On Not Leaving Well Enough Alone

by tristero

A lot of folks got annoyed that I poked fun at Josh Marshall and worse, that the fun I was poking wasn’t funny at all, just mean. So let me be clear what my point was.

What I was trying to say was that Josh now sounds as shrill on the subject of the corrupt DC punditry as the rest of us. That’s all. Of course, I wasn’t disparaging Josh’s yeoman’s work on Social Security and the just as important community building among at least some liberal public intellectuals and journalists. I was merely expressing bemusement at Josh’s change in attitude. Yes, indeed, Josh, Somerby has been right for years. The discourse is so bad it truly boggles the mind. For Josh to catch on now is, how can I put it? both welcome and extremely odd. It’s not that the meme du jour of the pundit class – blaming the American people for the atrocities in Iraq – is such an escalation of stupidity in their rhetorical defense of Crawford’s Own Churchill. It’s just more of the same crap that the rest of us have been shrieking about for years now.

And there I probably should leave it. But I won’t. Not when Josh insists that “For what it’s worth, I think substantially more troops would have made a big difference earlier on.” They wouldn’t have.

Bush/Iraq was a stupid, immoral idea with no chance – except in the technical, mathematical sense – of success. The failure of people as intelligent and right on as Josh Marshall to recognize this, coupled with the inability of those of us who were right from the start to gain anything close to a respected public voice in the media all but dooms this country to repeat the Bush/Iraq war. And soon.

And that is something I am 100 percent certain I have no intention of sitting idly by and have happen again. It is my strong belief that one important component that led to the political environment that allowed Bush to start this crazy war was that well-intentioned, smart people refused to speak up when they could have. Perhaps Atrios is right, that only Powell could have prevented Bush/Iraq, but the list of people who didn’t bother trying is long. Had more people like Josh been as forceful in opposing the war as Josh has been in opposing Social Security destruction…well, who knows, but I for one would have liked to see it happen.

Josh makes his fundamental error even clearer:

I know there are a lot of people who either think that Iraq was a doable proposition that was botched or a project destined for failure no matter how it was handled. There are, needless to say, fewer and fewer in the former category. And I’d basically class myself in the latter one, if pushed. But both strike me as needlessly dogmatic viewpoints which make it harder to learn from the myriad mistakes that were made while telling us little about how we extricate ourselves from the mess.

In other words, it is counter-productive, he says, to assert dogmatically that Bush/Iraq was doomed from the start or coulda been a smashing success with more competent leadership (but he reluctantly belongs in the “impossible” category ).

Not so. As I have argued on many occasions, the failure of Bush/Iraq was a spectacular intellectual failure. From the standpoint of those who were not far-right ideologues, it was a failure to recognize immediately an absolutely crazy idea and label it as crazy before it had the chance to be taken seriously. These were no trivial, excusable blunders, but some of the worst, most easily avoidable errors of judgment in American history.

It is not dogmatic to state that there was no genuine moral justification for Bush/Iraq, and that people as sensitive as Josh and far more influential failed to realize that, or did realize it, and failed to speak out. It is not dogmatic to state that even a cursory glance at the history of democracy demonstrates that it is nearly impossible (as well as immoral) to impose democracy by force of arms and that the specific factors that enabled the rare successes were conspicuously missing in Iraq. Finally, it is not dogmatic to state that it is totally absurd to think that “better leadership” would have led to a “better result” for Bush/Iraq. Better leadership would never have seriously considered invading and conquering Iraq in the first place.

Perhaps if there was even some hint of sanity in the mainstream American discourse about foreign policy I would be less insistent on this. But the truth is that the only people who have seriously good microphones are all those people who were wrong about Bush/Iraq from the start. Until there is, at the very least, some sense that this country’s opinion leaders are prepared to listen carefully to those who got it right, I will continue to give those who got it wrong, and persist in getting matters of war and death wrong, a very hard time.

I never want to live through a repeat of 2002/03, ever, not to mention the ghastly aftermath we must now watch get far worse for at least two more years.The way I see it, one of the best ways I can help make sure that doesn’t happen is to terminate, with extreme prejudice, any attempt to let those who were wrong get off the hook, especially if they persist in continuing to misapprehend their contributing role. I’m glad that Josh is now so disgusted at the repellent fluffers in Washington that he has let himself write truthfully, even at the risk of seeming shrill. However, I am not glad that Josh still doesn’t grasp fully the deep and extremely dangerous failure of intellectual judgment that lies behind the opinion that more troops or a better president would have led to a more “desirable” outcome. After being so wrong on Bush/Iraq, a reluctant admission that if you want to be dogmatic about it then I side with the ‘impossible’ dogmatists, makes me fear that when Cheney and Bush start up in earnest over Iran, the same misjudgment will doom any attempt to oppose it.

So I will continue to call him, and others far more influential than he, on their failure of intellectual judgment until I am confident that those of us who know better are fairly represented in the Amercian public discourse.