perfidy

Slate is hosting a week-long series called Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War. As a centrist fencesitter whose support for the war changes like Ohio weather, I have to say it's interesting reading.

Well, that's not quite fair to myself. What I ought to say is this: I remain deeply skeptical about the reasons that the Bush administration offered about why Saddam Hussein needed to fall. Whether or not Hussein was thisclose to using lethal force against the US remains very much in doubt and no matter how you parse the words that Bush, Cheney, Rice, etc. used on any given day the undeniable impression which accrues is that they wanted us, the Amurrican people, to think that Hussein was, in fact, thisclose.

For me, the humanitarian argument was one of the strongest in favor of getting rid of the rat bastid. A close second was the "unfinished business" scenario. Unfortunately, I also believe that "unfinished business" is no reason to go to war.

My other, more specific objections over timing and preparation are well-covered in this month's Atlantic Monthly cover stories by James Fallows and Kenneth Pollack. I suggest you check them out.

That all being said, it's an interesting thing to watch hawkish liberals play Monday morning quarterback on their own predictions and opinions about Iraq.
Jacob Weisberg starts things off as moderator, offering his own assessment:

To me, the liberation of 25 million Iraqis remains sufficient justification, which is why I don't think the failure to find weapons of mass destruction by itself invalidates the case for war (though it certainly weakens it). What does affect my view is the huge and growing cost of the invasion and occupation: in American lives (we're about to hit 500 dead and several thousand more have been injured); in money (more than $160 billion in borrowed funds); and in terms of lost opportunity (we might have found Osama Bin Laden by now if we'd committed some of those resources to Afghanistan). Most significant are the least tangible costs: increased hatred for the United States, which both fosters future terrorism and undermines the international support we will need to fight terrorism effectively for many years to come. Of course, the fall of Saddam has made us safer and is likely to produce all sorts of positive side effects, such as Qaddafi's capitulation. But the diminution of America's ability to create consensus around actions necessary for collective security makes us less safe. So, while I still think the Iraq war was morally justified, I'm not at all sure it was worth the costs.

Kenneth Pollack offers his (re)assessment thus:

I think the war put to rest the fantasies of the neocons that we could simply arm Ahmad Chalabi and a few thousand followers (followers he still has not actually produced), give them air cover, and send them in to spark a rolling revolution. Richard Perle and others argued for that initially, but in the end they had to support a full-scale invasion as the only realistic course. The covert-action-based regime-change policies that I and others in the U.S. government had pushed for as an alternative never had a high likelihood of success, either—they were just slightly more likely to produce a coup and much less likely to create a catastrophic "Bay of Goats," as Gen. Anthony Zinni once put it. Ironically, I think the events of the last 12 months have also indicated that containment was doing both better than we believed, and worse. On the one hand, the combination of inspections and the pain inflicted by the sanctions had forced Saddam to effectively shelve his WMD ambitions, probably since around 1995-96. On the other hand, the behavior of the French, Russians, Germans, and many other members of the United Nations Security Council in the run-up to the war was final proof that they were never going to do what would have been necessary to revise and support containment so that it might have lasted for more than another year or two.

Pollack goes on to mention deterrence as a possible gambit to keep Hussein in check. I find this curious. Hussein had a gift for self-preservation at all costs (the same impulse which makes it very unlikely he was going to do anything on his own to infuriate the USA). But at the same time he has proven a notoriously slippery customer, more like the Saddam Hussein of South Park's imagination (yeah, budday!) than a brittle aging autocrat like that shit Castro.

Just a thought: given the interplay of these two things-- self-preservation and perfidousness-- how would it be possible to know whether deterrence was working?

Anway, moving on. The next commenter, Thomas Friedman, also mentions deterrence but then swings for the fences.

The real reason for this war—which was never stated—was to burst what I would call the "terrorism bubble," which had built up during the 1990s.

This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as "martyrs," and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we too are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it's not very diplomatic—it's not in the rule book—but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable. Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could—period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

I can almost buy this-- almost. I would be more convinced that this analysis is correct if we had invaded Syria or Pakistan-- a real, live, state sponsor of Muslim extremist terrorism.

The way I see the libervasion of Iraq, in a geopolitical sense, is like this (cowboy analogy to follow-- please excuse me): the US walks into the meanest, roughest bar in town, pulls out a sixgun, and shoots the guy closest to the door in the face. Sure, it makes everyone think you're crazy and not to be fucked with, but might there not be better, more efficient ways to make it utterly and unmistakably clear that the USA is unfuckwithable?

That's it folks. The half-bakery is closed. No more donuts today.