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In reality, preemptive war is very difficult to justify, it requires
more than facts, but a state of suspension between trust and faith in one’s
leaders. The Bush administration could not prove its case, legally and morally,
and opted to use fear, exaggerated claims, and dubious means, some of it fabrications.
When the danger is real and
plausible, most people will tolerate some degree of manipulation and secrecy. But the war hawk neocons used as their Trojan Horse an underachieving
first born of a former president to stage a major policy coup from traditional
American foreign policy, which had been based on a combination of Nixonian détente
and Teddy Roosevelt’s Big Stick concept, to that of a Divine Right imperialism
strongly driven by American military supremacy - which once again we learn has
its limits. Their vehicle by itself was not sustaining, like many before them, they
overestimated their ability to control events as they expanded their empire. Resource wars, expansionism, the military industrial complex, ambitious
egos, these are externalities used by ideologues, sometimes for no better
reason than because they can. They may have believed they were
preventing evil, but instead played vigilantes in their rush to be glorious
heroes. Zealotry kept them from realizing that the means does not justify the
ends, indeed, it matters how you get there. Now, we face the consequences of this unchecked rush to war,
their use of overwhelming force to manipulate Congress and the public. As Gerard Baker wrote in the London Times recently, it is supreme irony
that the week Saddam Hussein’s trial was to open, the Bush administration is
figuratively on trial for its sins committed in their quest to dispose of
him. Let us hope that the rule of
law prevails in both cases. kwc Here is a good example of the informative experience one can get
reading better political-issue blogs. The summary and comments below are by Kevin Drum aka Political Animal
at Washington Monthly. The two
articles under discussion are: American Prospect staff writers Rosenfeld/Yglesias: The Incompetence Dodge http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10454 Josh Marshall at his Talking Points Memo: “Practice to Deceive”. Chaos in the Middle East is the Bush plan http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0304.marshall.html ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Make
War no More?....In
the American Prospect this month, Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias chastise liberal hawks who
have defended their past support of the Iraq war by claiming that the only reason it's failed is
because George Bush has prosecuted it incompetently. Instead, they argue, liberal hawks should admit
that it was just a bad idea, full stop. It's simply not possible to impose
democracy by force, and it wouldn't have worked no matter who was in charge. This criticism
certainly applies to me. Sure,
I switched from pro-war to anti-war
before the war started, but
so what? I did so because I thought that "Bush's implementation of the war
is the very one that will prevent it from ultimately being successful,"
and this statement clearly implies that I thought it was possible for a
different implementation to succeed. So let's take a look at that. Sam and Matt make
three practical — not moral — points, all of them technical in nature. First,
they take apart the argument that the occupation would have worked better if
only we'd used more troops. This may be true, they point out, but since we
didn't have more troops, this is
just wishful thinking.
I've made this argument myself, so obviously I'm sympathetic to it. Second, they claim
that hawks are wrong to think that we might have succeeded if only we hadn't
disbanded the Iraqi army shortly after the fall of Baghdad. Unfortunately, Sam
and Matt gloss over this pretty quickly, suggesting only that this wasn't the
result of incompetence, it was the result of insistent Shia and Kurdish demands
that any president would have been forced to respond to. This is unconvincing, and it's something that deserves a deeper look
since it's pretty clear that the disbanded army has been a primary recruiting
ground for the Sunni insurgency we've been fighting ever since. Third — and here I'm
paraphrasing very loosely — they argue that the American military is lousy at
policing and counterinsurgency. In fact, I'd go further, and argue (for example, here, here, and
here) that no
Western power has ever demonstrated much success at counterinsurgency. As Major John Nagl, a scholar of
guerrilla war, admits, "counterinsurgency
requires an excruciatingly fine calibration of lethal force. Not enough of it
means you will cede the offensive to your enemy, yet too much means you will
alienate the noncombatants whose support you need." That knife edge may
simply be impossible to balance. These are all good
arguments, but I think they obscure two more fundamental points that Sam and
Matt don't address. Point #1 is the fact that democratization was probably never more than a
small part of the original plan anyway, so maybe the whole "democracy at the point of a
gun" argument isn't all that important. Here is Josh Marshall describing the neocon grand plan back
in April 2003: In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even
primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons
of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather,
the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort
to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. ....In short, the administration is trying to roll the table
— to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple
virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like
Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that
ultimately breeds terrorism....Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and
each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still
further American involvement,
until democratic governments — or, failing that, U.S. troops — rule the entire
Middle East. In other words, democracy is nice — eventually — but the bigger issue is kicking over the
status quo in the Middle East and forcing change. And the hawks would argue that this is
happening. Slowly and fitfully, to be sure, but count up the successes: Iraq
and Afghanistan are better off than before, Libya has given up its nuke
program, Lebanon's Cedar Revolution is a sign of progress, Egypt has held a
more open election than any before it, and the Syrian regime is under
considerable pressure. Did
the invasion of Iraq precipitate these changes? I think the hawks considerably overstate their
case, but at the same time they do
have a case. Even if Iraq is a mess, it might all be worthwhile if it
eventually produces progress toward a more open, more liberal Middle East. At
the very least, it's an argument that needs to be engaged. Point #2 is a little more abstract. Because Sam and Matt 's
arguments against democracy building are technical, they beg a question: what
if we corrected the problems they allude to? After all, it's not impossible to
have a bigger army, or to have an army that's better at policing and
counterinsurgency, as Thomas P.M. Barnett argues we should. So, should we? This question deserves a considered answer, because it gets
to the heart of both liberal and conservative hawkishness. Is the threat posed by Middle Eastern
terrorism great enough that we should take on the task of building a military
that can fight and win wars of counterinsurgency and occupation in the future?
Or should we just flatly rule it out? As it happens, regular readers know that I mostly agree with
Sam and Matt's probable views on all these questions. Kicking over anthills and
hoping against hope that something good comes out of it is little more than
fatuous lunacy. The Iraq invasion has had some positive effects on the Middle
East, but they've been modest and have been counterbalanced by some
negative effects — and those effects are likely to get ever more negative as
time goes by. In
general, military action is counterproductive in a long ideological struggle
like the war on terrorism,
just as hot wars — Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Afghanistan — were the most disastrous events of the Cold
War
for everyone involved. And while I think that taking counterinsurgency more
seriously is a good idea, I also suspect that there are systemic reasons that will flatly prevent Western powers
from ever successfully fighting a large scale overseas guerrilla war. Still, these are assertions, not arguments, and if you're
going to flatly suggest — on practical rather than moral grounds — that war
"can be justified only in the face of ongoing or imminent genocide, or
comparable mass slaughter or loss of life," you need to engage these broad arguments, not merely demonstrate that Iraq would have been
difficult verging on impossible no matter who was running the war. I think we
need a sequel. WM 102105 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
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