He said "a bunch", not all, and he's replying to this must-read column by Tim Noah. Noah poses the question of why the very people who have been utterly vindicated by how things turned out, continue to be marginalized as if they were wrong and the hawks were right.
One need not ascribe faux-machismo or craven careerism to every prominent liberal hawk to point out that major news outlets were most certainly applying a testosterone litmus test. And it is naive to suppose that no liberal hawks felt this pressure. Incredibly, even now one's criticism of the war is taken seriously only if one favored the war at the outset.
Now, now, Ogged. You have to understand: what's important isn't unifying to get Bush out of office (and the Republicans out of the majority in both houses of Congress), building alliances, persuading people, and winning votes. What's important is to feel self-righteous and good about one's self, and superior to others.
Have you no sense of priorities?
Always remember: what politics is most about is tearing other people down.
I can still say, despite having been lied to, and despite the botched execution of the post-war occupation, that the reasons still seem good to me,
-----------
Yo,
1. you were not lied to,
2. the war has gone very well compared to any war in the history of humanity.
Even if you still believe we were lied to, who was the liar? W or Saddam?
For those riding the short bus, even if Saddam had nothing he should have been shot for pointing a fake gun. Look at what Lybia has been able to do? Lybia?
Saddam should have been removed prior to 911.
Here is a link to clear up the fog (I have zero connection to any site I link).
sv, saying "a bunch" without giving some way to distinguish the guilty from the innocent is just a smear: it implicates all the liberal hawks, and leaves it to them to defend themselves from a nasty charge.
Patrick, I don't get it--I didn't argue that Atrios wasn't right, I'm just upset at his suggestion that those who were wrong were wrong in an evil, rather than reasonably mistaken way.
Good to see you chime in on this. I think it's pretty clear what's going on.
The predicament of Atrios and his supporters is simply the predicament we all share -- you and I included. None of us knows any actual right-wingers. At least, none of us is in conversation with any. From the perspective we all share, actual right-wingers are creatures from another planet.
Hence, in the lead up to the war the most salient thing to me was the silliness of much of the anti-war argument (the anti-war conclusion turned out to be correct, but most of the arguments for it were quite bad, given the evidential context back then), and I paid little attention to the other-worldly things that right-wingers were then saying (which of course was unforgivable of me). And now it's just the same from Atrios's perspective: the former war-supporters with whom he's angriest are the left-liberals who eighteen months ago were angriest with him.
It isn't just payback. It's most fundamentally a sign that none of us shares a conversational context with actual right-wingers. Given that conversational background, the relentless hounding is inevitable. From Atrios's perspective, you and I really are the principal enemy on this issue. And we'd think the same of former war-supporters if we had held his position.
As for the base motives, I read that as an attempt to hold us accountable. He expected this behavior of the right-wingers, since he regards them as nothing but hawkbots and to that extent beyond accountability. It's you and I that he thinks deserve a good whipping, since at least we're persons and might benefit from it.
In sum, he means the relentless hounding as a compliment.
Gee, ogged, Atrios didn't mention you by name did he? So if, as you claim, you weren't one of those fools primarily motivated by a desire to get that big A-plus on the testosterone test he was talking about, but instead you had valid reasons for having been wrong about the Iraq invasion, why do you assume Atrios was talking about you and get all offended?
It's happening here. The "silliness of the anti war arguments"? Other than the anti-war concern that Saddam would use or distribute his WMDs, what other "silly" argument turned was wrong, even given the available and obviously-hyped evidence? This seems to be Atrios' point: we (the pro war) were wrong, but our arguments are better, so we should get more time on the Newshour than those silly people who understood the prewar situation more clearly.
On the Web, I think the reaction to Atrios's post is simply projection. Atrios agrees with Noah that only previously pro-war voices get heard on the mass media, and bloggers takes offense? That's just thin skin.
I'm a formerly marginally hawkish liberal. Currently I'm feeling more pessimistic and ashamed about Iraq than ogged is-- actually, to be precise, it sent me into several months of paroxysmic fretting over the question of whether I'd be sentenced to hanging by a Nuremberg trial in a just world, from which my wife had to spend a lot of time talking me down so I could continue functioning.
Now that the outright panic and self-loathing have settled down a bit, my current feeling on the moral triumphalism of antiwar leftists is this:
1. I'm allowed to disagree with their arguments when I don't find them persuasive, which I sometimes don't.
2. However, many more of them seem persuasive than they did before. Even given my normal level of suspicion of the Bush administration, I honestly did not expect that the lies and incompetence would be of the magnitude that they have turned out to be.
(Here I pause to let some of you scream "WHY WASN'T IT FUCKING OBVIOUS TO YOU, YOU PRICK, YOU STOOGE, YOU BABY-MURDERER??" for a few minutes.)
I suppose that part of it was an overreaction to some of the conspiratorial takes from Ted Rall and such on the *Afghanistan* war. But most of it was a committed democrat's implicit trust in the system, that you ought to give some benefit of the doubt to the guy who ended up in office and save your criticisms for election time if the results are bad. Well, it's election time and the results are really, really bad, and a lot of blameless people are dead. So at least the path is clear now.
3. So I'm not going to go around criticizing people like Atrios and PNH who are feeling angry and vindicated, since they're probably mostly right and anyway it's time for me to take a few shots for the team.
4. On the other hand, I don't think I am obligated to agree with the Matt Taibbi/Chun the Unavoidable types who are proposing mass show trials for pro-war journalists, scarlet letters and loss of voting rights for pro-war liberals, etc. For one thing, most of these fantasy proposals would have to start by punishing John Kerry for political impurity, which is probably counterproductive at this point.
5. On the other other hand, none of that crazy stuff is going to happen anyway, so #4 is irrelevant in practice.
For what it's worth, that's how it feels to me, a year and a half out.
I'm actually not as intolerant of my liberal friends who were initially pro-Iraq-invasion as I may have made it seem. The fact is, we were all lied to. We're supposed to be able to trust our elected leaders on fundamental issues of national security, even if they weren't the candidates we voted for. It's not a hanging offense to have been deceived by people who've made a life's work of being good at deception.
Atrios hasn't been making the categorical claim you're attributing to him. What he's trying to get at is the establishment groupthink within which even now people who thought the war was a good idea have more credibility than the people who correctly thought it was going to be a disaster. It's not gloating; it's frustration at the establishment's evident determination to not learn one goddamn thing. Look, if we were wrong about something and a bunch of other people who we were previously marginalizing turn out to have been dead right, maybe we should stop marginalizing them quite so much and give them a listen, hey? But no, the anti-war people are still just a bunch of crazy hippies and who would ever listen to them. Darn the bad luck of them turning out to be, cough cough, ahem ahem, rightabouteverything. Look, a cheesesteak sandwich!
Just to be clear, the "silly" anti-war arguments that I had in mind were those that insisted that the war was an oil-grab. At least in my neck of the campus woods, that was the loudest anti-war argument in early 2003. One certainly didn't hear much sober-realist 'occupation is harder than it looks' argument coming from the anti-war left in those days. But it's the sober-realist argument that has been vindicated.
On the anti-war left, there was a 'this administration is just hopelessly incompetent' argument that has been vinidicated too. But at the time, that was not the main argument coming from the left.
A lot of liberals like me thought the Iraq war was a bad idea.
It was.
In fact, it was a horrifically bad idea, and all the that 'terrible-dictator-is-gone-so-its-all-good argument holds no water. Yes, it might all turn out for the best. In fact, wait long enough and ANY bad situation turns out for the best.
You were wrong. you were just as wrong as bill keller, paul wolfowitz and ken adelman. But rather than just say "I was wrong and this is a disaster" you have to keep defending your positions.
I read your blog. I think you are a good writer and inciteful. But in the matter of the invasion, you were dead fucking wrong. From the costs of the war to the disasterous anti americanism it has spawned over the world, to the fact that two Americans die a day, and twelve are wounded, you were simply purely wrong.
read a history book. history is rife with examples of armies marching into the mesoptamian valley and losing- or essentially making little difference.
If I were you I would back off. Defending this mess, and the positions that led to it is rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
So you stood up for the moronic brownshirt fucks when they LIED about going to war while millions of others who had a brain in their head opposed them. The brownshirts were horribly, horribly wrong, and the cost was tens of thousands of lives, billions and billions of dollars, and a hatred that will last generations. And you'r upset that someone points out you supported this folly?
I don't know about the campuses. My greatest contact with the "anti-war left" entailed going down to DC for the big anti-war demo in January 2003. The "oil-grab" argument didn't seem to be particularly more prominent there than any of the many others.
I don't think anyone's apology at this point for being so very wrong is ever enough for some people ...
BUT if those of you who pushed for this war are not doing everything in your power NOW to kick this admin out of office, then, IMHO, you are not doing nearly enough, ... and I have no problems (personally) reminding you that because of your deriliction, we have the body count that we do.
Hawkish liberals made a huge mistake in aligning themselves with Bush on the Iraq war. Each and every one of them lives in shame, whether acknowledged or not.
Suckered by Bush ( meaning plaed by a dolt ) Mocked by All.
INstead of savaging Atrios , who has stayed true to Himself and his ilk , regardless of what ease he might have enjoyed were he to buckle , you might thank him for being a sigal of Moral Clarity. But then , you would have to seee through the fog a different way , wouldn't you
The "bad anti-war arguments made on my campus" line of reasoning as an excuse for supporting this rather obvious disaster really doesn't hold water. College campuses, for many decades now, have been home to some of the worst and most untenable left political arguments around (and some good ones, too). But if the very presence of the former renders you incapable of holding an obvious concurring but not identical position, I don't see how you could maintain being a liberal on any issue.
DJW has nailed it: It's disingenuous to cherrypick strawmen among anti-war positions so you can dismiss all of us as naive and "right" through sheer dumb luck. Plenty of anti-war sentiments were arrived at soberly, through refusing to be fooled by the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Chalabi Axis. We listened instead to people like Scott Ritter and Hans Blix; we recalled Powell and Rice saying in 2001 that Hussein was contained and that sanctions/inspections had worked quite well. We saw through the lies and distortions.
The problem was, some of y'all were far too busy banging the drums and helping the Right marginalize us as anything from "shrill" to "treasonous" to listen to us.
Now it's all gone to hell, as we told you it would. We were RIGHT, goddamn you, and for solid reasons. Yet many of you marginalize us still, apparently because you don't want to lose face by admitting you were suckered, but big time, by Big-Time Cheney himself. You write sniveling, self-serving mea culpa op-eds that say "Well, I was wrong, but no reasonable person could've thought any different than I did at the time." Then you pretend that anti-war people were all a bunch of peace & freelove, war-is-always-wrong 1960s campus throwbacks singing Kum Ba Yah while wringing hands about "blood for oil".
That argument sucks rocks. It's dead wrong, and it ignores the fact that 90% of us bleeding-heart pacifists were all for going into Afghanistan to nail bin Laden (and, gosh, they fucked that one up too, didn't they?)
If you want to continue arguing that the Iraq war was justified for other reasons etc., that's fine--debate based on facts is always a good thing. But I'm glad Atrios is making those of you who cling to specious, self-serving rationalizations face up to their intellectual bankruptcy.
Thurbonium: "It's disingenuous to cherrypick strawmen among anti-war positions so you can dismiss all of us as naive and "right" through sheer dumb luck."
No one has issued such a dismissal here. In my comment above, I said that there were at least two good anti-war arguments back in early 2003: a sober-realist argument emphasizing the difficulties of occupation and an anti-Bush argument emphasizing the incompetence of the administration. Both arguments have been vindicated. If you made either of these arguments in early 2003, I commend you: you were indeed right and moreover in a way that credits you.
If you made some other argument against the war, we'll need to discuss the matter further. Some of the further arguments were fairly cogent, but others were not cogent at all. Credit/blame is not zero-sum. It doesn't follow from the fact that I deserve some blame for having been wrong that anyone who was right deserves credit for that.
That's all anyone has claimed here (well, except abc123...)
Atrios accuses liberal hawks, like ogged, of essentially not having any rational reasons for supporting the Iraq war, but instead doing it as proof of possessing a lot of testosterone.
Ogged responds to the insult with a testosterone-dripping, "Fuck you Atrios."
Case pretty much closed. Ogged's unreasonable, irrational, I've-got-big-cajones "fuck you from a distance" taunt betrays his mindset -- which is still about how tough geeky assholes can be when they send other people's kids to their death.
I tell you what: As a veteran and a liberal, I'll welcome all of you pseudo-liberal, chickenhawk, Hitchens-loving fuckers back into the civilized world when you start feeling guilty enough to consider suicide.
Davies really does come through this looking like a genius. Here's another one: James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly. His column "The 51st State?" was the most spot-on antiwar argument ever assembled, and I will be paying close attention to him in the future.
I'm disappointed, Atrios has been far nicer to you people than I have.
Kos and I said in the Winter of 2003, this was going to be a disaster. While all you wanna be hawks were saying it was necessary
So, where are the WMD? Up Saddam's ass?
Your lackeylike support of this pointless war was morally and ethically inexcusable. Now, you're whining that we were right and we shouldn't remind you of this?
Sorry. You were WRONG. And 963 Americans have paid for that being wrong. Iraq is in near anarchy.
So you're mad at Atrios? Please. Your reasons for supporting the war were brain dead and we're now killing Shia in their holiest city to support a former Baathist thug.
THERE WAS NO CREDIBLE REASON FOR WAR. And now the Iraqis live in a hell even Saddam couldn't have created.
Did your balls feel bigger for supporting the Dauphin and his little colonial adventure? Did you feel like a real man?
Of course you should be smacked about for your idiocy. Supporting the war has always been wrong and if people remind you of it, have the grace to shut the fuck up and accept your beating.
"Of course you should be smacked about for your idiocy. Supporting the war has always been wrong and if people remind you of it, have the grace to shut the fuck up and accept your beating."
I know, we should make this the Democratic Party's new campaign slogan. "Lackeys of America: Shut the Fuck Up and Accept your Beating." It'll be a landslide.
Personally, by now, I'll take a lot of this. But in an election year you do want to change minds to think what's right, not punish people who already have changed their minds for not having been as right as you all along. That strategy actually creates a disincentive for people to change their minds, since it implies that they'll be morally obligated to be miserable afterward.
this is the argument the country should have instead of SBVT....Many times the documents now exsist to assure the rational peace left that their instincts were right than ever exsisted to support the war , and so now ,as the natural opposing force to the neo-con flood of evidence of the wisdom of ideology, should now come the actual factual , and all thier obfuscations and rationalisation and sophistry should be batted aside and crushed mercilessly by truth , fact and the repeated statement that the hawks , regardless of rationale , were dead stinking wrong about everything . Woolsey especially , Pearle and his lot need to be publicly shamed , embarrased and once and for aqll shoved back under the failed policy rock, lest they rekindle and retool in thier basements and come back swinging into Tehran...Mylorie , don't forget her, made into a pamflet and hounded and blamed , Miller , exposed and shamed .The rational left in the nation needs to take back it's voice and take back it's part of the table.The right , the liberal hawk and all thier enablers should, yes, sit and take it , but the architects of this disaster , those named above , need to be sent out to the fringes where they can make money in currency specualtion , arms dealing and endangered species based quisine .
Decent citizens have to stop taking their reservations, stop taking them on as guest experts and stop endowing them intellectual tenure ,at schools, in media and in the mind of the nation , lest it be left with the identity of global bully forever ;lest the next generation be groomed to conscripted sacrifice to illusion .
Not only is Iraq, as Steve Gilliard says, near anarchy, but, according to Naomi Klein in this month's "Harper's", the anarchy was deliberately planned by the neocons to, ideologically, create their free market utopia and, practically, to destroy the Iraqi middle class and loot the country of everything one could remove from it. This, of course, is no surprise to any of us premature-antiwar types.
I'm glad I read Steve Gilliard's post before writing as it obviates the need for anything more than a reinforcement of both his words and tone. Wrong is wrong is wrong and when the consequences of being so are as completely horrific as there are in this case, there is little time for distinctions as to how one is wrong.
In continuing to hide behind any excuses (you were lied to, right, has this by any chance ever happened to the American people before ?), you have demonstrated yourself to be the moral equivalent of an invertebrate.
Ogged's "fuck Atrios" already does make it clear that Atrios was right about the liberal hawks having a testosterone problem. But what I've also seen a lot of in this thread is the overt threat that if the liberal hawks aren't treated nicely, they'll take their marbles and go home. In other words, if we don't agree to pretend that they were always right, and that they aren't still spouting nonsense about their reasons still seeming good, then they won't work against the election of G.W. Bush.
Well, if you children want to cut off your nose to spite your face, go ahead. If you're not going to do anything because a few people persist in bringing up the fact that you were and are wrong, and that you collaborated in the murder of thousands, then I don't think that you're mature enough so that we could get any real use out of your help.
Let me just say, as a longtime regular here and as vociferous an antiwar partisan as anybody, that you folks who have wandered over from Eschaton and heaped derision on Ogged should spend a little more time reading through the archives to understand his positions on the war over the past year and a half. It's not anywhere near as simplistic as you believe it to be.
The attitudes expressed here by some of you, however, miss the mark entirely. Pissing matches over who was right or wrong before the invasion are beside the point. It happened. Those of us opposed to it were unable to stop it and having been "right" and a buck will get you a cup of coffee, if that. The only question that matters is where we go from here and how we get out of what appears to be the world's biggest tarbaby.
Gloating might feel good, but it accomplishes nothing. In fact, it may well prove counter-productive to the only decent option we have in front of us: giving the bum's rush to the asshats currently in charge of the federal government.
But what I've also seen a lot of in this thread is the overt threat that if the liberal hawks aren't treated nicely, they'll take their marbles and go home.
I haven't read that sentiment expressed anywhere in this thread or in the original post. Again, if you're referring to Ogged, you clearly haven't spent any time here reading him.
"Ogged's "fuck Atrios" already does make it clear that Atrios was right about the liberal hawks having a testosterone problem. But what I've also seen a lot of in this thread is the overt threat that if the liberal hawks aren't treated nicely, they'll take their marbles and go home. In other words, if we don't agree to pretend that they were always right, and that they aren't still spouting nonsense about their reasons still seeming good, then they won't work against the election of G.W. Bush."
If you're talking about me, that's not what I was trying to imply at all. I was saying that if the non-hawks place emphasis on punishing the ex-hawks by impugning their personal morality (as opposed to stating that they were disastrously and fatally wrong, which is fine because it is a true statement), it is a disincentive for the conversion of wavering hawks who currently support Bush into ex-hawks.
I've heard a lot of talk to the effect that such people are not worth the effort because they're obviously too stupid or unreliable to be trustworthy. But if you only want to associate with or convince people who are true-blue friends who will never desert you, then you don't understand how elections work.
"In continuing to hide behind any excuses (you were lied to, right, has this by any chance ever happened to the American people before ?), you have demonstrated yourself to be the moral equivalent of an invertebrate."
OK, I'm an asshole, but how does this attitude make things right in the future? Applied nationally, it will reelect Bush; you can't change the minds of the people who are still wavering Bush supporters by calling them assholes who can never be redeemed.
Basically what's being displayed here is the Calvinist approach to politics: people are unchangeably good or bad, and the purpose of political discourse is to reveal the identities of the bad people so the good can fire denunciations at them. On the right, this same kind of thinking is what led to the idiotic screeds about "old Europe" and much of the condemnation of antiwar liberals. Over the long term, it's a loser.
...And I should hasten to add, again, that neither Atrios nor PNH nor many of the people who have criticized the liberal hawks are guilty of this Calvinist mindset. PNH, in particular, has railed against it most passionately.
Matthew McIrvin, on the day that Kerry brings out a campaign commercial that denounces "wavering Bush supporters by calling them assholes who can never be redeemed", you will have a point. Until then, I can only ask who you are directing your comments to. You've already said that Atrios isn't doing this.
This whole "you are being Calvinists" objection is a big distraction, nothing more, because it is always directed at some amorphous group of unnamed Internet commenters who represent no one but themselves. It turns attention away from the valid point that Atrios was making about the marginalization of anti-war opinion, and towards the hurt feelings of a few liberal hawks who threaten to have a temper tantrum if "we" don't stop picking on them.
This is the most ridiculous thread ever on Unfogged.
A. Contra Puchalsky, no former war-supporter here has had or threatened a temper tantrum (unless you count ogged's original "Fuck Atrios" -- a sentiment that no one else has echoed).
B. Every single comment from those who double posted here and on Eschaton (posting here, and then bragging on Eschaton how they told off the whiners on Unfogged -- e.g. Default and Gilliard, among others) has manifested the Calvinist mindet described by McIrvin.
C. I'd go one beyond McIrvin. The rhetorical tactics employed by the ogged-bashers in this thread are likely to send lukewarm Kerry-supporters fleeing. Note well: that's not a threat. I am not a lukewarm but a red-hot (ABB) Kerry-supporter. I'm not talking about my own support for the candidate but about the effectiveness of this schoolyard rhetoric. There are lots of lukewarm Kerry-supporters out there who could easily be driven away by this sort of nonsense. "Good riddance"?
It is *deeply* tiresome to be told that one endorses or opposes a policy because of moral deficiency or hormonal imbalance. I expect both left and right can agree on this, and I suspect it was that irritation which prompted ogged's hard-edged response. It seems now that atrios didn't exactly mean this. So good for him.
What about the substance? Well, I fear that by writing here I am about to intrude into another 'fact universe'. And we all know from Marvel comics how bad it is when universes collide. You can see this as an initiation of the conversation Ted H. refers to above, or you can flame away.
1st point. A valid argument must both arrive at the correct conclusions, and also arrive at those conclusions for the right reasons. Consider an analyst who predicted the NASDAQ would go up in 1999, but based this conclusion on a perceived "infinite need for bandwidth." How do we feel about the rightness of that analyst? By analogy, if someone predicted doom in the occupation of Iraq, but also predicted doom in Afghanistan, and doom for the initial military conquest of Iraq, and perhaps looking back, doom for gulf war I; well there's a discount factor. Similarly, if someone alleged the incompetence of the Bush administration, but grounded that allegation on a perplexing or tendentious rationale (e.g. "because the president is stupid -- literally a moron – and Cheney and Rumsfeld are well known incompetents"), this again prompts a discount factor. Such a discounting doesn't constitute cherry-picking, it is just the way one looks at policy analysis. Even if we want to stipulate for the sake of this conversation that the anti-war conclusions were right, perhaps there were not such a prolific number that were right for the right reasons.
2nd point. I often find it useful to define the set of evidence that would convince me that my opinion was wrong. I am not yet convinced the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, but I can imagine the evidence that would convince me. Let me ask those in this thread who believe Iraq is already a disaster: what evidence would cause you to reverse this opinion? (answers like "all the dead people coming back to life," though no doubt heartfelt, will not be helpful).
3rd point. "Collaborated in the murder of thousands," nuremberg trials," all capitals "no credible reasons for war." What on earth are is going on here? If your beef against the invasion is a) there were no WMD, b) there were no 9-11 links, and c) the occupation is much harder expected, fine. But this other stuff is crazy talk. Just as a brief benchmarking to reality, were the reasons for the bombing of Serbia so much more compelling? This is exactly the reason why the anti-war left was, is, and will be marginalized – because it throws around nutty stuff like this. Or at least, that's how it looks from Mars.
"Then on balance, the best thing you could do to demonstrate that this is a rational belief is to enlist and ask to be sent to Iraq."
Or, consequentially, one could demonstrate what a completely lame notion this is. There are many possibilities, and apparently all need proof by showing up in Iraq. Wow.
Illogic and idiocy, jump forth.
Apparently, ability to demonstrate what a rational belief is is not as widespread as we'd all hope.
He said "a bunch", not all, and he's replying to this must-read column by Tim Noah. Noah poses the question of why the very people who have been utterly vindicated by how things turned out, continue to be marginalized as if they were wrong and the hawks were right.
One need not ascribe faux-machismo or craven careerism to every prominent liberal hawk to point out that major news outlets were most certainly applying a testosterone litmus test. And it is naive to suppose that no liberal hawks felt this pressure. Incredibly, even now one's criticism of the war is taken seriously only if one favored the war at the outset.
Posted by son volt | Link to this comment | 08-20-04 5:21 PM
Now, now, Ogged. You have to understand: what's important isn't unifying to get Bush out of office (and the Republicans out of the majority in both houses of Congress), building alliances, persuading people, and winning votes. What's important is to feel self-righteous and good about one's self, and superior to others.
Have you no sense of priorities?
Always remember: what politics is most about is tearing other people down.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 08-20-04 5:38 PM
What's important is to feel self-righteous and good about one's self, and superior to others.
See? Told you the war was unnecessary. I felt that way already.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 08-20-04 6:30 PM
Ogged said:
I can still say, despite having been lied to, and despite the botched execution of the post-war occupation, that the reasons still seem good to me,
-----------
Yo,
1. you were not lied to,
2. the war has gone very well compared to any war in the history of humanity.
Even if you still believe we were lied to, who was the liar? W or Saddam?
For those riding the short bus, even if Saddam had nothing he should have been shot for pointing a fake gun. Look at what Lybia has been able to do? Lybia?
Saddam should have been removed prior to 911.
Here is a link to clear up the fog (I have zero connection to any site I link).
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/
Posted by abc123 | Link to this comment | 08-21-04 7:33 PM
I was wondering how it was that Atrios is more convincing than you are. Thanks for reminding me: it was that "being right" part.
He's also right about how some people are determined to claim extra credibility despite having been wrong about everything. Good luck with that.
Posted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden | Link to this comment | 08-21-04 9:49 PM
Oh, and also: "Welcome to post-truth."
Posted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden | Link to this comment | 08-21-04 9:51 PM
sv, saying "a bunch" without giving some way to distinguish the guilty from the innocent is just a smear: it implicates all the liberal hawks, and leaves it to them to defend themselves from a nasty charge.
Patrick, I don't get it--I didn't argue that Atrios wasn't right, I'm just upset at his suggestion that those who were wrong were wrong in an evil, rather than reasonably mistaken way.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 08-21-04 11:41 PM
Ogged,
Good to see you chime in on this. I think it's pretty clear what's going on.
The predicament of Atrios and his supporters is simply the predicament we all share -- you and I included. None of us knows any actual right-wingers. At least, none of us is in conversation with any. From the perspective we all share, actual right-wingers are creatures from another planet.
Hence, in the lead up to the war the most salient thing to me was the silliness of much of the anti-war argument (the anti-war conclusion turned out to be correct, but most of the arguments for it were quite bad, given the evidential context back then), and I paid little attention to the other-worldly things that right-wingers were then saying (which of course was unforgivable of me). And now it's just the same from Atrios's perspective: the former war-supporters with whom he's angriest are the left-liberals who eighteen months ago were angriest with him.
It isn't just payback. It's most fundamentally a sign that none of us shares a conversational context with actual right-wingers. Given that conversational background, the relentless hounding is inevitable. From Atrios's perspective, you and I really are the principal enemy on this issue. And we'd think the same of former war-supporters if we had held his position.
As for the base motives, I read that as an attempt to hold us accountable. He expected this behavior of the right-wingers, since he regards them as nothing but hawkbots and to that extent beyond accountability. It's you and I that he thinks deserve a good whipping, since at least we're persons and might benefit from it.
In sum, he means the relentless hounding as a compliment.
Posted by Ted H. | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 7:24 AM
Gee, ogged, Atrios didn't mention you by name did he? So if, as you claim, you weren't one of those fools primarily motivated by a desire to get that big A-plus on the testosterone test he was talking about, but instead you had valid reasons for having been wrong about the Iraq invasion, why do you assume Atrios was talking about you and get all offended?
Posted by W. Kiernan | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 7:57 AM
shorter W. Kiernan: if the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 8:33 AM
It's happening here. The "silliness of the anti war arguments"? Other than the anti-war concern that Saddam would use or distribute his WMDs, what other "silly" argument turned was wrong, even given the available and obviously-hyped evidence? This seems to be Atrios' point: we (the pro war) were wrong, but our arguments are better, so we should get more time on the Newshour than those silly people who understood the prewar situation more clearly.
On the Web, I think the reaction to Atrios's post is simply projection. Atrios agrees with Noah that only previously pro-war voices get heard on the mass media, and bloggers takes offense? That's just thin skin.
Posted by Jim | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 8:36 AM
abc123 should change his name snowball! :)
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 8:58 AM
I'm a formerly marginally hawkish liberal. Currently I'm feeling more pessimistic and ashamed about Iraq than ogged is-- actually, to be precise, it sent me into several months of paroxysmic fretting over the question of whether I'd be sentenced to hanging by a Nuremberg trial in a just world, from which my wife had to spend a lot of time talking me down so I could continue functioning.
Now that the outright panic and self-loathing have settled down a bit, my current feeling on the moral triumphalism of antiwar leftists is this:
1. I'm allowed to disagree with their arguments when I don't find them persuasive, which I sometimes don't.
2. However, many more of them seem persuasive than they did before. Even given my normal level of suspicion of the Bush administration, I honestly did not expect that the lies and incompetence would be of the magnitude that they have turned out to be.
(Here I pause to let some of you scream "WHY WASN'T IT FUCKING OBVIOUS TO YOU, YOU PRICK, YOU STOOGE, YOU BABY-MURDERER??" for a few minutes.)
I suppose that part of it was an overreaction to some of the conspiratorial takes from Ted Rall and such on the *Afghanistan* war. But most of it was a committed democrat's implicit trust in the system, that you ought to give some benefit of the doubt to the guy who ended up in office and save your criticisms for election time if the results are bad. Well, it's election time and the results are really, really bad, and a lot of blameless people are dead. So at least the path is clear now.
3. So I'm not going to go around criticizing people like Atrios and PNH who are feeling angry and vindicated, since they're probably mostly right and anyway it's time for me to take a few shots for the team.
4. On the other hand, I don't think I am obligated to agree with the Matt Taibbi/Chun the Unavoidable types who are proposing mass show trials for pro-war journalists, scarlet letters and loss of voting rights for pro-war liberals, etc. For one thing, most of these fantasy proposals would have to start by punishing John Kerry for political impurity, which is probably counterproductive at this point.
5. On the other other hand, none of that crazy stuff is going to happen anyway, so #4 is irrelevant in practice.
For what it's worth, that's how it feels to me, a year and a half out.
Posted by Matt McIrvin | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 9:04 AM
I have a hard time understanding how, with everything we know now, that you still say you'd still support the war.
Hard to understand....
Posted by Bushcheneymustgo | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 9:10 AM
I'm actually not as intolerant of my liberal friends who were initially pro-Iraq-invasion as I may have made it seem. The fact is, we were all lied to. We're supposed to be able to trust our elected leaders on fundamental issues of national security, even if they weren't the candidates we voted for. It's not a hanging offense to have been deceived by people who've made a life's work of being good at deception.
Atrios hasn't been making the categorical claim you're attributing to him. What he's trying to get at is the establishment groupthink within which even now people who thought the war was a good idea have more credibility than the people who correctly thought it was going to be a disaster. It's not gloating; it's frustration at the establishment's evident determination to not learn one goddamn thing. Look, if we were wrong about something and a bunch of other people who we were previously marginalizing turn out to have been dead right, maybe we should stop marginalizing them quite so much and give them a listen, hey? But no, the anti-war people are still just a bunch of crazy hippies and who would ever listen to them. Darn the bad luck of them turning out to be, cough cough, ahem ahem, rightabouteverything. Look, a cheesesteak sandwich!
Posted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 9:29 AM
Just to be clear, the "silly" anti-war arguments that I had in mind were those that insisted that the war was an oil-grab. At least in my neck of the campus woods, that was the loudest anti-war argument in early 2003. One certainly didn't hear much sober-realist 'occupation is harder than it looks' argument coming from the anti-war left in those days. But it's the sober-realist argument that has been vindicated.
On the anti-war left, there was a 'this administration is just hopelessly incompetent' argument that has been vinidicated too. But at the time, that was not the main argument coming from the left.
Posted by Ted H. | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 9:30 AM
Ogged,
it boils down to this.
A lot of liberals like me thought the Iraq war was a bad idea.
It was.
In fact, it was a horrifically bad idea, and all the that 'terrible-dictator-is-gone-so-its-all-good argument holds no water. Yes, it might all turn out for the best. In fact, wait long enough and ANY bad situation turns out for the best.
You were wrong. you were just as wrong as bill keller, paul wolfowitz and ken adelman. But rather than just say "I was wrong and this is a disaster" you have to keep defending your positions.
I read your blog. I think you are a good writer and inciteful. But in the matter of the invasion, you were dead fucking wrong. From the costs of the war to the disasterous anti americanism it has spawned over the world, to the fact that two Americans die a day, and twelve are wounded, you were simply purely wrong.
read a history book. history is rife with examples of armies marching into the mesoptamian valley and losing- or essentially making little difference.
If I were you I would back off. Defending this mess, and the positions that led to it is rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
Posted by Maccabee | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 9:36 AM
So you stood up for the moronic brownshirt fucks when they LIED about going to war while millions of others who had a brain in their head opposed them. The brownshirts were horribly, horribly wrong, and the cost was tens of thousands of lives, billions and billions of dollars, and a hatred that will last generations. And you'r upset that someone points out you supported this folly?
Fuck YOU!
Posted by dave | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 9:43 AM
I don't know about the campuses. My greatest contact with the "anti-war left" entailed going down to DC for the big anti-war demo in January 2003. The "oil-grab" argument didn't seem to be particularly more prominent there than any of the many others.
Posted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 10:00 AM
I don't think anyone's apology at this point for being so very wrong is ever enough for some people ...
BUT if those of you who pushed for this war are not doing everything in your power NOW to kick this admin out of office, then, IMHO, you are not doing nearly enough, ... and I have no problems (personally) reminding you that because of your deriliction, we have the body count that we do.
Posted by Nads | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 10:05 AM
"I'm not even convinced that the invasion won't turn out, on balance, to have been for the best."
What? are you kidding?
I think that is Atrios' point, you guys are still on the train!
Posted by Eric | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 10:17 AM
Hawkish liberals made a huge mistake in aligning themselves with Bush on the Iraq war. Each and every one of them lives in shame, whether acknowledged or not.
Posted by mykull | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 10:18 AM
Suckered by Bush ( meaning plaed by a dolt ) Mocked by All.
INstead of savaging Atrios , who has stayed true to Himself and his ilk , regardless of what ease he might have enjoyed were he to buckle , you might thank him for being a sigal of Moral Clarity. But then , you would have to seee through the fog a different way , wouldn't you
Posted by A.s.H. | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 10:29 AM
The "bad anti-war arguments made on my campus" line of reasoning as an excuse for supporting this rather obvious disaster really doesn't hold water. College campuses, for many decades now, have been home to some of the worst and most untenable left political arguments around (and some good ones, too). But if the very presence of the former renders you incapable of holding an obvious concurring but not identical position, I don't see how you could maintain being a liberal on any issue.
Posted by djw | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 10:42 AM
DJW has nailed it: It's disingenuous to cherrypick strawmen among anti-war positions so you can dismiss all of us as naive and "right" through sheer dumb luck. Plenty of anti-war sentiments were arrived at soberly, through refusing to be fooled by the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Chalabi Axis. We listened instead to people like Scott Ritter and Hans Blix; we recalled Powell and Rice saying in 2001 that Hussein was contained and that sanctions/inspections had worked quite well. We saw through the lies and distortions.
The problem was, some of y'all were far too busy banging the drums and helping the Right marginalize us as anything from "shrill" to "treasonous" to listen to us.
Now it's all gone to hell, as we told you it would. We were RIGHT, goddamn you, and for solid reasons. Yet many of you marginalize us still, apparently because you don't want to lose face by admitting you were suckered, but big time, by Big-Time Cheney himself. You write sniveling, self-serving mea culpa op-eds that say "Well, I was wrong, but no reasonable person could've thought any different than I did at the time." Then you pretend that anti-war people were all a bunch of peace & freelove, war-is-always-wrong 1960s campus throwbacks singing Kum Ba Yah while wringing hands about "blood for oil".
That argument sucks rocks. It's dead wrong, and it ignores the fact that 90% of us bleeding-heart pacifists were all for going into Afghanistan to nail bin Laden (and, gosh, they fucked that one up too, didn't they?)
If you want to continue arguing that the Iraq war was justified for other reasons etc., that's fine--debate based on facts is always a good thing. But I'm glad Atrios is making those of you who cling to specious, self-serving rationalizations face up to their intellectual bankruptcy.
Posted by turbonium | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 11:51 AM
I'm not even convinced that the invasion won't turn out, on balance, to have been for the best.
You're pretty fucking deluded, then. Will you be sending a bouquet next month to the family of the 1000th U.S. soldier killed in Iraq?
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 12:12 PM
Thurbonium: "It's disingenuous to cherrypick strawmen among anti-war positions so you can dismiss all of us as naive and "right" through sheer dumb luck."
No one has issued such a dismissal here. In my comment above, I said that there were at least two good anti-war arguments back in early 2003: a sober-realist argument emphasizing the difficulties of occupation and an anti-Bush argument emphasizing the incompetence of the administration. Both arguments have been vindicated. If you made either of these arguments in early 2003, I commend you: you were indeed right and moreover in a way that credits you.
If you made some other argument against the war, we'll need to discuss the matter further. Some of the further arguments were fairly cogent, but others were not cogent at all. Credit/blame is not zero-sum. It doesn't follow from the fact that I deserve some blame for having been wrong that anyone who was right deserves credit for that.
That's all anyone has claimed here (well, except abc123...)
Posted by Ted H. | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 12:48 PM
Let's see:
Atrios accuses liberal hawks, like ogged, of essentially not having any rational reasons for supporting the Iraq war, but instead doing it as proof of possessing a lot of testosterone.
Ogged responds to the insult with a testosterone-dripping, "Fuck you Atrios."
Case pretty much closed. Ogged's unreasonable, irrational, I've-got-big-cajones "fuck you from a distance" taunt betrays his mindset -- which is still about how tough geeky assholes can be when they send other people's kids to their death.
I tell you what: As a veteran and a liberal, I'll welcome all of you pseudo-liberal, chickenhawk, Hitchens-loving fuckers back into the civilized world when you start feeling guilty enough to consider suicide.
Posted by default | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 12:48 PM
Davies really does come through this looking like a genius. Here's another one: James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly. His column "The 51st State?" was the most spot-on antiwar argument ever assembled, and I will be paying close attention to him in the future.
Posted by Matt McIrvin | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 12:55 PM
Thanks for the Fallows cite, Matt. I just skimmed it, and it does look like he really got it right.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 1:03 PM
I'm disappointed, Atrios has been far nicer to you people than I have.
Kos and I said in the Winter of 2003, this was going to be a disaster. While all you wanna be hawks were saying it was necessary
So, where are the WMD? Up Saddam's ass?
Your lackeylike support of this pointless war was morally and ethically inexcusable. Now, you're whining that we were right and we shouldn't remind you of this?
Sorry. You were WRONG. And 963 Americans have paid for that being wrong. Iraq is in near anarchy.
So you're mad at Atrios? Please. Your reasons for supporting the war were brain dead and we're now killing Shia in their holiest city to support a former Baathist thug.
THERE WAS NO CREDIBLE REASON FOR WAR. And now the Iraqis live in a hell even Saddam couldn't have created.
Did your balls feel bigger for supporting the Dauphin and his little colonial adventure? Did you feel like a real man?
Of course you should be smacked about for your idiocy. Supporting the war has always been wrong and if people remind you of it, have the grace to shut the fuck up and accept your beating.
Posted by steve_gilliard | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 1:19 PM
This war was not an oil grab.
It was a failed oil grab.
Posted by melior | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 1:19 PM
"Of course you should be smacked about for your idiocy. Supporting the war has always been wrong and if people remind you of it, have the grace to shut the fuck up and accept your beating."
I know, we should make this the Democratic Party's new campaign slogan. "Lackeys of America: Shut the Fuck Up and Accept your Beating." It'll be a landslide.
Personally, by now, I'll take a lot of this. But in an election year you do want to change minds to think what's right, not punish people who already have changed their minds for not having been as right as you all along. That strategy actually creates a disincentive for people to change their minds, since it implies that they'll be morally obligated to be miserable afterward.
Posted by Matt McIrvin | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 2:29 PM
this is the argument the country should have instead of SBVT....Many times the documents now exsist to assure the rational peace left that their instincts were right than ever exsisted to support the war , and so now ,as the natural opposing force to the neo-con flood of evidence of the wisdom of ideology, should now come the actual factual , and all thier obfuscations and rationalisation and sophistry should be batted aside and crushed mercilessly by truth , fact and the repeated statement that the hawks , regardless of rationale , were dead stinking wrong about everything . Woolsey especially , Pearle and his lot need to be publicly shamed , embarrased and once and for aqll shoved back under the failed policy rock, lest they rekindle and retool in thier basements and come back swinging into Tehran...Mylorie , don't forget her, made into a pamflet and hounded and blamed , Miller , exposed and shamed .The rational left in the nation needs to take back it's voice and take back it's part of the table.The right , the liberal hawk and all thier enablers should, yes, sit and take it , but the architects of this disaster , those named above , need to be sent out to the fringes where they can make money in currency specualtion , arms dealing and endangered species based quisine .
Decent citizens have to stop taking their reservations, stop taking them on as guest experts and stop endowing them intellectual tenure ,at schools, in media and in the mind of the nation , lest it be left with the identity of global bully forever ;lest the next generation be groomed to conscripted sacrifice to illusion .
Posted by A.s.H. | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 2:59 PM
Not only is Iraq, as Steve Gilliard says, near anarchy, but, according to Naomi Klein in this month's "Harper's", the anarchy was deliberately planned by the neocons to, ideologically, create their free market utopia and, practically, to destroy the Iraqi middle class and loot the country of everything one could remove from it. This, of course, is no surprise to any of us premature-antiwar types.
Posted by Jon Meltzer | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 4:36 PM
I'm glad I read Steve Gilliard's post before writing as it obviates the need for anything more than a reinforcement of both his words and tone. Wrong is wrong is wrong and when the consequences of being so are as completely horrific as there are in this case, there is little time for distinctions as to how one is wrong.
In continuing to hide behind any excuses (you were lied to, right, has this by any chance ever happened to the American people before ?), you have demonstrated yourself to be the moral equivalent of an invertebrate.
Posted by Alex | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 5:04 PM
Ogged's "fuck Atrios" already does make it clear that Atrios was right about the liberal hawks having a testosterone problem. But what I've also seen a lot of in this thread is the overt threat that if the liberal hawks aren't treated nicely, they'll take their marbles and go home. In other words, if we don't agree to pretend that they were always right, and that they aren't still spouting nonsense about their reasons still seeming good, then they won't work against the election of G.W. Bush.
Well, if you children want to cut off your nose to spite your face, go ahead. If you're not going to do anything because a few people persist in bringing up the fact that you were and are wrong, and that you collaborated in the murder of thousands, then I don't think that you're mature enough so that we could get any real use out of your help.
Posted by Rich Puchalsky | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 5:39 PM
Let me just say, as a longtime regular here and as vociferous an antiwar partisan as anybody, that you folks who have wandered over from Eschaton and heaped derision on Ogged should spend a little more time reading through the archives to understand his positions on the war over the past year and a half. It's not anywhere near as simplistic as you believe it to be.
The attitudes expressed here by some of you, however, miss the mark entirely. Pissing matches over who was right or wrong before the invasion are beside the point. It happened. Those of us opposed to it were unable to stop it and having been "right" and a buck will get you a cup of coffee, if that. The only question that matters is where we go from here and how we get out of what appears to be the world's biggest tarbaby.
Gloating might feel good, but it accomplishes nothing. In fact, it may well prove counter-productive to the only decent option we have in front of us: giving the bum's rush to the asshats currently in charge of the federal government.
But what I've also seen a lot of in this thread is the overt threat that if the liberal hawks aren't treated nicely, they'll take their marbles and go home.
I haven't read that sentiment expressed anywhere in this thread or in the original post. Again, if you're referring to Ogged, you clearly haven't spent any time here reading him.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 08-22-04 8:25 PM
"Ogged's "fuck Atrios" already does make it clear that Atrios was right about the liberal hawks having a testosterone problem. But what I've also seen a lot of in this thread is the overt threat that if the liberal hawks aren't treated nicely, they'll take their marbles and go home. In other words, if we don't agree to pretend that they were always right, and that they aren't still spouting nonsense about their reasons still seeming good, then they won't work against the election of G.W. Bush."
If you're talking about me, that's not what I was trying to imply at all. I was saying that if the non-hawks place emphasis on punishing the ex-hawks by impugning their personal morality (as opposed to stating that they were disastrously and fatally wrong, which is fine because it is a true statement), it is a disincentive for the conversion of wavering hawks who currently support Bush into ex-hawks.
I've heard a lot of talk to the effect that such people are not worth the effort because they're obviously too stupid or unreliable to be trustworthy. But if you only want to associate with or convince people who are true-blue friends who will never desert you, then you don't understand how elections work.
Posted by Matthew McIrvin | Link to this comment | 08-23-04 6:58 AM
"In continuing to hide behind any excuses (you were lied to, right, has this by any chance ever happened to the American people before ?), you have demonstrated yourself to be the moral equivalent of an invertebrate."
OK, I'm an asshole, but how does this attitude make things right in the future? Applied nationally, it will reelect Bush; you can't change the minds of the people who are still wavering Bush supporters by calling them assholes who can never be redeemed.
Basically what's being displayed here is the Calvinist approach to politics: people are unchangeably good or bad, and the purpose of political discourse is to reveal the identities of the bad people so the good can fire denunciations at them. On the right, this same kind of thinking is what led to the idiotic screeds about "old Europe" and much of the condemnation of antiwar liberals. Over the long term, it's a loser.
Posted by Matthew McIrvin | Link to this comment | 08-23-04 7:07 AM
...And I should hasten to add, again, that neither Atrios nor PNH nor many of the people who have criticized the liberal hawks are guilty of this Calvinist mindset. PNH, in particular, has railed against it most passionately.
Posted by Matthew McIrvin | Link to this comment | 08-23-04 7:09 AM
Matthew McIrvin, on the day that Kerry brings out a campaign commercial that denounces "wavering Bush supporters by calling them assholes who can never be redeemed", you will have a point. Until then, I can only ask who you are directing your comments to. You've already said that Atrios isn't doing this.
This whole "you are being Calvinists" objection is a big distraction, nothing more, because it is always directed at some amorphous group of unnamed Internet commenters who represent no one but themselves. It turns attention away from the valid point that Atrios was making about the marginalization of anti-war opinion, and towards the hurt feelings of a few liberal hawks who threaten to have a temper tantrum if "we" don't stop picking on them.
Posted by Rich Puchalsky | Link to this comment | 08-23-04 7:22 AM
This is the most ridiculous thread ever on Unfogged.
A. Contra Puchalsky, no former war-supporter here has had or threatened a temper tantrum (unless you count ogged's original "Fuck Atrios" -- a sentiment that no one else has echoed).
B. Every single comment from those who double posted here and on Eschaton (posting here, and then bragging on Eschaton how they told off the whiners on Unfogged -- e.g. Default and Gilliard, among others) has manifested the Calvinist mindet described by McIrvin.
C. I'd go one beyond McIrvin. The rhetorical tactics employed by the ogged-bashers in this thread are likely to send lukewarm Kerry-supporters fleeing. Note well: that's not a threat. I am not a lukewarm but a red-hot (ABB) Kerry-supporter. I'm not talking about my own support for the candidate but about the effectiveness of this schoolyard rhetoric. There are lots of lukewarm Kerry-supporters out there who could easily be driven away by this sort of nonsense. "Good riddance"?
Posted by anon | Link to this comment | 08-23-04 8:07 AM
It is *deeply* tiresome to be told that one endorses or opposes a policy because of moral deficiency or hormonal imbalance. I expect both left and right can agree on this, and I suspect it was that irritation which prompted ogged's hard-edged response. It seems now that atrios didn't exactly mean this. So good for him.
What about the substance? Well, I fear that by writing here I am about to intrude into another 'fact universe'. And we all know from Marvel comics how bad it is when universes collide. You can see this as an initiation of the conversation Ted H. refers to above, or you can flame away.
1st point. A valid argument must both arrive at the correct conclusions, and also arrive at those conclusions for the right reasons. Consider an analyst who predicted the NASDAQ would go up in 1999, but based this conclusion on a perceived "infinite need for bandwidth." How do we feel about the rightness of that analyst? By analogy, if someone predicted doom in the occupation of Iraq, but also predicted doom in Afghanistan, and doom for the initial military conquest of Iraq, and perhaps looking back, doom for gulf war I; well there's a discount factor. Similarly, if someone alleged the incompetence of the Bush administration, but grounded that allegation on a perplexing or tendentious rationale (e.g. "because the president is stupid -- literally a moron – and Cheney and Rumsfeld are well known incompetents"), this again prompts a discount factor. Such a discounting doesn't constitute cherry-picking, it is just the way one looks at policy analysis. Even if we want to stipulate for the sake of this conversation that the anti-war conclusions were right, perhaps there were not such a prolific number that were right for the right reasons.
2nd point. I often find it useful to define the set of evidence that would convince me that my opinion was wrong. I am not yet convinced the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, but I can imagine the evidence that would convince me. Let me ask those in this thread who believe Iraq is already a disaster: what evidence would cause you to reverse this opinion? (answers like "all the dead people coming back to life," though no doubt heartfelt, will not be helpful).
3rd point. "Collaborated in the murder of thousands," nuremberg trials," all capitals "no credible reasons for war." What on earth are is going on here? If your beef against the invasion is a) there were no WMD, b) there were no 9-11 links, and c) the occupation is much harder expected, fine. But this other stuff is crazy talk. Just as a brief benchmarking to reality, were the reasons for the bombing of Serbia so much more compelling? This is exactly the reason why the anti-war left was, is, and will be marginalized – because it throws around nutty stuff like this. Or at least, that's how it looks from Mars.
Cheers!
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 08-23-04 11:56 AM
"I'm not even convinced that the invasion won't turn out, on balance, to have been for the best."
Then on balance, the best thing you could do to demonstrate that this is a rational belief is to enlist and ask to be sent to Iraq.
Posted by John | Link to this comment | 08-23-04 2:29 PM
"Then on balance, the best thing you could do to demonstrate that this is a rational belief is to enlist and ask to be sent to Iraq."
Or, consequentially, one could demonstrate what a completely lame notion this is. There are many possibilities, and apparently all need proof by showing up in Iraq. Wow.
Illogic and idiocy, jump forth.
Apparently, ability to demonstrate what a rational belief is is not as widespread as we'd all hope.
That's the very very very sad thing.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 08-28-04 8:04 PM