I think it's revolting how the people who have the most to be ashamed of have, by virtue of owning the microphones, managed to shift the presumption in their favor. Even though Gilliard wins a prize for successful prognostication, and I liked his take at the time, it shouldn't matter who was able to say what would go wrong in detail. There should be no need whatsoever to be drawn that way, and we shouldn't be playing this game.

Back when "everyone" thought Saddam had WMDs, I thought that was a pretty fucking stupid reason to invade a country. I also found the attempts to link it to 9/11 offensive. But back then I was pretty well opposed to war in general, and looking at the sterling results we've gotten out of our little war of choice, being opposed to a war by default seems like a pretty prudent position.

Yes. Galt is simply trying to draw attention away from the more obvious question, Should people who supported the war (and more generally people who supported the administration) lose all credibility because they are generally belligerent or lose all credibility because they were so wrong on this particular point? My take is both, as a general thing -- with allowances made for some people being generally ok but having made such a huge mistake in this instance that I shouldn't listen to them in the future.

March 16, 2003.

To date, all of Bush's foreign policy has been conducted like a bull in a china shop, and now we're about to step into a terribly complicated situation among the Shi'a, the Ba'athist Sunni, the non-Ba'athist Sunni, returning ex-pats, the Kurds, the Turks, the Iranians, and possibly the Israelis, who say they'll retaliate this time if they are shelled.

Terribly complicated situations do not lend themselves well to the sort of binary lens through which GWB seems to view the world. And may I say as an aside that the next time I hear somebody wax orgasmic about Bush's "moral clarity," I will stab them in the neck scream. You are not blessed with clarity just because your moral crayon box only has two colors in it. Sorry, but that phrase drives me batty.

Anyhow, the problem is that, unlike Japan or Germany, Iraq is not an organic nation-state. Iraq is an artificial political entity created by the British in 1920 from pieces of the collapsed Ottoman empire. It's Yugoslavia without the skiing, and the initial post-Saddam era promises to be filled with bloody retribution. And the United States Army will be standing in the middle of it, responsible for policing and running courts and everything else.

And there's the next-step argument that the Bush clique will not address. We all agree that Saddam is a very bad man and that most Iraqis, indeed most humans, would rather he weren't there. But how long will the American public tolerate our military being caught in the middle of a brutal civil war with multiple fronts and several sides? You and I both know the answer: not long at all.

This has bad idea written all over it. Unimaginably expensive bad idea, at that. And when all hell breaks loose, the Republicans will blame it on Clinton's genitals.

I was saying at least some of those things and probably some at lot more expansively gibbering, but at one decisive moment, I knew that the entire case for war was bullshit: the moment Colin Powell claimed at the UN that those goddamned aluminum tubes were incontrovertible evidence of Iraq's being a nuclear threat.

Well, I don't have anything that I wrote at the time handy, and since I don't remember my conscious experience with a high degree of certainty, I won't bother rehashing what I think was my opinion at the time.

In hindsight, though, it seems like one of the big dividing lines between people who supported the war (reluctantly or eagerly) and people who didn't was whether they watched TV. September 12th 2001 was the last day I watched TV news until I finally flipped it on to watch Day 1 of the Best War Ever. My father, who I had previously thought of as being a liberal with extraordinarily good judgment, followed the Friedman path instead, which I still remember completely stunning me. But he watched TV news as addictively as I followed Internet news, and apparently it succeeded in wildly misinforming him. With Internet news I was able to see more clearly who knew what they were talking about and who didn't, and it was obvious that Scott Ritter was a lot more credible than Colin Powell. But maybe if I was watching an endless stream of TV pundits ignore/heap contempt on Scott Ritter and pronounce Colin Powell the smartest man in America, I would've been persuaded the other way... who knows?

Oh, I remember now that my other main source of news was the BBC World Service, which miraculously I could get in my car. I distinctly remember hearing their coverage of Powell's speech and I distinctly remember being totally unimpressed. So I think that 'hard news' coverage didn't convince anyone of the case for war, only emotional appeals and preconceived notions. Nothing in the debates of the past week has disabused me of this notion.

OK, so I rehashed it a little bit. Sorry. Too bad very few blogs have comments going back to 2002 or else I'd be able to quote myself.

I think I only knew one person who remotely thought the war was a good idea. Everyone I knew was against it, and for all the reasons rehearsed since.

It was completely obvious, even at the time. Those who want to claim that this is all only with the benefit of hindsight are talking out of their arses, as the arguments were simple, obvious and widely expressed.

I said a number of times to friends that I thought the war would last four years, and the occupation 14. I really didn't think the active war would be going on like this, coming up on four years later.

My take at the time was that
1) The standard for starting a war should be very high and clearly met, and there were no explanations given for this war that met both criteria, and
2) The world is hard and complicated. Surely things were going to be a crapfest afterwards in some way, and no public thought was being given to that.

Relatedly, my (very possibly incorrect) understanding of IR theory is that there's not much theoretical support for stable liberal states comprised of groups that really hate each other. In the stable liberal examples (Canada/Quebec) the dislike isn't that great. In the stable nasty examples, they're only stable because of a repressive regime (ie, Hussein).

Hmm. Well, I was optimistic at the time but still opposed to the war, really on the grounds that any policy of unlimited imperialism was mistaken. I can claim that it was really the arguments in favour of the war which persuaded me to oppose it. In particular, I was converted to pacifism by "Commentary" magazine.

see this (september 2002) and this, from just before the war started.

Neil's point about (American) TV news is very important. I spent ten days watching it in November 2001 and was really shocked by the way the war on Afghanistan was sold with all the techniques of commercials. You don't have to believe it was conscious war-mongering: those simply are the techniques used to attract viewers for any purpose. But the banners across the screen, branding reports as part of "America's War on Terror" were horrifying. They made thoght, and questioning, impossible for anyone who believed they were watching a window on the outside world.

The Galt is crazy. I think I started hanging around at her place in early '04, and she was making the same arguments for the war then as were made before, and responding to the same Scowcroft-ian(whom I think I continually identified as "Snowcroft") anti-war arguments as were made before the war. As late as last year, she wrote something along the lines of, "If Iraq becomes a stable democracy, I don't want to hear the anti-war people claiming they knew this could happen." While her current claim isn't perfectly symmetrical, you'd think a basic notion of fairness would get her STFU. (Other, random acts of...bad faith?...: She claimed in the run-up to the '04 election that one of the reasons she was voting for Bush was that the Republicans were better on civil liberties.) She's either trolling, she's turned into a straightforward shill, or she's crazy. I always thought she had at least some sincerity in her position in the past; I kind of hope she's trolling or just crazy.

She's either trolling, she's turned into a straightforward shill, or she's crazy.

Door #2.

I don't have anything blogged but I was working with a USMC (Ret) NATO planning guy at the time. We kept flip-flopping back and forth about the possibility of some WMD chemicals or possibly biologicals being given or stolen and used. For a terror attack in NYC or any city with a subway system, one wouldn't need huge amounts to cause great damage.

Once we heard of numbers being sent vs. what was first put on the plate by the generals, and of the Paul Van Riper war-game fiasco, we figured it for a mess but possibly not a disaster. Neither one of saw any need to bypass around the UN, a year or two wouldn't have made any difference to the threat.

I'll plead guilty to my persistently repeated error, thinking to myself "No one could be so stupid as to do or not do X, Y, or Z". My buddy is angrier, he says some generals should have resigned early on rather than speak out much, much later.

There is also the fairly obvious point that "hawks" can earn plenty of partial credit depending on how quickly they realised something was going wrong. Drum, Yglesias et al score pretty well on this subject, whereas McArdle scores appallingly badly. I think it was Paul Tudor-Jones who said that "being wrong is inevitable - staying wrong is unforgivable".

(unlurking) Our UC Santa Cruz faculty resolution against the war, as passed overwhelmingly in Feb 2003. I remember some arguing about the high cost estimates, but my number looks pretty low now. (lurking again)

17: Agree entirely. To be effectively immune to all available explanations of why Iraq is a clusterfuck--or even to the explanation that it is a clusterfuck--in '05 and '06 is astounding. The only remaining question: who will concede that the Iraq invasion was a bad idea first, Galt or Kaus?

I think there's a difference between "it was a bad idea" and "it was a mistake to support it." Yes, this is the incompetence dodge again. As I recall, dsquared was the one who had made the argument that this administration screwed up everything it attempted, and for not realizing the import of that, I was wrong to support the war. But I'm not convinced that the going all to shit was inevitable had things been done more competently.

As for the credibility of pundits and prognosticators, I think there's a bad faith reason the hippies haven't gotten a credibility bump--namely, that the press is in thrall to power and the appearance of strength, and will skew any debate to serve it--and a good faith reason, which is that one good call doesn't really tell us much about anyone's powers of prediction.

I'm not convinced that the going all to shit was inevitable had things been done more competently.

I am, unless you're defining competent as going back in time to triple the size of our military and developing a mind control ray. The crux of my opposition was that the power vacuum created by Hussein's departure guaranteed the nastiest, most complicated civil war imaginable in a society we didn't even begin to understand and that we would be completely unable to control it and stuck in the middle. It has escalated more slowly than I expected, but the basic thesis was sound.

But I'm not convinced that the going all to shit was inevitable had things been done more competently.

But, look, this is Yglesias's point about stupid trick plays in football: even if they're successful, the call was still a bad one. If you're saying that a thriving, open democracy with little negative effect on regional stability, at little to no cost, was a possibility, then you're crazy. If you're saying that, whatever else might have happened, it was worth the risks short of that, then you're crazy. Even if manage competently, even in the best of all possible worlds, it wasn't worth the costs.

What is most troubling is not the Iraq war, but the process that let people think it was a smart idea. This little misadventure really hasn't been that expensive for the US. We might not be so lucky next time around.

dsquared was the one who had made the argument that this administration screwed up everything it attempted

1. It was indeed dsquared.

2. I have this, from the day before the war actually started, I think. Maybe I will blog it. I have to think about whether I think it was quite right.

A lurker asked me to post this pre-war essay she wrote, as she can't post from work.

This may be sort of a "run with a different crowd" issue, but I recall very clearly a detailed conversation with Minneapolitan in Chicago, summer 2002, where we talked about the liklihood of sectarian conflict and civil war, the problems with de-Baathification and the probable destabilization of the entire region. (It was a lovely day, not too hot, just a few clouds to keep it from being horribly blaringly sunny. I was living in a converted convent for the summer pursuing my ESL teaching certification.)

There's this perception, I think, that the hippie crowd bases its opposition to war only on general principles of anti-violence. But quite a lot of people had been following the situation in Iraq in good detail because of the work against the sanctions. (And the hippies aren't quite so peace-y in the wake of good ol' run-yer-mouth Ward Churchill's influential Pacifism as Pathology, anyway.)

Yeah, ogged, I think apo and SCMT are right with this:

If you're saying that a thriving, open democracy with little negative effect on regional stability, at little to no cost, was a possibility, then you're crazy. If you're saying that, whatever else might have happened, it was worth the risks short of that, then you're crazy. Even if manage competently, even in the best of all possible worlds, it wasn't worth the costs.

If you look at what I wrote, I was pretty optimistic about the possibility of setting up a medium-term friendly brutal dictatorship. That's about as good as 'not going all to shit' could possibly have been expected to have been. And it wouldn't have been worth it at all -- not to Iraqis, and not even to us, given that the history of 'he's a bastard, but he's our bastard' types has not been to produce long term stable allies of ours. Hussein used to be 'our bastard'.

25: Yeah, and minneapolitan at least (I have a less clear picture of your politics, but I'm guessing from the comment that the two of you are pretty similar politically) is precisely who people think of when they make fun of puppet-wielding hippies. The puppet-wielding hippies (who, I should make clear, I'm also politically aligned with, just inexcusably too lazy to be much of an activist) were right about this for the right reasons.

...See, this is the narcisscissm of small differences, I guess, but since I know a lot of what-are-referred-to-as-hippies (who have, of course, myriad sub-categorizations to use among themselves) it's hard for me to realize that "puppet-wielding hippie" can refer to tie-wearing financial-industry types like Minneapolitan. I always think that PWH is a cultural term, when really it's a political one.

Did we know beforehand that sectarian animus would be as intense as it's been, and was that animus really just bubbling under the surface, or is it something that's been manipulated and amplified? Maybe competent post-war execution could have kept it in check?

Maybe competent post-war execution could have kept it in check?

Maybe it would help if you defined what would have constituted "competent post-war execution" rather than just leaving it to our imaginations. Bonus points awarded for keeping it in the realm of the possible.

I was pretty optimistic about the possibility of setting up a medium-term friendly brutal dictatorship. That's about as good as 'not going all to shit' could possibly have been expected to have been.

That's also what I was hoping for. Whether that was worthwhile or not depends on how you guaged the risks of leaving Hussein in power, and this is where we all start to hate each other.

28: See, I've never met him; I'm just stereotyping based on the lack of verbal footshuffling when he says leftist things. I mostly agree with them, but I'm surrounded enough by people who don't that I hedge and qualify.

Maybe it would help if you defined what would have constituted "competent post-war execution" rather than just leaving it to our imaginations. Bonus points awarded for keeping it in the realm of the possible.

Just the fairly uncontroversial points: a swifter and more forceful response to looting, no attempted de-baathification, and not disbanding the army. Which is to say, keeping the civil infrastructure intact, but changing the leadership.

Did we know beforehand that sectarian animus would be as intense as it's been

I certainly did not. I was opposed to this war every way come Sunday, but I only came to understand the divisions in Iraqi society gradually. However, from various things I've read, many Iraqis--particularly Sunnis, but also urban, professional, and intermarried people in general--have also been taken aback by the degree of sectarian hatred that has developed.

I supported the war (with hesitations), not on the democratic nation-building 'free the Iraqis' theory (which I would have recognized as doomed-to-fail, as I have so recognized ever since it was trotted out in the months following the invasion), but on the WMD theory. I didn't trust Bush, but did trust both Blair and (Bill) Clinton, who at the time were making a lot of the same noises as Bush. I was worried about Iraqi civilian casualties in a conflict, but the sanctions regime we had in place was doing plenty of bad anyway, and I thought regime change might at least let us clear those away (and hoped we could quickly ramp up humanitarian aid).

I vastly underestimated the mendacity and incompetence of our current government.

It was completely obvious, even at the time. Those who want to claim that this is all only with the benefit of hindsight are talking out of their arses, as the arguments were simple, obvious and widely expressed.

They weren't "widely expressed" in the US, except to people who read non-mainstream media. Note that nobody in the US is saying that the arguments were even simple or obvious at the time, merely that it seemed like the war may have been completely unnecessary because it was being promoted at an arbitrary time.

Did we know beforehand that sectarian animus would be as intense as it's been

Oh, hell yes. The easiest thing in the world is to dredge up old hate. At a minimum, we knew--because people had told us a decade before, at the end of a different war--that it was something to be very, very worried about. Not for nothing, but you live in the US and are as mellow a personality as can be imagined, and the only thing that you seem even marginally touchy about is the "Iranian"/"Persian" distinction. I don't doubt that there are good reasons for that touchiness, and I hope--in and amongst the various jokes--I/we/whatever are respectful of it. But it was always going to be easier, in post-war chaos, to give meat to similar touchiness in Iraq over Shi'a/Sunni distinctions.

The thing I can't get over, and which I didn't know until just recently, is that there are 25 mil. Kurds in contiguous lands spread over (I think) four states. Jeebus. I think that scares me most nowdays.

This where my puppet/hippie background converges with my knowledge of Iraq: I did, at the time, consider various little US-and-allies/lapdogs wars and ask myself whether they'd worked out well or whether the places had pretty much been left to twist in the wind. I ended up feeling that I couldn't think of a post-WWII functional US occupation and that therefore not only was I unsure of how one would play out but I was also extremely doubtful that one could be managed anyway. Again, a lot of the intense stupidity, corruption and mismangement (plus the bombing runs--you did know the we were bombing various parts of Iraq regularly during the sanctions, I assume) of the sanctions pretty much foretold what was going to happen once there was an actual war.

I think what triggered my conversation with Minneapolitan was my stated hope that at least a war would be finite, as opposed to the slow, dreadful attrition of the sanctions. (Which were horrible! Children dying of preventable and treatable diseases! Schools without pencils because lead was on the forbidden list! The slow collapse of the public health system as machines broke and supplies ran out!...I mean, I guess you could say that the Iraq war might have worked out better if it had been prosecuted on a country that hadn't endured ten years of sanctions. As it was, it reminded me of pulling the wings off of flys, or tormenting a sick animal--pretty grotesque.)

Whether that was worthwhile or not depends on how you guaged the risks of leaving Hussein in power, and this is where we all start to hate each other.

Yeah. This is where I say (1) it wasn't worthwhile at all for humanitarian reasons; its still a brutal dictatorship. We already had one of those, and didn't have to set innocent people on fire to install him. (2) It wasn't worthwhile long-term, because we've got no guarantees that 'our bastard' is going to stay 'our bastard' -- as I said above, Hussein was 'our bastard'. And (3) it wasn't worthwhile short or medium term, because the WMD crap was patent nonsense (oh, I was surprised when they found literally nothing. I was expecting some kind of insignificant chemical stockpile).

I'm not sure if you're hating me for that, but what were you seeing as the risks?

Note that nobody in the US is saying that the arguments were even simple or obvious at the time, merely that it seemed like the war may have been completely unnecessary because it was being promoted at an arbitrary time.

I am. Me me me! The arguments were simple and obvious at the time.

38: Or "flies" as some people like to call them.

33. I think you could add others to that list, such as greater immediate seizure of weapons stocks we knew were there, better control of our own weapons, quicker return of civil order, normal living conditions...

But, one of the problems when you start looking at all of these things is that it seems that it's not just Bush's fault. I mean, his team bears a lot of the blame, especially for their infantile refusal to form a backup plan (which they still somehow are keeping at - I don't understand, at all, how they are not completely and totally condemned for that position) but the military has made quite a few mistakes, too. Could a competent administration have compensated for a ham-handed military? That's a difficult hypothetical.

I was writing to my senator this morning, and was pretty disheartened to realize that the arguments I was using against this proposed "escalation" are some (though only some) of the same ones I have been using against every step of this war for four years:

No clear definition of winning, no clear benchmarks along the way to gauge if we're getting there, no legitimate reason to think a small increase in troops will accomplish the grandiosely stated "goal".....

Blech.

Did we know beforehand that sectarian animus would be as intense as it's been

I distinctly heard both "They're fairly secular and get along" and "They'll be at each other's throats without someone as brutal as Saddam to hold things together".

I should, at my advanced age, have learned to *always* start with the pessimistic view of human behavior. When I kept hearing things about how the pols and military had learned from Vietnam I didn't realize it meant they had learned how to forget all the lessons.

but the military has made quite a few mistakes, too. Could a competent administration have compensated for a ham-handed military? That's a difficult hypothetical.

This may be reflexive "No, honestly, I don't hate the military!"ism, but the impression I've had throughout is that the vast bulk of what could be described as military failures are most easily attributed to insufficient forces available, which goes right back up to the top.

See, hadn't we just had the Bosnia/Kosovo thing in the nineties? There was an example of (well, I don't believe in "ancient hatreds" since they usually turn out to be intermittent according to circumstances) political stress giving a lot of impetus to violence between small groups who had previously gotten along. Wasn't there a lot of Foreign Policy talk about the power of sectarian and ethnic differences in the wake of the Cold War? I mean, it was usually phrased as "The Others are irrational and kill each other because they've always done so whenever they could, so look out!" but there was definitely a lot of public awareness about that kind of thing.

45. yeah, certainly that's a direct cause. Also, it seems that they didn't have adequate time to prepare for interacting with a foreign people.

But, even if the Bush people had been more competent, it was stil the case that they were going in with a limited number of troops and fairly quickly. So these are two variables where assuming a better administration doesn't help, I think.

I too remember hearing that they were secular and got along. It's even possible that it was true, but didn't survive the invasion. The risk, as I think I've mentioned before, only to be told that I was nuts, was that Saddam, who I assumed had or was working on WMD, would give them to terrorists to use against the West.

Yeah, this was one my mother was right on top of, working from analogy with the Troubles in Ireland. You don't need ancient hatreds to be intractible in times of peace for them to flare up as nuclei around which conflict gets organized in times of war.

the impression I've had throughout is that the vast bulk of what could be described as military failures are most easily attributed to insufficient forces available

The impression I've had throughout is that the bulk of military failures are best attributed to poor resource allocation (via incompetence or active shenanigans -- e.g. "We can't plan for a longer war, because that will compromise the Magical Thinking that the war is going to be SHORT!") and/or to contractor failures.

Didn't Machiavelli have some sage words on why mercenaries are just not worth it? That should be true twice over for private firms providing other services.

In fact, a lot of the mess in Somalia (which is of particular interest to us in Minneapolis because we've got a lot of Somali immigrants here) sustains itself because in a time of chaos people ally themselves with tribes, sects, charismatic leaders, etc just because they need some organization that will protect them unquestioningly. They need some clear lines of support, and they are willing to attack others unquestioningly just for protection for themselves. I mean, what would I do if in a similar situation? Find some gun-nut hippies, probably.

The risk, as I think I've mentioned before, only to be told that I was nuts, was that Saddam, who I assumed had or was working on WMD, would give them to terrorists to use against the West.

Right, and this is still nuts. If by WMD you mean nukes, the aluminum tubes should have tipped you off that there was no evidence that he was building any: that the sanctions were working. If you mean chem or bio weapons, the deal is that there's never been a particularly effective chem or bio terrorist attack (Aum Shirinko, or however you spell it, killed ten or so? Maybe fifty?), and there are good reasons for that -- WMD aren't so M in any practical sense.

And what on earth does Saddam get from the terrorist attacks? Evil as he was, there'd have to have been a motive.

In my mind, those who opposed the war from the beginning ought to be clear about two things: (1) would the war still have been a bad idea if Saddam had been working furiously on a very dangerous WMD program, the products of which would in all likelihood make their way into the west (and if still a bad idea, why?)?, and (2) what reasons did you have to distrust Blair and Clinton in 2002/03?

I too remember hearing that they were secular and got along. It's even possible that it was true, but didn't survive the invasion.

One word: Joblessness.

The risk, as I think I've mentioned before, only to be told that I was nuts, was that Saddam, who I assumed had or was working on WMD, would give them to terrorists to use against the West.

What enrages me about this justification is that if the administration believed it, it makes their handling of the AQ Khan case even more spectacularly awful.

(Not yelling at anyone here, and not suggesting that I have the perfect nuclear-smuggling solution. But I hold my government to a higher standard.)

One problem was that there were so many reasons for misgivings about the war that you often chose arguments according to what you thought might convince, not what you really felt. Even in the family, Saddam's unusual evil, such that his removal was worthwhile in itself, whatever else, was so taken for granted that I in effect accepted it for the sake of argument. This despite having a great deal of doubt about it, that I expressed to my wife but to few other people.

There were a lot of points like that; if I'd convinced anybody by trying to meet "in the middle" I might think it had been worth it, but since I didn't, I wish I'd said what I really thought.

19

I don't know about Kaus but Galt has conceded the war was a bad idea hence her new argument that the pacifists were right like a stopped clock is right twice a day.

In my mind, those who opposed the war from the beginning ought to be clear about two things: (1) would the war still have been a bad idea if Saddam had been working furiously on a very dangerous WMD program, the products of which would in all likelihood make their way into the west (and if still a bad idea, why?)?, and (2) what reasons did you have to distrust Blair and Clinton in 2002/03?

There are a lot of un-possibles in there. Maybe. Similarly, if he'd had a SETI program that was trying to contact an alien species with unimaginable warmaking technology to convince them to help him conquer the world, and such alien species did exist and were tractable to his suasions, then it might have made sense to take out Iraq.

1: See, that just seems silly to me. If Saddam Hussein had a an army of giant flying robots with plasma guns, then I guess we'd have to fight him. But the standard of proof for that is pretty high, and the liklihood is low. If I were really convinced that SH had WMDS, STS, I would have done some different thinking about it, but since I wasn't, I didn't--I mean, I read a LOT of stuff about this and none of it convinced me.

If I should have done all this extra thinking and reading and taking-the-other-side-so-seriously-that-I-argued-their-case-more-strongly-than-they-did, how come no one else should have read even the gol-darned centrist international press (which was critical of the war) and taken their arguments seriously?

2. What reasons did I have to distrust Clinton? Hey, I'm a hippie, I don't like Clinton. Bombing the aspirin factory in Sudan for political gain. Stupid posturing about Haiti. Bad judgement in Africa. A really lame-ass welfare "reform". The flat inability to predict the bad effects of NAFTA. The slow erosion of the EPA and OSHA on his watch. Blair? I dunno, crappy third-way politics, but that was just a general feeling. If Blair had advocated invading Iraq off his own bat, he wouldn't have been able to gather the support.

I do believe I was pwnd there...although I like giant flying robots with plasma guns better than theoretical aliens.

I too remember hearing that they were secular and got along.

This pretty much ignores the history of Iraq directly after the first Gulf War, doesn't it?

if Saddam had been working furiously on a very dangerous WMD program

We had UN inspectors on the ground. It was more than clear, even if he had some stockpiles somewhere, that he wasn't working furiously on anything.

in all likelihood make their way into the west

How in God's name is this likely?

what reasons did you have to distrust Blair and Clinton in 2002/03

I never paid any attention to Tony Blair because why the hell should I care what the PM of the UK thinks about Iraq? And Clinton? Not in power. I assign his opinions the same importance as those of GHWB, Carter, and Ford. I will he note that he never found it imperative to invade Iraq.

(1) would the war still have been a bad idea if Saddam had been working furiously on a very dangerous WMD program, the products of which would in all likelihood make their way into the west (and if still a bad idea, why?)?,

You have to be more specific about 'very dangerous WMD program'. The thing is that as far as I can tell (and could tell at the time) there really isn't much in the way of 'WMD' that's going to be more effective in terrorist attacks than nitrogen/fuel oil explosives. That's the whole point of WMD, to leave it fuzzy what we're afraid of.

Are you postulating that he was going to develop something technologically unknown to the rest of the world, or what?

And I didn't trust Clinton or Blair for two reasons: yellowcake and aluminum tubes. The "OMG, he's going to get nukes" argument as made publicly rested on those two datapoints as their strongest support and they were both bullshit, and known to be bullshit ahead of time. If there was stronger evidence, it wasn't public. I might have fallen for "We know he's getting nukes, we can't reveal any of our evidence, trust us." But once they were asking for me to trust them on the basis of discredited evidence, I knew they had nothing.

You don't need ancient hatreds to be intractible in times of peace for them to flare up as nuclei around which conflict gets organized in times of war.

Yeah, what was the name of that place? Bosnia?

Brock, if Saddam had been working furiously on WMDs, and the "WMDs" had a prayer of ever wreaking mass destruction, and he had anything to gain from leaking them into the west (remember, in spite of everything he was a secularist and opposed to Islamic extremism), then there would perhaps be a case to answer. But we weren't operating in an information vacuum. The inspectors had tried and failed to find anything, Powell's UN speech was regarded as pitiful at the time. We were calling it on the available evidence, present and historical.

As for the trustworthiness of Clinton and Blair, well... Two brilliant men, whose records were probably both marginally positive before 2003, but who would ever have trusted either of them to fetch the milk/

The "stopped clock is right twice a day" line is the lamest. It allows Galt to say well, the war was a bad idea, but I was still in the right to support it.

Back in the days when nerdery of my type was mostly found on Usenet, there was this discussion on WMD.

It seems like a long, long time ago. Apparently, at the time, all I could find to say about the future of Iraq was this:

An Iraqi capitulation pre-empting an offensive is probably the best outcome we can hope for from this point on. I can only hope so, for the sake of n Iraqi conscripts, who - until the carpet bombing stops - only have the choice of taking their chances against randomly dropped Mk82s or the special fate saved for deserters by sadistic Iraqi MPs.

I'm sure our leaders are thinking it'll all be over soon - and we'll wonder what all the fuss was about. Whatever. It's all shit, as far as I'm concerned.

At least I was perceptive about the WMDs. There was a discussion about Fallujah later, also, but by that time it was fairly clear which way the wind was blowing.

would the war still have been a bad idea if Saddam had been working furiously on a very dangerous WMD program

Probably. But if not, the way it would have not been a bad idea is if we had followed the Gulf War I template and gotten the entire world on our side first. (Well, OK, not France.) And the way to do that would have been, you know, actual proof.

what reasons did you have to distrust Blair and Clinton in 2002/03?

I believed that they believed Saddam had WMD. (I also discounted some of their certainty, because it's their job as leaders to overestimate risks, and I imagine the terrors of underestiming risks were driving both of them.)

But heck, I believed there were WMD, except that as someone said above I thought they were relatively piddly little stocks and that the greatest danger was that they would have deteriorated and that our military would be having health problems 10-20 years from now because of inhaling toxins or whatnot.

I just didn't grasp a) why war was the best way to solve this, and b) why we had to go to war *right that very minute.*

63 -- or in the words of Roy, "near as I can figure, it's about how just because she was wrong about Iraq doesn't mean the people who disagreed with her were right."

I never paid any attention to Tony Blair because why the hell should I care what the PM of the UK thinks about Iraq?

I paid just a little bit less attention to Tony Blair than I did to Dominique de Villepin.

something that's been manipulated and amplified

Of course it has been, but that was just as predictable as all the rest.

It doesn't matter at all to the US--as distinct from US interests--whether or not Hussein had WMD. We could give the Iranians a nuke, and the cost would be a probable uptick in terrorism, regional activity, and general cussedness. It would not include the possibility that the Iranians would nuke us. What would be the point?

We're a Goliath, and there are only a handful of countries on earth that can conceivably mortally wound us militarily. The only Mideast country with capabilities to harm us deeply in the US is Israel--and even then, not that deeply--and I'm not sweating an Israeli attack.

Sometimes I wonder if the problem is that we're somehow not comfortable in our strength.

To remedy some confusion, in my 53 (1) and (2) are related, in that if you didn't distrust Bush/Blair/Clinton, you'd have had good grounds to think that something like (1) was the case.

60 is absolutely correct - the weapons inspectors really have gone down the memory hole, haven't they? After they turned up the DRONE OF FLYING DEATH that turned out to be a balsa wood remote-controlled plane, it because increasingly evident to me that the claims of Saddam's WMD -- which I had pretty much assumed were largely bullshit, particularly the nuclear claims/aluminum tubes issues -- were 98% junk. All the people badmouthing the IAEA haven't been called on to apologize, so why should Galt feel bad about literally fantasizing about people beating up (with a 2x4, I recall, was her specific stage direction) puppet-wielding hippies who were protesting?

And to prevent further confusion: I was obviously wrong to think the way I did. So I'm not trying to defend it, or the war. Those who opposed it from day one have been vindicated and then some. But when I reflect on my thought process in those days, I'm not totally sure what went wrong, or that I wouldn't make the same or a similar mistake again in the future.

And as a million people have noted, there's a nigh-infinite number of things that can go wrong with a plan -- you don't need to be able to guess which ones are going to happen to have a good idea of whether the plan is a sensible one. There's a reason Warren Buffett says he mentally maintains a "too hard" pile for investment ideas.

I'll cop to being wrong on the initial stages of the war -- I thought it was going to turn into classic urban warfare much earlier than it actually did, and that the supply lines were going to end up underprotected. Military commanders are much better at running a military operation than I am, but I'll go up against Cheney and Rumsfeld on the wisdom of the civilian leadership's decisions.

72 -- the fact that you are acknowledging it as a mistake (albeit one you might make again in the future) is a good sign. Galt's argument seems to be that she did not make a mistake, even though she ended up being wrong. Instead it was the other people, the people who were not wrong, who were making a mistake.

(And to avoid any confusion, I'm not saying I should get any credit or credibility for having opposed the war -- that was just luck. But people who opposed the war and wrote about it should get some, and people who were particularly prescient in their writings should get a lot. People who supported the war get -2 credibility points right off, the number of points deducted going up as the war progressed and they continued to support it.)

After they turned up the DRONE OF FLYING DEATH

That, and the missiles which, if you didn't put explosives in them, could fly a few miles past the legal limit.

This was maddening to me at the time and even more so now that Bush keeps saying the Saddam wouldn't let inspectors into the country. Iraq was *crawling* with UN inspectors—who agreed that Saddam was cooperating with them—and the WARNOW! crowd simply took that as proof that Hussein was ever so clever at hiding things. In other words, Megan McArdle can kiss my hairy red ass. She hasn't yet reached stopped clock level of rightness.

Late to the party, but here are three posts from me from March of 2003:

1. Strategy and Realism.

"(a) Since WWII, how many autocratic or totalitarian countries have been invaded by a democracy, had the bad guys deposed, and a stable democratic regime installed; and (b) How does this number compare to the number of invasions or other interventions that resulted in puppet governments, friendly autocrats, messy long-term military occupations, or outright disasters?

2. The Persistence of the Old Regime.

After their victory, those hoping to institute liberal democracy in Iraq are likely to find "The Iraqi People" (a noble abstraction) resolving itself into a multitude of Iraqi persons (a messy reality). ... What then? Does the U.S. really want to go down the road of purging the populace of the Baathists? (Where did I put my old Kulak detector?) More likely, does the U.S. want to take on the role of colonial administrator, struggling to keep a lid on the pot while waiting for a social revolution? Or, perhaps most likely, will the U.S. just declare victory as soon as Saddam is dead and get the hell out, perhaps installing a friendly puppet before leaving?

3. Clean Hands, Dirty Hands.

Of course a liberal democracy in Iraq is a better outcome than the alternatives. Now that they've gone and invaded, the Administration should try to build one. Unlike David, however, I am interested in description as well as persuasion. I want to know the answers to questions like these:

1. Is the Bush administration really making a good faith effort to build democracy? Or do they have some other agenda? Or are they just making it up as they go along?

2. Even if there's a good faith effort, what sort of costs are we prepared to pay to achieve this goal? Is this a six-month or a twenty-year commitment? Does that change our assessment?

3. What do the targets of our benevolence think about all this intervention? Do we think we can easily tell the goodies from the baddies after Saddam falls?

These are mundane empirical issues. ... My view is that, just as Marxism had to face up to "actually existing Socialism," we have to look at "actually existing democracy." ... I think there are empirical outcomes which, though vastly less desirable than OxDem's vision, seem much more likely on the ground.

Oh my God, I'd forgotten the balsa-wood drone of death. I'm laughing hysterically now. Those were really dark times for people who actually read page A14 and the foreign press.

I plead guilty to being in favor of the invasion, but not for any of the reasons Bush gave.

I knew that it would cause turmoil and the unraveling of Iraqi society, but I figured that the sanctions were going to do this eventually anyways. I still think this is the case, and I'm not sure that I can imagine a scenario where we ended the sanctions/no-fly-zone regime without getting rid of Saddam (just politics-wise).

What we need to recognize here is that the argument was not really even between war and not-war, since the US military had been carrying out a siege of Iraq for a decade - and bombing it at regular intervals - so we were basically at war already. Iraq's internal affairs were being guided and regulated from the outside to a degree that was not consistent with Iraq being an independent country. We were basically occupying Iraq, but contracting the work out to Saddam.

An actual anti-war position would have been to lift the sanctions, end the air campaign, wind down commitments in Sa'udi, etc. but very few people (and even fewer with power) were truly in favor of this.

Since the sanctions were basically costless to us (other than inciting regional hatred, of course ...), we could have, and probably would have, continued them indefinitely.

I felt that a full-scale war would end eventually, even if badly. Given the character of our political elites (both Republican and Democrat), barreling into Baghdad was the only way for us to finally leave the bloody place alone at some distant future time.

You end a war with the politicians you have, not the politicians you want. (Or to put it another way: I was for the war, because I was against it.)

An actual anti-war position would have been to lift the sanctions, end the air campaign, wind down commitments in Sa'udi

That's just about where I was, frankly.

Me too.

Dirty hippies.

Actually, that was more or less Unf's position, and I remember Magik and I making fun of him for it. Haha.

I have been a dirty hippie, certainly.

I would have been on board with that -- I would probably have wanted to continue inspections, but the sanctions weren't doing anything useful. It just never occured to me that any of that was even remotely politically accessible.

As apostropher has pointed out, let's not forget Billmon when the Prescience Awards are handed out. He's archived at the Wayback Machine, thankfully.

And speaking of Billmon, has anyone heard anything about why he just up and quit with no explanation? I'm hoping he just quit blogging and didn't give up the ghost entirely.

Also, someone named Miguel de Icaza has made a backup of Whiskey Bar available.

Working Wayback Machine link.

And yes, Billmon was right over and over and over.

I think he became convinced that he was making himself crazy in a futile attempt to change a future he feared.

Enough people know his real name that he won't fall off the radar in event of serious RL trouble.

88: Oops. Being on fire is obviously messing with my powers of concentration. The fire is so pretty!

Enough people know his real name that he won't fall off the radar in event of serious RL trouble.

That's good to know.

91 -- but paradoxically, it burns.

making himself crazy in a futile attempt to change a future he feared

90 is the sense that I got from his penultimate post. Also he has a family and a pretty high-powered job and the sort of blogging he did (as opposed to just linking to stories about genitals like I do) is both incredibly time-consuming and exhausting.

"90" s/b "That"

I have failed in not being sufficiently dirty hippy. War is bad.

(For children and other living things.)

2 and 77 get it so right, variously.
Being opposed to war on principle, however compelling the attraction, is hardly ever wrong.

When those prosecuting an aggressors war claim lofty ground. It is because the ground they stand on has a bad smell.

(Hi Austro!) Yeah, it's easy to make fun of the dirty hippies, but on these questions they happen to be right about 95% of the time.

What good is being right if no one listens to you?

The good lies in the fact that the reversal of the premise has consequences that might go a good way to defining evil.

It's an excellent way of reminding yourself not to turn down Apollo when he gets horny?

(Hi Apo!)The older I get, the more admire dirty hippies.

I think that Obsidian Wings just melted down.

Yep. It'll get back together again, though.

You really can't run a comments section with rules against being mean to troublemakers, unless whoever's enforcing the rules has some other way of managing it.

This is what happens when people don't insist on baked goods.

You've got to admit that's one persistant (and amazingly self-evident) troll.

94 explains why he quit blogging; it doesn't quite explain why he shut down the site which he didn't do the last time he quit.

Maybe to make sure he wasn't tempted back into it?

104: It's not a meltdown, I don't think. They just closed one thread. Could have banned the troll, maybe, but closing the thread only ends one discussion, not the site.

Still, the answer to 'do not feed the troll' is to insist that the troll feed you... spongecake!

Yeah, but that would be against the ObWi rules insofar as I understand them -- repeatedly insulting or harassing someone.

I don't follow ObWi--really I only read them when LB links to a post by Hilzoy. I like the popup comments box we have here, and I think that unfogged handles trolls better than any site I know.

You're banned, BG.

Of course I am.

What I fear is that 1) the new troll might stick around for a while before the ObWi people (who really dislike moderating or coordinating or emailing or rejiggering anything in the controls, apparently) get around to deciding to ban him, and that 2) von has irreparably lost the respect of a lot of the commentariat. I haven't seen a thread preemptorially closed so quickly in, I dunno, forever, perhaps, and von didn't even try to sort it out within the comments.

When a fair amount of even the normally reasonable commenters take against a front-page poster, the blog is usually in for a world of hurt.

ObWi has a real problem with its design as a left-right meeting place. It might have worked okay if it had stayed close to balanced in the commenters, but as it is it's a basically liberal bunch of people commenting on posts by liberals and conservatives.

There's no way for the conservatives not to feel ganged up on; they get hostile about it, and then things get uglier even with no one trying to act in bad faith. Add to that the fact that most people don't like to be outnumbered by people who disagree with them, and the conservative commenters are going to be rarer and more likely to be the sort of person who enjoys picking a fight.

I'm thinking part of what happened there was that von just wasn't in the mood to reprimand the only person in the thread he agreed with, despite the fact that he was the one making all the trouble, and closed the thread so he wouldn't have to.

That might be part of it, but that's one nasty troll. ObWi has managed to ignore deal with a lot of trolls in the past, but this one has it turned up to eleven. The "other causes for mushroom clouds" tangent was almost inspired.

ObWi has a real problem with its design as a left-right meeting place. It might have worked okay if it had stayed close to balanced in the commenters, but as it is it's a basically liberal bunch of people commenting on posts by liberals and conservatives.

I think it's more that ObWi tried to become a pro- and anti-war meeting place, and most of the commenters -- liberal or otherwise -- eventually figured out that the war and the arguments for it were stupid. It was like trying to have a "balanced" site about whether cigarettes are good or bad for you, with Charles Bird crossposting from RedState to tell you that they're "just what the doctor ordered."

that's one nasty troll

Problem is that he isn't particularly nasty. The ObWi rules cover insults and profanity, but not deliberately derailing a conversation (as with the, as you say, inspired mushroom cloud routine). I can't think of how you could ban him under their rules.

53: In my mind, those who opposed the war from the beginning ought to be clear about two things: (1) would the war still have been a bad idea if Saddam had been working furiously on a very dangerous WMD program, the products of which would in all likelihood make their way into the west (and if still a bad idea, why?)?, and (2) what reasons did you have to distrust Blair and Clinton in 2002/03?

1. Jesus fuck. Nothing to say.

2. There has never been any reason for anyone to trust Blair or Clinton. Clinton was a pretty good President, but not someone to trust.

I don't think that people who supported the war at first should be sending ultimatums to people who opposed the war from the beginning. I think that people who supported the war at first should be sitting quietly in the back row with their hands on their laps and paper bags over their heads.

Someone else who was right.

I want you to know that the only reason I'm consenting to this is because I wish to clear my name.

I have never actually wielded a puppet at a demonstration. I have, however, worn a large papier-mâché mask and an old church choir robe and carried a PVC pipe jail cell in a parade that featured a great many puppets.

I did also make most or all of the arguments that Frowner outlines above, for years before the war. And I attended demonstrations against sanctions, and against Gulf War I, and wrote letters and signed petitions and did lots of other stuff on those fronts. And this was not because I am somehow reflexively opposed to violence. I am opposed to a state monopoly on violence, mainly because I don't believe that anyone has ever provided any evidence that concentrating the power to do violence in the hands of a small elite has ever advanced the cause of human freedom in the slightest degree. Quite the contrary in fact, the more we concentrate power as a civilization (and has their ever been a greater disparity between the amount of power a person wields and their ability to wield it than now rests in the person of our glorious Leader?) the more we ensure that further violence must be meted out against the least powerful.

With regard to this specific war, I was saddened, but hardly shocked, to see so many ostensibly thoughtful people reduced to slavering, jingoistic morons by the incredibly crude and poorly distributed propaganda that the people in power foisted upon them. There was never a bit of proof presented for any of the administration's assertions. Likewise, there was never even a convincing narrative that would explain just how the Iraqi military could have managed to construct, maintain or weaponize any nuclear, biological or chemical materiel in the face of sanctions, intermittent bombing and the intense scrutiny of dozens of intelligence services and United Nations inspectors.

Having said all that, I'd also like to interrogate this idea of the "dirty hippy". Precisely who and what do we meant by this? Abbie Hoffman? Emmett Grogan? Mizmoon Soltysik? Joan Baez? Phil Ochs? Angela Davis? Tariq Ali? The Stonewall rioters? The Weather Underground? The Summer of Love? Woodstock? The Black Panther Party? I'm perfectly willing to admit that members of the various social movements of the 1950s-1970s, especially here in the U.S., were guilty of many excesses. But just as with the current war, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Those who opposed the Vietnam War, white supremacy, misogyny, heteronormativity and environmental degradation were correct to do so, and they often opposed it for exactly the right reasons even if some self-interest or muddled thinking occasionally crept into their activism. The stereotypical "dirty hippy" who hung out on the Haight-Ashbury in 1968 and mouthed some peacenik phrases has as little to do with the principled opponents of oppression then as the permanently drunk crusty punk of today does with serious antiwar activists. Sometimes their social scenes may intersect, but the activist does not draw her inspiration from the layabout.

Take a look at the crowd shots of millions of people taking to the streets on Feb. 15 and March 20 of 2003 -- very few dreadlocks and Dead Kennedys patches are in evidence. The opposition to this war has been both broad-based and considered, for all that the corporate media (and the mainstream blogosphere) have attempted to marginalize and segregate it.

And while I'm at it, here's your pro-war caucus's true face right here.

the "dirty hippy". Precisely who

This guy.

122: Well, much of the use of the term "dirty hippy" is ironic -- a lampooning of movementarian attitudes toward Those Leftists who they think of as somehow having been vaguely responsible for defeat in Vietnam, the Iranian hostage crisis, Hollywood's distressing recent shortage of John Wayne tributes et cetera.

OTOH, there was and is a regrettable tendency among many in the anti-war movement to try to distance themselves from "those" sorts of leftists, the sort We All Know Are Loopy (And By Their Dreadlocks and Patchouli Ye Shall Know Them). It's probably a good idea to point out how profoundly intellectually lazy that is. That attitude was also one of the drawbacks of the fact that the anti-war movement was broad-based in an unprecedented way -- many of the people joining it were, in fact, conservatives who had grown up hating on Those Leftists and had a hard time getting used to being on the other side of the barricades with them.

119: actually, they do cover that--disrupting meaningful conversation for its own sake is right in there. We've just always been wusses about enforcing the more subjective ones--myself included back in the day.

I was totally wrong about iraq, remember?

anarchy and civil war -- is worse than even the worst goverment

Fucking Hobbes. Who knew? Yeah, I was on board with some of those reasons. Of course, truly, I was part of the Iranian master plan of plunging Iraq into chaos so we could slide on in. Thanks, America.

Khorramabad! Cool.

There's a respectable philosophical viewpoint that, because remarkable claims demand remarkable evidence, attempts at dramatic change carry dramatic risks, and the bigger the scheme, the more people have ulterior motives, one ought to start off moderately opposed to any grand scheme. Given all the cognitive biases that are likely to come into play on whichever side is supported by power, it makes sense to aim-off somewhat.

It's not being right like a stopped clock is right twice a day, it's more like having three independent clocks and taking the average time, with the option of any two clocks switching off the other if it goes too far out of kilter.

That said, my opposition to the war wasn't based on cognitive psychology or epistemiology. I couldn't see what the benefits of it were, although the costs were all too obvious, and the risks were clearly very serious. I expected a few old artillery rounds full of gas, but I didn't think Saddam was a threat of any kind. And I felt it was a breach of maintenance of the aim to start pony-hunting in Iraq before securing the pony in Afghanistan, especially as at the time that pony was actually within sight.

Look, what it all comes down to, as Frowner says, is this: If you lack a coherent, articulated ideology, you are lost. It's no good to read journal articles or listen to speeches if you have no idea of the motivations of the writer or speaker. During the build-up to the Iraq War, it was obvious to me and many others that all of the negative outcomes with which we are all now sadly familiar were going to come to pass. Why? Because we had an ideological basis for interpreting the facts and opinions at hand, and that ideology led us to discount the self-serving pro-war propaganda from the Bushies and their corporate masters and privilege the well-founded critiques that came from academics, military strategists, regional experts, long-time antiwar activists and many, many others.

If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.

Hey, look at that!

Take a look at the crowd shots of millions of people taking to the streets on Feb. 15 and March 20 of 2003 -- very few dreadlocks and Dead Kennedys patches are in evidence.

This reminds me, when I marched in one of the San Francisco protests, a fellow marcher stopped me to ask incredulously if I really believed what it said on my sign. (It said "The media sells war -- don't buy it")

At that moment I despaired.

There's a respectable philosophical viewpoint that, because remarkable claims demand remarkable evidence, attempts at dramatic change carry dramatic risks, and the bigger the scheme, the more people have ulterior motives, one ought to start off moderately opposed to any grand scheme. Given all the cognitive biases that are likely to come into play on whichever side is supported by power, it makes sense to aim-off somewhat.

Very true, and as a corollary one ought to be highly suspicious of any grand scheme where the proponents refuse to entertain any serious discussion of evidence, risk or motive.

130: As an alternative to an ideology, which has problems of its own, I suggest getting a methodology instead. Whatever ideology you choose to espouse, good methodology should keep you from making any really bad mistakes.

131: Well, Dsquared's drive for worldwide intellectual hegemony marches on, no?

From belle's post: This is going to sound stupid, but I genuinely thought that if all those guys, and Colin Powell and everyone, really thought Iraq posed a possible nuclear threat, then they knew something I didn't.

This certainly seems like a reasonable enough position to take, and yet everybody who I know who fell for the big lie against their better judgment did it in essentially this way. Oh, well, Colin Powell, or the President, or Bill Clinton, or the PM of England, or Tom Friedman, they all know more than me and they seem pretty smart and they're plugged in, so I should trust them more than I trust myself.

I suppose that like Emerson I'm not inclined to trust people over my own judgment, and the Iraq fiasco has certainly cemented this tendency. I Won't Get Fooled Again. But is this just more collateral damage? Will I suffer in the future from having my lack of confidence in authority so spectacularly vindicated?

There's a respectable philosophical viewpoint that, because remarkable claims demand remarkable evidence, attempts at dramatic change carry dramatic risks, and the bigger the scheme, the more people have ulterior motives, one ought to start off moderately opposed to any grand scheme.

I think there's a Belgian proverb along these lines that says "When the fox comes preacher, farmer, mind your hens." Still, while the principle in general might be useful, like ('follow the dollar') it's not going to give you an answer or a guide in contemporary American politics except to be moderately suspicious of anything big.

I can't find what I wrote in 2002/2003, but my general thoughts were while I didn't like Saddam, I was pretty sure we weren't finished in Afghanistan, and that it might make sense to clean up one mess before moving onto the next.

This is going to sound stupid, but I genuinely thought that if all those guys, and Colin Powell and everyone, really thought Iraq posed a possible nuclear threat, then they knew something I didn't.

This, exactly, and the reason it works is that it's the answer to Alex's 'be moderately suspcious of any big change.' They had a case for WMD. They made the case. Unlike me & Belle and most of the rest of the Internet, these guys do military and political stuff for a living. Surely they know something I don't.

This certainly seems like a reasonable enough position to take, and yet everybody who I know who fell for the big lie against their better judgment did it in essentially this way. Oh, well, Colin Powell, or the President, or Bill Clinton, or the PM of England, or Tom Friedman, they all know more than me and they seem pretty smart and they're plugged in, so I should trust them more than I trust myself.

It is an unsurprising error, and I don't want to bust anyone for making it, in that I do things at least that dumb all the time. But you didn't have to rely on an instinctive distrust of authority not to make it -- the reliance on discredited evidence, specifically for the nuke claim, should have been enough to tip someone off even if they were willing to give authority a fair shot.

As I said above, I could easily have fallen for the nuke claims if they'd been made with no evidence -- just "We know this, and we can't tell you how because it's all too classified." Maybe not from Bush alone, but Clinton, and Blair, and Powell? I could have fallen for that. Once they're talking shit about aluminum tubes and balsawood drones, though, they're exposed as liars, and at that point what they say is absolutely worthless.

one ought to be highly suspicious of any grand scheme where the proponents refuse to entertain any serious discussion of evidence, risk or motive.

Ding ding ding.

I don't understand why more war cheerleaders can't admit that after 9/11, they were simply very receptive to the idea that we had to "do something" dramatic in the Middle East. I guess they care about their claims to moral seriousness?

136: When was the evidence discredited? Was it really discredited before the war started?

You know what's funny? I clicked through to reread belle's apology post, where she admitted that the desire to just smash somebody, doesn't much matter who, was an element in her support of the war. And of course she backed off that as insane, being generally a reasonable and admirable person who just made an error evaluating whether to support the war.

Baa, on the other hand, linked his reasons for still supporting the war (this is from December 2004 -- I don't know whether it still fairly describes his thinking) into her comment thread. He still thought smashing somebody was a positive argument for the war.

Was it really discredited before the war started?

Yes. But the administration looked America right in the face and successfully used the "who are you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes" defense.

138: Yep. The IAEA was saying "Wrong kind of tubes" the summer before the war started -- I'd have to look up the dates, but I'm sure. But we kept on bringing them up anyway. To believe what we were saying, you would have had to believe that the IAEA was lying to help Saddam conceal his nuclear program, which seemed unlikely.

Likewise with the yellowcake -- the original documents we were relying on were shown to be forgeries long before the war, but we kept on talking about it without ever explaining what the other evidence that made us still think Iraq was getting yellowcake from Africa was, given that the original documents weren't it.

When was the evidence discredited? Was it really discredited before the war started?

In March 2003 or so when the Blix teams went back in, and couldn't find anything Bush and Co. said was there, was a sure sign that something wasn't right with the picture being painted.

Really, their evidence was so obviously, laughably, easily discreditable that nobody should have been fooled. I don't think you can overestimate the effect of television news, as people have said upthread. The national media's failure to call bullshit during the run-up is going to go down as one of American journalism's worst failures ever.

Apparently I remembered the timeline wrong, but I have to say I'm probably stupid enough that I don't know that such information would have made a great deal of difference.

What do I know about bombs? Fuck all! I'm in the humanities! Aluminum tubes still doesn't mean a thing to me, practically, except that other smart people seem to think it means that it meant Iraq didn't have nukes. My friggin' Congress are the ones supposed to know these things, and they were fooled.

Which is to say I find the general game of "who was right earliest" interesting, but it sort of misses the point. Why were the other guys wrong? Belle was wrong, but Belle was wrong for perfectly good reasons: humility about her own knowledge, belief that her government was competent.

My friggin' Congress are the ones supposed to know these things, and they were fooled.

I doubt it. I think they were cowards who got muscled into voting for an equivocal resolution--"You can go to war if you meet all these conditions" that didn't get met, and didn't have the chutzpah to stand up and call the administration a bunch of liars.

The "You all just irrationally hate Bush" routine was terribly, terribly, politically effective.

Aluminum tubes still doesn't mean a thing to me

They didn't mean a thing to me either, but I googled it up easily enough to know that the Department of Energy experts (who didn't have a vested interest in invading Iraq) ridiculed the idea that those tubes would have been retrofit to work in centrifuges, and that they had an obvious application, just the way they were, for artillery rockets.

Now see, I'm just a monkey with a laptop and I knew that, so I'm pretty sure the reporters covering that beat knew it as well. The question isn't so much why were the other guys wrong (that's easy - they were lying to achieve a goal they couldn't achieve otherwise) as why didn't anybody in the media say loudly and forcefully, "They are spouting complete and utter bullshit."

Now see, I'm just a monkey with a laptop and I knew that, so I'm pretty sure the reporters covering that beat knew it as well.

I don't know. A lot reporters seem like they're seriously fucking lazy when it comes to stuff like this. Not that willful ignorance is any better.

Surely they know something I don't.

Near as I can tell, that turns out to be mostly false. and especially so if someone tells you there's something they can't tell you. There's also that psych study showing that "leaders" can lie better than "followers".

In any event, in all this analysis of retrospective correctness, I still don't see any way of realistically assigning credibility factors to the various claims at the time they're being made. It comes down, as it always does, to people following their prejudices and looking for evidence to support those while essentially being blind to contradictory evidence.

The problem was saying "Liar" was just too rude to be said in public and treated respectfully, but anything more polite than "Liar" didn't make sense. There wasn't room for honest error on the nuke evidence, as Apo said, any monkey with a laptop who was following things up could have known it was bullshit. Any explanation that allowed for the administration to be honestly deceived on the nuke evidence required you to concede that it wasn't really that obvious, at which point the argument breaks down, because if it's not that obvious, why does the monkey with laptop know more than the Secretary of State.

So there wasn't any way to call the administration on it without sounding like an unhinged (all together now) DIRTY HIPPIE!

I'm seriously considering getting some t-shirts printed with the slogan: "Scepticism: the only philosophy that's gone 2,000 years without a pyramid of skulls!"

But that's not true.

Maybe with a footnote saying "*Until credible evidence shows otherwise"?

Jainism has a pretty good track record.

(That is said fliply -- anyone got actual knowledge about whether Jain has wars in its history? Wikipaedia does not mention any but that does not mean much.

The problem was saying "Liar" was just too rude to be said in public and treated respectfully, but anything more polite than "Liar" didn't make sense.

I think this is exactly it, but it's not only the rudeness point, it's also the idea that most people don't expect their elected leaders to be lying quite so baldly and boldly. And, as you said, anything less than lying didn't make a lot of sense. Combine this with the general belief that if the government was *obviously* lying they'd be called out both by the press and by opposition parties, plus Cala's "I'm no WMD expert" sentiment, and it seems very understandable that reasonable people (like, say, me) were hoodwinked.

I'd nearly forgotten, but most people probably heard 'liar' and other such strong words from the pro-war side and not the anti.

Here's frequent cable news guest Michael Kelly responding to Al Gore's speech against the war in September 2002:

Gore's speech was one no decent politician could have delivered. It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts -- bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate....
If there is a more reprehensible piece of bloody-shirt-waving in American political history...I am not aware of it.
...the Gore style -- equal parts mendacity, viciousness and smarm...

He uses the word 'lie' twice more. Today, Gore's speech seems almost hawkish.

156 was me, but the links were from TAPPED.

The question isn't so much why were the other guys wrong (that's easy - they were lying to achieve a goal they couldn't achieve otherwise) as why didn't anybody in the media say loudly and forcefully, "They are spouting complete and utter bullshit."

Yeah, this has been a tough one for me. I'm relatively conservative, I suspect, for a Democrat, and realizing that the fucking hippies were right about the extent to which "what sells" determines the news is beyond depressing. I understood the argument, and was even sympathetic to it before the war, but I guess it had never been as nakedly clear to me as it was during the run-up. Actually, what's really horrible is that that's the optimist's view; the pessimest's view is that the major media is filled with people who really are that stupid.

I don't think Epicurus has much blood on his hands, for instance.

Gore would have made a better president than GWB.

I don't think Epicurus has much blood on his hands

Except of the countless millions of farm animals slaughtered to quench the appetites of history's epicures.

Although, if Gore had forcefully said that Bush was lying about the WMDs and the cause for war, Kelly might not have had so much to complain about. Gore's speech is totally typical of what I recall the mainstream anti-war position being at the time: "Saddam has WMDs, Saddam is awful, regime change is desirable, preventative war is OK, but we still shouldn't invade." It's easy to see that position as reprehensible because it lacks internal consistency and falls immediately into the trap noted in 145: "then the only reason you're against war is because you hate Bush!"

It doesn't lack internal consistency. It requires judgment.

Epicurus-style epicureanism is rather different from the modern understanding of "epicureanism".

Gore's speech did make several points about the chaos that would follow in Iraq was more threatening to the U.S. than Saddam, but this point is weak when you're already conceding that Saddam is threatening to the U.S. I don't remember many people arguing strongly that he wasn't, providing a counterbalance to the axis of trusted persons that convinced belle and Cala and so many others.

Many people, I should have said, who are trusted persons on par with the people who belle trusted. You've got Scott Ritter, you've got some guys with websites, and... who?

162: Here's where the brilliance of the term WMD comes in. It was clear that the Adminstration was making shit up about nukes. It wasn't clear that they were making shit up about chemical and biological weapons -- it seemed perfectly possible that there could be some stockpiles left. I was arguing about the war a lot at the time, and I was conceding that "of course he has WMD, just not anything that's a serious threat to us."

And re-read the speech -- he comes out squarely against preemptive war. (That is, preventive war in the language we used to speak before 2002.)

Of course, by the time the dogs of war were making their case, I already did hate Bush with a consuming, almost irrational passion.

I don't think Gore does concede that Saddam was a significant threat to the US:

The problem with preemption is that in the first instance it is not needed in order to give the United States the means to act in our own defense, either against terrorism in general or against Iraq in particular.

The speech is shaped by defensiveness against attacks -- he's conceding that Iraq is 'seeking' WMD because otherwise he gets instantly slammed as a Saddam lover who trusts Saddam more than Bush, because of his irrational Bush hatred. But he doesn't concede that that makes Iraq a threat. If Gore had the hindsight we do, the speech would be stronger, but for September '02 it looks pretty good to me.

Sure, it looks good, but it's also easy to see why it wasn't more convincing at the time. Near the end of the speech Gore said the administration has not said much of anything to clarify its idea of what would follow regime change or the degree of engagement that it is prepared to accept for the United States in Iraq in the months and years after a regime change has taken place -- and I think this quite well encapsulates the 'buyer's remorse' that America is now suffering from. But it's hard to take that too seriously when he's saying all Americans should acknowledge that Iraq does indeed pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf region, and we should be about the business of organizing an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction and they deserve to be dismantled and The president should be authorized to take action to deal with Saddam Hussein as being in material breach of the terms of the truce and, therefore, a continuing threat to the security of the region. To this should be added that his continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is potentially a threat to the vital interests of the United States..

Gore was participating in, instead of working to change, the insane discourse that dominated that year. But within that discourse it was very hard to make a case against the war.

apo is a smart monkey with a laptop who can find DoD experts saying that 'hey, those aluminum tubes are used for artilltery and can't be retrofitted to make centrifuges.' I don't have any way to evaluate that. He's a DoD expert, sure. But now I'm just weighing arguments from authority and worse, in the position of trying to read the tea leaves to figure out someone's motivations...and I'm out of my league.

I didn't support the war, pace neil, but I'm not sure my reasons for not supporting it were terribly good ones.

Here's where the brilliance of the term WMD comes in.

Yup. I don't think anyone was seriously challenging that Saddam had no WMD at all, and in 2002, I don't think it was politically possible to say, "There hasn't been a large-scale successful chemical weapons attack on a subway system, so even if al-Qaeda got it, they'd probably only make a few hundred New Yorkers sick", as no one would have believed a story like 9/11 in June 2001, either. There was a sense, inflated by the government, that al-Qaeda was going to do massive damage on American soil and wasn't going to execute anything that wasn't going to be at least as spectacular as falling towers.

"Saddam doesn't have the ability to make nukes, if these guys are right about aluminum tubes, so he's only going to hand over nerve gas to al-Qaeda."

"Oh, that's okay then." wouldn't have flown then.

I don't have any way to evaluate that. He's a DoD expert, sure. But now I'm just weighing arguments from authority and worse, in the position of trying to read the tea leaves to figure out someone's motivations...and I'm out of my league.

I'm worrying this like a dog with a bone, but no. You've got the IAEA saying "No way, wrong tubes". You've got people in the DoE saying "No way, wrong tubes." And you know they haven't got any motivation for lying -- the existence of genuine America-hating-Saddam-lovers, as much as people were throwing around accusations of it, was fantasy. The administration, on the other hand, is trying to sell a war, and does have a motivation for lying.

This isn't magic, it's engineering -- the tubes were plausible centrifuge components or they weren't. If they were, the administration should have been able to shut the IAEA up humiliatingly with support from every engineering professor in the country. But they didn't -- they just ignored the people pointing out that the tubes wouldn't work.

Ignoring criticisms is only a legitimate thing to do when your critic is self-evidently crazy -- the Holocaust denier (e.g.) who you don't want to give credibility to by engaging with them. When you've got someone ignoring institutionally credible critics on a matter where objective facts exist and are checkable, you know they're hiding something.

Colin Powell's presentation to the UN pretty much sealed it for me, since it was so transparently full of shit and relied on what was obviously weak supposition, non-evidence and 'arguments' with logical holes one could drive omnibuses through. As Apo says, a monkey with a laptop could easily work out it was full of shit.

Up to that point, I was possibly prepared to concede there may be WMDs although I still didn't (and don't) think that that was a good reason for 'us' to invade.

Also, I never bought the 'Blair and Clinton are smart guys' argument from authority since, for a start, I've always thought Blair was both venal and dumb.

LB, what's the administration's motivation for lying, that in 2002, doesn't sound paranoid when presented? And what sounds more plausible? That I'm wrong about whether to trust the experts, or that the administration is that blindingly misguided that they're ignoring the experts, or that the experts are mistaken, where I can't evaluate this last because "the tubes can't be retrofitted" sounds like "burble burble mission go splotchy elephant!"

Sort of tangential... suppose Iraq did have nukes. or we discovered them tomorrow marked 'Addressee Bin Laden Unknown return to sender.' Would you now feel that the war was justified? I don't think I would. I found the whole nuke discussion sort of irrelevant.

Powell's speech was billed as being the definitive laying-down-on-the-table case for war. He dithered about those goddamned aluminum tubes (which DOE and IAEA scientists had been raising a LOT of page A14 questions about) and that goddamed balsawood drone and pictures of a bunch of mobile trailers. That was just about all he had for us. Oh yes, also some rumors about yellowcake, which had also already been questioned on page A14.

These questions also never made it into the official discourse. I listened to most of the major Congressional debates that were available to the public (I was really obsessionally following this stuff), and it was the rare Senator who remembered even to ask about the doubts that had been raised about the evidence.

So frustrating.

the administration is that blindingly misguided that they're ignoring the experts

This is the version I was holding onto--because I'm technocratically minded like that--until it was proved to my satisfaction that the administration is just evil.

the thing that made me distrust everything was NOT the technical disputes, but when they would make these: "technically true, highly deceptive" claims. I remember seeing some MIT profs discuss the war in fall 2002--they talked about Bush and Cheney saying that if Saddam Hussein got enough enriched uranium he could make a bomb in less than a year. This was apparently technically correct, but in fact getting the HEU is the main obstacle to makig a bomb. Saddam could only get it within a year by buying it on the black market. If Saddam could do that so could Bin Laden, and the real danger was the black market in Pakistan, loose nukes in Russia, etc. etc. Saddam was a far lesser danger as far as nuclear weapons than either of those two countries, North Korea, Iran, and probably a good many others.

They thought he did have at least some chemical weapons, possibly bio. but probably not weaponized--but he wouldn't share those with terrorists unless we invaded. If we did invade, he would have nothing to lose, and then he might consider it--and those weapons are too small and too easy to hide to secure quickly.

The pro-war guy on the panel was Ken Pollack, the one whose book seemed to make hawks out of a surprising number of liberals, and he wasn't even close to convincing next to these guys--didn't even dispute most of their arguments.

I had leaned against supporting it to begin with, but that discussion completely sold me. And the case just clearer once the inspectors were back in and not finding anything. It still didn't occur to me that they'd find not even rusty old chemical weapons after the invasion, but by that point I was highly suspicious and thought: if the case is so clear, let's find some real evidence.

I also thought the preventive war doctrine was malevolent--liked to quote Truman and Eisenhower on how it was a weapon of dictators.

I don't remember if they were even talking about the Democracy domino theory etc. but I thought that was absurd from the first time I heard it.

LB, what's the administration's motivation for lying, that in 2002, doesn't sound paranoid when presented? And what sounds more plausible?

The problem is 'doesn't sound paranoid when presented': there's a perfectly good explanation, but under the terms of acceptable discussion, of course it sounds paranoid. They wanted to start a war with Iraq. They'd been hinting at it since before 9-11. It was domestically advantageous, and it fed into the 'restructuring the whole Middle East' fantasy. But the public wasn't going to go for "We're going to invade Iraq because we want the whole Middle East to be different" -- it's an incredible long shot, and, of course, a war of aggression, which lots of people still think is a bad thing to do. So they needed a credible threat as a casus belli.

The thing is that none of that is paranoid. Governments start wars based on lies all the time: we did it in Vietnam. It's not paranoid to say that that's what happened. (And, you know, it was too paranoid to say in the media, but in fall 2002, if someone had asked you whether the administration was really getting us into war because they were afraid of Iraq's WMDs, or whether they would have wanted to do it anyway, wouldn't you have agreed on the latter? If you would have, there's your motive right there.)

Assuming that the other experts were lying doesn't make sense. While the administration wanted war whether or not there was a genuine risk, there's no reason to think that the DoE and the IAEA were willing to lie to conceal a genuine risk. They would literally have had to be working for Saddam at that point, and that really doesn't make any sense at all.

Since well before 9/11. I went back into some old IRC logs and was somewhat surprised to find myself talking confidently about a forthcoming war with Iraq in February 2001. If anything I was surprised how the talk of Iraq died down between 9/11 and July 2002.

When Iraq first started coming up, apparently out of the blue, I'd had a kind of "soft" sympathy for the Afghanistan venture but had already started to distrust (again) the Bush Administration when all the fine talk about a "Marshall Plan for Afghanistan" was failing to materialize. This was a signal to me -- along with things like the PATRIOT Act -- that these were profoundly dangerous people. It was starting to occur to me that in the wake of 9/11, my country's neighbours to the south were ceasing (or had ceased) to be "America" as we knew it.

Still, I wasn't decisively against Iraq at first, though I was deeply suspicious; after all, Bush had also done good things, like speaking out against anti-Muslim violence early on, and you could hardly blame an American President for attacking Afghanistan in the circumstances. What turned me decisively against it was an incident, early in the game, when Bush got caught red-handed simply making up fictional IAEA reports in an interview (he was bluntly rebutted by the IAEA the next day, and the White House had to retract the statement). This is the sort of careless mendacity we've gotten used to by now, but at the time it was bizarre in a way that signalled something was deeply, deeply wrong. This was something weirder, and worse, than spin or clever deception -- this was a guy who just didn't care if he was caught deceiving.

The clumsiness and carelessness of the mendacity was what kept me anti-war and made me anti-Bush (and anti- anyone in my own country who professed to admire him), and the emergence of the pre-emptive doctrine and other sinister signals made me determined to petition my own government not to get involved. (That's a big part of why countries outside the States had such huge anti-war movements; even my own normally apolitical white-collar city hosted marches of unprecedented size.) People had to keep entire websites to track the endless bald-faced lies and self-contradictions of White House officials -- and creepily, apart from a few pockets here and there, for a long time in most of American consciousness it all just seemed to seep down the memory hole.

I can't claim any great prescience about the conduct of the war itself -- just before its outbreak I was convinced that either large-scale urban warfare would happen or that an insurgency would develop, but I certainly didn't predict the insurgency leading to large-scale urban warfare or the speed with which everything unravelled. For all my suspicion of Bush's White House, I never imagined that they'd be so stunningly incompetent and corrupt that their performance would actually give hawks an "out" -- the ability to claim that their fine idea had been ruined by fools. So that whole experience has certainly changed my perspective on a few things.

What I regret most looking back was that I was dismissive of anti-Afghan War voices in the early days, in much the same way that "liberal hawks" would later be dismissive of anti-Iraq War voices. I think that was a mistake, that they were right and I was wrong; there are still Canadian troops stuck in Afghanistan, part of a multinational force trying to clean up Bush's mess. That's a big problem.

Another point about this discussion: I know you all are saying it was all so very easy to see and so obvious and clear, but the thing is even if that's true it still would have required paying attention. And it's hard to overstate the degree to which paying attention is not something most people are willing to do. I'm very politically engaged (by national standards), but I didn't watch Powell's UN speech or read any IAEA reports on any damn aluminum tubes. I remember reading secondary discussions of both those things, and even that's likely more than most people could say. I'm not paid to pay attention to these sorts of things -- politicians are, and journalists are. And so when politicians and journalists aren't raising a front-page stink about these sorts of things, they're likely to escape my notice.

Another point about this discussion: I know you all are saying it was all so very easy to see and so obvious and clear, but the thing is even if that's true it still would have required paying attention.

This is absolutely true. Getting this stuff wrong is (IMO) completely forgivable, for exactly the reason you give. Paying attention is hard, and very few people do -- I don't about most things. I don't hold not having been paying enough attention against any pre-war hawks at all.

And it's hard to overstate the degree to which paying attention is not something most people are willing to do.

I think it's probably true, perhaps especially in the American case, that much of the really obvious stuff was obscure or occluded if you were relying on traditional news sources, or on superficially "respectable" conservative news magazines like the National Review. Not everyone had the time to become an obsessive blog reader, to read pages and pages of reports and PNAC publications and so on.

On the other hand, it can be fairly said that when a major thing like war comes around the bend, "other people are paid to pay attention" really isn't much of an excuse. It's pretty commonsensical to realize that war is a big deal, that politicians and journalists have dropped the ball in the past, and that taking some time out of your day to pay more attention is therefore warranted if you really value political engagement. And it's pretty clear by now what kind of things can happen if you don't value political engagement.

Pace 182. I guess LB is more gracious than I.

To be a little less gracious -- "I wasn't paying attention" is a perfectly reasonable accompaniment to "That's why I was wrong." It doesn't go nearly as well with "That's why no one could have seen this coming." Some people were paying attention, and some people did.

181: Absolutely true. I don't hold anybody's support against them (I mean, I'd still make out with both Ogged and Belle) EXCEPT the people who then went on to label opponents traitors or cowards or the like. Those people I would sooner spit on than shake their hands and if Joe Klein or Mickey Kaus or Andrew Sullivan fell down an open manhole, I'd do my level best to cover the damn thing up.

Yeah -- of course Megan is not saying "I wasn't paying attention", and is supposedly in the class of people who are paid to pay attention.

Assuming that the other experts were lying doesn't make sense.

In fairness, that doesn't have to be the assumption. The media's idea of fair and balanced is to quote one person who agrees and find one who disagrees. Controversies on evolution, on safety of new drugs, etc.

I'll drop this because I'm giving the impression I care more than I do. But I don't think it means that a person was dumber than a monkey if they saw the report, saw it on page A14, noticed that the media, the Democrats in Congress, no one was raising a stink and figured, "there's got to be something I don't know."

It doesn't go nearly as well with "That's why no one could have seen this coming."

I hope that's not the impression I'm giving.

I hope that's not the impression I'm giving.

No, not at all.

(I mean, I'd still make out with both Ogged and Belle)

And the blog pauses, thoughtfully.

At the same time?

If I needed to, sure.

and figured, "there's got to be something I don't know."

I held out that possibility until Colin Powell's speech. Then I just hated, hated, despaired, and hated.

185- I tried to concede pretty much exactly that in 72.

The media's idea of fair and balanced is to quote one person who agrees and find one who disagrees.

And the corollary is that if nobody is prominently disagreeing, then there must not be another side to the story.

That was what made it ungracious. 185 wasn't actually addressed to you or Cala so much as to possible other, wronger, people out there.

That was what made it ungracious

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

Colin Powell's speech was convincing in a lawyerly way. He made his argument by appealing to prejudice and eliding over the gaps in his evidence.

I honestly was not sure about whether Husayn had an industrial infrastructure that could support a WMD program. After the UN speech, though, I knew that if he did have one the US government knew absolutely jacksh*t about it.

The case looked threadbare even if you took nearly everything at face value.

1) When he presented the electronic intercepts, he would spin the statements he quoted in his speech a bit from the actual transcript, always to make something potentially benign into something darker ("inspect" ==> "clean out"). You could just read it off the screen if you wanted to, but the sinister version was still embedded in the subconscious.

Powell also skillfully avoided even trying to provide explanations for some of the terms used in the intercepts. He just expected people to draw their own conclusions, which is a classic lawyer technique. For example, the "modified vehicle" could just as easily have been Saddam's armored car, which was also produced by the al Kindi corporation, instead of a missile. Powell probably knew this, but the average person wouldn't know that without prompting, so you just take advantage of that ignorance of possible alternatives by gliding over it.

2) A CGI rendering of what the "mobile labs" might have looked like, was supposed to show what exactly? (Why not show surveillance photos instead?)

3) Satellite photographs of vehicles moving in and out of an active facility. Oh my god! I have never heard of such a thing! (What if they were just ordering out for pizza?)

The whole thing was delivered in such dark tones that you feared the heavens would shake if you chose not to believe it, but the evidence itself was mighty thin beer.

Some predictions (from March 3, 2k3:
Early March: Saddam continues to destroy his missiles. Security council does not pass second resolution (7 for, 2 against (Germany & Syria), 6 abstaining).

Mid-March: US & UK troops invade Iraq.

Early April: After approx. 2000 US/UK casualties and say 50,000 Iraqi, US/UK are now in control of Kurdish areas, southern Iraq, Baghdad, Mosul and Tikrit. Several barrels of toxins of various sorts are uncovered & widely trumpeted (leaving several thousand tons still unaccounted for). Saddam Hussein, his two sons, many units of the Republican Guard, and many tribals have headed for the countryside and small villages. France proposes a resolution to the Security Council creating a UN Administration for Reconstruction and Democratization in Iraq(UNARDI). America vetoes the resolution (UK abstains).

Mid-April: after a guerilla attack on a US base in Baghdad kills several hundred US troops, the army starts to crack down in rural areas, setting up checkpoints, enforcing curfews, engaging in house-to-house searches, detaining and questioning thousands of "suspected terrorists". Jack Straw holds a series of meetings with Dominique de Villepin. Rumor has it that they are working on a compromise resolution for a combined UN/NATO administration in Iraq.

Late April: UK and France jointly propose a security council resolution authorizing a combined UN/NATO administration: a UN-headed UNARDI in charge of civilian restructuring, and a NATO-headed security structure. US vetoes the bill in a 14-1 vote. Tony Blair is removed as Prime Minister by the Labour Party. New PM Gordon Brown announces that British troops will leave Iraq by late May.

Mid-May: US continues attempts to track down remaining Republican Guard elements, Saddam and family. Iraqi population grows more restless as curfews/checkpoints/etc. turn out to be more intrusive on a day-to-day level than oppression under previous regime. US accuses Syria of harboring Republican Guard "terrorists". UNHCR estimates 5 million Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons.

Mid-June: First suicide bombing targetting US troops.

I'm not going to pretend to have any idea what will happen between the Kurds and Turkey in the north. Or how the south will end up administered.

20-20 hindsight dept: Obviously, thought there would be too many casualties during the actual war. Overestimated how much opposition there'd be in the UK. Overestimated how many WMD's would be found. Overestimated America's ability to keep even temporary control of the situation in-country.

Probably not wholly irrelevent to this discussion is the fact (which I've mentioned here several times before) that I get all my news from Fox News.*

So in some sense I never even really had a chance...

*I now get my news from some combination of Fox News and a few blogs. In 2003, not so much...

Oh, and... 200!