Why do you dismiss chem/bio weapons out of hand? I mean, if we were serously worried about the nuke issue, why aren't we being more proactive about loose nukes in the former USSR?
why aren't we being more proactive about loose nukes in the former USSR?
That's a good question, but what else we should be doing isn't really the issue here (at least not in a way that I can see; maybe I'm not seeing something).
I just want to know what level of abstraction we should assume. I think that, as long as we're discussing 1-7 in the context of a hypothetical competent administration, we would do well to replace "Saddam" with "McX", and see whether your points compel, in general, the launch of preventive wars.
[there is the theory of the moebius... a twist in the fabric of space where time becomes a loop.]
#4 and #6 are the weak spot, I think; there's no reason (save pride, which can't be neglected) we couldn't've flown all the troops back home after the inspectors told us there's nothing there.
The sustainability of the embargo weighed heavily on liberals, I think; I remember lots of talk of dying babies.
That seems too abstract. "Deterrability" was a pretty important consideration (and really the only reason Al Qaeda-as-delivery-vehicle was even an issue). It seems like a factor that would always have to be considered.
Sadam shut down his nuclear program during the 90's because of the pressure from other countries. As long as the pressure remained he couldn't reconstitute the program.
5-6 are wrong
Sadam wanted nukes for the same reason everybody else wants nukes. To deter invasion and to increase the stature of the country. People take countries with nukes seriously.
Sadam wasn't stupid enough to give nukes to terrorists. We would put a serious hurting on anyone who who did that.
Sadam was a secularist not an islamist fundamentalist.
5. Saddam and AQ hated each other. Saddam was a secular dictator, not an Islamic fundie. Hence his whole war with Iraq. He would never give AQ a nuke because they'd be just as likely to use it against him. Two groups who are both my enemies are not necessarily allies.
4/6- It's really not so easy to make nukes. Pretty much everyone agreed that Saddam's nuclear program was under control and would remain so. It's somewhat easier to smuggle a bio/chem weapons program past the inspectors or satellites, not so nukes- there was really no chance of him ever making significant progress without us knowing well before it was too late.
1-3 are pretty much just statements of fact everyone agrees on.
3, 4, 5, and 6 apply to every country that is not well disposed toward the US. Saddam wasn't any closer to acquiring nukes than Venezuela. I think there's a hidden (not intentionally, of course) assumption that Saddam was likelier to get nukes because he was just badder and crazier than other leaders, but I don't think that's a strong argument.
IOW, if you accept 3-7 as persuasive, shouldn't we conquer as much of the world as is practical and not currently our allies? If that's not a reasonable response, why start with Iraq?
LB, I wholly agree, but then, if you accept 3-7 as persuasive, why not start with Iraq? You (the hypothetical accepter of 3-7) have to start somewhere.
The point is that if 3-7 are persuasive, we haven't proven that we need to conquer Iraq to keep us safe, we've proven that we need to conquer the world to keep us safe. Iraq alone isn't particularly useful. If we aren't prepared (both morally and practically) to conquer the world, the conquest of Iraq isn't a step toward making us safe, it's just pointless.
ogged-
"Badder and crazier" I'll accept, but how does that make him more likely to get nukes? There are perfectly sane reasons for any state to want nukes, and being a megalomanic dictator isn't of any practical assistance. Pakistan wasn't led by particularly lunatic people when it became a nuclear power, likewise Israel, etc.
Sadam was a secularist not an islamist fundamentalist.
Saddam and AQ hated each other. Saddam was a secular dictator, not an Islamic fundie.
This has always seemed to me a fine debating point, but an awfully thin reed for someone actually in a position of responsibility to cling to. Anyone can make a deal, right? And the fact that they share a language and a deep hatred for the U.S. makes a deal even more likely, no?
To get them, not so much. To hand them out once he had them, quite a bit. If Chavez gets nukes, that's not so great, but no one really thinks he'd give them to someone to use against the U.S.
we've proven that we need to conquer the world to keep us safe
I don't think "conquer the world" is particularly fair here. I'd reframe as "manage possible threats." Most can be managed non-militarily, a few (like Iraq) can't.
I'm relying on logic rather than on any indepth knowledge of the region, but wasn't Saddam's strongest interest maintaining power in Iraq rather than hurting the US? I haven't seen any indication that he would, e.g., trade control of Iraq for a chance to nuke Washington.
If those were his motivations, than Al Qaeda was a direct threat to his control of Iraq -- they didn't want him, a secularist, to stay in power. That doesn't mean that it would have been impossible for them to work together, but he had good reason to fear and oppose Al Q on his own account. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" only takes you so far.
"You're right, that is a hidden assumption. Why do you think it's weak?"
How was Saddam any crazier than the Islamist regime in Iran, which was closer to getting a bomb (and now is damn near to having one), and has actual, existing connections to actual, existing international terrorist organizations? For that matter, how was Saddam more of a threat than Kim Jong Il, who either was on his way to a bomb or already had one at the time? While you might argue that North Korea wasn't "invadable" before the war, the prospect of threatening Kim Jong Il with military force was more or less taken off the board the moment we embarked on a protracted nation-building excursion in Iraq which exhausted our military resources. This was not an unforseen consequence. This was not something unexpected that jumped up and bit startled hawks in the ass. The exhaustion of the military in Iraq is exactly what would've happened in the best of scenarios under the best of planning, and unless Saddam was the best possible target for the use of those resources - which even in 2002 was clearly not the case - the choice of Iraq for those resources was a mistake of catastrophic proportions.
LB, it sounds like you're saying that the only way for a wannabe world-conqueror to succeed is to take every country at once, as close to instantaneously as possible. If that were true, the utter impracticality of that strategy would reduce 3-7 to absurdity, and the case for would be disposed of. But I don't think the everywhere-now strategy is the only one possible, nor even that it exists. So there's no reductio, and there's still (in the mind of a 3-7ist) the question of which country or countries to take first.
Are you friggin' kidding me ogged? Are you trying to make me stroke out?
Assuming a non-suicidal state actor (ie, Saddam), why would he give something he's spent hundred of millions of dollars away? To an organization he doesn't control? Who will potentially use it against someone scary (ie, us) who will hold him responsible and nuke him and everyone in a 600 mile radius of him?
And if he is suicidal, why not smuggle it into Israel to detonate? Everyone in a 600 mile radius still dies, but (a) you have the lasting good memories of an unfortunate number of people in the ME, and (b) you potentially do destroy a country (b/c of emigration), rather than just piss it off.
Except for Russia, China, arguably India, and perhaps a handful of others, nukes are deterrents.
I will now try to find feeling in the right side of my body.
2. is the most misleading of all the statements. It isn't false, on its face, but placed at a level of abstraction that leads to a host of false conclusions. It is the sort of misstatement the current administration -- and the conservative talking heads -- have grown quite accustomed to. Frankly, I'm surprised, ogged, that you would print it in an unironic fashion.
9.11 doesn't have a neat and tidy "main lesson." 9.11 didn't suspend the rules of logic, or jumble up what constitutes imperialism and what doesn't. 9.11 proved nothing except that a group of terrorists were capable, on that day, of flying a plane into various buildings. It had nothing to do with nuclear weapons, or anyone's ability to create them. It certainly had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein.
The world didn't change after 9.11, except in as much as we let it. The jump from your 2. to 3. makes me pretty irate. That is no way to set up a logical argument.
Assuming a non-suicidal state actor (ie, Saddam), why would he give something he's spent hundred of millions of dollars away?
Yeah. This goes into the "badder & crazier" point. Saddam was morally utterly bankrupt, I'll say bad things about him all day, but doesn't seem to have been nuts in the sense of self-destructive. He was sane enough to hold onto power in Iraq for an awfully long time.
Text, color me naive, but the fact that there were people who were willing to blow up people not by the dozens, but by the tens of thousands, was a pretty big shock to me. Nothing ironic about it.
You thought that people who blow up buses stopped there because they thought doing more damage would be disproportionate? I never expected something like 9/11, but not because I thought no one was crazy enough to want to do it.
It was a shock to me too, ogged. Actually, what was a shock was that it could be done -- that anybody who wanted to do that also had the means to. That shock is probably what led me to be convinced, as you were, that the Iraq war wasn't such a bad idea.
I think it's what led most moderate supporters of the war to support it. And that's pretty sickening, isn't it? Getting punched in the face is a shock, too, but it doesn't validate retributive action against anybody except the guy who punched you.
9.11 proved nothing except that a group of terrorists were capable, on that day, of flying a plane into various buildings.
Agree entirely. I had a cost saving national defense plan that involved neuticles and strapping tape for every Bush supporter. And apparently ogged. Sadly, I am not a member of Congress.
but the fact that there were people who were willing to blow up people not by the dozens, but by the tens of thousands
Hey, wow, that's pretty bad. Ever hear of this thing called the Twentieth Century? They had a couple world wars, a handful of genocides, a nuclear arms race, and right in the middle Henry Kissinger wins a Nobel Peace Prize. Pretty rough stuff.
Put another way, ogged: knock off 1 and 2. They aren't a part of the debate. Now do we go to war? Would you have supported the Iraq war if not for 9.11?
I wouldn't have. Which makes me a giant ass. Because 1 and 2 are irrelevant to this debate. But it isn't just you who positioned the argument for war in this manner.
The whole thing was based on exaggerating Saddam's capacities and exaggerating his craziness. There was an enormous element of projection here -- after all, the US DOES have all forms of "WMDs", and Bush IS President.
We have proclaimed the right to wage preemptive war whenever we want, to torture, to hold prisoners incommunicado forever, to ignore the Geneva agreement, and to hold ourself exempt from all formns of international law.
As with the ticking bomb, a lot of important decision-making seems to be being done on the basis of principles extracted from movies.
I'm strongly tempted to aid Ogged by pointing out flaws in lots of stuff being tossed at him, but it's hard to see how that wouldn't rapidly slide (as this discussion is already slightly sliding) into one being argued with as if one were defending G. W. Bush, and that would be tiresome.
I took responsibility for my pre-war position by sticking it on my sidebar, though. In hindsight, my views is somewhat different, of course, but not entirely.
I'd certainly retrospectively have argued for, at the least, putting off any invasion until at least fall, and seeing how things went, or for delaying any invasion until after President Bush had left office, or for delaying it indefinitely until such time as the inspection and sanctions regime had fully failed.
But that's retrospectively, and introduces some problematic questions of its own. (Subtle hint about my qualms in the first paragraph above is that I answered a number of questions asked in this thread in the post I link to here; not necessarily satisfactorily, of course, but nonetheless.) (Another hint is that people who make absolute statements about what hypothetical then-future-Saddam-Hussein would do, well, I'd like to consult them on some horse bets, please.)
Seriously, though I was shocked to hell in the moment of 9/11, the only shocking thing about it was that it took so long. America has managed to be a major world power for a very long time without ever taking a major hit the way every other country in the world gets blown up, invaded, bombed, and mowed over. What this would demonstrate to anyone in anybody's imagination regarding Saddam Hussein is utterly beyond me.
(Another hint is that people who make absolute statements about what hypothetical then-future-Saddam-Hussein would do, well, I'd like to consult them on some horse bets, please.)
I'm not sure which way you mean this to cut, but I'd say it's true not only of Saddam Hussein, but of any other world leader. Which means to me that a strategy based on the idea that the existence of a nuke-desiring-but-not-possessing Saddam Hussein is a fundamentally different problem than the existence of a nuke-desiring-but-not-possessing Hugo Chavez is ill-founded.
Yglasias often talks about the way that the administration misleads, in particular, with regard to the build-up to this war. According to Yglasias, they don't lie, exactly, but they present information misleadingly.
Here is what I think this administration does: it makes nonsequitors. No individual statement is a lie. What is a lie is that there is any logical connection between them. The argument itself is a lie, though no piece of evidence is fabricated. (of course, some pieces of evidence were fabricated, but there's always some out).
Misleading through obvious fallacy: that may be Karl Rove's true genius. Or maybe I've been at work too long. Thoughts?
6 is my problem. I read it as saying, "No risk of a nuclear bomb going off in an American city, however small, (however small the risk, I mean--not however small the bomb) is acceptable." I was against the war because I thought the the risk of Sadam sending a nuke to Manhattan via Al Qaeda was small--not nonexistent, given 1-3 and 5, but considering sanctions, strikes on the Desert Fox model and deterrence, not large; and on the other hand, I thought the cost of an invasion of Iraq would be quite high.
So I think the main problem with your argument is that instead of balancing risk against cost in that way, you've decided that a nuclear strike would be so awful that we should do anything in our power to prevent it. I wouldn't call that crazy, but in the technical sense of the term, it's not rational.
I'd like to go through a Bush speech and count the number of non sequitors. Somebody writes these things for him, and I think that all the non sequitors are calculated.
Another hint is that people who make absolute statements about what hypothetical then-future-Saddam-Hussein would do, well, I'd like to consult them on some horse bets, please.
So how do you feel about people who made or, minimally, believed, statements about what would happen in Iraq after we removed the government of the last thirty years? They somehow seemed more credible for being able to pull candy-colored dreams directly out of their asses?
They are all reasonable arguments, but they never applied in Saddam's case. His ability to attack in this fashion was much stronger in the 1990's than in 2001-2003, of course the fabrications made this not so clear.
They are however all excellent arguments for war against the real threats-nations like Saudi Arabia who have supported terrorism against the United States in one form or another.
44: It's not so much that there were people "willing" to do so (hello, serial killers? mass murderers? the existence of these kinds of people isn't an issue)... it's more that there existed, within the U.S., a specific organized network of people, divided into different cells, living quietly over the course of years, receiving financial support from outside the country through hard-to-trace financial channels, who were then capable of putting a complex multi-part attack into motion, and succeeding against pretty steep odds, etc etc etc.
In this context, 9/11 certainly *was* a revelation.
In other words, there existed precisely the kind of "delivery system" that would be needed to deliver a nuclear weapon on an unsuspecting populace. And #21 is pretty much beyond the pale -- it's not about American cities, anyway. A nuclear weapon in downtown London? Tel Aviv? Moscow? Paris?
All of this, of course, is completely tangential to the issue of Iraq, or other, *actual*, effective means of preventing nuclear "proliferation" (coop threat reduction, or whatever you want to call it).
What I'm saying is, this comment is not (necessarily) meant as a defense of the war. Just pointing out that saying "there have always been genocidal nuke-desiring mass-murdering maniacs" is hardly a refutation of Ogged's #2.
there existed precisely the kind of "delivery system" that would be needed to deliver a nuclear weapon on an unsuspecting populace
This would be true if, like box cutters, nukes could legally be carried on to a plane. I admit I don't know the law on this. (The larger point is that it isn't clear to me that, outside of the acts of 9-11, the terrorists did much that was illegal. I assume trying to smuggle a nuke into the country would be a bigger deal.)
52: what is a refutation of #2 is that 9.11 didn't have a single "main lesson," and moreover, didn't have any lesson at all to teach with regard to Saddam Hussein or Iraq.
54: Sure, there doesn't have to be "a" main lesson. Just trying to say that, if ogged chose to take away a lesson from 9/11 that was something like what I outlined, he might not be completely wrong. Note again, I outlined something he *didn't* write (so I know I'm just putting words in his mouth). And again, not trying to make a claim for how well this sort of reasoning supports any kind of war in Iraq. Just wishful thinking, maybe.
53: I'm not really talking about the planes, more about the resident network of financiers, handlers, etc that one would assume would support 9/11-style attacks. Once you get the nuke into some country X, you still need to pick it up, store it, transport it, position it, set it off, etc.
I mean, on a completely different note, this is why a phrase like "war on terror" is so pernicious. It's not a war on a concept (as thousands have pointed out), it's a war on a specific organization, or collection of organizations, with specific supporters, specific structure, specific human capital and technological expertise.
there existed, within the U.S., a specific organized network of people, divided into different cells, living quietly over the course of years, receiving financial support from outside the country through hard-to-trace financial channels, who were then capable of putting a complex multi-part attack into motion, and succeeding
Terrorism in the US itself was nothing new (what was Oklahoma City?). Foreign terrorism was nothing new, either (what of the previous WTC bombing? what of the Millennium attacks?). The only thing 9/11 added to these was body count (in the case of McVeigh and the Blind Sheihk) and success (in the Millennium). This wasn't a revelation to anyone who'd been reading on the subject for the previous several years.
The sight of the Twin Towers collapsing into steel and ash was a visceral shock, but the actual event itself - a major terrorist attack within the U.S. - was being anticipated, discussed, and debated when I was in high school in the mid-to-late nineties in mainstream newsweeklies. That most of the country chose to spend the 2000 election obsessed on whether or not Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet doesn't take away the fact that we knew better.
I hope you all will excuse me if I go a bit off topic here, or at least, go beyond the argument as defined by ogged.
It is completely correct, in my view, to regard nuclear capabilities as the central issue. Very smart people (Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer, e.g.) opposed the war because they thought that a nuclear armed Saddan was not much of a problem.
So, why would Saddam with nukes be bad? One reason, and the one highlighted by ogged (and by the admnisitration) is the nuclear hand-off scenario. But that's far from the only reason. Gulf War I would have been a much harder option had Hussein had nukes. Hussein's pan-Arabism would have been much more threatening with nukes. The longevity of the regime would have been greatly, greatly increased by the development of nukes. The chance of a horrendous outcome involving Israel and numerous Arab countries was much higher with Saddam and nukes.
I suspect people like Cheney and Rumsfeld saw a shitbird, police state regime openly defying the civilized world and sitting on 20% of the Earth's oil. They also thought that America's strategic interests were not served by having only one of the major Gulf states a reliable ally/client. And that's what they thought *before* 9-11. So there was every reason to want to take out Saddam before he went nuclear and became a basically insoluble problem.
Then 9-11 came and added additional reasons and additional urgency. The new reasons: greater fear of nuclear handoff, yet more worries about relying on the Saudi regime, and a belief that the Middle Ease needed more that "management" of horrendous regimes to defang militant Islamism. It also created a unique moment of political possibility, as text notes above.
The counter-arguments we all know:
1. This will create more militant islamism
2. Given chances of success, the stakes aren;t worth the cost (financial, human, and in insitutional strain on the armed forces)
3. Iraq cannot be transformed into a basically stable, pro-American client
4. This just empowers Shiites and Iran.
5. And, of course, who cares if Saddam gets nukes
Reasonable concerns all.
* * *
To return briefly to the argument reconstructed by ogged, I would say the weak point is #6. Why would Saddam ever give access to his nukes to an Al Queda like group? I admit, it doesn't seem the likeliest thing in the world, but neither does *trying to assassinate a former president of the US*.
neither does *trying to assassinate a former president of the US*
True, but if you'll recall, Saddam got burned pretty bad pretty quickly on that (in that we found out very fast that he was behind that, and by all accounts to his surprise). If anything, the assassination attempt - his one dalliance in a major terrorist-style operation - backfired fairly quickly by (1) failing miserably and (2) fingering him for the job. After that Saddam had to know that any similar-scaled operation - much less one on the scale of 9/11 - would be traced back to him fairly quickly, meaning there would be no way for him to get away with nuking Manhattan by proxy.
57: Again, yeah, I know all these things. And agree. But there's a difference between "things which people who are paying attention know," and "things which are so widely known (and feared) that elected politicians are given the 'political capital' to attempt their radical solution."
Although I normally hate the phrase "political capital." And I'm *not* arguing that invading Iraq was the right means of "solution" here. But...
I mean, Clinton is (wrongly) derided for lobbing cruise missiles at Afghanistan in 2000 after the (same) network bombs a U.S. ship in Yemen. Everyone (who's paying attention) *knows* AQ did it. But do you think (even if he had no other political problems at the time) that he would have invaded Afghanistan under any circumstance?
Just over a year later, the invasion of Afghanistan is widely supported. And only because a spectacular event has made what was politically untenable into something that's politically feasible.
None of this (that AQ, based in Afghanistan, is a serious threat) is a surprise to those who've been paying attention... it had always been just a matter of time.
Sure. As I said, #6 is the weak point. It's just that if you are the president of the US, and you've just seen recent example that Islamic terrorist groups have ambition and abilities that exceeded your worst fears, you might not be so eager to bet on your understanding of Saddam Hussein's motivations.
Sure. As I said, #6 is the weak point. It's just that if you are the president of the US, and you've just seen recent example that Islamic terrorist groups have ambition and abilities that exceeded your worst fears, you might not be so eager to bet on your understanding of Saddam Hussein's motivations.
"Then 9-11 came and added additional reasons and additional urgency."
That is false. I am going to risk being shrill here, and repeat that 9-11 added no urgency for us to invade Iraq. Any sort of connection would require the following:
(1) actual evidence that Hussein had any relationship at all with Al-Qaida.
(2) actual evidence that Hussein was capable of creating nuclear weapons to give to Al-Qaida.
The administration presented false and misleading evidence in order to try to demonstrate (2). They barely even tried with (1).
Often, this point is presented in the negative: "we didn't have any proof that Hussein would not communicate with Al-Qaida in the future." Sure. We also didn't have any evidence that Donald Rumsfeld wouldn't try to contact Al-Qaida in the future. You don't usually have to prove the falsity of a statement for which there isn't any evidence in order not to act on it.
These are, frankly, shitty arguments, and I don't think anyone would have made them or fell for them without financial or emotional (respectively) reasons for doing so.
you might not be so eager to bet on your understanding of Saddam Hussein's motivations.
Sure, but replace "Saddam Hussein" with "Kim Jong Il" or "Ayatollah Khamenei" and you can (more easily) justify invading North Korea or Iran, who had/have much more well-developed weapons programs and clearer, more well-established connections to terrorism and weapons proliferation.
"[if] you've just seen recent example that Islamic terrorist groups have ambition and abilities that exceeded your worst fears, you might not be so eager to bet on your understanding of Saddam Hussein's motivations."
Why? Hussein isn't a terrorist group. His abilities were not in any way demonstrated by Al-Qaida's abilities. The only thing connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida is that they are both composed of arab people. There is nothing else there.
This is using 9.11 as an excuse for gross conjecture as to a completely unrelated problem.
baa -- But he is betting on them. He's making a huge, huge bet that they're dangerous enough to justify the costs (financial, human) of taking Saddam out. That's what's wrong with the "He might have been enough of a danger to be worth the war" argument -- it ignores the costs of the war, and the existence of other competing dangers who may be more difficult to counter in light of the war.
Isle, one of things about Saddam was that even if he wasn't suicidal or nuts, he was often dumb or reckless enough that that didn't matter. His attempt on GHW Bush is a good example: he was surprised that it was traced back to him, which is to say, he undertook a possibly suicidal action because he didn't think it was suicidial. I actually tried to explain this in the blog's early days.
Pollack's contention is not that Saddam cannot be deterred. Rather, he argues that some of Saddam's actions were not suicidal only because of exigencies that could not have been foreseen by Saddam (e.g., Iran's decision not to assault Baghdad in 1974 and GHWB's decisions to pull up short of Baghdad at the end of the Gulf War). Another way to put this point is to say that if you operate, as Saddam does, not rationally or suicidally, but within the gray area between the two, it is impossible for us to know whether you are suicidal or not. And if we can't know, then it would be, in Pollack's word, "reckless" to act as if you aren't.
The chance of a horrendous outcome involving Israel and numerous Arab countries was much higher with Saddam and nukes.
But this is precisely why there were other, better (later) solutions available. If Hussein with a nuke is a problem for Israel, I trust Israel to solve it with or without our open OK. Everyone in the neighborhood hates its guts already, so the costs are constrained. If Hussein with a nuke is a problem for other Arab nations, that will become clear as he approaches a nuclear weapon (some time after sanctions fail). At that point, other Arab nations (and Turkey) will be willing to help us, and our press in the area (and world wide) looks a lot better.
Much of the time, sitting on your hands is a better use of your time than acting for the sake of acting. jAlso, never enter into matters concerned with death with a Sicilian.
Doesn't several decades of remaining in power over a war-torn country provide a pretty strong argument that he wasn't suicidal? Even if someone takes big chances, if they keep on working for him it's a reasonable guess that they aren't wild, irrational chances.
(Even what eventually took him down was his failure to guess that we would act irrationally. He let in inspectors sufficiently to assure them that there were no NBC weapons -- not realizing that that would be insufficient to stave off war was, I think, not a sign of being suicidal, just a bad guess.)
Ogged, that's a pretty weak fucking argument when you're talking about Saddam getting his country nuked, which is exactly what we're talking about here.
Your position also assumes that Saddam is some sort of bizarre Arab Bond villain, whose primary motivation is the destruction of his hated arch-nemesis America,* so much so that he'll not only sign his death warrant, but sacrifice the power and prestige that will come through simply being the dictator of a nuclear power by up and giving a nuke to people he thinks are crazy, all on the off-chance that they might pull it off and blow up New York for him. This is less a psychological profile than a movie cliche.
I can't agree that 9-11 was irrelevant. None of the other things mentioned so far (20th century brutality, the first WTC bombing, etc.) seem quite on point. The campaigns of genocide took a while to gin up, and they were always part of some established political struggle. The first bombing was really business as usual: a van full of explosives, one person killed. Yeah, my phrase about "people willing to kill by the tens of thousands" is horribly imprecise, but I mean catastrophic terrorist attacks. Look, a lot of radical Islamists were upset with Al Qaeda after 9-11 (I think I linked to this story), because they had killed so many innocents. Al Qaeda had to find its own John Yoo to justify that and future attacks. There's just a high, high bar of conscience that needs to be vaulted before people do things like 9-11.
As for there being no connection, was Zarqawi in Iraq before the invasion or wasn't he? I thought the consensus was that elements in Saddam's regime had given him shelter. And didn't the Goldberg NYer story have Islamists in Iraq? Again, if I were president, this isn't something that I would need proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
"So how do you feel about people who made or, minimally, believed, statements about what would happen in Iraq after we removed the government of the last thirty years?"
Neutral? Same as I feel in general about people who make "statements"?
In my view, removing the word "absolute" as a modifier from a statement drastically changes the meaning of the statement. (Even statements about statements.)
Generally speaking, people who make absolute predictions about the future behavior of other human beings tend to be on thin ice, at best. I don't know why that should be controversial, but, then, I don't understand why anyone would claim absolute knowledge of future human behavior.
Making mere predictions about the future behavior of other human beings, however: not necessarily so much.
Since this apparently is confusing, I shall provide an example. "George Bush is apt to mangle the English language in some statement in the next month." That's a prediction. It's on reasonably safe grounds.
"George Bush would never not mangle the English language at precisely 2:13 p.m. EST, on 11/22/05." That's an absolute prediction; it's, okay, not on entirely unsafe ground, but it's not precisely a sure thing, either.
Puzzled query, though: are you suggesting that only people with one particular policy preference or set of preferences have "made or, minimally, believed, statements people who made or, minimally, believed, statements about what would happen in Iraq after we removed the government of the last thirty years after we removed the government of the last thirty years"? Or that only people with one particular policy preference or set of preferences have made statements about what would happen in Iraq if we didn't remove the government of Iraq?
I'm really not following, I'm afraid.
(Minor factual point: anyone insisting that Saddam Hussein was, flatly, a "secularist," isn't terribly familiar with the last dozen year or so of his regime and behavior; neither is an assertion that enemies can never cooperate will based on human history ("Stalin and Hitler would never cooperate!"; "Stalin and Churchill would never cooperate!"); nonetheless, this is not an argument from me that I think or ever thought colloboration by SH and AQ was likely; that's beside the point, however.)
I am new here, but I gotta say, text is right. Arabs do not have a history of joining together in the face of an enemy other than for rhetorical purposes. Pan-Arabism isn't something espoused by anyone except leaders of Arab countries with microphones in their faces. Members of AQ may or may not speak Arabic, and unless they are Iraqi, they are mutually incomprehensible (the Arab world being a diglossic society). Hussein was no Islamic fundamentalist; he invaded the only Islamic regime in the region, resulting in over two million casualties on each side. There was no way; that's what makes just the idea of linking AQ and Iraq laughable, and why I for one opposed the war from the get-go.
Sure, but replace "Saddam Hussein" with "Kim Jong Il" or "Ayatollah Khamenei" and you can (more easily) justify invading North Korea or Iran, who had/have much more well-developed weapons programs and clearer, more well-established connections to terrorism and weapons proliferation.
I hear this a lot, but I don't really get it. Both North Korea and Iran present much harder (perhaps insoluble) military options, and were politically off the table. It can't be that if there's an impossible to hit #1 target, you can't go after #2. And none of this bears on the "strategic" (for lack of a better word) reasons for wanting to remove Hussein.
LB:
One point is that the weak point in the "nuclear handoff" case is Hussein's lack of motivation to handoff, and that this is a gamble. Another point is that there are all sorts of reasons to want to remove Hussein. I hope we both agree that all of the potential costs must be weighed against all of the potential benefits.
ogged,
Bingo! Your copy of On Tyranny is coming via parcel post.
Also, for anyone who cares, the Walt & Mearsheimer essay I failed to link is here
And, of course, none of the doomsday scenarios about what Saddam might have done if he had evaded or outwaited the sanctions and gotten his hands on a nuke are impossible. They're possible. They just aren't near the level of likeliness that justifies burning a whole bunch of innocent people alive now, rather than waiting for a while and seeing if it still looks like it's going to be necessary.
who made the assertion that enemies will never cooperate? Is that assertion necessary to demonstrate that Iraq and Al-Qaida, in fact, weren't cooperating?
"After that Saddam had to know that any similar-scaled operation - much less one on the scale of 9/11 - would be traced back to him fairly quickly, meaning there would be no way for him to get away with nuking Manhattan by proxy."
Given his pattern of consistently rational decisions, and consistently demonstrated ability to correctly predict how others would respond if he, say, invaded a neighboring country, sure, he had to know.
Sorry, SCMT, missed you there. I think, basically, that there were no options other than the US for perventing "nuclear Saddam." For *constraining* nuclear Saddam, I agree, the neighbors would have been useful.
anyone insisting that Saddam Hussein was, flatly, a "secularist," isn't terribly familiar with the last dozen year or so of his regime and behavior
72: do you argue that 9.11 might be relevant apart from any connection between Iraq and Al-Qaida? I'd like you to articulate why. I will concede that 9.11 was shocking.
My 77 is also to 73. It's not necessary to show that awful outcomes were impossible to show that they don't seem to have been likely, or immediately likely, enough to justify a war.
ogged: is evidence that Zarqawi either did or didn't stay in a hospital in Bagdad enough to presume a strategic alliance between the Iraqi government and Al-Qaida? Is that all we had to go on? Would you base any other type of conclusion on such flimsy evidence?
don't seem to have been likely, or immediately likely, enough to justify a war
This is exactly the question. One thing to keep in mind is that, as far as the president of the US is concerned, American lives count for a lot more than anybody else's life. We debate from the standpoint of justice and fairness, but the people who actually have to make the decisions can only factor in justice and fairness as secondary considerations.
We debate from the standpoint of justice and fairness, but the people who actually have to make the decisions can only factor in justice and fairness as secondary considerations.
"The only thing connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida is that they are both composed of arab people. There is nothing else there."
Pull my other one. (Again, not making an argument that SH and AQ were apt to go into business together; but this is ludicrous.)
"Doesn't several decades of remaining in power over a war-torn country provide a pretty strong argument that he wasn't suicidal? "
Not so much. It's an indicator of past behavior, but not so much future. Circumstances change. States of mind change. Good old [GODWIN DELETION] had been in power in 1941 for eight years, but this wasn't a useful indicator for his behavior four years later.
And invading Iran, invading Kuwait, trying the Bush hit (assuming that's correctly pinned, which I couldn't personally testify to), are certainly signs that his decision-making/prediction-making mechanisms weren't necessarily the most reliable.
Ditto plenty of reports strongly suggestive that his mental state in the last couple of years pre-invasion had been deteriorating, though, of course, I again couldn't testify to how accurate or inaccurate said reports were.
"As for there being no connection, was Zarqawi in Iraq before the invasion or wasn't he? I thought the consensus was that elements in Saddam's regime had given him shelter."
Consensus? I think that's a difficult assertion to support.
#91: But there's always a non-zero chance that someone out there hates us, wants to do us great ill, and will find a way to do so. You can't use the President's responsibility to Americans to let him out of making the hard calls. He can't just be allowed to go around capping anyone who hates us. Because, given the assumption of easy nuke hand-offs between people who hate us, that's what you mean.
Both North Korea and Iran present much harder (perhaps insoluble) military options, and were politically off the table.
And Iraq's working out so well, then?
In the case of North Korea, we don't have to actually invade. All we would need is the credible threat of force to actually get somewhere in disarming Kim Jong Il. The key word there is "credible." Everyone knows we couldn't invade North Korea if we wanted to because our army's stuck in Iraq. You can't threaten anyone with an unloaded gun. Ditto for Iran right now: if anything we've strengthened their position in the ME as a result of this war.
And if Iran and North Korea don't work for you, then hell, it would've been nice to just bother getting Afghanistan right. 200 billion dollars there might've actually done some fucking good. Hell, we could've used some of the change to maybe run around and capture terrorists instead of, y'know, MAKING them. At this point we could've fought terror more effectively by sitting home.
Actually text, I don't much care about Zarqawi. The fact that the Saddam and Al Qaeda were both Arab, Sunni and avowedly hostile to the US seems like enough.
you make it sound like a balance of fairly close probabilities. But there just wasn't good evidence that (1) Saddam was capable of creating nuclear weapons, or (2) Had any means to get them to us.
What you are arguing is that almost no evidence of the threat is enough, where you have unrelated prior "bad" acts on the part of Saddam, and a recent -- also unrelated -- attack on U.S. soil. No evidence is enough evidence.
And "immediately likely" isn't a question. The administration knew that Saddam didn't have a nuke now, and wouldn't be able to make one in the near future. They knew we had years, and that we could extend those years by maintaining the inspections regime (not saying that maintenance could go on forever, nor that it was free; just that it was a stopgap means of keeping the clock from ticking).
We chose to go to war rather than to wait and see if it looked avoidable later.l
97: I've got hindsight on my side here, and I rather ureflectingly supported the war myself, but I just can't see how common religion plus common enemy is enough. That just doesn't seem to be a rational way of deciding whether or not to go to war.
"Pull my other one. (Again, not making an argument that SH and AQ were apt to go into business together; but this is ludicrous.)"
"Consensus? I think that's a difficult assertion to support."
Gary, this is cheap. Either make an argument that there was a connection between Saddam and Qaeda or don't make one, but don't make pithy little comments indicating that you might have an argument that you just don't feel like making.
awesome. sorry. i'm not muslim, but study the arab world. it just seems some tend to paint a broad brushstroke when they should be using an exacto knife.
The latter. As a voter, I'm voting for the candidate (if I can identify such) who's putting justice and fairness pretty damn high up on the list of considerations, and I don't see any structural reason why such a means of running the country is impossible.
I think we have basically different views about the facts on North Korea that will make useful discussion difficult. I believe the barrier to invasion of NoKo is their ability to inflict millions of casualties on the South, and their complete willingness to do so. And I doubt that with this reality any threat of force is going to get us what we want. Likewise, you see Afghanistan as a big disaster. I don't. Will Iraq be a stable, pro-American regime in 5 years. I sure hope so, and I would give the odds now at >70%.
On Iran, have to agree that switching from Sunni dictatorship to Shiite somethingelse-ship probably helps them. I don't know how much that changes their nuclear ambitions.
SCMT:
He can't just be allowed to go around capping anyone who hates us.
True, not anyone, but maybe some lattitude for the great powers is in order. It is too bad we couldn't bribe the French and Russians enough to give this this cover of multilateralsim, I grant you.
113: for the same reason that justice and fairness to other people (likely) aren't at the top of your list where your children's safety and happiness are concerned: not everyone gets the same consideration, depending on our relation to them: your life counts immeasurably more to George Bush (yes, even you, LB), than those of several dozen perfectly innocent Iraqis. That is, I think, as it should be (maybe not as it should be in utopia, but now).
10) states that Iraq and AQ were enemies and therefore unlikely to cooperate. It doesn not state that enemies never cooperate.
75) states "Arabs do not have a history of joining together in the face of an enemy other than for rhetorical purposes." I'll not evaluate the statement, as I don't know lots about arab history. But it does not say what you say it says.
66) That one's mine. Here's what I wrote:
"Why? Hussein isn't a terrorist group. His abilities were not in any way demonstrated by Al-Qaida's abilities. The only thing connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida is that they are both composed of arab people. There is nothing else there.
This is using 9.11 as an excuse for gross conjecture as to a completely unrelated problem."
I did not say that ememies never cooperate, but rather that we had no evidence that these specific enemies were cooperating. You know the difference between the two statements, Gary.
Which were the posts that implied that enemies can never cooperate?
Will Iraq be a stable, pro-American regime in 5 years. I sure hope so, and I would give the odds now at >70%.
If you do indeed believe this, baa, then you and I believe in wildly different, looking-glass versions of reality.
Let me ask you this: before the invasion, did you believe that the regime we were going to establish in Iraq was going to be a democracy? Do you believe so now?
I don't consider myself entitled to treat others unjustly to protect my children, certainly not on this level. (Hey, that kid down the hall keeps on being mean to Sally. He's shorter than her now, but his Dad's big, and the whole family is unstable, I think they deal drugs -- five years down the road he could be a real problem. Better douse him with gasoline and light the match now, before he gets too big for me to handle.)
If George Bush considers my life incommensurably more valuable than that of several dozen innocent Iraqis, I'd like him to please stop.
"The administration knew that Saddam didn't have a nuke now, and wouldn't be able to make one in the near future. "
It may not be most useful to regard, consider, or speak of "the administration" as a homogenous entity with a single mind. More useful might be discussing those individuals whose views controlled, and what they believed, although determining what anyone actually believes is a bit problematic.
"Gary, UAR lasted how many months?"
I'd have to look up the precise number of months, and it would depend upon your definitions, but I seem to recall the Syria-Egypt-Yemen linkage going for about 2 1/2 years, give or take, although Nasser and Sadat kept using the name through '71, and Syria still uses the UAR flag.
Arab nations continue to use the same flag colors, of course (remember the fuss over the Iraqi "Governing Council" government going to blue, like the Israelis?), but more to the point, I often read individual Arabs saying positive things, in lip service, at least, but also seemingly reflecting some genuine, if not entirely realistic, desire, about the theoretical goodness of pan-Arab unity.
It may not be most useful to regard, consider, or speak of "the administration" as a homogenous entity with a single mind. More useful might be discussing those individuals whose views controlled, and what they believed, although determining what anyone actually believes is a bit problematic.
What the fuck ever, Gary. I don't know who, in the Administration, knew what, because I'm not a mind reader. I know that anyone with access to and paying attention to the intelligence that's come out since the war knew that there was no basis for believing that Iraq had a nuke. This sort of skepticism is desperately annoying unless it's in service of a point. Did you have one?
read it in arabic, gary. these states, no matter how arbitrary their borders were drawn, are not in planning together, nor in cahoots. some are oil-producing; some are not. a couple have signed peace treaties with israel; some are still officially at war. some get along; some blow former prime ministers of their neighbors to bits. in fact, one could argue, i mean, i argue, that jewish and arab nationalisms fed each other in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and thus the homogenizing factor which you believe you see to be 'arabness' is as much an ideological construct as anything else. and again, there was never any unity. no one in morocco could understand a word of someone in iraq. period.
edited: i mean that arabness is a tool used rhetorically against perceived outsiders in global discourse. this is not the language used internally. sorry for that mistake there.
If George Bush considers my life incommensurably more valuable than that of several dozen innocent Iraqis, I'd like him to please stop.
Well, I didn't say "incommensurably." I figure 1 LB = 45 Iraqis. Seriously, I do wonder how much of the disagreement about what was "justified" is really about this point. I keep asking myself what I would have done in Bush's place, with the full weight of responsibiity for any American civilians killed by terrorism on my shoulders. Consideration for the nationals of other countries would, frankly, be damn low on my list of concerns, at least until we were talking about truly catastrophic harms (like the invasion has turned out, I'd argue, to be) or until it would make protecting Americans harder, and not easier. I think most Americans agree more with me than with you, but that's just a guess.
ogged, do you think that's part of the problem of nationalism in the first place? i remember thinking how pissed i was at oprah for lamenting the fact that the victims of katrina were 'citizens in trouble,' as if their citizenship was of paramount importance, rather than their humanity. shit, i think i've been reading too much agamben lately. whatever, just a thought. i see the differential value of people to be a problematic.
105: you really feel it's necessary to demonstrate that either a) ""The only thing connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida is that they are both composed of arab people. There is nothing else there." is false; or b) that it's difficult to support the assertion that "the consensus was that elements in Saddam's regime had given him shelter"?
Sigh.
We'll do "a" first:
1) The majority of members of AQ are Muslim. So are the majority of Iraqis.
Okay, we're done, it's falsified. (It only takes one to break "nothing else there," you know.) End of story.
But, hey, let's shoot for the stars, and mention:
2) Most members of AQ do not think well of U.S. foreign policy. Most members of the SH regime's government did not think well of U.S. foreign policy.
Is the stake protruding too much now? Is 3 going overboard?
3) Iraqi soldiers and American soldiers fought against each other and died within the decade prior to 2003. Al Qaeda operatives and American agents or weapons fought against and people on the other side in the decade prior to 2003.
And for extra, extra, extra, credit:
4) Saddam Hussein was happy to allow a variety of terrorists to operate out of Iraq. AQ operatives are sometimes terrorists. (That most of the terrorists SH supported to one degree or another generally tended to only attack in Israel or Lebanon or Jordan or elsewhere, and relatively rarely against Americans, is irrelevant to refuting the assertion in question, of course, although also, of course, this is of little comfort to Leon Klinghoffer or, for that matter, to Abu Abbas, also known as Mohammad Abbas; where was he headquartered and operating from, anyway, and where did he die?)
B? Howsabout I wait for Ogged to support his suggestion that there was such a consensus?
Seriously, I do wonder how much of the disagreement about what was "justified" is really about this point.
I don't think it's all that much. Though I'm tooting my own horn here, I think the key anti-war argument (on self-defense) is my 101.
We knew we weren't in danger now (from Iraqi nukes -- not talking about world terrorism). We knew that we had real non-war options to keep the danger from materializing. What would have been so hard about keeping the inspections regime going as long as possible, and then, when it broke down, if it did, talking about going to war?
We could have postponed this war. Possibly for a really long time. Maybe for long enough that it wouldn't have had to happen at all.
Are you kidding, or did you miss the point? Isle was pointing out (by referencing the thread topic) that even non-insane countries invade other countries sometimes.
I'll be generous: similarities are not enough to demonstrate that two distinct entities are in cahoots. Especially when those similarities are things like: shares a common religion, or dislikes the same third party. That is what I meant by "nothing connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida." Sorry to be unclear.
Except that I should be doing this incredibly dull task that has to be done for tomorrow, and I can't stay out of a good argument about the war. A shame we don't have any wholehearted advocates to argue with.
10) states that Iraq and AQ were enemies and therefore unlikely to cooperate. It doesn not state that enemies never cooperate.
#10 actually says: "He would never give AQ a nuke"
I'm fairly sure that's saying that SH would never cooperate with AQ in giving them a nuke.
The entire reasoning was: "Saddam and AQ hated each other. Saddam was a secular dictator, not an Islamic fundie. Hence his whole war with Iraq. He would never give AQ a nuke because they'd be just as likely to use it against him. Two groups who are both my enemies are not necessarily allies."
Now, I didn't even touch on the fact that besides that the second sentence is simplified to the point of being highly misleading, at best, but that the third sentence doesn't seem to logically follow at all, although it's certainly possible I'm just not understanding how Saddam's religious stances in regard to the war against Iran -- which is precisely what led to his morphing into a full-throated supporter of Sunni fundamentalism so long as it didn't challenge his rule, incidentally -- demonstrated that he was purely secular (most secular people don't constantly proclaim themselves as undying supporters of Islam, build hundreds of mosques, build what is intended to be the largest mosque in the world, have Korans written with allegedly their own blood, and so on, but maybe I'm just unfamiliar with that brand of secularism).
The fourth sentence suggests unfamiliarity with the writings of bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other AQ spokesmodels. The fourth sentence is true, but my point is that so is the reverse: two groups that dislike each other are not necessarily never going to cooperate.
119
yes, i only said that AQ and SH never cooperated. And yet that's untrue. You are familiar with what "would" means, I assume. "He would never give AQ a nuke" is not actually "AQ and SH never cooperated," is it?
one more thing, gary, if you're still around: even the Islamists are a very divided group. that obl usurped the role of the traditional mullahs is very important. most madrasas teach a very particular kind of islam, one which seeks to rectify social problems AT HOME. it is AQ which perhaps has only the most rudimentary knowledge of islamic law and practice; they are not madrasa-educated - they are WESTERN educated, mostly middle class, etc. there is MUCH diversity in the arab world... check out nyrb's recent article on madrasas if you're interested. obl hijacked the name islam on multiple levels, but perhaps the most egregious is his dismissal of centuries of erudite legal texts.
Sorry, no -- I thought you'd drifted into the "maybe this war wasn't a great idea after all, in retrospect" position, and were just defending the decision to go to war from the pre-war point of view. If you still think it was a terrific idea, you're exactly who I want around to argue with.
gary: fine. here's my exacto knife. they did not cooperate. there is zero historical basis for aq and sh to cooperate. thus, i WOULD argue that aq and sh would NEVER have cooperated, in no small part due to the fact that aq considered saddam an apostate regime. apostate = bad. a cursory examination of the history of this region would (there's that would) tells you that. perhaps not even cursory, as those millions of protestors worldwide demonstrated.
Yeah, I'm still in "best of a host of bad options camp." The postwar has been worse than I anticipated, I admit; but yes, I think this decision will be viewed from 2020 as the correct one.
I seem to have wandered into the wrong place again, but oh well.
The lesson Ogged took from 9/11 apparently was that whoever was in power in DC got one free war against whomever they chose. Because 9/11 taught him that people are very very bad and don't love us.
The case for Saddam's nuclear weapons was never strong. The case that he wanted to attack the US was never strong. The case that he was a madman was never strong. He just plain was not a madman; he was a cunning despot of a type familiar in world history, and his goals were normal though his methods were brutal. He was certainly one of the 10 or 20 worst tyrants in the world of his day. On the other hand, no important figure in the Bush administration ever had any problem with tyrants; they seemed to like them much of the time.
At the time the war was being argued, I was aware that there was really no use arguing back. The state, the media, and the foreign policy establishment had talked themselves into a war, and public opinion was being manipulated as I've never seen before. It was in the realm of group hysteria and the madness of crowds, except that it was really an elite-driven phenomenon.
I have to admit that during my leftist years, when I was opposing the dirty wars in Central America, I became blase. At least 1% of El Salvador's population was murdered during about a 10 year period (that would be 60,000 out of 6 million; my numbers are not exact but they are accurate and almost certainly low). I knew several Salvadoran survivors personally.
So in the big picture, 9/11 didn't change my world view much. I'm not saying that the chickens were coming home to roost, but 3000+ Americans is statistically pretty small by the standard I just described. We had the power to retaliate and act out , and Salvadorans didn't. So we got mad and started blowing shit up.
Hopefully, tomorrow we'll back to the frivolity and smut for which this site is world-renowned.
"What the fuck ever, Gary. I don't know who, in the Administration, knew what, because I'm not a mind reader."
Yes, precisely. I'm sure you're aware that assertions as to what someone knew or knows are problematic much of the time.
"I know that anyone with access to and paying attention to the intelligence that's come out since the war knew that there was no basis for believing that Iraq had a nuke."
"Had" a nuke isn't the question. What you said was ""The administration knew that Saddam didn't have a nuke now, and wouldn't be able to make one in the near future.""
It's the latter clause that needs to be knocked down, and if you can support the assertion that all the key decision-makers in the Bush Administration knew that Iraq wouldn't be able to make a nuclear weapon soon enough to be a threat, I would be interested. What evidence would you put forth as to what proves that, say, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and G. W. Bush knew that SH wouldn't be able to make a nuke in the next decade?
How do you know? Does everyone who reads the same material on a given topic come to the same conclusions, in your experience? Do people not have mental filters and prejudgments that
affect, even distort, at times, their interpretations and conclusions?
"This sort of skepticism is desperately annoying unless it's in service of a point. Did you have one?"
Yes, I think so. As well, I'm reasonably sure that, for instance, Colin Powell -- senior member of the cabinet, 4th in succession to the Presidencey, was significantly not of the same mind on all the relevant issue as, say, Donald Rumsfeld. Ditto I have reason to think that varying pro-invasion decision-makers in the Administration had varying beliefs about the need to invade Iraq, and varying rationales, some in conflict.
I'm something of an amateur student of Presidential/diplomatic history, and generally speaking, critiques that approach an administration as being homogenous will pretty much always always go wildly wrong PDQ. They completely obscure getting at what actually happened, and why, as a rule. That's pretty much my sweeping point here.
It's the latter clause that needs to be knocked down, and if you can support the assertion that all the key decision-makers in the Bush Administration knew that Iraq wouldn't be able to make a nuclear weapon soon enough to be a threat, I would be interested.
What do you mean by "soon enough to be a threat"? The intelligence showed that Iraq had neither a nuke nor a program for making them -- it was starting from zero. It showed that the inspections regime had been effective in keeping the Iraqi nuclear program for restarting. What basis do you have for saying that anyone (with access to the relevant intelligence) could reasonably have believed that Iraq would have been able to produce a nuke while the inspections regime was still in place?
To clarify my position, I do not think that the war in Iraq was ever defensive in intent and was never understood that way by the way by the people running the show. They had decided to use American power to reconfigure the world system, with special attention to the oil fields of the middle east. This is the kind of thing that militarily powerful nations do when thay have the chance.
The hysteria about Saddam attacking us was just a manufactured fraud. The Bush people knew that. Saddam was far, far more of a threat to Israel than to the US, and yet he'd never succeeded in giving even them any serious trouble. He was a threat to Iran, but they held him off.
One success of the pro-war campaign, a success whose effects are being felt right here right now, is to change the default position. The default became "Saddam is a nuclear-armed madman who wants to attack the US", and the opposition had to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he wasn't.
Right, and either did or didn't stay at a hospital in Baghdad.
This is the point where nobody can agree how many legs he has."
Thus the lack of consensus usually involved in "nobody can agree."
92
We debate from the standpoint of justice and fairness, but the people who actually have to make the decisions can only factor in justice and fairness as secondary considerations.
'Scuse me?
I expect Ogged is suggesting that the primary consideration of a good leader is preservation of her country and safeguarding the lives of its people. Justice and fairness are secondary considerations to that.
Specific hypotheticals are quite debatable, of course, but I'm not sure the above general proposition is controversial. Is it?
You are slowly killing me. Sometimes I suspect that there is some middle part of a reasoning process where your figures and mine match exactly. But the starts and ends are wildly different.
Should great powers have latitude? Sure, I guess. More to the point, they do. But in a unipolar world, the Great Power should use its power efficiently, because it has substantially more area to worry about than when it has an enemy (USSR) taking responsibility for half the globe.
The efficient thing to do, it seems to me, is to establish norms by which countries understand what is OK and what is not OK. Kicking the hell out of Afghanistan? Everyone pretty much understood the argument behind that one, and, not surprisingly, we had a lot of moral support worldwide.
But no one really understands why we went into Iraq. No one considered it an eminent threat to the US. No one considered it much of a threat to its neighbors. (See the lack of support in that neighborhood for our actions.) Now the norm established appears to be, "Do what we tell you or we will fuck you up." Not efficient. As a result, in the future, we'll have to spend more resources watching the rest of the world. (See our problems getting traction on Iran.) Not efficient. In 2020, we'll still have a hard time making the case that our understanding of the norm isn't, "Do what we want." Not efficient.
And all of that leaves aside the problem of either governing Iraq or worrying about what grows there.
What? He said there was no connection between the two, and that is understood to mean that they hate each other and are enemies?
#66 said:
The only thing connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida is that they are both composed of arab people. There is nothing else there.
This was in the context of responding to and refuting the notion that there was any possibility of AQ and AH ever cooperating. If there's "nothing else there," nothing in common, no connection, they couldn't cooperate, of course.
66
"[if] you've just seen recent example that Islamic terrorist groups have ambition and abilities that exceeded your worst fears, you might not be so eager to bet on your understanding of Saddam Hussein's motivations."
Why? Hussein isn't a terrorist group. His abilities were not in any way demonstrated by Al-Qaida's abilities. The only thing connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida is that they are both composed of arab people. There is nothing else there.
If the point there isn't that AQ and SH weren't going to cooperate on anything, ever, what was the point?
In any case, #10.
"...even the Islamists are a very divided group. that obl usurped the role of the traditional mullahs is very important. most madrasas teach a very particular kind of islam, one which seeks to rectify social problems AT HOME."
With all due respect, it would be pleasant if you might consider that fifth-grade-level lectures on the Islamic world might not be necessary, and that possibly some of your interlocuters have made some slight study of both the ummah, and of Arab history, for, say, perhaps, thirty-five years or so. Of course, your expertise on these topics may indeed be far greater than that of anyone else present, and possibly you are introducing new and unfamiliar concepts to someone here.
Thanks for the tip about the NYRB, though. It's barely possible I've linked to them over my past four years of blogging, nor my past decade-plus of online writing. You know, once or twice.
Not having read all the comments, I'll say that if that was the case, it wasn't reasonable to support the Iraq War, by a long shot. Losing 100,000 Iraqi lives RIGHT NOW means losing a lot more in the long run, together with the cost of destroying an entire fucking country (as opposed to one city, at the worst).
(Perhaps, as a bizarre kind of Christian, I finally don't value American lives more than other nations' lives. Perhaps I shouldn't expect that other people's math will work out that way.)
It also occurs to me that there is a very simple argument against the "Saddam + nukes = America under attack". The same logic that worked against Stalin would work against a nuclear armed Iraq. Saddam being a tyrant, but a rational tyrant understands that nuking the US is a death warrant. I don't think Saddam has a penchant for suicide (at least his history does not show this).
Secondly, 9/11 did not change the fact that the sanctions program was extremely successful in dismantling his nuclear and WMD capability. There was sufficient evidence for this.
Finally, the real nuclear threat to the US comes from deniable sources. Countries like Pakistan have nukes and are also intertwined with "Al Qaeda" and other terrorist organizations, and are the most likely sources of a deniable nuclear strike on the US. However, this is also not very likely because the possession of nuclear weapons is the currency of power. Any country's govt which lets nuclear weapons get into the hands of the local terrorist organization cedes power-and this is an unlikely event.
It is also rather self absorbed to believe that 9/11 was a new or previously unknown event. For the US, it was a new thing, but there are other nations who have experienced routine and sustained terrorist attacks and are far more likely to be targets of a nuclear delivery. If Saddam had nukes and wanted to nuke anyone, he would have done it to the Israelis first. And he would have done it earlier than 9/11/2001 . Of course the same deterrent arguments against this apply.
This is completely off topic, but , LB, your 156 is fascinating to me, because it is exactly how I felt (or rather, knew I was supposed to feel) at the time. I didn't like the "in your face" patriotism of Reagan, at the time. I classed it with Rocky 4 and Hulk Hogan beating Nikolai Volkoff. But since then, I've come to believe that initial reaction was wrong. Not because patriotism isn't often the refuge of scoundrels, but because extreme rhetoric really is required when the opposition is a massive, repressive police state that garrisons its vassal nations.
SCMT,
I think it's pretty obvious what Iraq did to get on the US shit list. Hussein invaded a treaty ally of the US, tried to bluff out a US threat of force, got routed, and then systematically subverted his surrender conditions. While Iran and NoKo got axis of evil mention, they really haven't done anything comparable to piss the US off. Much less Syria, Libya, or Venezuela. That's why I think the John Stewart "who will we invade next" arguement doesn't fly. Iraq *was* the #1 on the list. NoKo is close, I grant, but there are poor options there. Having China turn the heat up is probably the best we can do.
So I think the norms are there. If anything, the Iraq war clarfied those norms. That, I submit, is why Q/G/Kaddafi disarmed. That's why Syria is treading lightly in Lebanon. I think you are looking for a clarity in international norms that, ultimately, the medium will not support.
"Sorry, no -- I thought you'd drifted into the 'maybe this war wasn't a great idea after all, in retrospect' position, and were just defending the decision to go to war from the pre-war point of view.'
No, that's me, except that I'm not so much defending "the decision to go to war" (who's decision?) as simply disagreeing with, and pointing out fallacies in, certain assertions made in this thread.
I might be willing to defend the general propostion that Ogged's (and others'; who, me?) reasons at the time for supporting the invasion weren't unreasonable and crazy, though. If I felt like investing the time, which mostly I don't, not when it's 20-2 or whatever.
"Gary, you and I both have eyes, two ears, and a cock. That doesn't prove a connection."
Yes, that's interesting (that you are willing to state as a fact that I have a cock is particularly so), but what it has to do with anything I've said, I don't know.
Perhaps you can quote the part where I attempted to "prove a connection" or even suggested one existed. Otherwise, perhaps you have me confused with someone else.
"I'll be generous: similarities are not enough to demonstrate that two distinct entities are in cahoots. Especially when those similarities are things like: shares a common religion, or dislikes the same third party."
Of course. This hardly seems worth pointing out, unless someone is contesting it.
My 124 was intemperate, but the same thing still seems to be going on. You have a bunch of people here arguing that there was insufficient evidence that Saddam was going to be a threat to the US to justify a war. Your consistent response has been to react as if we were all claiming that it had been positively proven to be impossible that Saddam could ever be a threat.
I think anyone who seemed to be making that latter claim would agree that they had slipped, and meant only to make the former. If I'm right, what, particularly, are you refuting?
179 I contested it, as part of my "it ought to be a very low bar for acton where catastrophic attacks are to be averted." I'm not entirely happy with my contestation, but I'm not convinced it's wrong, either.
for this to work you have to look at Iraq as the only potential threat, which is silliness. Everyone knew that Pakistan, Russia, North Korea, and Iran were bigger threat.
Gary: I said (and you should remember, since you quoted it several times), "The only thing connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida is that they are both composed of arab people. There is nothing else there."
You disagreed with me, that is, you argued that something else connected the two entities. When I asked what, you listed a few traits that they held in common. Those traits aren't a connection. That both entities are composed of arab people isn't really a connection either, so perhaps I was unclear. I should have said "nothing connects them although they share a few traits in common," but I thought the way I did it was more rhetorically effective.
But now we agree that there is no connection, correct? So no harm, no foul.
an aside: why is it any more interesting that I stipulated that you have a cock, than that you have eyes and ears, none of which I've seen?
"Of course. This hardly seems worth pointing out, unless someone is contesting it."
Gary, sometimes I think you take your debating points from Paul Deignan, and that is in no way a compliment. Assert, deny, insult is not a good way to convince people of anything.
And you still haven't shown me any posts stating that enemies can never cooperate, though you have refuted that straw point quite well.
I don't think you'd fall into the trap of equating a statement that two particular enemies would not cooperate with a statement that enemies never cooperate, would you, Gary?
That would be like taking one episode from history in which two enemies did cooperate as evidence that two current enemies were likely to cooperate against the United States.
gary: fine. here's my exacto knife. they did not cooperate. there is zero historical basis for aq and sh to cooperate. thus, i WOULD argue that aq and sh would NEVER have cooperated, in no small part due to the fact that aq considered saddam an apostate regime. apostate = bad. a cursory examination of the history of this region would (there's that would) tells you that. perhaps not even cursory, as those millions of protestors worldwide demonstrated.
Yes, to be sure, I'm unfamiliar with the history of the region, and have not made even a cursory examination of the topic, but I feel comfortable discussing it, despite my obvious ignorance. Thank you for your presumptions there.
Bin Laden offered "peace treaty" to European countries, who I'm reasonably sure are less Islamic than, say, Twelvers, in bin Laden's view.
I urge … the establishment of a permanent commission to nurture awareness among Europeans regarding the justness of our causes, particularly the cause of Palestine, and that use be made of the vast media resources to this end.
"I hereby offer them a peace treaty, the essence of which is our commitment to halt actions against any country that commits itself to refraining from attacking Muslims or intervening in their affairs, including the American conspiracy against the larger Islamic world.
"This peace treaty can be renewed at the end of the term of a government and the rise of another, with the agreement of both sides.
"The peace treaty will be in force upon the exit of the last soldier of any given [European] country from our land. So apparently he is, if you take him at his word, willing to make treaties with unbelievers. Presumably making a treaty with an apostate is more difficult?
What's bin Laden's attitude been towards the regime of the land of the Two Holy Places? Positive? No? Yet he offered to defend Saudi Arabia, did he not? I guess that conclusively proves he could never colloborate with an apostate regime.
He was also quite unhappy with Crusader/Zionist actions against Iraq, wasn't he? (In 1996):
More than 600,000 Iraqi children have died due to lack of food and medicine and as a result of the unjustifiable aggression (sanction) imposed on Iraq and its nation. The children of Iraq are our children. You, the USA, together with the Saudi regime are responsible for the shedding of the blood of these innocent children. Due to all of that, what ever treaty you have with our country is now null and void.
Of course, he also says:
Also to remind the Muslims not to be engaged in an internal war among themselves, as that will have grieve consequences namely:
And:
An internal war is a great mistake, no matter what reasons are there for it. the presence of the occupier-the USA- forces will control the outcome of the battle for the benefit of the international Kufr.
Of course, he still was disgruntled about what the Crusader-Zionist forces were doing in apostate lands in 1998:
The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.
Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula. He consistently called upon the Ummah to fight over these states, no matter the apostasy of their governments.
And, of course, he's consistently supportive of Palestinians:
I also view with great esteem our brother cubs in Palestine who are teaching the Jews lessons in faith and the pride of the faithful.
There are a jillion variants of such statements from him, exhorting that the Ummah must support their fight; yet the PA is an apostate regime, is it not?
For that matter, how about that apostate Pakistani regime?
We supported the Pakistani people and congratulated them when God was gracious enough to enable them to acquire the nuclear weapon. We regard this as one of our rights, of Muslim rights.
As Abd-al-Bari 'Atwan, chief editor of the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds al-'Arabisays:
I felt that the man had his own vision and special strategy. This strategy is based on his concept of the region. The first point in this strategy is that the US Administration or the US forces, which he considers occupation forces in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula, are a prelude to a comprehensive Israeli-Jewish hegemony over the region with the aim of looting its wealth and humiliating its Muslim people. One senses this as the essence of his creed and strategy. Therefore, he believes that expelling these US forces from the Arab world is a top priority. He believes that the regimes should be reformed or, more correctly, changed. The regimes immune to reform should be changed, the shari'ah should be applied properly, and a just Islamic system should be set up in the Islamic and Arab states, particularly the Gulf states. This is a summary of his strategy. Currently, he does not want to fight the regimes. That is what he told me. He wants to fight the Americans, who are protecting these regimes.
Possibly you have a greater grasp of bin Laden's strategy and beliefs, though, given your expertise.
I could keep going, running through bin Laden's writings and statements, to find those that indicate that his policy has generally been to prioritize his war, and that fighting the far enemy (that's us) requires focusing on that fight, and not on the near enemy, and that indicate varying degrees of willingness to make necessary compromises to accomplish the first goal, but since every time I comment there are another 20-40 comments on the thread, it appears that if I kept trying to reply, I'd be here an infinite amount of time, so I won't.
Concluding statement: absolute predictions of the sort you're making are warranted neither by the specific facts nor human behavior in general. If you said you thought that SH/AQ colloboration was merely unlikely, I'd be right there with you. "would NEVER have cooperated"? Neither provable nor indicative of grasping what "never" means.
(If we accepted the recent alleged al-Zawahiri letter as authentic, the discussion would really be over, but since controversy exists as to whether it is or is not authentic, I've left it out here.)
"The intelligence showed that Iraq had neither a nuke nor a program for making them -- it was starting from zero."
This seems to be attributing autonomy to inanimate abstractions. Myself, I can't say what papers, in what order, saying what, Dick Cheney saw, and what he became convinced of, myself, nor can I say that in regard to anyone in the White House. I'm fairly sure you can't, either.
Is there a reasonable case to be made that there was intelligence available to the relevant decision-makers that, if interpreted correctly, could or should have led to the beliefs you endorse above? Of course.
This is not at all the same thing as demonstrating what specific people "knew" or believed. "Should have" isn't "did."
"But no one really understands why we went into Iraq. No one considered it an eminent threat to the US. No one considered it much of a threat to its neighbors. (See the lack of support in that neighborhood for our actions.)"
Parenthetical statement doesn't demonstrate the previous sentence in the slightest. One could consider A a threat without in the least supporting B's response #1. As happened to be the case in this instance.
Otherwise, this either is some strange new meaning of "no one," or apparently people with different views are actually pods from outer space or something.
(How imminent was the eminence of the Iraqi threat, though? I shan't venture a thought.)
But certainly the governments of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kuwait felt that the SH regime was somewhat threatening, as did Israel; Turkey, not so much, because circumstances differed, but they certainly weren't fans of SH. And a lot of people seem to think they know why we went into Iraq, agree with them or not. Some of them even were or are in the Administration.
There are endless reasonable debates and disagreements about the Iraq war. Defining people who disagreed with your view as being non-existent isn't one of them.
Re 194 on 172: I think I read your remarks out of context. A product of trying to catch up too quickly. A good sign I should quit, especially since I've not blogged a thing for hours, nor watched the movie I was planning to, and missed paying attention to Boston Legal, among other planned activities.
And precisely as I said I expected in 41, people are arguing with me as if I'm defending Bush's acts and decisions.
"You have a bunch of people here arguing that there was insufficient evidence that Saddam was going to be a threat to the US to justify a war."
And I fully agree that there's an excellent case to be made for that. I'm quite sure I've never, ever, said otherwise. I'm also sure I've said variants of that hundreds of times.
"Your consistent response has been to react as if we were all claiming that it had been positively proven to be impossible that Saddam could ever be a threat."
My "consistent response" has been to to respond to a number of entirely separate points, actually, in defense of no larger case. Which, you might note, is quite the norm for me.
I'm quite sure I've not said a word here about what "all" people here say or do, period.
"I think anyone who seemed to be making that latter claim would agree that they had slipped, and meant only to make the former. If I'm right, what, particularly, are you refuting?"
"an aside: why is it any more interesting that I stipulated that you have a cock, than that you have eyes and ears, none of which I've seen?"
I'm given to understand that the former is approximately 50% more rare than the latter, give or take. And you didn't stipulate it, you made an absolute, unmodified, statement of fact: "Gary, you and I both have eyes, two ears, and a cock." So I was wondering how you'd achieved such direct knowledge, rather than merely hypothesizing. Generally my eyes and ears are visible, you know, in the picture on my blog and the other pictures of me that have been on the net for a decade or so.
But, you know, if you saw those films I starred in, that's another matter.
"But now we agree that there is no connection, correct? So no harm, no foul."
I'm perfectly happy to state that I've seen no information that leads me to believe there was a significant connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. I've never suggested anything the slightest bit different in my life, so far as I can recall.
(Note this is not precisely what you asked if we agree upon, but it's what I'm offering.)
"Gary, sometimes I think you take your debating points from Paul Deignan"
Haven't been interested enough to read anything by him, I'm afraid.
187
"Of course. This hardly seems worth pointing out, unless someone is contesting it."
Gary, sometimes I think you take your debating points from Paul Deignan, and that is in no way a compliment. Assert, deny, insult is not a good way to convince people of anything. Funny, I thought I was emphatically agreeing. I'm also unaware that I'm the only person who has posted to this thread who has asserted or denied. If I've insulted anyone, I apologize.
I approved the original rejected comment (more than 5 links=moderated) and got rid of your subsequent attempts, along with your note that the first one hadn't gone through.
Even granting 1-7 - some of which I could argue with, but others are already doing so - and baa's point that Iraq was #1 on the list of targets and easiest to invade - a point I agree with, I mean we already had control of the air - there are still assumptions missing from this case for war.
8. We can do this without substantial support from major power allies other than the UK.
9. We know how to manage an occupation whose goal is to create a liberal democracy.
8 is why I didn't think we'd invade when we actually did. I thought we'd end up having to change the sanctions regime and invade only after catching Hussein doing what was probably inevitable: trying to sneak in weaponizable material. Perhaps I was naive in thinking it would be possible to loosen the sanctions and still - importantly - maintain both the no-fly zones and the inspections regime. But in any case, I thought we'd do something to get a larger alliance together. Even great powers with latitude need active help.
As for 9, I know you've written
Maybe bringing democracy to Iraq was an impossible job, but that wasn't the job in mind
but I didn't think we could only make a change at the top; it wasn't going to be just regime change but political, social, economic change. There was going to be a power vacuum. So there was always the question of what, having beaten the crap out of the Iraqi army (something I never doubted we could do), were we going to do with the occupation? It's easier in the short run to set up a police state than it is to set up a self-policing, democratic one, but there was no way, given our values, and our rhetoric, that we could do anything but try to make Iraq a democracy. It may not have been a prominent selling point for the war, but it was an underlying assumption. And it was not clear to me that we could create a democracy by force in a foreign country, many of whose inhabitants would be suspicious of our motives.
However, if we want to make this routine, I've prepared a standard declaration.
"You have to blockquote everything separated by a line break with its own pair of tags."
And thanks to that, I'm not going to be surprised when people have trouble making sense of my own comments and quotes. Yet: not interested in re-editing all those comments, either. Oh, well.
Besides, now that I'm half caught up, no one else care enough to still be around. Of course, if I'd not tried, that would be interpreted as showing my lack of interest in discussion, I fear. But perhaps not.
After five and a half hours, though, on 195, I'll leave you to believe as you wish, SCMT. Discussions where people don't have at least vaguely the same level of general knowledge of the subject, and general agreement on the basic facts, tend to be extremely tedious, alas.
Discussions where people don't have at least vaguely the same level of general knowledge of the subject, and general agreement on the basic facts, tend to be extremely tedious, alas.
Yes. I rather took that to be LB's and text's points as well.
Gary, as best I recall from my physics education, special relativity is not held to be "genius" by cognoscenti - various people at the time were likely to come up with the concept before long. General relativity wasn't going to be invented by someone other than Einstein anytime soon.
Also note that you use "fallacy" in a question-begging way above; I would have found it annoying if I had been involved in the discussion.
More generally and topically, I'm extremely skeptical that Saddam post-sanction would have been able to produce a bomb on any relevant timescale. Refining weapons-grade uranium from yellowcake would have been just too hard and too slow and too subject to exposure by evolving monitoring technology (not to mention the simple expedient of checking the yellowcake depot).
Very short answer on on 195: since the Ba'athists came back to power in Iraq in July, '68, Iraq has fought with Syria, fought with Jordan, fought with Kuwait, fought with Saudi Arabia, fought with Egypt, and fought with Israel. Fought with Niger, Morocco, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. And been bombed repeatedly from Turkish bases. (I trust I need not provide cites; no one will contest these things never happened, right?)
Did any of Iraq's neighbors publically support the 2002 U.S. invasion of Iraq? Obviously not. Does this therefore demonstrate that none of those governments considered Iraq to be threatening? Of course not. (Popular opinion is a different matter.)
If we go back to 2002, we can, for instance, pluck out Fouad Ajami's opinion:
As far as some of the rhetoric from the League of Arab states, the Secretary-General of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, the man is basically a demagogue. We're not going to open the gates of hell and there are going to be all kinds of discrepancies between the public posture of some of the Arab states, which will be disapproving of a strike against Iraq, and some very, very quiet and essential cooperation when the time comes and when we draw the sword.
However, I'm not debating how much or little quiet support other Arab nations gave to attacking Iraq; I'm merely saying that, in general, Iraq's neighbors tended to find SH threatening. They'd have been crazy not to have.
There are plenty of sound reasons why this wouldn't lead to those governments wanting to endorse the invasion by America of an Arab nation for the purpose of overthrowing its government, of course. (Although, of course, we did indeed wind up being allowed to quietly make military use of Saudi Arabian soil, Jordanian soil, Bahraini soil, Quatari soil, and on and on.)
1. It would be really horrible for a nuclear device to go off in one of America's cities.
True, and as is implied by ogged, it is the responsibility of the US government to prevent this.
2. The main lesson of 9-11 was that there are people who are willing to set off a nuclear device in an American city.
I'd say that was known. I think the main lesson of 9/11 is how unprepared the US was to stop something 9/11, or something like it. Yes, it made clear that BL would use an atomic weapon in the US if he could, but this would hypothetically lead to a policy of aggressive strict control of real existing bomb sources by partnering with known nuclear powers to tighten physical security of all materials and weapons, and, to the elimination or capture of Bin Ladin and ALL of his organization. If you know BL would if he could, you don't get side tracked invading wannabe nuclear powers. Your lesson is no reason to invade anywhere but Afghanistan (assuming BL stayed there).
3. Saddam would like to have nukes.
Yes. But wanting and getting are not the same thing. Saddam wanted power, to maintain it, and to gain it. Getting nukes would have been part of this, if he could've gotten them. But power comes not only from having might, but in having people believe that you do, or that you might have might. Why did Saddam hide nonexistent weapons programs from the inspectors? Why did he act like he had them, by impeding inspectors? I suggest it is not just an act of defiance against the US, it was also a way of bluffing power. If your potential enemies, Israel and Iran, believe you might have wmd's, then, presumably this acts at least as some level of deterrent. We say his bluffing made us uncertain, but the inspectors were more sure. They said repeatedly that the wmd capabilities were destroyed and kept from becoming re-established. Saddam's motivations for staying the cat and mouse game were not that opaque. A competent government should have seen through this, especially given the reports of the inspectors.
4. Saddam can't be kept from getting nukes by inspectors, because he will only allow inspectors in under credible threat of force, which force is not sustainable over the long term.
The actual inspectors' job was never to keep Saddam from getting nukes, it was merely to ascertain whether, where, how, and to what extent he might have been pursuing them and various other weapons. Action to inspect and destroy weapons capabilities was always backed up by credible threat of military force. This is where Clinton and then Bush(initially) failed to leverage quite enough force against Saddam's resistance, after he kicked the inspectors out (in 1998?). Indications, except for a few now largely discredited exceptions, showed that the inspection routine was working, when enforced, in preventing wmd capabilities in Iraq after 1991. Eventually when Bush escalated the threat, Saddam let the inspectors back in. Could this balance of threat have been sustained over the long term? Yes, in theory. The US had maintained far more expensive military stalemates in Korea and Germany for decades. But keeping Iraq pinned down militarily indefinitely didn't make military sense, it was too expensive for the payoff: a stalemate cease-fire standoff with a country the US had overwhelmed militarily. In other words, militarily it wasn't Korea, or cold-war Germany. Additionally international support the US's position on Iraq was eroding with the potential for sanctions reductions. Turkey and Saudi Arabia who had for 12 years hosted US forces acting against Iraq were increasingly restricting US military operations. To oversimplify grossly, the US had three options: maintain with increasing difficulty enforced inspections and sanctions, use some level of force, or withdraw. I remember thinking, "well I know some use of force is going to happen" as soon as additional troops started being sent to Kuwait in 2002.
5. Whether Saddam and Al Qaeda (or other terrorist groups) have had contact is largely irrelevant, because there's very little to keep them from having contact in the future, especially given that they have a mutual enemy in the U.S.
I bought this then. I don't now. A competent government should not have bought this then. Many commenters here, myself included, now know enough to know the connection was and would subsequently have been unlikely given what AQ was then. With some exceptions, imho, most of SH's support for terror was arab world PR, such as supporting the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and harboring a few known terrorists. He might have eventually made a show of supporting the AQ we know today. But had he gotten an atomic bomb or two, or 10, they would have been his most precious possessions, the foundations of his power. I cannot believe now, nor did I in 2002, that he would ever part with such things.
6. The only way to ensure that Saddam doesn't get nukes, and doesn't pass them on to people willing to use them in the U.S., is to invade.
No, inspections could have kept working. The US would have to have been really flexible in applying force, but there were a bunch of attacks short of invasion that may have served to enforce the continued compliance with UN inspections. Long term, this would have been difficult, but avoiding this difficulty does not seem to me to justify invasion.
7. Iraq is invadable. Unlike Pakistan, it doesn't already have nukes. And there's some reason to believe that Iraqis might welcome an invasion.
The US knew the Shiites and Kurds would be liberated and thankful. Nobody talked about the disempowerment of the Sunni's. It was all about de-Bathification. Bremmer acted as such and disbanded the Iraqi army and fired all Bath party members from government jobs. A competent US government should have foreseen the potential insurgency nurturing aspects of disregarding the effects this might have on significant portions of the Sunni population, not to mention what problems might arise from Iraqi Shiite connections to Iran. A competent US government should have seen that removing the tyrant SH and his party and is organs of control would lead to dangerous power shifts coupled with balkanization. Not that the current quagmire was precisely predictable, but that overthrow would necessitate long and hard occupation for which the US military was ill equipped or trained. Invadable? Yes, but a competent US government should have seen the trouble beyond the successful invasion.
Sorry for the long late post. Been too busy todayand just felt the need to put in my 2 cents, 'bout what it's worth.
The overwhelming thing that would confuse me about this discussion, if I didn't have some slight sense about human psychology, is that Ogged's post is his "review of the case for invading Iraq as I saw (and endorsed) it."
The correctness or incorrectness of his beliefs at the time are not answers to the different question of whether his beliefs/opinions had any reasonable basis.
But, of course, mostly people are leaping into to debate whether or not those opinions were correct, instead.
Personally, I kinda thought it was clear that the anti-war case had been looking an awful lot better than the pro-war case for somewhere between a year and a half to two years, if it didn't before that.
And as regards my own opinion, it's almost as if I'd written hundreds and hundreds of posts intimating that this was my belief, for at least a year and a half or so (not that I ever actually said I supported the invasion, either; I just said I wouldn't march against it; that was wishy-washy enough, though, that I thought I needed to take responsibility for coming so close to supporting the invasion, so if we're only marking in binary, I should be marked guilty). (Which is why it's a tad annoying when people repeatedly write comments to me as if all this weren't so, and as if I'd said something here to indicate otherwise., as if I were arguing in favor of invading then having been The Right Thing To Do.)
"Surely you are kidding? These countries are nowhere near Iraq to be in armed conflict. Unless diplomatic differences can be regarded as fighting."
Suggest looking into troops in the order of battle against Iraq in 1991.
"Sure, if it was magically 1991 in Iraq again, and everybody outside magically became completely stupid."
I'm not entirely sure what this means, but my suggestion is that the considerable surprise at discovering just how badly U.S. intelligence had underestimated how close SH had came in getting to the Bomb by 1991 was an extremely significant factor in the thinking of most of the 2002 Administration pro-Iraq-attack folks. Perhaps you entirely disagree, which is certainly your perogative, of course.
The recent Iraq War was, for better or worse, an aggressive geopolitical war. If you read between the lines, both the administration and the majority of the warbloggers understand it that way and support it that way.
Most Americans do not believe in that kind of war, so it was necessary to whip up all sorts of other reasons. These other reasons came into play after the decision to go to war had already been made. Even if they had all been valid, they were always peripheral to what was actually happening.
So after the decision was made, Saddam's "gassing his own people" became important, even though we hadn't cared before then. The rights of women became important (even though Iraq was the most secular and least Islamic state in the region.) And so on.
After the fact, everything but the kitchen sink was thrown to the public. If there had been a significant astrological constituency, we would have been told that we invaded because the moon was in Virgo with Aquarius in trine. (Hardly a joke: at one point a major policymaker, Wolfowitz I think, was sent to fluff the Armageddon Christians. Is Saddam was the seven-headed beast? Will the Temple be rebuilt? Will the Son of Man return in his glory? Tune in tomorrow.)
There is, of course, the possibility that at some point some of our Machiavellian policymakers were starting to believe the fluff that they were saying. When you think about it, that really makes things worse, and not better.
That sounds like a "dove" position, doesn't it? Well, it is. I think that the pervasive, knee-jerk dismissal of dovish arguments is a big part of the reason why we are in such a bad place right now. (In the same way, the pervasive, kneejerk dismissal of marijuana-legalization arguments is a big part of the reason why the US is becoming a police state.)
If it were up to me, I'd have all the doves get rid of their unicycles and puppets and drums and burn their hemp garments and cut off their dreads and start eating hamburgers. Obviously it's not, though. If you don't like hippies, fine. But you shouldn't have let that be the foundation of your opinions about foreign policy.
But for God's sake, let's return Unfogged to the cynicism and fluff. This is no goddamn fun for anyone. What's done is done, and we have to live with it.
215: I have never liked analytic philosophers tendency to build important arguments around far-fetched hypotheticals.
Asking people to treat a group of actual arguments leading to a recent major political disaster as though they were really hypotheticals is a bit much. "
If all these things were true...."
It's sort of like chatting about hypothetical rape to a recent rape victim.
The fact that the Saddam and Al Qaeda were both Arab, Sunni and avowedly hostile to the US seems like enough.
Ogged, that's an unsophisticated view of people. And it's definitely not evidence of a link between two political camps. Al Qaeda's ideal state involves reestablishing the Caliphate and plunging Islam into neverending conflict. It's completely reasonable to think that even an anti-American pan-Arabist would balk at this suggestion.
And come on, Salafis identify pan-Arabist (Qawmiya) Muslims as heretics along the lines of the democratic West.
I opposed the invasion, before it happened, because of variations on eb's points 8 & 9, i.e., the US is not fit to do this without a real coalition (don't get up in my grille about Poland) mainly because the US doesn't know what it's doing.
Specifically, there is to my knowledge one case in the historical record that the US knows how to run an invasion to produce good results afterward (Japan), while there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. And arguments that this war is more like World War II than it is like e.g. the Philippine War or any of some dozens of Latin American interventions have all been pretty poor.
No argument about 9/11 changing things has suggested a change that would improve on America's appalling history as a colonial power -- and by appalling I mean, it's just very bad at it, even if we grant that no country is particularly good at it. Note this isn't an argument about the specific incompetence of the Bush administration -- although I think there is evidence for that -- but for the general incompetence of American institutions at administering colonial dominions.
This is one of the reasons the US created the United Nations and the Bretton Woods agencies in 1944-45. Americans didn't want to run the world. The US might want to revisit the utility of those and similar institutions.
#212: Now, what's the point of this question, anyway?
This seems pointless after a night's sleep, but:
1.Start with the original language at issue: But certainly the governments of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kuwait felt that the SH regime was somewhat threatening, as did Israel
2.Remember various concerns about the use of "absolute" words. (See, e.g., #41 or #197).
3.Wonder whether you have some sort of inside polling data about the states of mind of the various government players in the various governments referenced.
4.Wonder if perhaps "certainly" was a mistake.
5.Remember #123: It may not be most useful to regard, consider, or speak of "the administration" as a homogenous entity with a single mind.
6.Wonder whether the statement "the governments of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kuwait felt that the SH regime was somewhat threatening" suffers from the same malady.
7.Suspect that's not what you meant to write.
I suppose the point was that nit-picking arguments that are pretty clear on their face doesn't seem like a good way to use your time, as it is irritating to both you and the person you're nitting. But that seemed more interesting late last night than it does today.
This appears to be a dead thread, but let me register my surprise that no one siding with ogged here has volunteered to die in his war. With all the critique of the hawks who brought us to war (Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney, etc.) and their total lack of military experience, I figured that the participants here (whom I read regularly here) would have been more careful.
Instead, the pro-war argument seems to say quite baldly that a miniscule nuclear (oh, I mean, nucular) threat justfies sending other people to die. A key issue is whether *you* would risk death, doesn't it? President Ogged just gave his seven point speech to the nation --- who here is about to enlist?
The correctness or incorrectness of his beliefs at the time are not answers to the different question of whether his beliefs/opinions had any reasonable basis.
Gary (re: 215)-
While this has certainly gotten testy on both sides, I don't believe that either you or ogged has been attacked for having been wrong in hindsight -- the argument has been that ogged's position had real problems from the outset. Of the people you've been arguing with, I'm pretty sure that everyone is aware that you are now, personally, of the opinion that the war was misguided. Any crankiness (at least from me, and I surmise from other people) directed toward you has been directed at perceived maddening levels of nitpickyness, rather than at your being somehow culpably wrong on the war.
(Re: 191)
Is there a reasonable case to be made that there was intelligence available to the relevant decision-makers that, if interpreted correctly, could or should have led to the beliefs you endorse above? Of course.
This is not at all the same thing as demonstrating what specific people "knew" or believed. "Should have" isn't "did."
Can I stipulate that when I say an organization (like the Administration) 'knew' something, I mean that all reasonable evidence shows that if the decision makers in that organization were doing their job in a reasonably normal fashion, they knew it? (And when I say 'can I stipulate', I mean that I have in the past, and plan to continue, using the language in that fashion. My apologies if you find it difficult to follow.)
I tend to refer to 'the Administration' because as a citizen rather than a participant, it's a bit of a black box. From reading the news, I can tell what information was available to whoever was making the decision to go to war. I don't know of my own knowledge if George Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, or Barney is the ultimate decision-maker in the White House -- but I do know (sufficiently to satisfy myself) that whoever that decision maker is, they either saw the intelligence I described, or were either intentionally or recklessly unaware of it. If I can't discuss the information available to the administration without knowing of my own knowledge who saw specifically which pieces of intelligence, the entire area of discussion is closed off, and I am not willing to accept that.
I think we've only got one actual pro-war voice here, baa. Anyone else on that side of the argument (I believe only Gary and ogged) is just arguing that the pro-war arguments aren't self-evident crap.
I like Mr. B's 214 a lot, but putting it all together, it sounds like the short summary is: we were bound to use some level of force sooner or later, but it could have been done much more competently. Am I misunderstanding?
I am going to respond to the post, not the thread.
I think no one is going to like this, but partly for my own peace of mind, partly because I'm just not sure the
congealing liberal consensus is right,
I'm not clear that the liberal consensus is correct either, excepting in that invading Iraq was a stupid idea.
here's a review of the case for invading Iraq as I saw (and endorsed) it.
[...]1-7 still seem non-crazy to me.
That sentence is why I am going to respond to the post, instead of taking the post as merely 'restating the pre-war position'.
1. It would be really horrible for a nuclear device to go off in one of America's cities.
It would be really horrible for the United States to be hit by an asteroid. It would be really horrible for the sun to blow up. It would really suck to be invaded by brain-eating space aliens.
Russian ICBMs can be retargeted to US cities and be clearing their silos in no more than two minutes, tops, and would arrive in less than 30 minutes. Russian SLBMs do not need to be retargeted but at last report the Russian Navy could not put more than two SLBM subs to sea at any given time. Between them they can hit the US with at least 40 and up to 400 nuclear warheads in less than 15 minutes. Cruise missle situation is more problematic as they are relatively short range. Taking into consideration poor missle and warhead maintainance by the Russians, they should be able to hit the US with an absolute minimum of 10% of their available megatonnage, which means ~3000 megatonnes (3 gigatones) or very roughly 3-4000 warheads.
The French NAVY has 200 hundred warheads (in the 750 kt range) available for immediate launch. Arrival times after launch are no greater than 15 minutes. I will ignore french ICBMs. I will also ignore the British nuclear weapons altogether because of the close relationship with the US and because it is rumoured that British weapons cannot be targeted on the US (which I suspect is untrue).
The Chinese can hit any part of the US with ICBMs. The number of ICBMs available which can hit the US is not, from the evidence, large, but it isn't small either. I will assume that the Chinese can manage anything the French can accomplish.
Ergo, the worst thing that could happen outside of the space aliens would be for the United States to get into a war with France, Russia or China. I will note that none of those countries are happy with us for the moment and we have been behaving belligerently towards them.
ALL of those countries are capable of smuggling a nuclear weapon into the United States. The possibility of this occurring was first suggested no later than 1948.
One city can be rebuilt. Lose 100 cities and its over.
2. The main lesson of 9-11 was that there are people who are willing to set off a nuclear device in an American city.
The main lesson of 9/11 was that little terrorist people were keen to kill rich first-worlders and associated elites if said first-worlders elites messed with them too much. And it was EASY. Bubble popped. Not a real bubble, but an illusion harbored by the sort of people who go to good schools. See Columbine, etc etc.
3. Saddam would like to have nukes.
Everyone would like to have nukes. Nukes are popular. With nukes, you can keep rich first-worlders and associated elites off your case. *EVERYBODY* wants that. Also, they all want harems and unnumbered Swiss bank accounts. With nukes, you have enough leverage to make them buy you off.
4. Saddam can't be kept from getting nukes by inspectors, because he will only allow inspectors in under credible threat of force, which force is not sustainable over the long term.
No observation system can prevent people from acquiring things. It simply makes you aware of it. That said, inspectors merely confirm what you already know (or should know) from satellite, overflight and port observations.
5. Whether Saddam and Al Qaeda (or other terrorist groups) have had contact is largely irrelevant, because there's very little to keep them from having contact in the future, especially given that they have a mutual enemy in the U.S.
Saddam is irrelevant to whether or not Al Queda has contact with nuclear-armed powers. They already got that. See Pakistan, Iran.
6. The only way to ensure that Saddam doesn't get nukes, and doesn't pass them on to people willing to use them in the U.S., is to invade.
Same applies to Mauritania, Madagascar and Palau.
7. Iraq is invadable. Unlike Pakistan, it doesn't already have nukes.
Ergo, the strategy to prevent Osama bin Laden (the person you know wishes to attack you) from acquiring nukes is to ignore him and his presence in the country with nuclear weapons and attack the country that doesn't have them on the off-chance that he might have 'D'Oh!' moment and decide to pack up and leave the country with nuclear weapons.
And there's some reason to believe that Iraqis might welcome an invasion.
Which Iraqis?
Nothing about chemical and biological weapons, certainly nothing about humanitarianism and democracy.
Ok, I agree with that.
The absence of humanitarian and democratic considerations among the "liberal hawks" I talked to, incidentally, is one reason I'm not sure I buy the argument that lamenting "incompetence" is a dodge.
I am actually inclined to agree. The liberal hawks were interested in 'stability' and 'pumping oil' and all that other 'realism' bullshit, just like Bush and Cheney. Democracy (or even liberty, given their insistance that the Kurds remain in Iraq) was the furthest fucking thing from their minds.
Which brings up the question of why they're always whining about standing up for 'Iraqi Democrats' the very people they had even intent of screwing at the first opportunity.
Maybe bringing democracy to Iraq was an impossible job, but that wasn't the job in mind.
Democracy is not a sandwich. You can't 'bring it'. No, I don't know what you mean.
Let's avoid one discussion: This was certainly not the administration's case for war, which was a jumble and muddle of
things like this, along with stuff about WMDs, and democracy, and freedom, and ponies.
Mumbo-jumbo and handwaving. You could never tell what it was you were buying.
1-7 still seem non-crazy to me. The one that looks most vulnerable is 7, but that's precisely the one that the
"incompetence" argument is meant to address. Of course, there are counterarguments to most of the points, but forgive me if I'm not convinced that those arguments are dispositive.
They aren't. 1-5 are irrelevant. Handwaving. They only matter if and ONLY IF the threat of Saddam Hussein attacking the US with a nuclear weapon is greater (substantially) than the threat of Osama bin Laden acquiring a nuclear weapon from Pakistan and using it against the US. A calculation which would make no sense.
6 is just silly. 7 is retarded.
For the record: I was against the American support for Saddam at the time. Having the Iranians run over Saddam would have ranked right up there in terribleness with not getting a tie for Christmas. (I suspectstrongly suspect one reason Bush, Jr. decided to forego classification of Reagan's papers was partly to continue concealing the depth of America involvement with Saddam and his (or should I say our?) chemical weapons.) That said, I would have been against the first Bush administration greenlighting Saddam Excellent Kuwaiti Adventure, had I known about it. Having greenlighted the fucking thing, I was against the exquisitely silly 'defense' of Saudi (how the fuck was he going to hold 800,000 sq miles of sand?), the subsequent invasion (also silly) of Kuwait, against stiffing the Shi'a after encouraging them to rise up, not against going to Baghdad, provided we didn't hang around. Against the on again, off again treatment of the Kurds regardless of whether the Turks approved.
(By the above I mean that I did not think beforehand that the Americans would have any serious difficulties with Saddam's army (and why would they?) either the first time or the second time, but I saw no benefit to anyone by continuing to be involved.)
Before round two (opposed at least a year beforehand!) I did NOT predict a massive guerilla war because I didn't think we would be stupid enough to invade Iraq and then like, you know, hang around. Only a moron would try to hold e'er so much useless dirt.
I rejected and continue to reject the characterization of Saddam as Hitlerian. He wasn't a loon enraptured by some high level abstraction ('The Jews are like rats!' 'We are the vanguard of the socialist proletariat!'). As a thug he is no different from Sargon or Ashurbanipal or Taimurlane or half-a-dozen cranky Persians. Or Romans. Or Byzantines. Or Arabs. Or Mongols. 'Gimme the money and the women and the palaces.' Shit, he was perfectly willing to turn his country into an American quasi-satrapy as long as he got to beat on the Iranians.
ash
['The last part could have been much longer and better written but I'm tired and going to bed. Have a nice day.']
maybe close to 8&9, but not only are we not so very good at nation building / peace-keeping (at least i think i remember bush saying that until 9-11 changed everything), i think its useful to think about supporting a war in iraq in december 01 and march 03 are not the same thing. the difference b/w an effort to marshall int'l support to eliminate bad actors (gotta love that big mo coming off afghanistan) is different than us 'n poland skipping through the middle-east like johnny democracyseed while flipping the bird to the rest of the globe (including most of our allies who are more experienced in peace-keeping (not that they've done such a bang up job themselves). if you're justifying the war based on risk to americans, shouldn't you factor in the chance that alienating major allies could also be a problem when dealing with later threats?
also, whether or not one agrees with them, i think that democracy-spreadin' was a critical part of the rationale for the weekly-standard crowd. but that doesn't sell so well as a mushroom cloud in des moines. and i think its relevant that the method the war was sold at home undercut its support abroad. maybe they thought middle eastern democracy would itself be the most important safeguard of american safety, but even if you think that it was possible to acheive through their domino theory, saying saddam's gonna kill you with balsa drones is hiding the ball.
re: valuing lives differently: of course the executive branch is going to err on the side of aggressive action which might be perceived as protective of americans. one, iraqis don't get a vote here, whether or not they're blown up. second, the executive branch is generally the take no prisoners, shoot first and ask questions later branch. presidents don't tend to win points for thoughtful consideration. that's why it would be super sweet if we had, i don't know, 2 other branches of government which could counterbalance it. they could have different incentives built in, and we could require certain procedures followed before going to war. we could call them "checks and balances."
sorry this is unfocused, all over the place, and not terribly relevant to the discussion. i'm not real sure how the assumptions were supposed to work. but this shit makes me want to weep sometimes. i really do like your site, mr. ogged, and you sure do have some fine comment threads.
A point mentioned by text in 55 and expanded on by baa in 58: Then 9-11 came and added additional reasons and additional urgency. The new reasons: greater fear of nuclear handoff, yet more worries about relying on the Saudi regime, and a belief that the Middle Ease needed more that "management" of horrendous regimes to defang militant Islamism. It also created a unique moment of political possibility, as text notes above.
The first few points mentioned there ("greater fear" . . . "yet more worries" . . . "a belief that") are all changes in perception brought about by 9/11. These increased fears are the basis for ogged's point #2. But just because our fear level got ratcheted up by an order of magnitude doesn't mean that Saddam became any more dangerous between 9/10 and 9/12. But there was, as baa mentioned, this "unique moment of political possibility". And that led to the kitchen sink approach to pro-war arguements, as pointed out in 220.
FWIW, with regards to ogged's #2, the lesson I took from 9/11 was that these bastards are patient, clever, and resourceful, and therefore they don't need a nuclear bomb in order to kill large numbers of people. What'd they use on 9/11? Planning, training, and fucking boxcutters! Sure, they'd like a nuke if they could get their hands on it, but not having one isn't going to stop them from planning all sorts of other devious shit in the meantime. The way to stop them is to find them and stop them before they can do anything else. How do we find them? Good intelligence, which will require people willing to become informants. Which will require average people in the Middle East to see us as the good guys and al Qaeda as the bad guys. And the invasion of Iraq in no way helped us to bring that about.
Remember how we finally caught the Unabomber? His brother fingered him as a possible suspect. The way we will ultimately become safe is when people around the world see terrorism as so abhorrent that they are would rather see their own brothers in jail than to know that their brothers had killed and maimed innocent people. And no invasion of one country by another will ever accomplish that.
LB: Gary and ogged ... [are] just arguing that the pro-war arguments aren't self-evident crap.
I wouldn't have used that particular legalism, but they were in fact self-evident crap. The arguments relied on the idea that the desires for democracy and free-market capitalism burn so brightly in every human heart that, let loose by our invasion, they would consume every petty distinction and grievance barring the creation of a stable, peaceful Iraq.
Point of detail: for a brief period, Kazkhstan had ICBMs. Ali G would be laughing out of the other side of his mouth if they still did.
As I said, I think that the "madman" picture of Saddam was a projective fiction based on film villains.
I apparently haven't been very persuasive, but ogged's points 2, 4, and 6 seem wildly wrong in a hysterical, paranoid direction, and 5 also seems to to be a wild assumption.
Soon enough we're going to see a rerun of almost all of these seven points with regard to Iran, so this exercise hasn't been entirely vain.
FL: the strategic problems of a nuclear Saddam are in themselves sufficiently serious to (at least) prompt us to consider the use of force.
Yes. But the urgent, essentially unilateral use of force to topple the regime without any clear idea of what would replace it and when? No.
ogged: we were bound to use some level of force sooner or later
Yes. This was evident at least since Clinton and Blair shopped around the idea of a war in 1998 or so. But the question, then as later, was could you get a decent-sized "we". Clinton's answer was if not, then you didn't use force. 9/11 should not have changed that calculus.
I read Mr. B's 214 as saying, we might have had to reprise the 1998 bombings or something similar, as shown to be necessary by continued inspections.
And I think that's the killer to FL's 233. Nuclear Saddam: bad. Preventing nuclear Saddam: good. Is there a chance that Saddam might go nuclear? Well, as we now know, no, but even if there was, did that axiomatically mean that we had to conquer the whole country instead of doing something else? And did we perhaps have the option of gathering more information, at extremely low cost, and doing a better job of figuring out what our options are? Yes.
There was never any point in saying, "well, the chance may be p that Saddam will go nuclear eventually, so our only options are to sit back and hope he doesn't or conquer the country RIGHT NOW." Any more than in Gulf War I our options were to leave him unmolested or conquer Baghdad. And the proportionate use of force to the threat of getting nukes was to do what it to took to keep him from getting nukes. This argument doesn't provide a scintilla of support for all-out war unless you've got an argument that that's the only way to stop him from getting nukes. Letting the weapons inspections finish was always obviously the best way to answer that question.
This is all leaving out the problem of opportunity costs--the way the war on Iraq has kept us from doing other things that are important from humanitarian and non-proliferation standpoints. It's also leaving out the absolute horror of war, which needs good reasons for fighting.
Matt, Slol, I hope it's clear that I wasn't endorsing the conclusion "use force!" The point was that the debate really comes down to empirical claims about probabilities (of Nuclear Saddam, of the success of reconstruction, etc.).
So Baa's argument is good, but as he says, he thinks #6 is the weak point. Since this straw-Saddam isn't allowed to have B/C weapons, we'll say nukes only. By Baa and Ogged's thinking, India and/or Pakistan should have attacked Russia, China, Iran or the US because the other one might get nuclear weapons and might use it against them and the place that the adversary would get the weapons is not internally.
For #1: It would be really horrible for any explosive device to go off in any city.
#2. The main lesson of 9/11 is that there are people in the world who are deranged enough to kill people en masse. But we knew this (see Holocaust, Israel, Kashmir, London, Amman, etc.).
#3. A lot of countries would like to have nukes. These include(d): South Africa, Iran, Iraq.
#4. Hogwash. So long as the inspectors are there, he can't do anything. If he kicks the inspectors out, then we can do something. You may say that Iran is the case that says this isn't true, but I say Iran's actions are predicated on our actions over the past 3 years and our relative position of weakness.
#5. Whether China and Russia are friendly now is of no import, because later on they might gang up and kill us all. Seriously, what?
#6. Is based on #4, which is, well, hard to support.
#7. Based on that logic, Iran is invadeable. Hugo Chavez says he doesn't have nukes and doesn't want them, but he's probably lying and he's got a lot of oil, so let's attack him next.
Look, the whole problem with the argument is that the IAEA inspectors were in country at the time. They were about to start inspecting again. If they had found something, then there's a case for war, if you want. But the doctrine of pre-emption is one based on a flimsy "well someday somebody might do something, so we're gonna make sure somebody can't." That's like me saying "well, someday my son might kill me, so I'm going to go leave him on a hill." Sure, it sounds good, but there's nothing to say that a) my son won't kill me b) my son will kill me c) my son will kill me, have sex with his mother, and then poke out his eyes d) none of the above.
240: Slol, you said what I meant much shorter and better.
239: Soon enough we're going to see a rerun of almost all of these seven points with regard to Iran, so this exercise hasn't been entirely vain.
Yeah, fucking exactly. We need to get rid of the idea RIGHT NOW that if the government says, "Well, country X might get nukes" it follows that you have to launch a war of conquest. Maybe I should be trying to persuade everyone that 1-7 looked plausible, so next time 'round we can say "Well that argument looked plausible last time, and see how poorly it turned out?"
No, I didn't think you were endorsing the conclusion "use force", but I disagree that it comes down to probabilities.
Let's stipulate the probabilities support the use of force. My point was that "use force" is not a monolithic concept. An alternative, and much more supportable, use of force might entail:
1. Have a plausible plan.
1a. "Plausibility" entails budgeting for reasonable assumptions about costs (including manpower, duration) of occupation.
2. Use plausibility of said plan to win an international consensus.
3. Use international consensus to render plan legitimate.
4. Use legitimacy of plan to win allies in Arab / Muslim world. (As opposed to, e.g., use implausibility and illegitimacy of plan to create terrorists in Arab / Muslim world.)
242: Labs, I didn't think you were, but I think you were framing the question wrong. For the question "Should we conquer and occupy this country?" we need to ask "Is there a significant chance Saddam will get nukes that can't be stopped by anything short of conquest?"
So no, I don't think that the mere statement "Saddam has probability p of getting nukes if we don't do anything" provides any support whatsoever for war, meaning the war that was proposed.
Am I alone in feeling like this is WWI all over again (i.e., they'll be home by christmas)? Instead of trench warfare, we've got guerilla warfare, and instead of mustard gas, we've got IEDs.
This is worse than WWI. In WWI we faced organized armies that were capable of a unified surrender when it came to it. Here, we face a loosely-organized array of enemies who are unlikely to surrender no matter how bad things get for them, and even if some of them did decide to surrender or quit fighting, the others would likely continue to fight on regardless.
Just to clarify, we're postulating a competent administration for the purposes of this thread?
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:29 PM
As long as competent means "competent" and not "argumentative fiat means all eventualities were anticipated."
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:31 PM
Why do you dismiss chem/bio weapons out of hand? I mean, if we were serously worried about the nuke issue, why aren't we being more proactive about loose nukes in the former USSR?
Posted by mike d | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:32 PM
why aren't we being more proactive about loose nukes in the former USSR?
That's a good question, but what else we should be doing isn't really the issue here (at least not in a way that I can see; maybe I'm not seeing something).
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:35 PM
I just want to know what level of abstraction we should assume. I think that, as long as we're discussing 1-7 in the context of a hypothetical competent administration, we would do well to replace "Saddam" with "McX", and see whether your points compel, in general, the launch of preventive wars.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:37 PM
[there is the theory of the moebius... a twist in the fabric of space where time becomes a loop.]
#4 and #6 are the weak spot, I think; there's no reason (save pride, which can't be neglected) we couldn't've flown all the troops back home after the inspectors told us there's nothing there.
The sustainability of the embargo weighed heavily on liberals, I think; I remember lots of talk of dying babies.
Posted by grar too many mikes | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:39 PM
That seems too abstract. "Deterrability" was a pretty important consideration (and really the only reason Al Qaeda-as-delivery-vehicle was even an issue). It seems like a factor that would always have to be considered.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:39 PM
7 to 5.
6: right, forgot to include the effect of sanctions. Thanks.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:41 PM
4 is questionable
Sadam shut down his nuclear program during the 90's because of the pressure from other countries. As long as the pressure remained he couldn't reconstitute the program.
5-6 are wrong
Sadam wanted nukes for the same reason everybody else wants nukes. To deter invasion and to increase the stature of the country. People take countries with nukes seriously.
Sadam wasn't stupid enough to give nukes to terrorists. We would put a serious hurting on anyone who who did that.
Sadam was a secularist not an islamist fundamentalist.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:41 PM
5. Saddam and AQ hated each other. Saddam was a secular dictator, not an Islamic fundie. Hence his whole war with Iraq. He would never give AQ a nuke because they'd be just as likely to use it against him. Two groups who are both my enemies are not necessarily allies.
4/6- It's really not so easy to make nukes. Pretty much everyone agreed that Saddam's nuclear program was under control and would remain so. It's somewhat easier to smuggle a bio/chem weapons program past the inspectors or satellites, not so nukes- there was really no chance of him ever making significant progress without us knowing well before it was too late.
1-3 are pretty much just statements of fact everyone agrees on.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:43 PM
3, 4, 5, and 6 apply to every country that is not well disposed toward the US. Saddam wasn't any closer to acquiring nukes than Venezuela. I think there's a hidden (not intentionally, of course) assumption that Saddam was likelier to get nukes because he was just badder and crazier than other leaders, but I don't think that's a strong argument.
IOW, if you accept 3-7 as persuasive, shouldn't we conquer as much of the world as is practical and not currently our allies? If that's not a reasonable response, why start with Iraq?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:45 PM
10- war with Iran, that is- so hard to keep all those countries straight.
Posted by SP | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:47 PM
he was just badder and crazier than other leaders
You're right, that is a hidden assumption. Why do you think it's weak?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:50 PM
LB, I wholly agree, but then, if you accept 3-7 as persuasive, why not start with Iraq? You (the hypothetical accepter of 3-7) have to start somewhere.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:51 PM
For #7--the first Gulf War was still kinda half-open; conceptually easier to finish it than to start a whole new war elsewhere.
Posted by grar too many mikes | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:56 PM
SB-
The point is that if 3-7 are persuasive, we haven't proven that we need to conquer Iraq to keep us safe, we've proven that we need to conquer the world to keep us safe. Iraq alone isn't particularly useful. If we aren't prepared (both morally and practically) to conquer the world, the conquest of Iraq isn't a step toward making us safe, it's just pointless.
ogged-
"Badder and crazier" I'll accept, but how does that make him more likely to get nukes? There are perfectly sane reasons for any state to want nukes, and being a megalomanic dictator isn't of any practical assistance. Pakistan wasn't led by particularly lunatic people when it became a nuclear power, likewise Israel, etc.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:57 PM
Sadam was a secularist not an islamist fundamentalist.
Saddam and AQ hated each other. Saddam was a secular dictator, not an Islamic fundie.
This has always seemed to me a fine debating point, but an awfully thin reed for someone actually in a position of responsibility to cling to. Anyone can make a deal, right? And the fact that they share a language and a deep hatred for the U.S. makes a deal even more likely, no?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 5:59 PM
how does that make him more likely to get nukes
To get them, not so much. To hand them out once he had them, quite a bit. If Chavez gets nukes, that's not so great, but no one really thinks he'd give them to someone to use against the U.S.
we've proven that we need to conquer the world to keep us safe
I don't think "conquer the world" is particularly fair here. I'd reframe as "manage possible threats." Most can be managed non-militarily, a few (like Iraq) can't.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:03 PM
If terrorists could completely destroy the united states, giving nukes to the terrorists could make sense. Otherwise, not so much.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:03 PM
I'm relying on logic rather than on any indepth knowledge of the region, but wasn't Saddam's strongest interest maintaining power in Iraq rather than hurting the US? I haven't seen any indication that he would, e.g., trade control of Iraq for a chance to nuke Washington.
If those were his motivations, than Al Qaeda was a direct threat to his control of Iraq -- they didn't want him, a secularist, to stay in power. That doesn't mean that it would have been impossible for them to work together, but he had good reason to fear and oppose Al Q on his own account. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" only takes you so far.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:04 PM
I just got here, so fill me in. What would the problem be with #1, having a nuclear device go of in an American city?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:05 PM
"You're right, that is a hidden assumption. Why do you think it's weak?"
How was Saddam any crazier than the Islamist regime in Iran, which was closer to getting a bomb (and now is damn near to having one), and has actual, existing connections to actual, existing international terrorist organizations? For that matter, how was Saddam more of a threat than Kim Jong Il, who either was on his way to a bomb or already had one at the time? While you might argue that North Korea wasn't "invadable" before the war, the prospect of threatening Kim Jong Il with military force was more or less taken off the board the moment we embarked on a protracted nation-building excursion in Iraq which exhausted our military resources. This was not an unforseen consequence. This was not something unexpected that jumped up and bit startled hawks in the ass. The exhaustion of the military in Iraq is exactly what would've happened in the best of scenarios under the best of planning, and unless Saddam was the best possible target for the use of those resources - which even in 2002 was clearly not the case - the choice of Iraq for those resources was a mistake of catastrophic proportions.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:05 PM
LB, it sounds like you're saying that the only way for a wannabe world-conqueror to succeed is to take every country at once, as close to instantaneously as possible. If that were true, the utter impracticality of that strategy would reduce 3-7 to absurdity, and the case for would be disposed of. But I don't think the everywhere-now strategy is the only one possible, nor even that it exists. So there's no reductio, and there's still (in the mind of a 3-7ist) the question of which country or countries to take first.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:10 PM
the case for war
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:12 PM
I hate this argument I'm making. It's all nit and no pick.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:14 PM
Are you friggin' kidding me ogged? Are you trying to make me stroke out?
Assuming a non-suicidal state actor (ie, Saddam), why would he give something he's spent hundred of millions of dollars away? To an organization he doesn't control? Who will potentially use it against someone scary (ie, us) who will hold him responsible and nuke him and everyone in a 600 mile radius of him?
And if he is suicidal, why not smuggle it into Israel to detonate? Everyone in a 600 mile radius still dies, but (a) you have the lasting good memories of an unfortunate number of people in the ME, and (b) you potentially do destroy a country (b/c of emigration), rather than just piss it off.
Except for Russia, China, arguably India, and perhaps a handful of others, nukes are deterrents.
I will now try to find feeling in the right side of my body.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:14 PM
23- Wasn't saying that we couldn't possibly conquer the world, one bite at a time, just that unless that's the plan, Iraq isn't significant progress.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:15 PM
2. is the most misleading of all the statements. It isn't false, on its face, but placed at a level of abstraction that leads to a host of false conclusions. It is the sort of misstatement the current administration -- and the conservative talking heads -- have grown quite accustomed to. Frankly, I'm surprised, ogged, that you would print it in an unironic fashion.
9.11 doesn't have a neat and tidy "main lesson." 9.11 didn't suspend the rules of logic, or jumble up what constitutes imperialism and what doesn't. 9.11 proved nothing except that a group of terrorists were capable, on that day, of flying a plane into various buildings. It had nothing to do with nuclear weapons, or anyone's ability to create them. It certainly had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein.
The world didn't change after 9.11, except in as much as we let it. The jump from your 2. to 3. makes me pretty irate. That is no way to set up a logical argument.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:16 PM
Assuming a non-suicidal state actor (ie, Saddam), why would he give something he's spent hundred of millions of dollars away?
Yeah. This goes into the "badder & crazier" point. Saddam was morally utterly bankrupt, I'll say bad things about him all day, but doesn't seem to have been nuts in the sense of self-destructive. He was sane enough to hold onto power in Iraq for an awfully long time.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:19 PM
23: We should really put all our armies in Australia. But if we take Iraq we get to draw an additional Risk card!
Posted by grar too many mikes | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:20 PM
Text, color me naive, but the fact that there were people who were willing to blow up people not by the dozens, but by the tens of thousands, was a pretty big shock to me. Nothing ironic about it.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:20 PM
Out for a bit. Where's baa?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:21 PM
You thought that people who blow up buses stopped there because they thought doing more damage would be disproportionate? I never expected something like 9/11, but not because I thought no one was crazy enough to want to do it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:23 PM
Where's baa?
Briefing the Rumsfeld on the case against Iran. (Kidding.)
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:23 PM
It was a shock to me too, ogged. Actually, what was a shock was that it could be done -- that anybody who wanted to do that also had the means to. That shock is probably what led me to be convinced, as you were, that the Iraq war wasn't such a bad idea.
I think it's what led most moderate supporters of the war to support it. And that's pretty sickening, isn't it? Getting punched in the face is a shock, too, but it doesn't validate retributive action against anybody except the guy who punched you.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:25 PM
9.11 proved nothing except that a group of terrorists were capable, on that day, of flying a plane into various buildings.
Agree entirely. I had a cost saving national defense plan that involved neuticles and strapping tape for every Bush supporter. And apparently ogged. Sadly, I am not a member of Congress.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:26 PM
color me naive
Don't mind if I do.
but the fact that there were people who were willing to blow up people not by the dozens, but by the tens of thousands
Hey, wow, that's pretty bad. Ever hear of this thing called the Twentieth Century? They had a couple world wars, a handful of genocides, a nuclear arms race, and right in the middle Henry Kissinger wins a Nobel Peace Prize. Pretty rough stuff.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:27 PM
Put another way, ogged: knock off 1 and 2. They aren't a part of the debate. Now do we go to war? Would you have supported the Iraq war if not for 9.11?
I wouldn't have. Which makes me a giant ass. Because 1 and 2 are irrelevant to this debate. But it isn't just you who positioned the argument for war in this manner.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:28 PM
The whole thing was based on exaggerating Saddam's capacities and exaggerating his craziness. There was an enormous element of projection here -- after all, the US DOES have all forms of "WMDs", and Bush IS President.
We have proclaimed the right to wage preemptive war whenever we want, to torture, to hold prisoners incommunicado forever, to ignore the Geneva agreement, and to hold ourself exempt from all formns of international law.
As with the ticking bomb, a lot of important decision-making seems to be being done on the basis of principles extracted from movies.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:31 PM
neuticles and strapping tape for every Bush supporter
Also "fauxvaries". Carry on.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:31 PM
I'm strongly tempted to aid Ogged by pointing out flaws in lots of stuff being tossed at him, but it's hard to see how that wouldn't rapidly slide (as this discussion is already slightly sliding) into one being argued with as if one were defending G. W. Bush, and that would be tiresome.
I took responsibility for my pre-war position by sticking it on my sidebar, though. In hindsight, my views is somewhat different, of course, but not entirely.
I'd certainly retrospectively have argued for, at the least, putting off any invasion until at least fall, and seeing how things went, or for delaying any invasion until after President Bush had left office, or for delaying it indefinitely until such time as the inspection and sanctions regime had fully failed.
But that's retrospectively, and introduces some problematic questions of its own. (Subtle hint about my qualms in the first paragraph above is that I answered a number of questions asked in this thread in the post I link to here; not necessarily satisfactorily, of course, but nonetheless.) (Another hint is that people who make absolute statements about what hypothetical then-future-Saddam-Hussein would do, well, I'd like to consult them on some horse bets, please.)
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:33 PM
(I'm laughing like a fool at 'fauxvaries'.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:33 PM
Seriously, though I was shocked to hell in the moment of 9/11, the only shocking thing about it was that it took so long. America has managed to be a major world power for a very long time without ever taking a major hit the way every other country in the world gets blown up, invaded, bombed, and mowed over. What this would demonstrate to anyone in anybody's imagination regarding Saddam Hussein is utterly beyond me.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:34 PM
"The fact that there were people who were willing to blow up people not by the dozens, but by the tens of thousands, was a pretty big shock to me."
? Did you skip all of your history classes ?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:36 PM
(Another hint is that people who make absolute statements about what hypothetical then-future-Saddam-Hussein would do, well, I'd like to consult them on some horse bets, please.)
I'm not sure which way you mean this to cut, but I'd say it's true not only of Saddam Hussein, but of any other world leader. Which means to me that a strategy based on the idea that the existence of a nuke-desiring-but-not-possessing Saddam Hussein is a fundamentally different problem than the existence of a nuke-desiring-but-not-possessing Hugo Chavez is ill-founded.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:41 PM
42: Thanks, LB. I think my work here is done.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:46 PM
This post has put something together for me:
Yglasias often talks about the way that the administration misleads, in particular, with regard to the build-up to this war. According to Yglasias, they don't lie, exactly, but they present information misleadingly.
Here is what I think this administration does: it makes nonsequitors. No individual statement is a lie. What is a lie is that there is any logical connection between them. The argument itself is a lie, though no piece of evidence is fabricated. (of course, some pieces of evidence were fabricated, but there's always some out).
Misleading through obvious fallacy: that may be Karl Rove's true genius. Or maybe I've been at work too long. Thoughts?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:47 PM
6 is my problem. I read it as saying, "No risk of a nuclear bomb going off in an American city, however small, (however small the risk, I mean--not however small the bomb) is acceptable." I was against the war because I thought the the risk of Sadam sending a nuke to Manhattan via Al Qaeda was small--not nonexistent, given 1-3 and 5, but considering sanctions, strikes on the Desert Fox model and deterrence, not large; and on the other hand, I thought the cost of an invasion of Iraq would be quite high.
So I think the main problem with your argument is that instead of balancing risk against cost in that way, you've decided that a nuclear strike would be so awful that we should do anything in our power to prevent it. I wouldn't call that crazy, but in the technical sense of the term, it's not rational.
Posted by Ben Doyle | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:48 PM
I'd like to go through a Bush speech and count the number of non sequitors. Somebody writes these things for him, and I think that all the non sequitors are calculated.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:50 PM
Another hint is that people who make absolute statements about what hypothetical then-future-Saddam-Hussein would do, well, I'd like to consult them on some horse bets, please.
So how do you feel about people who made or, minimally, believed, statements about what would happen in Iraq after we removed the government of the last thirty years? They somehow seemed more credible for being able to pull candy-colored dreams directly out of their asses?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:56 PM
They are all reasonable arguments, but they never applied in Saddam's case. His ability to attack in this fashion was much stronger in the 1990's than in 2001-2003, of course the fabrications made this not so clear.
They are however all excellent arguments for war against the real threats-nations like Saudi Arabia who have supported terrorism against the United States in one form or another.
Posted by The Blue Flautist | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 6:57 PM
44: It's not so much that there were people "willing" to do so (hello, serial killers? mass murderers? the existence of these kinds of people isn't an issue)... it's more that there existed, within the U.S., a specific organized network of people, divided into different cells, living quietly over the course of years, receiving financial support from outside the country through hard-to-trace financial channels, who were then capable of putting a complex multi-part attack into motion, and succeeding against pretty steep odds, etc etc etc.
In this context, 9/11 certainly *was* a revelation.
In other words, there existed precisely the kind of "delivery system" that would be needed to deliver a nuclear weapon on an unsuspecting populace. And #21 is pretty much beyond the pale -- it's not about American cities, anyway. A nuclear weapon in downtown London? Tel Aviv? Moscow? Paris?
All of this, of course, is completely tangential to the issue of Iraq, or other, *actual*, effective means of preventing nuclear "proliferation" (coop threat reduction, or whatever you want to call it).
What I'm saying is, this comment is not (necessarily) meant as a defense of the war. Just pointing out that saying "there have always been genocidal nuke-desiring mass-murdering maniacs" is hardly a refutation of Ogged's #2.
Posted by foo | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:00 PM
there existed precisely the kind of "delivery system" that would be needed to deliver a nuclear weapon on an unsuspecting populace
This would be true if, like box cutters, nukes could legally be carried on to a plane. I admit I don't know the law on this. (The larger point is that it isn't clear to me that, outside of the acts of 9-11, the terrorists did much that was illegal. I assume trying to smuggle a nuke into the country would be a bigger deal.)
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:04 PM
52: what is a refutation of #2 is that 9.11 didn't have a single "main lesson," and moreover, didn't have any lesson at all to teach with regard to Saddam Hussein or Iraq.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:08 PM
Mentioning 9.11 is a good way to anger up the blood though. That's its function in the "proof" for war.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:10 PM
54: Sure, there doesn't have to be "a" main lesson. Just trying to say that, if ogged chose to take away a lesson from 9/11 that was something like what I outlined, he might not be completely wrong. Note again, I outlined something he *didn't* write (so I know I'm just putting words in his mouth). And again, not trying to make a claim for how well this sort of reasoning supports any kind of war in Iraq. Just wishful thinking, maybe.
53: I'm not really talking about the planes, more about the resident network of financiers, handlers, etc that one would assume would support 9/11-style attacks. Once you get the nuke into some country X, you still need to pick it up, store it, transport it, position it, set it off, etc.
I mean, on a completely different note, this is why a phrase like "war on terror" is so pernicious. It's not a war on a concept (as thousands have pointed out), it's a war on a specific organization, or collection of organizations, with specific supporters, specific structure, specific human capital and technological expertise.
Posted by foo | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:19 PM
there existed, within the U.S., a specific organized network of people, divided into different cells, living quietly over the course of years, receiving financial support from outside the country through hard-to-trace financial channels, who were then capable of putting a complex multi-part attack into motion, and succeeding
Terrorism in the US itself was nothing new (what was Oklahoma City?). Foreign terrorism was nothing new, either (what of the previous WTC bombing? what of the Millennium attacks?). The only thing 9/11 added to these was body count (in the case of McVeigh and the Blind Sheihk) and success (in the Millennium). This wasn't a revelation to anyone who'd been reading on the subject for the previous several years.
The sight of the Twin Towers collapsing into steel and ash was a visceral shock, but the actual event itself - a major terrorist attack within the U.S. - was being anticipated, discussed, and debated when I was in high school in the mid-to-late nineties in mainstream newsweeklies. That most of the country chose to spend the 2000 election obsessed on whether or not Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet doesn't take away the fact that we knew better.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:19 PM
Sorry ogged, I was on a plane all day.
* * *
I hope you all will excuse me if I go a bit off topic here, or at least, go beyond the argument as defined by ogged.
It is completely correct, in my view, to regard nuclear capabilities as the central issue. Very smart people (Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer, e.g.) opposed the war because they thought that a nuclear armed Saddan was not much of a problem.
So, why would Saddam with nukes be bad? One reason, and the one highlighted by ogged (and by the admnisitration) is the nuclear hand-off scenario. But that's far from the only reason. Gulf War I would have been a much harder option had Hussein had nukes. Hussein's pan-Arabism would have been much more threatening with nukes. The longevity of the regime would have been greatly, greatly increased by the development of nukes. The chance of a horrendous outcome involving Israel and numerous Arab countries was much higher with Saddam and nukes.
I suspect people like Cheney and Rumsfeld saw a shitbird, police state regime openly defying the civilized world and sitting on 20% of the Earth's oil. They also thought that America's strategic interests were not served by having only one of the major Gulf states a reliable ally/client. And that's what they thought *before* 9-11. So there was every reason to want to take out Saddam before he went nuclear and became a basically insoluble problem.
Then 9-11 came and added additional reasons and additional urgency. The new reasons: greater fear of nuclear handoff, yet more worries about relying on the Saudi regime, and a belief that the Middle Ease needed more that "management" of horrendous regimes to defang militant Islamism. It also created a unique moment of political possibility, as text notes above.
The counter-arguments we all know:
1. This will create more militant islamism
2. Given chances of success, the stakes aren;t worth the cost (financial, human, and in insitutional strain on the armed forces)
3. Iraq cannot be transformed into a basically stable, pro-American client
4. This just empowers Shiites and Iran.
5. And, of course, who cares if Saddam gets nukes
Reasonable concerns all.
* * *
To return briefly to the argument reconstructed by ogged, I would say the weak point is #6. Why would Saddam ever give access to his nukes to an Al Queda like group? I admit, it doesn't seem the likeliest thing in the world, but neither does *trying to assassinate a former president of the US*.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:19 PM
neither does *trying to assassinate a former president of the US*
True, but if you'll recall, Saddam got burned pretty bad pretty quickly on that (in that we found out very fast that he was behind that, and by all accounts to his surprise). If anything, the assassination attempt - his one dalliance in a major terrorist-style operation - backfired fairly quickly by (1) failing miserably and (2) fingering him for the job. After that Saddam had to know that any similar-scaled operation - much less one on the scale of 9/11 - would be traced back to him fairly quickly, meaning there would be no way for him to get away with nuking Manhattan by proxy.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:26 PM
57: Again, yeah, I know all these things. And agree. But there's a difference between "things which people who are paying attention know," and "things which are so widely known (and feared) that elected politicians are given the 'political capital' to attempt their radical solution."
Although I normally hate the phrase "political capital." And I'm *not* arguing that invading Iraq was the right means of "solution" here. But...
I mean, Clinton is (wrongly) derided for lobbing cruise missiles at Afghanistan in 2000 after the (same) network bombs a U.S. ship in Yemen. Everyone (who's paying attention) *knows* AQ did it. But do you think (even if he had no other political problems at the time) that he would have invaded Afghanistan under any circumstance?
Just over a year later, the invasion of Afghanistan is widely supported. And only because a spectacular event has made what was politically untenable into something that's politically feasible.
None of this (that AQ, based in Afghanistan, is a serious threat) is a surprise to those who've been paying attention... it had always been just a matter of time.
Posted by foo | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:28 PM
Also -- assassination is incommensurably cheaper than giving away your nuke. It might be reckless, but it doesn't involve loss of an immense asset.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:29 PM
Sure. As I said, #6 is the weak point. It's just that if you are the president of the US, and you've just seen recent example that Islamic terrorist groups have ambition and abilities that exceeded your worst fears, you might not be so eager to bet on your understanding of Saddam Hussein's motivations.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:30 PM
Sure. As I said, #6 is the weak point. It's just that if you are the president of the US, and you've just seen recent example that Islamic terrorist groups have ambition and abilities that exceeded your worst fears, you might not be so eager to bet on your understanding of Saddam Hussein's motivations.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:30 PM
"Then 9-11 came and added additional reasons and additional urgency."
That is false. I am going to risk being shrill here, and repeat that 9-11 added no urgency for us to invade Iraq. Any sort of connection would require the following:
(1) actual evidence that Hussein had any relationship at all with Al-Qaida.
(2) actual evidence that Hussein was capable of creating nuclear weapons to give to Al-Qaida.
The administration presented false and misleading evidence in order to try to demonstrate (2). They barely even tried with (1).
Often, this point is presented in the negative: "we didn't have any proof that Hussein would not communicate with Al-Qaida in the future." Sure. We also didn't have any evidence that Donald Rumsfeld wouldn't try to contact Al-Qaida in the future. You don't usually have to prove the falsity of a statement for which there isn't any evidence in order not to act on it.
These are, frankly, shitty arguments, and I don't think anyone would have made them or fell for them without financial or emotional (respectively) reasons for doing so.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:37 PM
you might not be so eager to bet on your understanding of Saddam Hussein's motivations.
Sure, but replace "Saddam Hussein" with "Kim Jong Il" or "Ayatollah Khamenei" and you can (more easily) justify invading North Korea or Iran, who had/have much more well-developed weapons programs and clearer, more well-established connections to terrorism and weapons proliferation.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:39 PM
"[if] you've just seen recent example that Islamic terrorist groups have ambition and abilities that exceeded your worst fears, you might not be so eager to bet on your understanding of Saddam Hussein's motivations."
Why? Hussein isn't a terrorist group. His abilities were not in any way demonstrated by Al-Qaida's abilities. The only thing connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida is that they are both composed of arab people. There is nothing else there.
This is using 9.11 as an excuse for gross conjecture as to a completely unrelated problem.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:42 PM
baa -- But he is betting on them. He's making a huge, huge bet that they're dangerous enough to justify the costs (financial, human) of taking Saddam out. That's what's wrong with the "He might have been enough of a danger to be worth the war" argument -- it ignores the costs of the war, and the existence of other competing dangers who may be more difficult to counter in light of the war.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:42 PM
Isle, one of things about Saddam was that even if he wasn't suicidal or nuts, he was often dumb or reckless enough that that didn't matter. His attempt on GHW Bush is a good example: he was surprised that it was traced back to him, which is to say, he undertook a possibly suicidal action because he didn't think it was suicidial. I actually tried to explain this in the blog's early days.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:43 PM
baa:
The chance of a horrendous outcome involving Israel and numerous Arab countries was much higher with Saddam and nukes.
But this is precisely why there were other, better (later) solutions available. If Hussein with a nuke is a problem for Israel, I trust Israel to solve it with or without our open OK. Everyone in the neighborhood hates its guts already, so the costs are constrained. If Hussein with a nuke is a problem for other Arab nations, that will become clear as he approaches a nuclear weapon (some time after sanctions fail). At that point, other Arab nations (and Turkey) will be willing to help us, and our press in the area (and world wide) looks a lot better.
Much of the time, sitting on your hands is a better use of your time than acting for the sake of acting. jAlso, never enter into matters concerned with death with a Sicilian.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:44 PM
Doesn't several decades of remaining in power over a war-torn country provide a pretty strong argument that he wasn't suicidal? Even if someone takes big chances, if they keep on working for him it's a reasonable guess that they aren't wild, irrational chances.
(Even what eventually took him down was his failure to guess that we would act irrationally. He let in inspectors sufficiently to assure them that there were no NBC weapons -- not realizing that that would be insufficient to stave off war was, I think, not a sign of being suicidal, just a bad guess.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:47 PM
Ogged, that's a pretty weak fucking argument when you're talking about Saddam getting his country nuked, which is exactly what we're talking about here.
Your position also assumes that Saddam is some sort of bizarre Arab Bond villain, whose primary motivation is the destruction of his hated arch-nemesis America,* so much so that he'll not only sign his death warrant, but sacrifice the power and prestige that will come through simply being the dictator of a nuclear power by up and giving a nuke to people he thinks are crazy, all on the off-chance that they might pull it off and blow up New York for him. This is less a psychological profile than a movie cliche.
*not actually his arch-nemesis
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:53 PM
I can't agree that 9-11 was irrelevant. None of the other things mentioned so far (20th century brutality, the first WTC bombing, etc.) seem quite on point. The campaigns of genocide took a while to gin up, and they were always part of some established political struggle. The first bombing was really business as usual: a van full of explosives, one person killed. Yeah, my phrase about "people willing to kill by the tens of thousands" is horribly imprecise, but I mean catastrophic terrorist attacks. Look, a lot of radical Islamists were upset with Al Qaeda after 9-11 (I think I linked to this story), because they had killed so many innocents. Al Qaeda had to find its own John Yoo to justify that and future attacks. There's just a high, high bar of conscience that needs to be vaulted before people do things like 9-11.
As for there being no connection, was Zarqawi in Iraq before the invasion or wasn't he? I thought the consensus was that elements in Saddam's regime had given him shelter. And didn't the Goldberg NYer story have Islamists in Iraq? Again, if I were president, this isn't something that I would need proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:54 PM
"So how do you feel about people who made or, minimally, believed, statements about what would happen in Iraq after we removed the government of the last thirty years?"
Neutral? Same as I feel in general about people who make "statements"?
In my view, removing the word "absolute" as a modifier from a statement drastically changes the meaning of the statement. (Even statements about statements.)
Generally speaking, people who make absolute predictions about the future behavior of other human beings tend to be on thin ice, at best. I don't know why that should be controversial, but, then, I don't understand why anyone would claim absolute knowledge of future human behavior.
Making mere predictions about the future behavior of other human beings, however: not necessarily so much.
Since this apparently is confusing, I shall provide an example. "George Bush is apt to mangle the English language in some statement in the next month." That's a prediction. It's on reasonably safe grounds.
"George Bush would never not mangle the English language at precisely 2:13 p.m. EST, on 11/22/05." That's an absolute prediction; it's, okay, not on entirely unsafe ground, but it's not precisely a sure thing, either.
Puzzled query, though: are you suggesting that only people with one particular policy preference or set of preferences have "made or, minimally, believed, statements people who made or, minimally, believed, statements about what would happen in Iraq after we removed the government of the last thirty years after we removed the government of the last thirty years"? Or that only people with one particular policy preference or set of preferences have made statements about what would happen in Iraq if we didn't remove the government of Iraq?
I'm really not following, I'm afraid.
(Minor factual point: anyone insisting that Saddam Hussein was, flatly, a "secularist," isn't terribly familiar with the last dozen year or so of his regime and behavior; neither is an assertion that enemies can never cooperate will based on human history ("Stalin and Hitler would never cooperate!"; "Stalin and Churchill would never cooperate!"); nonetheless, this is not an argument from me that I think or ever thought colloboration by SH and AQ was likely; that's beside the point, however.)
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:54 PM
Isle, you're making good points and I'm hesitant to say anything given that you're only really attacking me, but keep it reasonably civil.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:57 PM
I am new here, but I gotta say, text is right. Arabs do not have a history of joining together in the face of an enemy other than for rhetorical purposes. Pan-Arabism isn't something espoused by anyone except leaders of Arab countries with microphones in their faces. Members of AQ may or may not speak Arabic, and unless they are Iraqi, they are mutually incomprehensible (the Arab world being a diglossic society). Hussein was no Islamic fundamentalist; he invaded the only Islamic regime in the region, resulting in over two million casualties on each side. There was no way; that's what makes just the idea of linking AQ and Iraq laughable, and why I for one opposed the war from the get-go.
Posted by andrea | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:57 PM
Isles:
Sure, but replace "Saddam Hussein" with "Kim Jong Il" or "Ayatollah Khamenei" and you can (more easily) justify invading North Korea or Iran, who had/have much more well-developed weapons programs and clearer, more well-established connections to terrorism and weapons proliferation.
I hear this a lot, but I don't really get it. Both North Korea and Iran present much harder (perhaps insoluble) military options, and were politically off the table. It can't be that if there's an impossible to hit #1 target, you can't go after #2. And none of this bears on the "strategic" (for lack of a better word) reasons for wanting to remove Hussein.
LB:
One point is that the weak point in the "nuclear handoff" case is Hussein's lack of motivation to handoff, and that this is a gamble. Another point is that there are all sorts of reasons to want to remove Hussein. I hope we both agree that all of the potential costs must be weighed against all of the potential benefits.
ogged,
Bingo! Your copy of On Tyranny is coming via parcel post.
Also, for anyone who cares, the Walt & Mearsheimer essay I failed to link is here
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:57 PM
And, of course, none of the doomsday scenarios about what Saddam might have done if he had evaded or outwaited the sanctions and gotten his hands on a nuke are impossible. They're possible. They just aren't near the level of likeliness that justifies burning a whole bunch of innocent people alive now, rather than waiting for a while and seeing if it still looks like it's going to be necessary.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:57 PM
was Zarqawi in Iraq before the invasion or wasn't he?
I thought he was in the Kurdish zone available to the US.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:58 PM
who made the assertion that enemies will never cooperate? Is that assertion necessary to demonstrate that Iraq and Al-Qaida, in fact, weren't cooperating?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:58 PM
"After that Saddam had to know that any similar-scaled operation - much less one on the scale of 9/11 - would be traced back to him fairly quickly, meaning there would be no way for him to get away with nuking Manhattan by proxy."
Given his pattern of consistently rational decisions, and consistently demonstrated ability to correctly predict how others would respond if he, say, invaded a neighboring country, sure, he had to know.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:58 PM
was Zarqawi in Iraq before the invasion or wasn't he?
He was in Northern Iraq, outside of Saddam's control. Jesus fucking Christ, it's like winter '02 all over again.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:58 PM
79 to 73
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 7:59 PM
Oh yeah, Gary, because Pure And Utter Madness is the only reason why one country would invade another. What's the thread topic again?
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:00 PM
I thought he was in the Kurdish zone available to the US.
Right, and either did or didn't stay at a hospital in Baghdad.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:00 PM
Right, and either did or didn't stay at a hospital in Baghdad.
This is the point where nobody can agree how many legs he has.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:01 PM
Sorry, SCMT, missed you there. I think, basically, that there were no options other than the US for perventing "nuclear Saddam." For *constraining* nuclear Saddam, I agree, the neighbors would have been useful.
anyone insisting that Saddam Hussein was, flatly, a "secularist," isn't terribly familiar with the last dozen year or so of his regime and behavior
Thank you, Gary Farber!
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:02 PM
72: do you argue that 9.11 might be relevant apart from any connection between Iraq and Al-Qaida? I'd like you to articulate why. I will concede that 9.11 was shocking.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:02 PM
This is the point where nobody can agree how many legs he has.
We can all agree that the answer isn't "three."
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:03 PM
My 77 is also to 73. It's not necessary to show that awful outcomes were impossible to show that they don't seem to have been likely, or immediately likely, enough to justify a war.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:03 PM
ogged: is evidence that Zarqawi either did or didn't stay in a hospital in Bagdad enough to presume a strategic alliance between the Iraqi government and Al-Qaida? Is that all we had to go on? Would you base any other type of conclusion on such flimsy evidence?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:05 PM
don't seem to have been likely, or immediately likely, enough to justify a war
This is exactly the question. One thing to keep in mind is that, as far as the president of the US is concerned, American lives count for a lot more than anybody else's life. We debate from the standpoint of justice and fairness, but the people who actually have to make the decisions can only factor in justice and fairness as secondary considerations.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:06 PM
We debate from the standpoint of justice and fairness, but the people who actually have to make the decisions can only factor in justice and fairness as secondary considerations.
'Scuse me?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:09 PM
"The only thing connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida is that they are both composed of arab people. There is nothing else there."
Pull my other one. (Again, not making an argument that SH and AQ were apt to go into business together; but this is ludicrous.)
"Doesn't several decades of remaining in power over a war-torn country provide a pretty strong argument that he wasn't suicidal? "
Not so much. It's an indicator of past behavior, but not so much future. Circumstances change. States of mind change. Good old [GODWIN DELETION] had been in power in 1941 for eight years, but this wasn't a useful indicator for his behavior four years later.
And invading Iran, invading Kuwait, trying the Bush hit (assuming that's correctly pinned, which I couldn't personally testify to), are certainly signs that his decision-making/prediction-making mechanisms weren't necessarily the most reliable.
Ditto plenty of reports strongly suggestive that his mental state in the last couple of years pre-invasion had been deteriorating, though, of course, I again couldn't testify to how accurate or inaccurate said reports were.
"As for there being no connection, was Zarqawi in Iraq before the invasion or wasn't he? I thought the consensus was that elements in Saddam's regime had given him shelter."
Consensus? I think that's a difficult assertion to support.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:09 PM
yeah, what was that?
Posted by andrea | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:10 PM
#91: But there's always a non-zero chance that someone out there hates us, wants to do us great ill, and will find a way to do so. You can't use the President's responsibility to Americans to let him out of making the hard calls. He can't just be allowed to go around capping anyone who hates us. Because, given the assumption of easy nuke hand-offs between people who hate us, that's what you mean.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:10 PM
Both North Korea and Iran present much harder (perhaps insoluble) military options, and were politically off the table.
And Iraq's working out so well, then?
In the case of North Korea, we don't have to actually invade. All we would need is the credible threat of force to actually get somewhere in disarming Kim Jong Il. The key word there is "credible." Everyone knows we couldn't invade North Korea if we wanted to because our army's stuck in Iraq. You can't threaten anyone with an unloaded gun. Ditto for Iran right now: if anything we've strengthened their position in the ME as a result of this war.
And if Iran and North Korea don't work for you, then hell, it would've been nice to just bother getting Afghanistan right. 200 billion dollars there might've actually done some fucking good. Hell, we could've used some of the change to maybe run around and capture terrorists instead of, y'know, MAKING them. At this point we could've fought terror more effectively by sitting home.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:10 PM
Actually text, I don't much care about Zarqawi. The fact that the Saddam and Al Qaeda were both Arab, Sunni and avowedly hostile to the US seems like enough.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:10 PM
"Pan-Arabism isn't something espoused by anyone except leaders of Arab countries with microphones in their faces. "
A weak form of that assertion is quite supportable. As phrased, not so much.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:11 PM
you make it sound like a balance of fairly close probabilities. But there just wasn't good evidence that (1) Saddam was capable of creating nuclear weapons, or (2) Had any means to get them to us.
What you are arguing is that almost no evidence of the threat is enough, where you have unrelated prior "bad" acts on the part of Saddam, and a recent -- also unrelated -- attack on U.S. soil. No evidence is enough evidence.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:11 PM
uh, AQ is likely not even predominantly arab. islam (in reference to Sunni in 97) has nothing to do with this; islamism is a totally different issue.
Posted by andrea | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:13 PM
And "immediately likely" isn't a question. The administration knew that Saddam didn't have a nuke now, and wouldn't be able to make one in the near future. They knew we had years, and that we could extend those years by maintaining the inspections regime (not saying that maintenance could go on forever, nor that it was free; just that it was a stopgap means of keeping the clock from ticking).
We chose to go to war rather than to wait and see if it looked avoidable later.l
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:13 PM
Gary, UAR lasted how many months?
Posted by andrea | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:14 PM
97: I've got hindsight on my side here, and I rather ureflectingly supported the war myself, but I just can't see how common religion plus common enemy is enough. That just doesn't seem to be a rational way of deciding whether or not to go to war.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:14 PM
you're right, text. it's not fucking enough.
Posted by andrea | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:14 PM
"Pull my other one. (Again, not making an argument that SH and AQ were apt to go into business together; but this is ludicrous.)"
"Consensus? I think that's a difficult assertion to support."
Gary, this is cheap. Either make an argument that there was a connection between Saddam and Qaeda or don't make one, but don't make pithy little comments indicating that you might have an argument that you just don't feel like making.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:15 PM
AQ is likely not even predominantly arab
At the risk of going off topic, ??
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:15 PM
Sorry, ogged ;)
But it's true. Muslim, yes. But there are more non-Arab Muslims than Arab Muslims. That's all I'm saying.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:16 PM
"The only thing connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida is that they are both composed of arab people. There is nothing else there."
Pull my other one. (Again, not making an argument that SH and AQ were apt to go into business together; but this is ludicrous.)
Tell me, Gary Farber, what else was there?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:16 PM
But there are more non-Arab Muslims than Arab Muslims.
As a Muslim, I'm aware of this. :-)
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:18 PM
92: does what I said not make sense or are you (strongly) disagreeing?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:19 PM
awesome. sorry. i'm not muslim, but study the arab world. it just seems some tend to paint a broad brushstroke when they should be using an exacto knife.
Posted by andrea | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:20 PM
"who made the assertion that enemies will never cooperate?"
#10. Subsequently, #75. Close to explicitly, 66. A couple of other comments have implied it in this case or come close to so doing.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:20 PM
The latter. As a voter, I'm voting for the candidate (if I can identify such) who's putting justice and fairness pretty damn high up on the list of considerations, and I don't see any structural reason why such a means of running the country is impossible.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:21 PM
113 to 110.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:22 PM
Toads:
I think we have basically different views about the facts on North Korea that will make useful discussion difficult. I believe the barrier to invasion of NoKo is their ability to inflict millions of casualties on the South, and their complete willingness to do so. And I doubt that with this reality any threat of force is going to get us what we want. Likewise, you see Afghanistan as a big disaster. I don't. Will Iraq be a stable, pro-American regime in 5 years. I sure hope so, and I would give the odds now at >70%.
On Iran, have to agree that switching from Sunni dictatorship to Shiite somethingelse-ship probably helps them. I don't know how much that changes their nuclear ambitions.
SCMT:
He can't just be allowed to go around capping anyone who hates us.
True, not anyone, but maybe some lattitude for the great powers is in order. It is too bad we couldn't bribe the French and Russians enough to give this this cover of multilateralsim, I grant you.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:23 PM
Close to explicitly, 66.
What? He said there was no connection between the two, and that is understood to mean that they hate each other and are enemies?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:23 PM
113: for the same reason that justice and fairness to other people (likely) aren't at the top of your list where your children's safety and happiness are concerned: not everyone gets the same consideration, depending on our relation to them: your life counts immeasurably more to George Bush (yes, even you, LB), than those of several dozen perfectly innocent Iraqis. That is, I think, as it should be (maybe not as it should be in utopia, but now).
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:25 PM
10) states that Iraq and AQ were enemies and therefore unlikely to cooperate. It doesn not state that enemies never cooperate.
75) states "Arabs do not have a history of joining together in the face of an enemy other than for rhetorical purposes." I'll not evaluate the statement, as I don't know lots about arab history. But it does not say what you say it says.
66) That one's mine. Here's what I wrote:
"Why? Hussein isn't a terrorist group. His abilities were not in any way demonstrated by Al-Qaida's abilities. The only thing connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida is that they are both composed of arab people. There is nothing else there.
This is using 9.11 as an excuse for gross conjecture as to a completely unrelated problem."
I did not say that ememies never cooperate, but rather that we had no evidence that these specific enemies were cooperating. You know the difference between the two statements, Gary.
Which were the posts that implied that enemies can never cooperate?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:25 PM
yes, i only said that AQ and SH never cooperated. khalas.
Posted by andrea | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:30 PM
This has been good, and sorry if I've been too heated, but I must run.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:30 PM
Will Iraq be a stable, pro-American regime in 5 years. I sure hope so, and I would give the odds now at >70%.
If you do indeed believe this, baa, then you and I believe in wildly different, looking-glass versions of reality.
Let me ask you this: before the invasion, did you believe that the regime we were going to establish in Iraq was going to be a democracy? Do you believe so now?
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:31 PM
Re: 117
I don't consider myself entitled to treat others unjustly to protect my children, certainly not on this level. (Hey, that kid down the hall keeps on being mean to Sally. He's shorter than her now, but his Dad's big, and the whole family is unstable, I think they deal drugs -- five years down the road he could be a real problem. Better douse him with gasoline and light the match now, before he gets too big for me to handle.)
If George Bush considers my life incommensurably more valuable than that of several dozen innocent Iraqis, I'd like him to please stop.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:31 PM
"The administration knew that Saddam didn't have a nuke now, and wouldn't be able to make one in the near future. "
It may not be most useful to regard, consider, or speak of "the administration" as a homogenous entity with a single mind. More useful might be discussing those individuals whose views controlled, and what they believed, although determining what anyone actually believes is a bit problematic.
"Gary, UAR lasted how many months?"
I'd have to look up the precise number of months, and it would depend upon your definitions, but I seem to recall the Syria-Egypt-Yemen linkage going for about 2 1/2 years, give or take, although Nasser and Sadat kept using the name through '71, and Syria still uses the UAR flag.
Arab nations continue to use the same flag colors, of course (remember the fuss over the Iraqi "Governing Council" government going to blue, like the Israelis?), but more to the point, I often read individual Arabs saying positive things, in lip service, at least, but also seemingly reflecting some genuine, if not entirely realistic, desire, about the theoretical goodness of pan-Arab unity.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:32 PM
It may not be most useful to regard, consider, or speak of "the administration" as a homogenous entity with a single mind. More useful might be discussing those individuals whose views controlled, and what they believed, although determining what anyone actually believes is a bit problematic.
What the fuck ever, Gary. I don't know who, in the Administration, knew what, because I'm not a mind reader. I know that anyone with access to and paying attention to the intelligence that's come out since the war knew that there was no basis for believing that Iraq had a nuke. This sort of skepticism is desperately annoying unless it's in service of a point. Did you have one?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:35 PM
read it in arabic, gary. these states, no matter how arbitrary their borders were drawn, are not in planning together, nor in cahoots. some are oil-producing; some are not. a couple have signed peace treaties with israel; some are still officially at war. some get along; some blow former prime ministers of their neighbors to bits. in fact, one could argue, i mean, i argue, that jewish and arab nationalisms fed each other in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and thus the homogenizing factor which you believe you see to be 'arabness' is as much an ideological construct as anything else. and again, there was never any unity. no one in morocco could understand a word of someone in iraq. period.
Posted by andrea | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:35 PM
edited: i mean that arabness is a tool used rhetorically against perceived outsiders in global discourse. this is not the language used internally. sorry for that mistake there.
Posted by andrea | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:36 PM
Seven reasons why it was right to gun down Jean Charles de Menezes:
1. He was a darkie, so he might've been al Qaeda.
2. He came out of a house that was under surveillance, never mind that the surveillor was on a pee break when he left
3. He wore a bulky padded jacket, so he could've carried bombs. OK, it was a jean jacket, but from afar it's hard to tell the difference.
4. He ran away and jumped over a ticket barrier when called on to stop. Well, not really, but he might have if he'd been called on.
5. Did I mention he was a darkie?
6. (Left blank for future use.)
7. We don't shoot to kill. We shoot to incapacitate. With dum dum bullets.
Posted by ogmb | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:40 PM
Not much of a darkie, I think.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:41 PM
If George Bush considers my life incommensurably more valuable than that of several dozen innocent Iraqis, I'd like him to please stop.
Well, I didn't say "incommensurably." I figure 1 LB = 45 Iraqis. Seriously, I do wonder how much of the disagreement about what was "justified" is really about this point. I keep asking myself what I would have done in Bush's place, with the full weight of responsibiity for any American civilians killed by terrorism on my shoulders. Consideration for the nationals of other countries would, frankly, be damn low on my list of concerns, at least until we were talking about truly catastrophic harms (like the invasion has turned out, I'd argue, to be) or until it would make protecting Americans harder, and not easier. I think most Americans agree more with me than with you, but that's just a guess.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:43 PM
ogged, do you think that's part of the problem of nationalism in the first place? i remember thinking how pissed i was at oprah for lamenting the fact that the victims of katrina were 'citizens in trouble,' as if their citizenship was of paramount importance, rather than their humanity. shit, i think i've been reading too much agamben lately. whatever, just a thought. i see the differential value of people to be a problematic.
Posted by andrea | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:45 PM
105: you really feel it's necessary to demonstrate that either a) ""The only thing connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida is that they are both composed of arab people. There is nothing else there." is false; or b) that it's difficult to support the assertion that "the consensus was that elements in Saddam's regime had given him shelter"?
Sigh.
We'll do "a" first:
1) The majority of members of AQ are Muslim. So are the majority of Iraqis.
Okay, we're done, it's falsified. (It only takes one to break "nothing else there," you know.) End of story.
But, hey, let's shoot for the stars, and mention:
2) Most members of AQ do not think well of U.S. foreign policy. Most members of the SH regime's government did not think well of U.S. foreign policy.
Is the stake protruding too much now? Is 3 going overboard?
3) Iraqi soldiers and American soldiers fought against each other and died within the decade prior to 2003. Al Qaeda operatives and American agents or weapons fought against and people on the other side in the decade prior to 2003.
And for extra, extra, extra, credit:
4) Saddam Hussein was happy to allow a variety of terrorists to operate out of Iraq. AQ operatives are sometimes terrorists. (That most of the terrorists SH supported to one degree or another generally tended to only attack in Israel or Lebanon or Jordan or elsewhere, and relatively rarely against Americans, is irrelevant to refuting the assertion in question, of course, although also, of course, this is of little comfort to Leon Klinghoffer or, for that matter, to Abu Abbas, also known as Mohammad Abbas; where was he headquartered and operating from, anyway, and where did he die?)
B? Howsabout I wait for Ogged to support his suggestion that there was such a consensus?
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:45 PM
Not much of a darkie, I think.
That was kind of the point.
Posted by ogmb | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:49 PM
Seriously, I do wonder how much of the disagreement about what was "justified" is really about this point.
I don't think it's all that much. Though I'm tooting my own horn here, I think the key anti-war argument (on self-defense) is my 101.
We knew we weren't in danger now (from Iraqi nukes -- not talking about world terrorism). We knew that we had real non-war options to keep the danger from materializing. What would have been so hard about keeping the inspections regime going as long as possible, and then, when it broke down, if it did, talking about going to war?
We could have postponed this war. Possibly for a really long time. Maybe for long enough that it wouldn't have had to happen at all.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:49 PM
"What's the thread topic again?"
Thread topics are universally whatever people talk about in threads. Exceptions are venues that delete thread-drift, or have rules against it.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:51 PM
Gary, you and I both have eyes, two ears, and a cock. That doesn't prove a connection.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:52 PM
Are you kidding, or did you miss the point? Isle was pointing out (by referencing the thread topic) that even non-insane countries invade other countries sometimes.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:53 PM
136 to 134.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:54 PM
I'll be generous: similarities are not enough to demonstrate that two distinct entities are in cahoots. Especially when those similarities are things like: shares a common religion, or dislikes the same third party. That is what I meant by "nothing connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida." Sorry to be unclear.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:54 PM
101 was quite good, LB, but I'm going to vote for my own 135, though it's bad form to do so.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:57 PM
135 is genius
Posted by andrea | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:58 PM
now I'm really done for the evening, or at least the next few hours. Not to get mushy, but it's great to have this along with the penis jokes.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:59 PM
thanks, andrea.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 8:59 PM
Except that I should be doing this incredibly dull task that has to be done for tomorrow, and I can't stay out of a good argument about the war. A shame we don't have any wholehearted advocates to argue with.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:00 PM
A shame we don't have any wholehearted advocates to argue with
are you baiting me, LB?
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:04 PM
#10 actually says: "He would never give AQ a nuke"
I'm fairly sure that's saying that SH would never cooperate with AQ in giving them a nuke.
The entire reasoning was: "Saddam and AQ hated each other. Saddam was a secular dictator, not an Islamic fundie. Hence his whole war with Iraq. He would never give AQ a nuke because they'd be just as likely to use it against him. Two groups who are both my enemies are not necessarily allies."
Now, I didn't even touch on the fact that besides that the second sentence is simplified to the point of being highly misleading, at best, but that the third sentence doesn't seem to logically follow at all, although it's certainly possible I'm just not understanding how Saddam's religious stances in regard to the war against Iran -- which is precisely what led to his morphing into a full-throated supporter of Sunni fundamentalism so long as it didn't challenge his rule, incidentally -- demonstrated that he was purely secular (most secular people don't constantly proclaim themselves as undying supporters of Islam, build hundreds of mosques, build what is intended to be the largest mosque in the world, have Korans written with allegedly their own blood, and so on, but maybe I'm just unfamiliar with that brand of secularism).
The fourth sentence suggests unfamiliarity with the writings of bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other AQ spokesmodels. The fourth sentence is true, but my point is that so is the reverse: two groups that dislike each other are not necessarily never going to cooperate.
yes, i only said that AQ and SH never cooperated. And yet that's untrue. You are familiar with what "would" means, I assume. "He would never give AQ a nuke" is not actually "AQ and SH never cooperated," is it?
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:07 PM
one more thing, gary, if you're still around: even the Islamists are a very divided group. that obl usurped the role of the traditional mullahs is very important. most madrasas teach a very particular kind of islam, one which seeks to rectify social problems AT HOME. it is AQ which perhaps has only the most rudimentary knowledge of islamic law and practice; they are not madrasa-educated - they are WESTERN educated, mostly middle class, etc. there is MUCH diversity in the arab world... check out nyrb's recent article on madrasas if you're interested. obl hijacked the name islam on multiple levels, but perhaps the most egregious is his dismissal of centuries of erudite legal texts.
Posted by andrea | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:08 PM
Sorry, no -- I thought you'd drifted into the "maybe this war wasn't a great idea after all, in retrospect" position, and were just defending the decision to go to war from the pre-war point of view. If you still think it was a terrific idea, you're exactly who I want around to argue with.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:08 PM
147 to 144.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:10 PM
gary: fine. here's my exacto knife. they did not cooperate. there is zero historical basis for aq and sh to cooperate. thus, i WOULD argue that aq and sh would NEVER have cooperated, in no small part due to the fact that aq considered saddam an apostate regime. apostate = bad. a cursory examination of the history of this region would (there's that would) tells you that. perhaps not even cursory, as those millions of protestors worldwide demonstrated.
Posted by andrea | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:13 PM
(Next: The Case Against Josh Marshall.)
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:13 PM
Man do I wish he wouldn't do that. I always get over-excited, and then the story isn't all that.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:16 PM
I kind of like it when he does that. Frisson, you know?
Also, I love Mickey Kaus.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:16 PM
Yeah, I'm still in "best of a host of bad options camp." The postwar has been worse than I anticipated, I admit; but yes, I think this decision will be viewed from 2020 as the correct one.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:17 PM
20/20 hindsight?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:18 PM
And by that I mean, by basically everyone in 2020. Kind of like everyone now thinks it was a good idea to call the USSR an "evil Empire."
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:19 PM
Some of us still think that sounded dumb. Not pro-USSR, particularly, just anti overheated rhetoric.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:20 PM
I seem to have wandered into the wrong place again, but oh well.
The lesson Ogged took from 9/11 apparently was that whoever was in power in DC got one free war against whomever they chose. Because 9/11 taught him that people are very very bad and don't love us.
The case for Saddam's nuclear weapons was never strong. The case that he wanted to attack the US was never strong. The case that he was a madman was never strong. He just plain was not a madman; he was a cunning despot of a type familiar in world history, and his goals were normal though his methods were brutal. He was certainly one of the 10 or 20 worst tyrants in the world of his day. On the other hand, no important figure in the Bush administration ever had any problem with tyrants; they seemed to like them much of the time.
At the time the war was being argued, I was aware that there was really no use arguing back. The state, the media, and the foreign policy establishment had talked themselves into a war, and public opinion was being manipulated as I've never seen before. It was in the realm of group hysteria and the madness of crowds, except that it was really an elite-driven phenomenon.
I have to admit that during my leftist years, when I was opposing the dirty wars in Central America, I became blase. At least 1% of El Salvador's population was murdered during about a 10 year period (that would be 60,000 out of 6 million; my numbers are not exact but they are accurate and almost certainly low). I knew several Salvadoran survivors personally.
So in the big picture, 9/11 didn't change my world view much. I'm not saying that the chickens were coming home to roost, but 3000+ Americans is statistically pretty small by the standard I just described. We had the power to retaliate and act out , and Salvadorans didn't. So we got mad and started blowing shit up.
Hopefully, tomorrow we'll back to the frivolity and smut for which this site is world-renowned.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:23 PM
"What the fuck ever, Gary. I don't know who, in the Administration, knew what, because I'm not a mind reader."
Yes, precisely. I'm sure you're aware that assertions as to what someone knew or knows are problematic much of the time.
"I know that anyone with access to and paying attention to the intelligence that's come out since the war knew that there was no basis for believing that Iraq had a nuke."
"Had" a nuke isn't the question. What you said was ""The administration knew that Saddam didn't have a nuke now, and wouldn't be able to make one in the near future.""
It's the latter clause that needs to be knocked down, and if you can support the assertion that all the key decision-makers in the Bush Administration knew that Iraq wouldn't be able to make a nuclear weapon soon enough to be a threat, I would be interested. What evidence would you put forth as to what proves that, say, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and G. W. Bush knew that SH wouldn't be able to make a nuke in the next decade?
How do you know? Does everyone who reads the same material on a given topic come to the same conclusions, in your experience? Do people not have mental filters and prejudgments that
affect, even distort, at times, their interpretations and conclusions?
"This sort of skepticism is desperately annoying unless it's in service of a point. Did you have one?"
Yes, I think so. As well, I'm reasonably sure that, for instance, Colin Powell -- senior member of the cabinet, 4th in succession to the Presidencey, was significantly not of the same mind on all the relevant issue as, say, Donald Rumsfeld. Ditto I have reason to think that varying pro-invasion decision-makers in the Administration had varying beliefs about the need to invade Iraq, and varying rationales, some in conflict.
I'm something of an amateur student of Presidential/diplomatic history, and generally speaking, critiques that approach an administration as being homogenous will pretty much always always go wildly wrong PDQ. They completely obscure getting at what actually happened, and why, as a rule. That's pretty much my sweeping point here.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:23 PM
"Smut, give me smut and nothing but,
Oh I'm a market you can't glut,
I don't know what,
Compares with smut!"
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:24 PM
I kind of like it when he does that. Frisson, you know?
"Tectonic plates" was frisson. Every time after has been soupçon.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:28 PM
It's news, but not huge news.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:29 PM
It's the latter clause that needs to be knocked down, and if you can support the assertion that all the key decision-makers in the Bush Administration knew that Iraq wouldn't be able to make a nuclear weapon soon enough to be a threat, I would be interested.
What do you mean by "soon enough to be a threat"? The intelligence showed that Iraq had neither a nuke nor a program for making them -- it was starting from zero. It showed that the inspections regime had been effective in keeping the Iraqi nuclear program for restarting. What basis do you have for saying that anyone (with access to the relevant intelligence) could reasonably have believed that Iraq would have been able to produce a nuke while the inspections regime was still in place?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:29 PM
LB, get to work. We'll be here tomorrow.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:30 PM
To clarify my position, I do not think that the war in Iraq was ever defensive in intent and was never understood that way by the way by the people running the show. They had decided to use American power to reconfigure the world system, with special attention to the oil fields of the middle east. This is the kind of thing that militarily powerful nations do when thay have the chance.
The hysteria about Saddam attacking us was just a manufactured fraud. The Bush people knew that. Saddam was far, far more of a threat to Israel than to the US, and yet he'd never succeeded in giving even them any serious trouble. He was a threat to Iran, but they held him off.
One success of the pro-war campaign, a success whose effects are being felt right here right now, is to change the default position. The default became "Saddam is a nuclear-armed madman who wants to attack the US", and the opposition had to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he wasn't.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:31 PM
Marshall: The redemption?
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:31 PM
urk
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:32 PM
"85
Right, and either did or didn't stay at a hospital in Baghdad.
This is the point where nobody can agree how many legs he has."
Thus the lack of consensus usually involved in "nobody can agree."
I expect Ogged is suggesting that the primary consideration of a good leader is preservation of her country and safeguarding the lives of its people. Justice and fairness are secondary considerations to that.Specific hypotheticals are quite debatable, of course, but I'm not sure the above general proposition is controversial. Is it?
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:32 PM
One success of the pro-war campaign, a success whose effects are being felt right here right now, is to change the default position.
John, here's my post from March of '03.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:34 PM
It is.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:34 PM
Gary, see 117 and 122 for my exchange with LB on the uncontroversial point.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:35 PM
Gary, my 72 on "consensus" was deliberately worded to reflect less-than-certainty on my part.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:37 PM
baa -
You are slowly killing me. Sometimes I suspect that there is some middle part of a reasoning process where your figures and mine match exactly. But the starts and ends are wildly different.
Should great powers have latitude? Sure, I guess. More to the point, they do. But in a unipolar world, the Great Power should use its power efficiently, because it has substantially more area to worry about than when it has an enemy (USSR) taking responsibility for half the globe.
The efficient thing to do, it seems to me, is to establish norms by which countries understand what is OK and what is not OK. Kicking the hell out of Afghanistan? Everyone pretty much understood the argument behind that one, and, not surprisingly, we had a lot of moral support worldwide.
But no one really understands why we went into Iraq. No one considered it an eminent threat to the US. No one considered it much of a threat to its neighbors. (See the lack of support in that neighborhood for our actions.) Now the norm established appears to be, "Do what we tell you or we will fuck you up." Not efficient. As a result, in the future, we'll have to spend more resources watching the rest of the world. (See our problems getting traction on Iran.) Not efficient. In 2020, we'll still have a hard time making the case that our understanding of the norm isn't, "Do what we want." Not efficient.
And all of that leaves aside the problem of either governing Iraq or worrying about what grows there.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:38 PM
In any case, #10.
"...even the Islamists are a very divided group. that obl usurped the role of the traditional mullahs is very important. most madrasas teach a very particular kind of islam, one which seeks to rectify social problems AT HOME."
With all due respect, it would be pleasant if you might consider that fifth-grade-level lectures on the Islamic world might not be necessary, and that possibly some of your interlocuters have made some slight study of both the ummah, and of Arab history, for, say, perhaps, thirty-five years or so. Of course, your expertise on these topics may indeed be far greater than that of anyone else present, and possibly you are introducing new and unfamiliar concepts to someone here.
Thanks for the tip about the NYRB, though. It's barely possible I've linked to them over my past four years of blogging, nor my past decade-plus of online writing. You know, once or twice.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:53 PM
Not having read all the comments, I'll say that if that was the case, it wasn't reasonable to support the Iraq War, by a long shot. Losing 100,000 Iraqi lives RIGHT NOW means losing a lot more in the long run, together with the cost of destroying an entire fucking country (as opposed to one city, at the worst).
(Perhaps, as a bizarre kind of Christian, I finally don't value American lives more than other nations' lives. Perhaps I shouldn't expect that other people's math will work out that way.)
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:55 PM
I agree with #157 .
It also occurs to me that there is a very simple argument against the "Saddam + nukes = America under attack". The same logic that worked against Stalin would work against a nuclear armed Iraq. Saddam being a tyrant, but a rational tyrant understands that nuking the US is a death warrant. I don't think Saddam has a penchant for suicide (at least his history does not show this).
Secondly, 9/11 did not change the fact that the sanctions program was extremely successful in dismantling his nuclear and WMD capability. There was sufficient evidence for this.
Finally, the real nuclear threat to the US comes from deniable sources. Countries like Pakistan have nukes and are also intertwined with "Al Qaeda" and other terrorist organizations, and are the most likely sources of a deniable nuclear strike on the US. However, this is also not very likely because the possession of nuclear weapons is the currency of power. Any country's govt which lets nuclear weapons get into the hands of the local terrorist organization cedes power-and this is an unlikely event.
It is also rather self absorbed to believe that 9/11 was a new or previously unknown event. For the US, it was a new thing, but there are other nations who have experienced routine and sustained terrorist attacks and are far more likely to be targets of a nuclear delivery. If Saddam had nukes and wanted to nuke anyone, he would have done it to the Israelis first. And he would have done it earlier than 9/11/2001 . Of course the same deterrent arguments against this apply.
Posted by The Blue Flautist | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:57 PM
This is completely off topic, but , LB, your 156 is fascinating to me, because it is exactly how I felt (or rather, knew I was supposed to feel) at the time. I didn't like the "in your face" patriotism of Reagan, at the time. I classed it with Rocky 4 and Hulk Hogan beating Nikolai Volkoff. But since then, I've come to believe that initial reaction was wrong. Not because patriotism isn't often the refuge of scoundrels, but because extreme rhetoric really is required when the opposition is a massive, repressive police state that garrisons its vassal nations.
SCMT,
I think it's pretty obvious what Iraq did to get on the US shit list. Hussein invaded a treaty ally of the US, tried to bluff out a US threat of force, got routed, and then systematically subverted his surrender conditions. While Iran and NoKo got axis of evil mention, they really haven't done anything comparable to piss the US off. Much less Syria, Libya, or Venezuela. That's why I think the John Stewart "who will we invade next" arguement doesn't fly. Iraq *was* the #1 on the list. NoKo is close, I grant, but there are poor options there. Having China turn the heat up is probably the best we can do.
So I think the norms are there. If anything, the Iraq war clarfied those norms. That, I submit, is why Q/G/Kaddafi disarmed. That's why Syria is treading lightly in Lebanon. I think you are looking for a clarity in international norms that, ultimately, the medium will not support.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 9:59 PM
"Sorry, no -- I thought you'd drifted into the 'maybe this war wasn't a great idea after all, in retrospect' position, and were just defending the decision to go to war from the pre-war point of view.'
No, that's me, except that I'm not so much defending "the decision to go to war" (who's decision?) as simply disagreeing with, and pointing out fallacies in, certain assertions made in this thread.
I might be willing to defend the general propostion that Ogged's (and others'; who, me?) reasons at the time for supporting the invasion weren't unreasonable and crazy, though. If I felt like investing the time, which mostly I don't, not when it's 20-2 or whatever.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 10:00 PM
"Gary, you and I both have eyes, two ears, and a cock. That doesn't prove a connection."
Yes, that's interesting (that you are willing to state as a fact that I have a cock is particularly so), but what it has to do with anything I've said, I don't know.
Perhaps you can quote the part where I attempted to "prove a connection" or even suggested one existed. Otherwise, perhaps you have me confused with someone else.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 10:02 PM
"I'll be generous: similarities are not enough to demonstrate that two distinct entities are in cahoots. Especially when those similarities are things like: shares a common religion, or dislikes the same third party."
Of course. This hardly seems worth pointing out, unless someone is contesting it.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 10:05 PM
Gary-
My 124 was intemperate, but the same thing still seems to be going on. You have a bunch of people here arguing that there was insufficient evidence that Saddam was going to be a threat to the US to justify a war. Your consistent response has been to react as if we were all claiming that it had been positively proven to be impossible that Saddam could ever be a threat.
I think anyone who seemed to be making that latter claim would agree that they had slipped, and meant only to make the former. If I'm right, what, particularly, are you refuting?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 10:07 PM
"135 is genius"
I'm going out on a limb and putting Special Relativity ahead of it. Or even, say, Jacques Barzun, to grab someone from the humanities.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 10:08 PM
179 I contested it, as part of my "it ought to be a very low bar for acton where catastrophic attacks are to be averted." I'm not entirely happy with my contestation, but I'm not convinced it's wrong, either.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 10:09 PM
181: Someone's going to track you down and kill you, Gary.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 10:09 PM
for this to work you have to look at Iraq as the only potential threat, which is silliness. Everyone knew that Pakistan, Russia, North Korea, and Iran were bigger threat.
Also: #5 is crazy.
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 10:11 PM
Gary: I said (and you should remember, since you quoted it several times), "The only thing connecting Iraq and Al-Qaida is that they are both composed of arab people. There is nothing else there."
You disagreed with me, that is, you argued that something else connected the two entities. When I asked what, you listed a few traits that they held in common. Those traits aren't a connection. That both entities are composed of arab people isn't really a connection either, so perhaps I was unclear. I should have said "nothing connects them although they share a few traits in common," but I thought the way I did it was more rhetorically effective.
But now we agree that there is no connection, correct? So no harm, no foul.
an aside: why is it any more interesting that I stipulated that you have a cock, than that you have eyes and ears, none of which I've seen?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 10:15 PM
Also: #5 is crazy.
I wasn't going to say anything, but yeah.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 10:23 PM
"Of course. This hardly seems worth pointing out, unless someone is contesting it."
Gary, sometimes I think you take your debating points from Paul Deignan, and that is in no way a compliment. Assert, deny, insult is not a good way to convince people of anything.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 10:32 PM
Since it's Gary Farber night, I'll point out that I already addressed point 5 in comment 64, if anyone cares to scroll up.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 10:36 PM
And you still haven't shown me any posts stating that enemies can never cooperate, though you have refuted that straw point quite well.
I don't think you'd fall into the trap of equating a statement that two particular enemies would not cooperate with a statement that enemies never cooperate, would you, Gary?
That would be like taking one episode from history in which two enemies did cooperate as evidence that two current enemies were likely to cooperate against the United States.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 10:45 PM
Bin Laden offered "peace treaty" to European countries, who I'm reasonably sure are less Islamic than, say, Twelvers, in bin Laden's view.
"I hereby offer them a peace treaty, the essence of which is our commitment to halt actions against any country that commits itself to refraining from attacking Muslims or intervening in their affairs, including the American conspiracy against the larger Islamic world.
"This peace treaty can be renewed at the end of the term of a government and the rise of another, with the agreement of both sides.
"The peace treaty will be in force upon the exit of the last soldier of any given [European] country from our land. So apparently he is, if you take him at his word, willing to make treaties with unbelievers. Presumably making a treaty with an apostate is more difficult?
What's bin Laden's attitude been towards the regime of the land of the Two Holy Places? Positive? No? Yet he offered to defend Saudi Arabia, did he not? I guess that conclusively proves he could never colloborate with an apostate regime.
He was also quite unhappy with Crusader/Zionist actions against Iraq, wasn't he? (In 1996):
Of course, he also says: And: Of course, he still was disgruntled about what the Crusader-Zionist forces were doing in apostate lands in 1998:Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula. He consistently called upon the Ummah to fight over these states, no matter the apostasy of their governments.
And, of course, he's consistently supportive of Palestinians:
There are a jillion variants of such statements from him, exhorting that the Ummah must support their fight; yet the PA is an apostate regime, is it not?For that matter, how about that apostate Pakistani regime?
As Abd-al-Bari 'Atwan, chief editor of the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds al-'Arabi says: Possibly you have a greater grasp of bin Laden's strategy and beliefs, though, given your expertise.I could keep going, running through bin Laden's writings and statements, to find those that indicate that his policy has generally been to prioritize his war, and that fighting the far enemy (that's us) requires focusing on that fight, and not on the near enemy, and that indicate varying degrees of willingness to make necessary compromises to accomplish the first goal, but since every time I comment there are another 20-40 comments on the thread, it appears that if I kept trying to reply, I'd be here an infinite amount of time, so I won't.
Concluding statement: absolute predictions of the sort you're making are warranted neither by the specific facts nor human behavior in general. If you said you thought that SH/AQ colloboration was merely unlikely, I'd be right there with you. "would NEVER have cooperated"? Neither provable nor indicative of grasping what "never" means.
(If we accepted the recent alleged al-Zawahiri letter as authentic, the discussion would really be over, but since controversy exists as to whether it is or is not authentic, I've left it out here.)
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 10:53 PM
"The intelligence showed that Iraq had neither a nuke nor a program for making them -- it was starting from zero."
This seems to be attributing autonomy to inanimate abstractions. Myself, I can't say what papers, in what order, saying what, Dick Cheney saw, and what he became convinced of, myself, nor can I say that in regard to anyone in the White House. I'm fairly sure you can't, either.
Is there a reasonable case to be made that there was intelligence available to the relevant decision-makers that, if interpreted correctly, could or should have led to the beliefs you endorse above? Of course.
This is not at all the same thing as demonstrating what specific people "knew" or believed. "Should have" isn't "did."
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 11:06 PM
"... thus the homogenizing factor which you believe you see to be 'arabness' is as much an ideological construct as anything else. "
By all means, tell me more about what I believe. How many fingers do I believe I'm holding up?
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 11:08 PM
"But no one really understands why we went into Iraq. No one considered it an eminent threat to the US. No one considered it much of a threat to its neighbors. (See the lack of support in that neighborhood for our actions.)"
Parenthetical statement doesn't demonstrate the previous sentence in the slightest. One could consider A a threat without in the least supporting B's response #1. As happened to be the case in this instance.
Otherwise, this either is some strange new meaning of "no one," or apparently people with different views are actually pods from outer space or something.
(How imminent was the eminence of the Iraqi threat, though? I shan't venture a thought.)
But certainly the governments of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kuwait felt that the SH regime was somewhat threatening, as did Israel; Turkey, not so much, because circumstances differed, but they certainly weren't fans of SH. And a lot of people seem to think they know why we went into Iraq, agree with them or not. Some of them even were or are in the Administration.
There are endless reasonable debates and disagreements about the Iraq war. Defining people who disagreed with your view as being non-existent isn't one of them.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 11:25 PM
Re 194 on 172: I think I read your remarks out of context. A product of trying to catch up too quickly. A good sign I should quit, especially since I've not blogged a thing for hours, nor watched the movie I was planning to, and missed paying attention to Boston Legal, among other planned activities.
And precisely as I said I expected in 41, people are arguing with me as if I'm defending Bush's acts and decisions.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 11:30 PM
But certainly the governments of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kuwait felt that the SH regime was somewhat threatening, as did Israel
Cite?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 11:32 PM
"You have a bunch of people here arguing that there was insufficient evidence that Saddam was going to be a threat to the US to justify a war."
And I fully agree that there's an excellent case to be made for that. I'm quite sure I've never, ever, said otherwise. I'm also sure I've said variants of that hundreds of times.
"Your consistent response has been to react as if we were all claiming that it had been positively proven to be impossible that Saddam could ever be a threat."
My "consistent response" has been to to respond to a number of entirely separate points, actually, in defense of no larger case. Which, you might note, is quite the norm for me.
I'm quite sure I've not said a word here about what "all" people here say or do, period.
"I think anyone who seemed to be making that latter claim would agree that they had slipped, and meant only to make the former. If I'm right, what, particularly, are you refuting?"
The points I've responded to.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 11:36 PM
"an aside: why is it any more interesting that I stipulated that you have a cock, than that you have eyes and ears, none of which I've seen?"
I'm given to understand that the former is approximately 50% more rare than the latter, give or take. And you didn't stipulate it, you made an absolute, unmodified, statement of fact: "Gary, you and I both have eyes, two ears, and a cock." So I was wondering how you'd achieved such direct knowledge, rather than merely hypothesizing. Generally my eyes and ears are visible, you know, in the picture on my blog and the other pictures of me that have been on the net for a decade or so.
But, you know, if you saw those films I starred in, that's another matter.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 11:42 PM
"But now we agree that there is no connection, correct? So no harm, no foul."
I'm perfectly happy to state that I've seen no information that leads me to believe there was a significant connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. I've never suggested anything the slightest bit different in my life, so far as I can recall.
(Note this is not precisely what you asked if we agree upon, but it's what I'm offering.)
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 11:45 PM
"Gary, sometimes I think you take your debating points from Paul Deignan"
Haven't been interested enough to read anything by him, I'm afraid.
"Of course. This hardly seems worth pointing out, unless someone is contesting it."
Gary, sometimes I think you take your debating points from Paul Deignan, and that is in no way a compliment. Assert, deny, insult is not a good way to convince people of anything. Funny, I thought I was emphatically agreeing. I'm also unaware that I'm the only person who has posted to this thread who has asserted or denied. If I've insulted anyone, I apologize.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 11:48 PM
Blockquoting seems to not work more than erratically here. Sigh.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 11:49 PM
Okay, and now apparently my comments are disappearing and reappearing and others are disappearing, as well.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 11:51 PM
You have to blockquote everything separated by a line break with its own pair of tags.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 11:51 PM
I approved the original rejected comment (more than 5 links=moderated) and got rid of your subsequent attempts, along with your note that the first one hadn't gone through.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 11:53 PM
Even granting 1-7 - some of which I could argue with, but others are already doing so - and baa's point that Iraq was #1 on the list of targets and easiest to invade - a point I agree with, I mean we already had control of the air - there are still assumptions missing from this case for war.
8. We can do this without substantial support from major power allies other than the UK.
9. We know how to manage an occupation whose goal is to create a liberal democracy.
8 is why I didn't think we'd invade when we actually did. I thought we'd end up having to change the sanctions regime and invade only after catching Hussein doing what was probably inevitable: trying to sneak in weaponizable material. Perhaps I was naive in thinking it would be possible to loosen the sanctions and still - importantly - maintain both the no-fly zones and the inspections regime. But in any case, I thought we'd do something to get a larger alliance together. Even great powers with latitude need active help.
As for 9, I know you've written
Maybe bringing democracy to Iraq was an impossible job, but that wasn't the job in mind
but I didn't think we could only make a change at the top; it wasn't going to be just regime change but political, social, economic change. There was going to be a power vacuum. So there was always the question of what, having beaten the crap out of the Iraqi army (something I never doubted we could do), were we going to do with the occupation? It's easier in the short run to set up a police state than it is to set up a self-policing, democratic one, but there was no way, given our values, and our rhetoric, that we could do anything but try to make Iraq a democracy. It may not have been a prominent selling point for the war, but it was an underlying assumption. And it was not clear to me that we could create a democracy by force in a foreign country, many of whose inhabitants would be suspicious of our motives.
However, if we want to make this routine, I've prepared a standard declaration.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 11:56 PM
"You have to blockquote everything separated by a line break with its own pair of tags."
And thanks to that, I'm not going to be surprised when people have trouble making sense of my own comments and quotes. Yet: not interested in re-editing all those comments, either. Oh, well.
Besides, now that I'm half caught up, no one else care enough to still be around. Of course, if I'd not tried, that would be interpreted as showing my lack of interest in discussion, I fear. But perhaps not.
After five and a half hours, though, on 195, I'll leave you to believe as you wish, SCMT. Discussions where people don't have at least vaguely the same level of general knowledge of the subject, and general agreement on the basic facts, tend to be extremely tedious, alas.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-15-05 11:59 PM
Aw, crap, and I missed Patti Smith on the Late Late show, too.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 12:01 AM
Should have Tivo'd it.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 12:03 AM
Kidding!
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 12:03 AM
I guess I got here too late.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 12:10 AM
Discussions where people don't have at least vaguely the same level of general knowledge of the subject, and general agreement on the basic facts, tend to be extremely tedious, alas.
Yes. I rather took that to be LB's and text's points as well.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 12:16 AM
Gary, as best I recall from my physics education, special relativity is not held to be "genius" by cognoscenti - various people at the time were likely to come up with the concept before long. General relativity wasn't going to be invented by someone other than Einstein anytime soon.
Also note that you use "fallacy" in a question-begging way above; I would have found it annoying if I had been involved in the discussion.
More generally and topically, I'm extremely skeptical that Saddam post-sanction would have been able to produce a bomb on any relevant timescale. Refining weapons-grade uranium from yellowcake would have been just too hard and too slow and too subject to exposure by evolving monitoring technology (not to mention the simple expedient of checking the yellowcake depot).
Posted by rilkefan | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 12:36 AM
Very short answer on on 195: since the Ba'athists came back to power in Iraq in July, '68, Iraq has fought with Syria, fought with Jordan, fought with Kuwait, fought with Saudi Arabia, fought with Egypt, and fought with Israel. Fought with Niger, Morocco, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain. And been bombed repeatedly from Turkish bases. (I trust I need not provide cites; no one will contest these things never happened, right?)
Did any of Iraq's neighbors publically support the 2002 U.S. invasion of Iraq? Obviously not. Does this therefore demonstrate that none of those governments considered Iraq to be threatening? Of course not. (Popular opinion is a different matter.)
If we go back to 2002, we can, for instance, pluck out Fouad Ajami's opinion:
However, I'm not debating how much or little quiet support other Arab nations gave to attacking Iraq; I'm merely saying that, in general, Iraq's neighbors tended to find SH threatening. They'd have been crazy not to have.There are plenty of sound reasons why this wouldn't lead to those governments wanting to endorse the invasion by America of an Arab nation for the purpose of overthrowing its government, of course. (Although, of course, we did indeed wind up being allowed to quietly make military use of Saudi Arabian soil, Jordanian soil, Bahraini soil, Quatari soil, and on and on.)
Now, what's the point of this question, anyway?
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 1:06 AM
"More generally and topically, I'm extremely skeptical that Saddam post-sanction would have been able to produce a bomb on any relevant timescale."
I don't know what you consider "relevant." I'm certainly skeptical he could have produced a bomb in under 3-5 years after sanctions collapsed.
Of course, pretty much no one thought he could come anywhere near as close as he came to making a bomb in 1991.
Which is pretty much the key to the entire story, after all.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 1:10 AM
1. It would be really horrible for a nuclear device to go off in one of America's cities.
True, and as is implied by ogged, it is the responsibility of the US government to prevent this.
2. The main lesson of 9-11 was that there are people who are willing to set off a nuclear device in an American city.
I'd say that was known. I think the main lesson of 9/11 is how unprepared the US was to stop something 9/11, or something like it. Yes, it made clear that BL would use an atomic weapon in the US if he could, but this would hypothetically lead to a policy of aggressive strict control of real existing bomb sources by partnering with known nuclear powers to tighten physical security of all materials and weapons, and, to the elimination or capture of Bin Ladin and ALL of his organization. If you know BL would if he could, you don't get side tracked invading wannabe nuclear powers. Your lesson is no reason to invade anywhere but Afghanistan (assuming BL stayed there).
3. Saddam would like to have nukes.
Yes. But wanting and getting are not the same thing. Saddam wanted power, to maintain it, and to gain it. Getting nukes would have been part of this, if he could've gotten them. But power comes not only from having might, but in having people believe that you do, or that you might have might. Why did Saddam hide nonexistent weapons programs from the inspectors? Why did he act like he had them, by impeding inspectors? I suggest it is not just an act of defiance against the US, it was also a way of bluffing power. If your potential enemies, Israel and Iran, believe you might have wmd's, then, presumably this acts at least as some level of deterrent. We say his bluffing made us uncertain, but the inspectors were more sure. They said repeatedly that the wmd capabilities were destroyed and kept from becoming re-established. Saddam's motivations for staying the cat and mouse game were not that opaque. A competent government should have seen through this, especially given the reports of the inspectors.
4. Saddam can't be kept from getting nukes by inspectors, because he will only allow inspectors in under credible threat of force, which force is not sustainable over the long term.
The actual inspectors' job was never to keep Saddam from getting nukes, it was merely to ascertain whether, where, how, and to what extent he might have been pursuing them and various other weapons. Action to inspect and destroy weapons capabilities was always backed up by credible threat of military force. This is where Clinton and then Bush(initially) failed to leverage quite enough force against Saddam's resistance, after he kicked the inspectors out (in 1998?). Indications, except for a few now largely discredited exceptions, showed that the inspection routine was working, when enforced, in preventing wmd capabilities in Iraq after 1991. Eventually when Bush escalated the threat, Saddam let the inspectors back in. Could this balance of threat have been sustained over the long term? Yes, in theory. The US had maintained far more expensive military stalemates in Korea and Germany for decades. But keeping Iraq pinned down militarily indefinitely didn't make military sense, it was too expensive for the payoff: a stalemate cease-fire standoff with a country the US had overwhelmed militarily. In other words, militarily it wasn't Korea, or cold-war Germany. Additionally international support the US's position on Iraq was eroding with the potential for sanctions reductions. Turkey and Saudi Arabia who had for 12 years hosted US forces acting against Iraq were increasingly restricting US military operations. To oversimplify grossly, the US had three options: maintain with increasing difficulty enforced inspections and sanctions, use some level of force, or withdraw. I remember thinking, "well I know some use of force is going to happen" as soon as additional troops started being sent to Kuwait in 2002.
5. Whether Saddam and Al Qaeda (or other terrorist groups) have had contact is largely irrelevant, because there's very little to keep them from having contact in the future, especially given that they have a mutual enemy in the U.S.
I bought this then. I don't now. A competent government should not have bought this then. Many commenters here, myself included, now know enough to know the connection was and would subsequently have been unlikely given what AQ was then. With some exceptions, imho, most of SH's support for terror was arab world PR, such as supporting the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and harboring a few known terrorists. He might have eventually made a show of supporting the AQ we know today. But had he gotten an atomic bomb or two, or 10, they would have been his most precious possessions, the foundations of his power. I cannot believe now, nor did I in 2002, that he would ever part with such things.
6. The only way to ensure that Saddam doesn't get nukes, and doesn't pass them on to people willing to use them in the U.S., is to invade.
No, inspections could have kept working. The US would have to have been really flexible in applying force, but there were a bunch of attacks short of invasion that may have served to enforce the continued compliance with UN inspections. Long term, this would have been difficult, but avoiding this difficulty does not seem to me to justify invasion.
7. Iraq is invadable. Unlike Pakistan, it doesn't already have nukes. And there's some reason to believe that Iraqis might welcome an invasion.
The US knew the Shiites and Kurds would be liberated and thankful. Nobody talked about the disempowerment of the Sunni's. It was all about de-Bathification. Bremmer acted as such and disbanded the Iraqi army and fired all Bath party members from government jobs. A competent US government should have foreseen the potential insurgency nurturing aspects of disregarding the effects this might have on significant portions of the Sunni population, not to mention what problems might arise from Iraqi Shiite connections to Iran. A competent US government should have seen that removing the tyrant SH and his party and is organs of control would lead to dangerous power shifts coupled with balkanization. Not that the current quagmire was precisely predictable, but that overthrow would necessitate long and hard occupation for which the US military was ill equipped or trained. Invadable? Yes, but a competent US government should have seen the trouble beyond the successful invasion.
Sorry for the long late post. Been too busy todayand just felt the need to put in my 2 cents, 'bout what it's worth.
Posted by Mr. B | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 1:10 AM
The overwhelming thing that would confuse me about this discussion, if I didn't have some slight sense about human psychology, is that Ogged's post is his "review of the case for invading Iraq as I saw (and endorsed) it."
The correctness or incorrectness of his beliefs at the time are not answers to the different question of whether his beliefs/opinions had any reasonable basis.
But, of course, mostly people are leaping into to debate whether or not those opinions were correct, instead.
Personally, I kinda thought it was clear that the anti-war case had been looking an awful lot better than the pro-war case for somewhere between a year and a half to two years, if it didn't before that.
And as regards my own opinion, it's almost as if I'd written hundreds and hundreds of posts intimating that this was my belief, for at least a year and a half or so (not that I ever actually said I supported the invasion, either; I just said I wouldn't march against it; that was wishy-washy enough, though, that I thought I needed to take responsibility for coming so close to supporting the invasion, so if we're only marking in binary, I should be marked guilty). (Which is why it's a tad annoying when people repeatedly write comments to me as if all this weren't so, and as if I'd said something here to indicate otherwise., as if I were arguing in favor of invading then having been The Right Thing To Do.)
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 1:24 AM
Loosely speaking, I'd generally agree with the vast majority of Mr. B's summary and views, by the way.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 1:28 AM
Gary,
"Fought with Niger, Morocco, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain"
Surely you are kidding? These countries are nowhere near Iraq to be in armed conflict. Unless diplomatic differences can be regarded as fighting.
Posted by The Blue Flautist | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 1:29 AM
"Of course, pretty much no one thought he could come anywhere near as close as he came to making a bomb in 1991.
Which is pretty much the key to the entire story, after all."
Sure, if it was magically 1991 in Iraq again, and everybody outside magically became completely stupid.
Posted by rilkefan | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 1:31 AM
"Surely you are kidding? These countries are nowhere near Iraq to be in armed conflict. Unless diplomatic differences can be regarded as fighting."
Suggest looking into troops in the order of battle against Iraq in 1991.
"Sure, if it was magically 1991 in Iraq again, and everybody outside magically became completely stupid."
I'm not entirely sure what this means, but my suggestion is that the considerable surprise at discovering just how badly U.S. intelligence had underestimated how close SH had came in getting to the Bomb by 1991 was an extremely significant factor in the thinking of most of the 2002 Administration pro-Iraq-attack folks. Perhaps you entirely disagree, which is certainly your perogative, of course.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 4:34 AM
The recent Iraq War was, for better or worse, an aggressive geopolitical war. If you read between the lines, both the administration and the majority of the warbloggers understand it that way and support it that way.
Most Americans do not believe in that kind of war, so it was necessary to whip up all sorts of other reasons. These other reasons came into play after the decision to go to war had already been made. Even if they had all been valid, they were always peripheral to what was actually happening.
So after the decision was made, Saddam's "gassing his own people" became important, even though we hadn't cared before then. The rights of women became important (even though Iraq was the most secular and least Islamic state in the region.) And so on.
After the fact, everything but the kitchen sink was thrown to the public. If there had been a significant astrological constituency, we would have been told that we invaded because the moon was in Virgo with Aquarius in trine. (Hardly a joke: at one point a major policymaker, Wolfowitz I think, was sent to fluff the Armageddon Christians. Is Saddam was the seven-headed beast? Will the Temple be rebuilt? Will the Son of Man return in his glory? Tune in tomorrow.)
There is, of course, the possibility that at some point some of our Machiavellian policymakers were starting to believe the fluff that they were saying. When you think about it, that really makes things worse, and not better.
That sounds like a "dove" position, doesn't it? Well, it is. I think that the pervasive, knee-jerk dismissal of dovish arguments is a big part of the reason why we are in such a bad place right now. (In the same way, the pervasive, kneejerk dismissal of marijuana-legalization arguments is a big part of the reason why the US is becoming a police state.)
If it were up to me, I'd have all the doves get rid of their unicycles and puppets and drums and burn their hemp garments and cut off their dreads and start eating hamburgers. Obviously it's not, though. If you don't like hippies, fine. But you shouldn't have let that be the foundation of your opinions about foreign policy.
But for God's sake, let's return Unfogged to the cynicism and fluff. This is no goddamn fun for anyone. What's done is done, and we have to live with it.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 5:42 AM
215: It sounds like Unfogged should have some kind of boilerplate text on all comments:
"All blog posts ever written by this commenter are re-alleged as though fully set forth herein."
(Also, apparently I should add Gary's blog to my subscriptions.)
Posted by Matt #3 | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 6:42 AM
215: I have never liked analytic philosophers tendency to build important arguments around far-fetched hypotheticals.
Asking people to treat a group of actual arguments leading to a recent major political disaster as though they were really hypotheticals is a bit much. "
If all these things were true...."
It's sort of like chatting about hypothetical rape to a recent rape victim.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 6:55 AM
The fact that the Saddam and Al Qaeda were both Arab, Sunni and avowedly hostile to the US seems like enough.
Ogged, that's an unsophisticated view of people. And it's definitely not evidence of a link between two political camps. Al Qaeda's ideal state involves reestablishing the Caliphate and plunging Islam into neverending conflict. It's completely reasonable to think that even an anti-American pan-Arabist would balk at this suggestion.
And come on, Salafis identify pan-Arabist (Qawmiya) Muslims as heretics along the lines of the democratic West.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 7:13 AM
I opposed the invasion, before it happened, because of variations on eb's points 8 & 9, i.e., the US is not fit to do this without a real coalition (don't get up in my grille about Poland) mainly because the US doesn't know what it's doing.
Specifically, there is to my knowledge one case in the historical record that the US knows how to run an invasion to produce good results afterward (Japan), while there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. And arguments that this war is more like World War II than it is like e.g. the Philippine War or any of some dozens of Latin American interventions have all been pretty poor.
No argument about 9/11 changing things has suggested a change that would improve on America's appalling history as a colonial power -- and by appalling I mean, it's just very bad at it, even if we grant that no country is particularly good at it. Note this isn't an argument about the specific incompetence of the Bush administration -- although I think there is evidence for that -- but for the general incompetence of American institutions at administering colonial dominions.
This is one of the reasons the US created the United Nations and the Bretton Woods agencies in 1944-45. Americans didn't want to run the world. The US might want to revisit the utility of those and similar institutions.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 7:19 AM
Gary:
#212: Now, what's the point of this question, anyway?
This seems pointless after a night's sleep, but:
1.Start with the original language at issue: But certainly the governments of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kuwait felt that the SH regime was somewhat threatening, as did Israel
2.Remember various concerns about the use of "absolute" words. (See, e.g., #41 or #197).
3.Wonder whether you have some sort of inside polling data about the states of mind of the various government players in the various governments referenced.
4.Wonder if perhaps "certainly" was a mistake.
5.Remember #123: It may not be most useful to regard, consider, or speak of "the administration" as a homogenous entity with a single mind.
6.Wonder whether the statement "the governments of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kuwait felt that the SH regime was somewhat threatening" suffers from the same malady.
7.Suspect that's not what you meant to write.
I suppose the point was that nit-picking arguments that are pretty clear on their face doesn't seem like a good way to use your time, as it is irritating to both you and the person you're nitting. But that seemed more interesting late last night than it does today.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 8:02 AM
This appears to be a dead thread, but let me register my surprise that no one siding with ogged here has volunteered to die in his war. With all the critique of the hawks who brought us to war (Wolfowitz, Feith, Cheney, etc.) and their total lack of military experience, I figured that the participants here (whom I read regularly here) would have been more careful.
Instead, the pro-war argument seems to say quite baldly that a miniscule nuclear (oh, I mean, nucular) threat justfies sending other people to die. A key issue is whether *you* would risk death, doesn't it? President Ogged just gave his seven point speech to the nation --- who here is about to enlist?
Posted by sparacando | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 8:03 AM
The correctness or incorrectness of his beliefs at the time are not answers to the different question of whether his beliefs/opinions had any reasonable basis.
Gary (re: 215)-
While this has certainly gotten testy on both sides, I don't believe that either you or ogged has been attacked for having been wrong in hindsight -- the argument has been that ogged's position had real problems from the outset. Of the people you've been arguing with, I'm pretty sure that everyone is aware that you are now, personally, of the opinion that the war was misguided. Any crankiness (at least from me, and I surmise from other people) directed toward you has been directed at perceived maddening levels of nitpickyness, rather than at your being somehow culpably wrong on the war.
(Re: 191)
Is there a reasonable case to be made that there was intelligence available to the relevant decision-makers that, if interpreted correctly, could or should have led to the beliefs you endorse above? Of course.
This is not at all the same thing as demonstrating what specific people "knew" or believed. "Should have" isn't "did."
Can I stipulate that when I say an organization (like the Administration) 'knew' something, I mean that all reasonable evidence shows that if the decision makers in that organization were doing their job in a reasonably normal fashion, they knew it? (And when I say 'can I stipulate', I mean that I have in the past, and plan to continue, using the language in that fashion. My apologies if you find it difficult to follow.)
I tend to refer to 'the Administration' because as a citizen rather than a participant, it's a bit of a black box. From reading the news, I can tell what information was available to whoever was making the decision to go to war. I don't know of my own knowledge if George Bush, Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, or Barney is the ultimate decision-maker in the White House -- but I do know (sufficiently to satisfy myself) that whoever that decision maker is, they either saw the intelligence I described, or were either intentionally or recklessly unaware of it. If I can't discuss the information available to the administration without knowing of my own knowledge who saw specifically which pieces of intelligence, the entire area of discussion is closed off, and I am not willing to accept that.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 8:29 AM
Sparac-
I think we've only got one actual pro-war voice here, baa. Anyone else on that side of the argument (I believe only Gary and ogged) is just arguing that the pro-war arguments aren't self-evident crap.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 8:31 AM
I'll not assume Gary's cock if he'd rather I didn't. Sorry, Gary. Sometimes I'm a bit friendly.
I'd invite you to assume mine, but some people react violently to remote, though massive threats.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 8:56 AM
cock jokes! jollity! many of us supported a stupid war! I've got a cock!
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 8:58 AM
Hey, is the thread dead? But I just got back in!
I like Mr. B's 214 a lot, but putting it all together, it sounds like the short summary is: we were bound to use some level of force sooner or later, but it could have been done much more competently. Am I misunderstanding?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:13 AM
I am going to respond to the post, not the thread.
I think no one is going to like this, but partly for my own peace of mind, partly because I'm just not sure the
congealing liberal consensus is right,
I'm not clear that the liberal consensus is correct either, excepting in that invading Iraq was a stupid idea.
here's a review of the case for invading Iraq as I saw (and endorsed) it.
[...]1-7 still seem non-crazy to me.
That sentence is why I am going to respond to the post, instead of taking the post as merely 'restating the pre-war position'.
1. It would be really horrible for a nuclear device to go off in one of America's cities.
It would be really horrible for the United States to be hit by an asteroid. It would be really horrible for the sun to blow up. It would really suck to be invaded by brain-eating space aliens.
Russian ICBMs can be retargeted to US cities and be clearing their silos in no more than two minutes, tops, and would arrive in less than 30 minutes. Russian SLBMs do not need to be retargeted but at last report the Russian Navy could not put more than two SLBM subs to sea at any given time. Between them they can hit the US with at least 40 and up to 400 nuclear warheads in less than 15 minutes. Cruise missle situation is more problematic as they are relatively short range. Taking into consideration poor missle and warhead maintainance by the Russians, they should be able to hit the US with an absolute minimum of 10% of their available megatonnage, which means ~3000 megatonnes (3 gigatones) or very roughly 3-4000 warheads.
The French NAVY has 200 hundred warheads (in the 750 kt range) available for immediate launch. Arrival times after launch are no greater than 15 minutes. I will ignore french ICBMs. I will also ignore the British nuclear weapons altogether because of the close relationship with the US and because it is rumoured that British weapons cannot be targeted on the US (which I suspect is untrue).
The Chinese can hit any part of the US with ICBMs. The number of ICBMs available which can hit the US is not, from the evidence, large, but it isn't small either. I will assume that the Chinese can manage anything the French can accomplish.
Ergo, the worst thing that could happen outside of the space aliens would be for the United States to get into a war with France, Russia or China. I will note that none of those countries are happy with us for the moment and we have been behaving belligerently towards them.
ALL of those countries are capable of smuggling a nuclear weapon into the United States. The possibility of this occurring was first suggested no later than 1948.
One city can be rebuilt. Lose 100 cities and its over.
2. The main lesson of 9-11 was that there are people who are willing to set off a nuclear device in an American city.
The main lesson of 9/11 was that little terrorist people were keen to kill rich first-worlders and associated elites if said first-worlders elites messed with them too much. And it was EASY. Bubble popped. Not a real bubble, but an illusion harbored by the sort of people who go to good schools. See Columbine, etc etc.
3. Saddam would like to have nukes.
Everyone would like to have nukes. Nukes are popular. With nukes, you can keep rich first-worlders and associated elites off your case. *EVERYBODY* wants that. Also, they all want harems and unnumbered Swiss bank accounts. With nukes, you have enough leverage to make them buy you off.
4. Saddam can't be kept from getting nukes by inspectors, because he will only allow inspectors in under credible threat of force, which force is not sustainable over the long term.
No observation system can prevent people from acquiring things. It simply makes you aware of it. That said, inspectors merely confirm what you already know (or should know) from satellite, overflight and port observations.
5. Whether Saddam and Al Qaeda (or other terrorist groups) have had contact is largely irrelevant, because there's very little to keep them from having contact in the future, especially given that they have a mutual enemy in the U.S.
Saddam is irrelevant to whether or not Al Queda has contact with nuclear-armed powers. They already got that. See Pakistan, Iran.
6. The only way to ensure that Saddam doesn't get nukes, and doesn't pass them on to people willing to use them in the U.S., is to invade.
Same applies to Mauritania, Madagascar and Palau.
7. Iraq is invadable. Unlike Pakistan, it doesn't already have nukes.
Ergo, the strategy to prevent Osama bin Laden (the person you know wishes to attack you) from acquiring nukes is to ignore him and his presence in the country with nuclear weapons and attack the country that doesn't have them on the off-chance that he might have 'D'Oh!' moment and decide to pack up and leave the country with nuclear weapons.
And there's some reason to believe that Iraqis might welcome an invasion.
Which Iraqis?
Nothing about chemical and biological weapons, certainly nothing about humanitarianism and democracy.
Ok, I agree with that.
The absence of humanitarian and democratic considerations among the "liberal hawks" I talked to, incidentally, is one reason I'm not sure I buy the argument that lamenting "incompetence" is a dodge.
I am actually inclined to agree. The liberal hawks were interested in 'stability' and 'pumping oil' and all that other 'realism' bullshit, just like Bush and Cheney. Democracy (or even liberty, given their insistance that the Kurds remain in Iraq) was the furthest fucking thing from their minds.
Which brings up the question of why they're always whining about standing up for 'Iraqi Democrats' the very people they had even intent of screwing at the first opportunity.
Maybe bringing democracy to Iraq was an impossible job, but that wasn't the job in mind.
Democracy is not a sandwich. You can't 'bring it'. No, I don't know what you mean.
Let's avoid one discussion: This was certainly not the administration's case for war, which was a jumble and muddle of
things like this, along with stuff about WMDs, and democracy, and freedom, and ponies.
Mumbo-jumbo and handwaving. You could never tell what it was you were buying.
1-7 still seem non-crazy to me. The one that looks most vulnerable is 7, but that's precisely the one that the
"incompetence" argument is meant to address. Of course, there are counterarguments to most of the points, but forgive me if I'm not convinced that those arguments are dispositive.
They aren't. 1-5 are irrelevant. Handwaving. They only matter if and ONLY IF the threat of Saddam Hussein attacking the US with a nuclear weapon is greater (substantially) than the threat of Osama bin Laden acquiring a nuclear weapon from Pakistan and using it against the US. A calculation which would make no sense.
6 is just silly. 7 is retarded.
For the record: I was against the American support for Saddam at the time. Having the Iranians run over Saddam would have ranked right up there in terribleness with not getting a tie for Christmas. (I
suspectstrongly suspect one reason Bush, Jr. decided to forego classification of Reagan's papers was partly to continue concealing the depth of America involvement with Saddam and his (or should I say our?) chemical weapons.) That said, I would have been against the first Bush administration greenlighting Saddam Excellent Kuwaiti Adventure, had I known about it. Having greenlighted the fucking thing, I was against the exquisitely silly 'defense' of Saudi (how the fuck was he going to hold 800,000 sq miles of sand?), the subsequent invasion (also silly) of Kuwait, against stiffing the Shi'a after encouraging them to rise up, not against going to Baghdad, provided we didn't hang around. Against the on again, off again treatment of the Kurds regardless of whether the Turks approved.(By the above I mean that I did not think beforehand that the Americans would have any serious difficulties with Saddam's army (and why would they?) either the first time or the second time, but I saw no benefit to anyone by continuing to be involved.)
Before round two (opposed at least a year beforehand!) I did NOT predict a massive guerilla war because I didn't think we would be stupid enough to invade Iraq and then like, you know, hang around. Only a moron would try to hold e'er so much useless dirt.
I rejected and continue to reject the characterization of Saddam as Hitlerian. He wasn't a loon enraptured by some high level abstraction ('The Jews are like rats!' 'We are the vanguard of the socialist proletariat!'). As a thug he is no different from Sargon or Ashurbanipal or Taimurlane or half-a-dozen cranky Persians. Or Romans. Or Byzantines. Or Arabs. Or Mongols. 'Gimme the money and the women and the palaces.' Shit, he was perfectly willing to turn his country into an American quasi-satrapy as long as he got to beat on the Iranians.
ash
['The last part could have been much longer and better written but I'm tired and going to bed. Have a nice day.']
Posted by ash | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:17 AM
[redacted]
Posted by [redacted] | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:19 AM
Fuck, even I prefer baa's argument to Ogged's.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:21 AM
maybe close to 8&9, but not only are we not so very good at nation building / peace-keeping (at least i think i remember bush saying that until 9-11 changed everything), i think its useful to think about supporting a war in iraq in december 01 and march 03 are not the same thing. the difference b/w an effort to marshall int'l support to eliminate bad actors (gotta love that big mo coming off afghanistan) is different than us 'n poland skipping through the middle-east like johnny democracyseed while flipping the bird to the rest of the globe (including most of our allies who are more experienced in peace-keeping (not that they've done such a bang up job themselves). if you're justifying the war based on risk to americans, shouldn't you factor in the chance that alienating major allies could also be a problem when dealing with later threats?
also, whether or not one agrees with them, i think that democracy-spreadin' was a critical part of the rationale for the weekly-standard crowd. but that doesn't sell so well as a mushroom cloud in des moines. and i think its relevant that the method the war was sold at home undercut its support abroad. maybe they thought middle eastern democracy would itself be the most important safeguard of american safety, but even if you think that it was possible to acheive through their domino theory, saying saddam's gonna kill you with balsa drones is hiding the ball.
re: valuing lives differently: of course the executive branch is going to err on the side of aggressive action which might be perceived as protective of americans. one, iraqis don't get a vote here, whether or not they're blown up. second, the executive branch is generally the take no prisoners, shoot first and ask questions later branch. presidents don't tend to win points for thoughtful consideration. that's why it would be super sweet if we had, i don't know, 2 other branches of government which could counterbalance it. they could have different incentives built in, and we could require certain procedures followed before going to war. we could call them "checks and balances."
sorry this is unfocused, all over the place, and not terribly relevant to the discussion. i'm not real sure how the assumptions were supposed to work. but this shit makes me want to weep sometimes. i really do like your site, mr. ogged, and you sure do have some fine comment threads.
Posted by matty | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:32 AM
A day late and a dollar short, but here goes.
A point mentioned by text in 55 and expanded on by baa in 58: Then 9-11 came and added additional reasons and additional urgency. The new reasons: greater fear of nuclear handoff, yet more worries about relying on the Saudi regime, and a belief that the Middle Ease needed more that "management" of horrendous regimes to defang militant Islamism. It also created a unique moment of political possibility, as text notes above.
The first few points mentioned there ("greater fear" . . . "yet more worries" . . . "a belief that") are all changes in perception brought about by 9/11. These increased fears are the basis for ogged's point #2. But just because our fear level got ratcheted up by an order of magnitude doesn't mean that Saddam became any more dangerous between 9/10 and 9/12. But there was, as baa mentioned, this "unique moment of political possibility". And that led to the kitchen sink approach to pro-war arguements, as pointed out in 220.
FWIW, with regards to ogged's #2, the lesson I took from 9/11 was that these bastards are patient, clever, and resourceful, and therefore they don't need a nuclear bomb in order to kill large numbers of people. What'd they use on 9/11? Planning, training, and fucking boxcutters! Sure, they'd like a nuke if they could get their hands on it, but not having one isn't going to stop them from planning all sorts of other devious shit in the meantime. The way to stop them is to find them and stop them before they can do anything else. How do we find them? Good intelligence, which will require people willing to become informants. Which will require average people in the Middle East to see us as the good guys and al Qaeda as the bad guys. And the invasion of Iraq in no way helped us to bring that about.
Remember how we finally caught the Unabomber? His brother fingered him as a possible suspect. The way we will ultimately become safe is when people around the world see terrorism as so abhorrent that they are would rather see their own brothers in jail than to know that their brothers had killed and maimed innocent people. And no invasion of one country by another will ever accomplish that.
OK. I'm done with the soapbox for now.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:35 AM
LB: Gary and ogged ... [are] just arguing that the pro-war arguments aren't self-evident crap.
I wouldn't have used that particular legalism, but they were in fact self-evident crap. The arguments relied on the idea that the desires for democracy and free-market capitalism burn so brightly in every human heart that, let loose by our invasion, they would consume every petty distinction and grievance barring the creation of a stable, peaceful Iraq.
That was and remains a load of cobblers'.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:37 AM
By the way, does 232 win the "longest comment ever" prize?
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:41 AM
Point of detail: for a brief period, Kazkhstan had ICBMs. Ali G would be laughing out of the other side of his mouth if they still did.
As I said, I think that the "madman" picture of Saddam was a projective fiction based on film villains.
I apparently haven't been very persuasive, but ogged's points 2, 4, and 6 seem wildly wrong in a hysterical, paranoid direction, and 5 also seems to to be a wild assumption.
Soon enough we're going to see a rerun of almost all of these seven points with regard to Iran, so this exercise hasn't been entirely vain.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:42 AM
FL: the strategic problems of a nuclear Saddam are in themselves sufficiently serious to (at least) prompt us to consider the use of force.
Yes. But the urgent, essentially unilateral use of force to topple the regime without any clear idea of what would replace it and when? No.
ogged: we were bound to use some level of force sooner or later
Yes. This was evident at least since Clinton and Blair shopped around the idea of a war in 1998 or so. But the question, then as later, was could you get a decent-sized "we". Clinton's answer was if not, then you didn't use force. 9/11 should not have changed that calculus.
ogged: even I prefer baa's argument to Ogged's.
I thought you preferred small-o ogged.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:43 AM
I read Mr. B's 214 as saying, we might have had to reprise the 1998 bombings or something similar, as shown to be necessary by continued inspections.
And I think that's the killer to FL's 233. Nuclear Saddam: bad. Preventing nuclear Saddam: good. Is there a chance that Saddam might go nuclear? Well, as we now know, no, but even if there was, did that axiomatically mean that we had to conquer the whole country instead of doing something else? And did we perhaps have the option of gathering more information, at extremely low cost, and doing a better job of figuring out what our options are? Yes.
There was never any point in saying, "well, the chance may be p that Saddam will go nuclear eventually, so our only options are to sit back and hope he doesn't or conquer the country RIGHT NOW." Any more than in Gulf War I our options were to leave him unmolested or conquer Baghdad. And the proportionate use of force to the threat of getting nukes was to do what it to took to keep him from getting nukes. This argument doesn't provide a scintilla of support for all-out war unless you've got an argument that that's the only way to stop him from getting nukes. Letting the weapons inspections finish was always obviously the best way to answer that question.
This is all leaving out the problem of opportunity costs--the way the war on Iraq has kept us from doing other things that are important from humanitarian and non-proliferation standpoints. It's also leaving out the absolute horror of war, which needs good reasons for fighting.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:43 AM
Matt, Slol, I hope it's clear that I wasn't endorsing the conclusion "use force!" The point was that the debate really comes down to empirical claims about probabilities (of Nuclear Saddam, of the success of reconstruction, etc.).
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:48 AM
So Baa's argument is good, but as he says, he thinks #6 is the weak point. Since this straw-Saddam isn't allowed to have B/C weapons, we'll say nukes only. By Baa and Ogged's thinking, India and/or Pakistan should have attacked Russia, China, Iran or the US because the other one might get nuclear weapons and might use it against them and the place that the adversary would get the weapons is not internally.
For #1: It would be really horrible for any explosive device to go off in any city.
#2. The main lesson of 9/11 is that there are people in the world who are deranged enough to kill people en masse. But we knew this (see Holocaust, Israel, Kashmir, London, Amman, etc.).
#3. A lot of countries would like to have nukes. These include(d): South Africa, Iran, Iraq.
#4. Hogwash. So long as the inspectors are there, he can't do anything. If he kicks the inspectors out, then we can do something. You may say that Iran is the case that says this isn't true, but I say Iran's actions are predicated on our actions over the past 3 years and our relative position of weakness.
#5. Whether China and Russia are friendly now is of no import, because later on they might gang up and kill us all. Seriously, what?
#6. Is based on #4, which is, well, hard to support.
#7. Based on that logic, Iran is invadeable. Hugo Chavez says he doesn't have nukes and doesn't want them, but he's probably lying and he's got a lot of oil, so let's attack him next.
Look, the whole problem with the argument is that the IAEA inspectors were in country at the time. They were about to start inspecting again. If they had found something, then there's a case for war, if you want. But the doctrine of pre-emption is one based on a flimsy "well someday somebody might do something, so we're gonna make sure somebody can't." That's like me saying "well, someday my son might kill me, so I'm going to go leave him on a hill." Sure, it sounds good, but there's nothing to say that a) my son won't kill me b) my son will kill me c) my son will kill me, have sex with his mother, and then poke out his eyes d) none of the above.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:49 AM
240: Slol, you said what I meant much shorter and better.
239: Soon enough we're going to see a rerun of almost all of these seven points with regard to Iran, so this exercise hasn't been entirely vain.
Yeah, fucking exactly. We need to get rid of the idea RIGHT NOW that if the government says, "Well, country X might get nukes" it follows that you have to launch a war of conquest. Maybe I should be trying to persuade everyone that 1-7 looked plausible, so next time 'round we can say "Well that argument looked plausible last time, and see how poorly it turned out?"
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:50 AM
No, I didn't think you were endorsing the conclusion "use force", but I disagree that it comes down to probabilities.
Let's stipulate the probabilities support the use of force. My point was that "use force" is not a monolithic concept. An alternative, and much more supportable, use of force might entail:
1. Have a plausible plan.
1a. "Plausibility" entails budgeting for reasonable assumptions about costs (including manpower, duration) of occupation.
2. Use plausibility of said plan to win an international consensus.
3. Use international consensus to render plan legitimate.
4. Use legitimacy of plan to win allies in Arab / Muslim world. (As opposed to, e.g., use implausibility and illegitimacy of plan to create terrorists in Arab / Muslim world.)
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:53 AM
Disregard my comment about India/Pakistan in the opener. It doesn't fit #7.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:53 AM
245 to 242.
240: Slol, you said what I meant much shorter and better.
I have efficiently pre-empted Weiner. I shall now change his regime.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:54 AM
242: Labs, I didn't think you were, but I think you were framing the question wrong. For the question "Should we conquer and occupy this country?" we need to ask "Is there a significant chance Saddam will get nukes that can't be stopped by anything short of conquest?"
So no, I don't think that the mere statement "Saddam has probability p of getting nukes if we don't do anything" provides any support whatsoever for war, meaning the war that was proposed.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:55 AM
Am I alone in feeling like this is WWI all over again (i.e., they'll be home by christmas)? Instead of trench warfare, we've got guerilla warfare, and instead of mustard gas, we've got IEDs.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 9:56 AM
This is worse than WWI. In WWI we faced organized armies that were capable of a unified surrender when it came to it. Here, we face a loosely-organized array of enemies who are unlikely to surrender no matter how bad things get for them, and even if some of them did decide to surrender or quit fighting, the others would likely continue to fight on regardless.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 10:22 AM
ok, I disagree that it's worse than WWI, if only for reasons of scale.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 10:25 AM
I think the better analogy is the Philippine War.
1. Short war, US routs conventional military, deposes despised ruler.
2. US stays, not so welcome. Guerrilla war.
3. US army smaller than it should be to fight guerrilla war, generals keep saying.
4. Both sides begin committing atrocities. US uses torture to no clear purpose.
5. Investigations bring torture &c. to light. US administration shocked. US pledges reform.
6. War declared over. War continues.
7. Small army, ugly war, repeated violent bad incidents recede in newspapers.
8. US stays in-country for decades.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-16-05 10:39 AM
"(I believe only Gary and ogged) is just arguing that the pro-war arguments aren't self-evident crap."
Key modification: that