Were We Wrong?

by digby

Kevin Drum asks:

If anti-war liberals were right about the war from the start, how come they don’t get more respect? Here’s the nickel version of the answer from liberal hawks: It’s because they don’t deserve it. Sure, the war has gone badly, but not for the reasons the doves warned of.

Is this true? I wish my memory were more detailed about what anti-war liberals were saying back in 2002, but it’s not. I once thought about browsing through old archives to at least see what the high-traffic liberal blogs were saying back then, but that turned out to be easier said than done. Matt, Josh, and I all supported the war for a while, so we don’t count. Kos and Tapped seem to have lost their archives from that far back. C&L, Firedoglake, Aravosis, Greenwald, and the Huffington Post didn’t exist back then. Atrios still has his archives, but he didn’t post obsessively about the war and didn’t write the kind of essays where he explained his position in detail anyway.

I didn’t start my own blog until January 2003, (well before the war started and I wrote plenty about it.) But before that I was writing furiously on other blogs, particularly for Atrios, who put this on his front page on September 29, 2002, calling it The Digby Doctrine:

I don’t object to going into Iraq because I think Saddam doesn’t want nukes. Of course he does. So do a lot of people, including al Qaeda. And a lot of unstable regimes already have them, like the countries of the former Soviet Union and Pakistan. I object because I don’t believe there is any new evidence that he’s on the verge of getting them or that he had anything to do with 9/11, or that he’s crazy because he gassed his own people (without our objection at the time), or that he’s just plain so evil that we simply must invade without delay, all of which have been presented as reasons over the past few weeks. There are reasons why we are planning to invade Iraq, but they have nothing to do with the reasons stated and are based upon political and ideological not security goals.

I particularly object because I deeply mistrust the people who are insisting that Saddam presents an urgent danger because they have been agitating for invasion and regime change, offering a variety of rationales, for 11 years. Pardon me for being skeptical but there is an entire cottage industry in the GOP devoted to the destruction of Saddam for a variety of reasons, none of which have anything to do with an imminent threat to the US. Until they concocted this bogus 9/11 connection, even they never claimed that the threat was to the US, but rather to Israel, moderate Arabs and the oil reserves.

I very much object because among these obsessives are the authors of the Bush Doctrine, which is nothing more than a warmed over version of the PNAC defense policy document that was based upon Cheney’s 1992 defense dept. draft laying out the neocon case for ensuring the continued status of the US as the only superpower after the cold war. They did not take the threat of terrorism into account when they formulated this strategy and have made no adjustments since the threat emerged. Instead they are cynically using the fear created by 9/11 to advance goals that have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism and in fact will make another attack more likely. We will not be able to protect ourselves against another 9/11 by asserting a doctrine of unilateral preventive war in Iraq or anywhere else. Terrorism is a different animal that requires a completely fresh approach with an emphasis on cooperative intelligence, creative police work and stealthy military strategies. We can’t invade every country that contains people who are potential terrorists. And the more we try to solve this problem through military force the more terrorists we will create.

This is my main objection to invasion of Iraq without convincing evidence of collusion in 9/11, without mideast allies and using a dubious doctrine of a right of preventive war. I believe it will make more terrorist attacks on the United States more rather than less likely. We should be trying very hard to avoid that rather than rushing toward it at warp speed without due consideration.

I’m not the only one who thinks this. The Republican establishment itself is divided on this issue. Plenty of very smart, hard headed realists know that this new doctrine of pre-emptive unilateral regime change is a bad idea and their lobbying succeeded in convincing the President that he should go to the UN over the objections of his more unilaterally minded advisors.

The result has been that the administration position has been incoherent ever since. One day we must invade because Saddam is close to getting nukes, another it’s that he already has chemical and bio weapons. The next he’s a genocidal maniac. Blair and Powell say they want disarmament one day, Rummy and Cheney argue that regime change is the goal the next. According to next week’s Time Magazine, an administration source admits that they are throwing everything out there and hoping that something will “stick.”

Now the process is getting bogged down again, the inevitable is not looking quite so inevitable. Saddam might acquiesce to inspections. The security council is not cooperating. Public opinion is opaque. The bandwagon effect may not be working. So what do they do? After weeks of insisting that the reason for “regime change” is Saddam’s impending acquisition of nukes (“we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”) suddenly the rationale is once again that Iraq is harboring al Qaeda.

How fucking convenient. No more need for the UN, no more need for congressional resolutions or convincing the public, now we can [theoretically]invade on the basis of the post 9/11 resolution giving Bush the power to attack any country associated with the attack on the WTC.

Doesn’t this inconsistency make you just the tiniest bit suspicious of what’s really going on?

I have said before that if Bush will take yes for an answer and allow the UN to make another resolution demanding inspections, I will be more than happy to let him take credit for a hugely successful bluff. If Saddam fucks up we will then at least have the support of the international community to go to war on the basis of his intransigence instead of on the basis of a spurious right to “pre-emptive regime change” without convincing evidence of a threat.

More importantly we will not have implemented the delusional Bush Doctrine or engaged in unilateral “pre-emptive” military action in the mideast and thoroughly screwed up the coalition needed for terrorism prevention by striking at the hornets nest of Islamic anti-Americanism for no good reason. At this point, I’ll be thrilled if we can avoid WWIII and keep from burning all of our bridges in the very countries where we need cooperation to prevent more terrorism on US soil.

You’ll recall that Saddam did let in the inspectors and Bush would not take yes for an answer so he pulled them out and invaded. (Still, he seems to have a delusion that this never happened.)

It was just a year after 9/11 and I was terribly concerned at the time about two things: creating more hatred (and terrorism) toward America in the Muslim world for completely inexplicable and useless reasons — and establishing a doctrine of preventive war. (It never occurred to me that we would carry out a torture and gulag regime and specifically screw things up so badly that Iraq would be in civil war, with us in the crossfire, nearly five year later. How naive of me.)

It doesn’t all hold up but most of it was proven correct. And while it’s not the most sophisticated take on what was happening, it’s more on target than all the liberal hawks who jumped on the Alice In Wonderland ride with the neocons.

I was sitting in my little cottage in Santa Monica, reading books and papers, watching television and writing on the internet. It really wasn’t that hard to figure out what was going on.

Also, what Atrios said.

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