It Was An Unprovoked War, People

by tristero

Without repeating what Digby and others have said recently, I’d like to jot down a few thoughts regarding the current discussion of opposition to the Bush/Iraq war.

Part I – We Were Right, But No One’s Gloating, Pal

By falsely accusing Schell, and by implication others, of “gloating,” Jonathan Chait demonstrates that he, not those of us who were right about the war, is deeply unserious.

Gloating… my God, I’m sure Schell understands what’s at stake as well as I do, but does Chait? No one with an ounce of humanity could possibly gloat about being right about something like Bush/Iraq. Chait fails to realize we understood all too well that this was a pointless invasion that could only lead to the senseless slaughter of thousands upon thousands of innocents. Only a madman gloats about foreseeing the rampant butchery of humans, and Chait very well knows it.

Chait’s attitude, however, highlights the fact that disagreement over Bush/Iraq was, and is, at least from the point of view of those of us who opposed this disaster from the start, tragically serious. This is not a gentlemanly, academic dispute over something like the dating of Bach manuscripts. This argument is, as I see it, about truly understanding the scope of the monumental, egregious failure by the US government and the American media to recognize the basic principles of international relations, the laws of probability, and the nature of human behavior. It is about preventing a recurrence of a catastrophe that could easily have been avoided.

Gloating? I am sickened that I saw the disaster of Bush/Iraq coming. Worse, despite doing everything I could possibly think of to prevent it, to the point of damaging my career, I – along with the rest of us – failed to prevent it. Gloating? I will live always with the nagging sense that I could have done something more, something unknown that could have made a difference. Gloating is the last thing on my mind when I point out, as I’ve done numerous times to the hawks I know, that I was right and they should be listening right now to those genuine experts who were.

Part II – Yes, Kevin, We Were Right About The Right Things

Kevin Drum attempts to ask a more pointed and focused question than Chait. Were those of us opposed to Bush/Iraq right about the right things? He focuses on the notion that many of us objected to the concept of “pre-emptive war:”

The fact that Iraq is a clusterfuck doesn’t demonstrate that preemptive war is wrong any more than WWII demonstrated that wars using Sherman tanks are right. It’s the wrong unit of analysis. After all, Iraq didn’t fail because it was preemptive (though that didn’t help); it failed either because George Bush is incompetent or because militarized nation building in the 21st century is doomed to failure no matter who does it. Preemption per se had very little to do with it, and the argument against preemptive war, which is as much moral as pragmatic, is pretty much the same today as it was in 2002.

In an update, Kevin clarifies the difference between “preventive” and “pre-emptive” war. While that is an important distinction, it is more or less irrelevant to Kevin’s point, as he himself recognizes, because the clarification causes him to make no changes in his position.

That is because Kevin’s point itself is irrelevant. Many of us opposed to Bush/Iraq were opposed to it because it was an unprovoked war despite the Bush administration’s desire, along with the liberal hawks, to frame the argument in meaningless and hypothetical general terms, ie, whether there are times when a pre-emptive war, or in contrast, a preventive war, is any good. Bush’s line of reasoning, which many people including Kevin, found serious was one that I never bought for a second, nor did many war critics . During a speech in the fall of 2002, I mockingly characterized the Bush position as “preemptive unilateralism,” aka PU, and urged everyone to ridicule Bush’s arguments rather than discuss them.

In Kevin’s follow-up post, which Digby discusses below, Kevin continues to insist on discussing 2002/03 solely within the Bush administration’s public framing rather than grasping that those of us opposed to Bush/Iraq were opposed because it was an unprovoked war whose reasons were, at best, incoherent.

Kevin is also woefully mistaken when he argues that “the specific quagmire that we find ourselves in now has very little to do with the fact that the Iraq war was preventive,” which instead he blames on the Bush administration’s incompetence. What he fails to realize is that waging uprovoked war by a United States government in response to 9/11 is itself the height of incompetence. There would be no argument that unprovoked invasion was a competent policy if Bush had proposed invading, say, Madagascar, but Iraq had just as little to do with 9/11 .

In other words, the fact that the Bush administration ever seriously considered invading Iraq should have been enough of a forewarning that they would, inevitably as night follows day, wind up specifically in the precise quagmire we see today in Iraq.

Part III The Chuckle-Headed Flakes Were The Bush/Iraq Hawks. The Rest Of Us Had Both Feet On Planet Earth

Finally, I’d like to draw attention to some other ways the issues of 2002/2003 remain poorly understood.

It is absolutely ludicrous to characterize opposition to the war as a leftwing position. That is, unless people like the great John Brady Kiesling, who voted for Bush in 2000, is a leftist, which he emphatically is not. A corollary to that kind of stereotyping is to falsely characterize those of us who opposed Bush/Iraq as “anti-war,” ie, opposed to any war at any time.
Many people who knew Bush/Iraq was a terrible idea from the start supported the Afghan war and the 1991 war against Saddam.

To be blunt, it is the height of intellectual incompetence to describe those of us who knew Bush/Iraq would be a disaster in such simplistic terms. To do so is to make the same kind of category errors that led to the mistake of supporting the war in the first place and to dismissing those of us who were alarmed as the standard issue leftist anti-war crowd. Many people on the left and many peace activists were, naturally, opposed to Bush/Iraq, but the striking thing about the demonstrations of 2002/2003 was that opposition to the war was nearly universal, and far greater in this country than many recall (millions of Americans marched against the possibility of the Bush/Iraq war in February and March of 2003).

Most of us opposed to Bush/Iraq made the same arguments whether or not we were, in Kevin’s odd phrase, “prominent” critics. And, contra Kevin’s opinion that we didn’t foresee the specific quagmire the world faces today, in fact we did. We warned that if Bush invaded Iraq without provocation, without international backing from UN, the gates of Hell would be opened. That is exactly what has happened. And the worst is ahead of us.

That is nothing that any of us opposed to this insane war feel any desire to gloat over.

[Updated for clarity.]