet with Congressman (he bailed and we met with staff).

- while in DC, joined a larger delegation that met with Sen. Warner's staff. Rather than put his defense/foreign poliy L.A. to work, Warner sent a 22-year-old intern. Who took no notes.

- had letters in the local and regional papers every week during September and October opposing the war, then again after the UN vote consistently mid-November to the eve of the war.

- sent a dozen people to the October DC march against the war, and 70 locals to the January 2003 one.

- helped bring Tony Zinni and Pat Lang to a panel discussion at VMI three days after the fatal Congressional vote in front of 400 cadets and locals in which Zinni blasted the war.

- got on national TV when Good Morning America came to town on Veterans Day; as we constituted half the crowd for the Potemkin-village Veterans Day parade, replete with signs, American flags, sober-minded flyers, and red-white-and-blue balloons reading 'No War on Iraq', they had to interview us.

- held weekly vigils outside the courthouse from mid-January through the invasion.

- got excellent coverage from our local paper for all our public activities, culminating with very sympathetic interviews (balanced with one of a local war supporter) that appeared on the day Baghdad fell.

We made more of a dent locally than the movement did nationally, exactly because we got a much more respectful hearing for our arguments.

But the national media and "respectable" pundits froze out coverage of dissenters (especially ones like Webb and Zinni who could not be dismissed as hippies), mocked opposition, pretended there were no serious arguments being made, and bowed to the powerful CW that this war was just plain going to happen. As did the Democratic leadership in Congress.

No amount or soberness of opposition would have stopped Bush once he had that blank check from Congress.

And Bob McManus: you're replicating that behavior of giving in to what "everyone knows" all over again wrt Iran. Your characterization of Yglesias' position is a slander.

If Democrats buy into the lie that there is a military option to prevent Iran getting a nuclear weapon, then we'll end up having that war. I'll blame you, among others, though of course the fundamental blame is on Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld.

[Nell]

@Belle:

Thanks so much for the pointer to your 2004 piece. I think it's very, very helpful to the current replay wrt Iran.

Opposition to the war wasn't a "no-brainer", there were problems with the previous-to-invasion policy toward Iraq, and if everyone who supported the war were as honest about their reasons it would be a hell of a lot easier to endure the coming twelve months in the U.S.A.

[Doctor Slack]

No one with the starting position of "Bush war evil" would have had any influence.

Wrong. No one with the starting position of "Bush can be wrong" would have had any influence, as Shinseki found out.

Similarly, anyone who argues against mentioning the moral grounds for opposing the nuking of Iran is completely missing the point if they think steering clear of this will get the Shrub's attention, or if they think that attacking Rumsfeld is an acceptable substitute. Does anyone really believe that the Revolt of the Retired Generals is going to deflect Bush from his ill-fated Napoleonic complex? In the unlikely event that Bush ever did get rid of Rumsfeld, what are the real chances of his appointing a competent, non-partisan replacement given his record to date?

About the only thing that's ever likely to get Bush's attention is a clear and present political threat -- events like the recent mass rallies against Tancredo's immigration law.

Given that, I really hope the lesson American anti-war activists have taken away is not that public protest is useless, or that everything might have worked out if it wasn't for that guy with the stilts. They achieved a hell of a lot in a short span of time against steep odds, and the prominence and diversity of that movement shouldn't be underestimated in its contribution to Bush's subsequent political vulnerability.

[Mark Wade Stone]

Yes, these moral-high-ground warmonger leftists who have come in out of the rain are as stupid as you other "leftists" who just supported the war because you thought it was cool, and you could fill out your shiny new blog with neat-o tough talk.

Blood coming off your hands yet?

[renato]

This is one reason the generals are attacking Rumsfeld not Bush.

The generals' criticism of Rumsfeld is a proxy for criticism of Bush.

They can't bring themselves to dis the Decider-in-Chief because, even in retirement, they believe it is improper and possibly dangerous to have high-ranking military people throwing their weight around regarding who holds the office.

But make no mistake about it, the criticism of Rumsfeld is an implicit indictment of Bush's failures. He has failed the nation in Iraq, as well as the troops.

[busdrivermike]

The average American holds no fault for supporting the Presidents decision to go to war in Iraq.

People should look themselves in the mirror and ask if they voted for Bush or Gore, Bush or Kerry.

They should then plan on going to the Armed forces recruiting station, or back to their lives. This depends on their own code of chivalry and honor.

[TK]

This has to be one of the classiest mea culpas I have ever read. You have my admiration and respect. Now if only you had been a conservative supporter of the war instead of a liberal, because, you know, conservatives believe in taking responsibility and shit. Oh, well: one down, about 30 million to go.

The unacknowledged irony in Belle's spot-on description of the American political climate (even today) is that the so-called "sober realists," who were so much more serious than the hippies, were the ones who engaged in the lion's share of the vituperation. Not to put too fine a point on it, they acted like immature children, while the hippies tried to keep them from possibly running the car of a cliff. Yes, the antiwar people said unkind and cynical things about the people planning the war, and those unkind and cynical things turned out to be, if anything, too kind and trusting.

But I don't think anyone who opposed the war ever impugned the patriotism of fellow Americans who supported the invasion. What we didn't appreciate was being told we were stupid and knee-jerk and terrorist sympathizers and didn't deserve a place in a debate about the single most decision a democracy can make: declaring unprovoked war on another country. What kind of mature democracy thinks that way?

The reason I say "even today" about the political climate is that war supporters still can't wean themselves from these habits of thought. Upthread someone confesses to agreeing with Hitchens about "anti-Americans" like Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky, for all his manifest and erfectly human faults, has spent a life writing and giving lectures to thousands about US foreign policy, at little or no profit to himself, and that's not even his day job. You think he does this to turn his native country over to its enemies? So do you think he needs moralistic lectures from a drunken Trotskyite British ex-pat like Christopher Hitchens? Please. Chomsky probably receives more personal vituperation and orchestrated slander than any nonpolitician in American political life, which is a pretty odd effort to go to for someone whose views are supposed so self-evidently crackpot.

Maybe that's because he's actually proven right a good deal of the time? Recall shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan (the "good" war of course, which all decent patriots support) when Chomsky was derided as a nutball by the smart people at the Note and Slate (and Salon) for predicting that the US would commit human rights abuses that would be covered up and if that failed, rationalized by the US media? How crackpot does that sound now?

Here's an idea for the "sober realists": try acting sober and dealing with reality, not some cartoon version you carry around in your head. If people disagree with you, and you think they are wrong, say so. But the crap about "anti-Americanism"? Take it and stick it up your ass. Then go look in a mirror.

[Delicious Pundit]

Me, I was and am with that famously dirty hippie, Dean Acheson: "It is worse than immoral. It is a mistake."

Of course, the McManus will remind me that a fondness for Dean Acheson is not a recipe for electorial success in either party.

[CathiefromCanada]

I learned more about the American anti-war movement from reading these comments than from years of NYT and WP stories. Thanks so much.
In Canada, we were given the impression that just about everybody in the US thought this war was a great idea. Luckily, our Prime Minister then, Jean Chretien, responded to Canadian public opinion which was 70 per cent opposed to the war, and kept us out of it. His objection was to the "regime change" goal -- as he said, whose regime will you want to change next? Still, the pro-war Canadians (yes, there were some) were just as insulting toward war opponents as you describe in the US -- there was an absolute unwillingness to deal with any anti-war arguments in a serious way, but instead they seemed to think that derisive snorts and name-calls of "coward!" were all that was necessary to defend the war.
And now the same pattern is happening in US society over war with Iran -- the same idea that America has the right to change Iran's government, the same totally unrealistic scenarios of how such a war would be won easily and quickly, with the added element that, since the army is tied up in Iraq, therefore the way to win in Iran is to use nuclear weapons from the get-go -- and the same unwillingness to realize that no nation ever has the right to make unprovoked war on anyone, ever, regardless of how many copies of the "Bush Doctrine" have been printed.

[Rafe]

Doctor Memory: The problem with your contention is that very few folks at the anti-war protests can count themselves. Tony Kushner put it best back in '04, when asked about the Democrats:

...Listen, here's the thing about politics: It's not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.

[snip]

In a certain sense, Bush was right when he called the anti-war demonstrations a "focus group." We went out on the street and told him that we didn't like the war. But that was all we did: We expressed an opinion. There was no one in Congress to listen to us because we were clear about why they couldn't listen. Hillary Clinton was too compromised, or Chuck Schumer -- and God knows they are. But if people don't pressure them to do better, we're lost.

We've not moved very far from that. I applaud the primary challenges that are being waged against Clinton and Jane Harman and Joe Lieberman, and I wish there were more like it. But these challenges are few and far between, and most anti-war folks prefer to express an opinion and talk about how Democrats are in cahoots with the Man.

Yes, a lot are. A lot aren't. For those who are, or who are on the fence, we need to make it worth their while to listen to us. And we can only do that by having an impact on the entirety of the political process. Demonstrations--including the one today in NYC--won't make a lick of good if they're not followed up with a wallop at the ballot box.

And if you don't believe me, you need only look at the pro-immigrant rallies that have been held. Politicians are quaking because not only are Latinos and other immigrants marching, they're registering to vote, and they will vote. Somehow, I don't think anti-war marchers will do the same.