Confessions of a misguided hawk

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It's been three years and seven months since the United States invaded Iraq. But only last week did I become definitively convinced that the war I once cheered on was a failure -- that it made the world a more dangerous place overall.

As I saw things in early 2003, there were three good reasons for deposing Saddam Hussein, any one of which, by itself, was sufficient to justify his ouster: (1) Saddam was a maniac who had weapons of mass destruction; (2) The creation of a democracy in the heart of the Muslim Middle East would transform the region by firing a fatal crack into the monolith of Arab tyranny; and (3) Putting the wrecking ball to Saddam's dungeons would end the wanton slaughter of Iraq's long-suffering people.

Turns out I was zero for three.

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What has always attracted me to conservative thought is that it privileges empiricism and experience over utopian ideologies and blind faith. Yet, in the case of the Iraq War and its conduct, this pattern has been turned on its head. More than three years after the war began, many hawks insist it was a triumph. And Rumsfeld, a man who should have lost his job two years ago, remains a figure of awe.

George Orwell once wrote that thinking people should keep a journal of their thoughts so they can track of all the discredited views they once held. In the case of a newspaper columnist such as myself, that isn't necessary -- because they're all there on the yellowing page. You can't hide from your mistakes. All you can do is own up to them and apologize.

And so, for whatever it's worth to anybody, mea culpa.

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What has always attracted me to conservative thought is that it privileges empiricism and experience over utopian ideologies and blind faith.

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Here's a solid paragraph from the article:

[QUOTE] Here at home, what I find most depressing is the convoluted mental tricks my fellow hawks play to avoid facing these truths.

Does anyone think he's talking about DAVID FRUM???

He regrets in the article that Dubya didn't put "more boots on the ground" to get the job of crushing Iraq into submission done properly.

Only the naive expect the leopard to change its spots.

ETA:
Apparently Michael Ignatieff said something similar to the Globe and Mail in an interview. The Globe, however, placed a teaser on Page 1 today and invited the reader to turn to page 19 for the full Iggy interview. But the interview is nowhere to be found - not on page 19, not anywhere in the paper, and not on the online edition. It was some huge cock-up on the part of the Globe.

[ 19 October 2006: Message edited by: M. Spector ]

I don't think that is a naive view, at all.

It is true that Kay, and many other neocons, too, hold on to the figleaf that, if everything was done perfectly, the war would have been a success.

But to me, it is a significant step forward for him to recognise that his faith in the leaders was misplaced.

That's why I mentioned David Frum, who wrote a book claiming that Bush was "The Right Man", and another in which he claims that the invasion of Iraq would bring in "An End to Evil".

Probably, the present situation in Iraq does not amount to "an end to evil", nor is it obvious that Bush was "the right man" for anything but a series of disasters.

There, the Man Who Has Been Teaching the Law of War for his Entire Life (as he identified himself to George Strombo the other night) had this to say:

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On Iraq, he said he 'takes full responsibility for not having anticipated how incompetent the Americans would be. I don't have remaining confidence in the Americans ... . The Bush operation in Iraq betrayed any hopes I had of Iraq transitioning to a stable political elite, and now all those hopes rest with my friends, the Iraqi political elite.'

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Good grief.

Meanwhile, one wonders if those 'friends' in the Iraqi political elite are the same ones whose counsel he referred to when he was making the case for the American invasion as an 'imperial act.'

Martin introduces the story with this quotation:

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"People seem to believe I want to live in an American imperial world. I do not. I do not."

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Chomsky had it right when he identified Ignatieff as an imperial apologist and a purveyor of 'garbage' on the US role internationally.

Now, Ignatieff may be trying to climb down from the back of the Republican Imperial Elephant he helped train, but he still won't acknowledge that other huge smelly beast in the living room: his support for an illegal war of aggression. Well executed, badly executed: doesn't matter. Ignatieff argued repeatedly for the commission of the 'supreme international crime,' and still isn't willing to own up to it.

Martin concludes his piece by saying that Ignatieff is still trying to figure out how to 'play to Canada,' after spending years of 'playing' to Britain and America:

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When in America, he often played to America (the famous 'we' quote). He hasn't been home for long, and he is stil trying to discover how to play to Canada.

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So our job is to make the virtual, real. Our job is to regulate the use of military violence by our democracies because nobody else seems to be doing it. Certainly, our Congress isn't doing it.

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Ironic, eh?

Ignatieff's record is so confused and contradictory that I doubt he did himself any good with this hypocritical, incoherent attempt to distance himself from the execution of the Bush administration's foreign policy.

[ 19 October 2006: Message edited by: sgm ]

I left my paper copy at work today so I can't check, but I don't recall seeing a Lawrence Martin article/column in the Toronto edition. There is one online, however, behind the Wall of Death.

My paper said "Full interview A19" at the end of the front-page teaser.

Maybe the interview only appeared in the National Edition.

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jeff house wrote:
Yet David Frum at the National Post has not come forward with a mea culpa on Iraq or Bush, not even a partial one like Kay has written.

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Not only that, he wrote a piece just a couple of days ago devoted to debunking the recent Lancet study on the number of excess deaths in post-invasion Iraq.

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The mistake wasn't going into Iraq; the mistake was to stay. The mistake wasn't resorting to bayonets; the mistake was trying to sit on them. The mistake wasn't to remove a tyrant who wasn't ready to go; the mistake was to try to build a nation that wasn't ready to be. The mistake wasn't leading a horse to water, the mistake was trying to make it drink. With the best of intentions, America managed to make Iraq's problem its own. Now the U.S. President is standing on the riverbank, hanging on to a spooked, rearing, kicking horse. It's not a pretty sight.

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But moralpolitik isn't necessarily smart. (Nor is it necessarily moral, but that's another story.) It prompted three U.S. administrations over 16 years to wage war against a blood-stained Baathist tyrant who simply wanted to sell us oil, partly to protect blood-stained Wahhabi and Shiite fanatics who wanted to obliterate us. You may think it's carrying altruism a bit too far, but there it is.

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Remember that Churchill made a number of bad moves in the early days of the Second World War, but while he often despaired, quitting was never an option ... . Militant Muslims would not fold their tents and melt into the desert if we were to withdraw from this war'; they watch to see how many will follow Jonathan Kay

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The mistake wasn't going into Iraq; the mistake was to stay.

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But if they hadn't "stayed", the government they set up would have lasted about four weeks.

Then Saddam would have returned, or if not, someone equally unpalatable to the Americans.

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To say that the invasion was a mistake requires us to believe that, because Saddam had not rebuilt his WMD capacity at the time, he never would. After all that has happened in the last three and a half years, is that a position that can sensibly be maintained? Fortunately, that's a mistake Jon will never have to admit.

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'It seems to me,' writes Coyne, 'we are obliged to give some thought to what the world would be like had Saddam remained.'

Unfortunately, 'thought' is precisely what Coyne doesn't give to the (ill-conceived) question he raises, relying instead on a distortion of the factual record he himself cites, while bullying his reader with scare-mongering imperatives--'Now imagine what Saddam might have done with $60 oil'--and misleading rhetorical questions, like the ones concluding this doomsday scenario, in which a post-9/11 US government has not attacked Iraq:

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And now consider that we are still in the shadow of September 11. The Taliban have been toppled and, as critics of the Iraq war would have it, the Americans have kept their "focus" on Afghanistan. That doesn't mean they've caught Osama bin Laden -- the escape from Tora Bora was in 2001, long before the Iraq "distraction" -- but it may well mean he and his followers are in need of a new hideout. We know that they were in continual contact with Saddam, even if Duelfer found that this did not amount to a "relationship." Where in this world would they find a regime more willing to defy the Americans, then at the height of their power? What might they have achieved, within the shelter of a nuclear-armed Iraq?

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One of the problems with this counterfactual column is that its evocation of a nuclear-armed Iraq capable of sheltering Osama and Al-Qaeda in the wake of 9/11 runs counter to the most important piece of evidence he offers in support of his argument: the Duelfer report.

Coyne says, rightly, that the Duelfer report provides evidence that Saddam Hussein intended to rebuild his WMD programmes once free of international sanctions.

(Coyne's oversimplifying some points here, but I'll leave that for now.)

Confusing an intention with a practical capability, however, Coyne creates alarmist scenarios unjustified by the evidence mentioned in the report he cites.

Page 24 of Part One of the report, for instance, says that 'Saddam was focused on the eventual acquistion of a nuclear weapon,' but it also notes the 'absence of an effective [nuclear] program after 1991.'

Furthermore, the Duelfer report says that before the Gulf War in 1991, 'Iraq was within a few years of producing a nuclear weapon.'

So, even before the destruction of the 1991 Gulf War, the Duelfer report had Saddam Hussein still 'a few years' away from producing a nuclear weapon.

(I'm leaving aside here the question of whether the hypothetical weapon had a workable delivery system, etc.)

And after the war, according to the report, there was apparently an 'absence of an effective [nuclear] program.'

And yet Coyne, on the basis of this Duelfer report, claims to be 'giving some thought' to his counterfactual hypothesis when he writes things like this:

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We know that Saddam was well on his way to developing nuclear arms before the first Gulf War, or more specifically before the Israelis bombed the Osirak reactor. But why go through all that time and trouble, when today he could just buy them off the shelf from North Korea?

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More disturbing even than his rejection of basic evidentiary standards, however, is his misrepresentation of historical facts.

As I would put it:

How can Coyne raise his frightening doomsday scenario of a nuclear-armed Husseini Iraq sheltering Osama and Al-Qaeda when he himself must know (based on the Duelfer report he cites) that Iraq was still some years away from a nuclear weapon in 1991, after which time Iraq's nuclear capability--despite Saddam's most ardent wishes--was seriously degraded?