Learning Too Much

by digby

Jonathan Chait misses the point with this article today in TNR:

I don’t want to accuse American doves of rooting for the United States to lose in Iraq, because I know they love their country and understand the dire consequences of defeat. But the urge to gloat is powerful, and some of them do seem to be having a grand time in the wake of being vindicated.

Radar magazine recently published an article bemoaning the fact that pro-war liberal pundits have not been drummed out of the profession for their error. In it, lefty foreign policy guru Jonathan Schell sniffs, “There doesn’t seem to be a rush to find the people who were right about Iraq and install them in the mainstream media.”

Being right about something is a fairly novel experience for Schell, and he’s obviously enjoying it immensely. But before we genuflect to Schell’s wisdom, it’s worth recalling that his own record of prognostication is not exactly perfect.

He goes on to discuss how many times he thinks Schell has been wrong, which is supposed to somehow prove his point. But the Radar article shows something else. It’s not just that war war hawks have been richly rewarded for being wrong — war critics have in many cases been punished. Chait himself is a good example of one who benefitted at the expense of someone who was right — he’s taken the op-ed slot at the LA Times that was held for years by Robert Sheer, who was a fierce critic of the administration and the war.

Chait uses the example of the Democrats in 1992 to further make his point:

Or go back to the last war we fought with Iraq. Schell insisted that we could force Iraq to leave Kuwait with sanctions alone, rather than by using military force. But the years that followed that war made it clear just how impotent that tool was. Saddam Hussein endured more than a decade of sanctions rather than give up a weapons of mass destruction program that turned out to be nonexistent. If sanctions weren’t enough to make him surrender his imaginary weapons, I think we can safely say they wouldn’t have been enough to make him surrender a prized, oil-rich conquest.

Most liberals made the same argument as Schell in 1990, and as subsequent years exposed the silliness of the claim, many of them were humbled. Indeed, most Democrats in the Senate voted against the Persian Gulf War, and that vote disqualified many of them from running for president in 1992. The presidential nomination went to a governor, Bill Clinton, who didn’t have to vote on the war, and he selected as his running mate then-Senator Al Gore, one of a handful of Democrats who supported it.

This was why so many of the presidential aspirants (and pundits?) voted for the Iraq war. They were fighting the last one and that most certainly was a mistake. And it will continue to be a mistake if reflexively supporting a war is considered the smart move. Despite Chait’s glib description of Saddam’s imaginary nucelar arsenal, it’s impossible to prove a negative. We will never know if sanctions might have worked in 1991, all we know is that the limited war we opted for instead was successful. (Unfortunately it also resulted in a bunch of Iraq obsessives who finally got their chance to “finish the job” — and here we are.) Which is where Chait’s argument really breaks down. He entitles his piece “Were you right about the last war? Who cares.”

Who cares indeed? But we aren’t talking about the last war, are we? We are talking about the current war, the one which these war hawks supported and for which they continue to set forth absurd solutions to the mess its become (like reinstalling Saddam Hussein.) As much as these guys want to say that it doesn’t matter how we got here — it does. In his opening sentence, Chait cutely suggests that people who were against the war are rooting for defeat, but doesn’t seem to see the corollary — those who supported the war refuse to admit that it’s hopeless.

Certainly nobody expects someone to be right all the time and nobody says that someone who was wrong about the war cannot ever speak in public again. But why they should be rewarded with big book contracts about foreign policy and op-ed columns where they continue, day after day, to kick the ball down the field, give it a surge or one more Friedman Unit is the question. Iraq is the biggest issue of our time. It’s happening right this minute. At what point does credibility become an issue in the here and now?

Nobody’s perfect, but in the perverse incentive structure that exists in the punditocrisy, it’s clear you are always better off being a war hawk and being wrong than being a war critic and being right. That’s a problem and it’s one of the reasons why we are in this mess today.

Chait ends his piece saying that he hopes we’ll learn lessons from Iraq but he’s afraid we’ll learn too much. That seems unlikely.

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