First diary here! Crossposted on dKos and MLW.
This post by Atrios, commenting on a post by the sheepishly repentent former pro-war liberal Belle Waring, has got me thinking about Iraq in a slightly different way. (This may be plowing old ground for many of you, but it’s nice to plow again every once in a while to see if anything new pops up.)
I think that Belle is right that “once-hawks” are still often seen as righter than “never-hawks,” and among other things that is obviously harmful to the Democratic Party. For my analysis as to why; follow me beneath the fold.
A few other things happened this past week to add to the stew of my thoughts about the issue: the former head of Mossad appeared on The Daily Show to promote his new book and hint darkly that we may yet find WMDs in Iraq buried in the sand (others posit that they were shipped to Syria.) Rep. Lantos got arrested to protest U.S. inaction in Darfur despite still favoring our presence in Iraq, prompting one poster to write that this combination struck her as hypocritical, and me to respond that I was sure that some people (perhaps Lantos among them) had supported the Iraq war on respectable humanitarian grounds.
A few people agreed with me — but I’m not sure I agree with myself. And so I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the decision to go to war against Iraq.
As I wrote my comment, I felt like I was perhaps being a little soft on former war supporters. After reading Atrios’s post, that feeling grew. So my question now is, taking away hindsight, what was the proper view at the time towards a war with Iraq? I’ll admit that I had had no idea that the Bush gang was this incompetent; I opposed the war primarily because I thought it was a neocolonial grab for oil and permanent bases and because I thought it would be a recruiting boon for Al Qaeda and would not lead to a stable country. I’ll stand by this assessment, but I have to admit that it doesn’t match up with the developing conventional wisdom. People seem to have come to identify two main considerations that with hindsight should have guided our policy regarding Iraq. I’m not comfortable with what I see as this emerging conclusion.
So far as I can tell, Iraq is seen as a failure among the broader public for two reasons: (1) it was unjustified (in that there were no WMDs) and (2) it led to an insurgency that we can’t seem to stop. If those are the lessons behind our failure in Iraq, it has implications for what we do in Iran, so I want to probe them a bit.
First, if one thinks that the war was unjustified because of the lack of WMDs, then the prevalent belief of conservatives such as the Mossad chief that there really were (or are!) WMDs there undoes the error of the war. They, as they see it, were right — tragically right! — like the cop who shot the armed robber but then couldn’t find the gun and so is decried as a cold-blooded murderer. Second, I think that these people believe that if WMDs had been found, there would have been no (or at most an easily defeated) insurgency, and the rest of the world would have rallied behind us and helped us quash it.
It’s this second connection that’s key in the minds of our opponents. They think that the insurgency is, in effect, just a matter of bad luck. Maybe Rummy was a bad strategist as well, maybe a few other things, but mostly bad luck that we didn’t find a smoking gun of Iraqi WMDs. “Otherwise, everything would have been fine!” They really do think this way.
My intuition is this: had we found biological or chemical weapons — and perhaps even nuclear weapons — there would still have been an insurgency and we would still have ended up about where we are now. The reason that there is an insurgency, at base, is because our cause was not seen as just by the people whose hearts and minds we had to convince and whose cooperation we needed to prevent or combat it. That means that, to me, the only way to have prevented an insurgency would have been to go in righteously, if at all: only upon actual provocation (one that doesn’t depend on the notion that having the ability to attack the U.S. is the worst thing possible), with no designs on Iraqi oil or for permanent bases or for reshaping Iraq into a free-market paradise or for gaining all sorts of contracts for Halliburton and its ilk, and with the support of the world community generally. If we had acted only under those conditions, I don’t think we would have found ourselves in the present situation. But, we also would not have gone to war at all in that place at that time.
Our actions in Iraq were designed to project power and to collect spoils. Even self-defense against biological or chemical WMDs — and probably even nuclear WMDs, at least absent a threat of first use against us — would not have changed that. And I think that means that we would have still seen an insurgency, still been unable to defeat it, and still have ended up pretty much where we are right now.
If that’s so, then we can tell the Mossad chief and our conservative opponents that it really didn’t matter whether Iraq had WMDs or not, so they should stop worrying about whether they’re buried in the sand. What mattered is whether we had clean hands. And we did not.
Now I think that most people at this point would disagree with my argument. And that’s what prompts this diary: I think that this is the key to why people who were pro-war and have since switched are seen by many as “righter” than those of us who were anti-war all along. They think that WMDs mattered and that they were bamboozled by Bush. I think that righteousness mattered and that they were willfully blind.
I should admit: I am not against intervention — I was thrilled when went into Haiti to remove Cedras, and thought that we should have been in the Balkans as soon as it was clear that Russia wasn’t willing to go to war over it — because both interventions seemed to me to be righteous ones. That doesn’t mean that we stood nothing to gain, but only that what we stood to gain was the benefit that everyone gets from a stable international community rooted in human rights, as opposed to something self-serving. (It is telling that these are interventions that conservatives opposed.)
Focusing on WMDs is useful because it points out how craven the Bush administration was. But we shouldn’t let it be the whole story. If it is, we have less chance of staying out of Iran. The real story is: We were wrong to go into Iraq because we were doing it for selfish reasons, and everyone there knew it, and people don’t like being taken advantage of, and so they were bound to resist, and they did, and they will win because they (unlike us) cannot up and leave. We can only justify going to war when it is righteous, and “righteous” does not mean the same thing as “good for the parochial interests of the U.S.”
That’s what the pro-war liberals missed in 2002-2003. The question was not whether Iraq had WMDs. It was whether we had a moral basis for war. We may sometimes be right in favoring intervention when the rest of the world doesn’t — Rwanda, for example (to the extent we did favor it.) But when the rest of the world doesn’t want us to do something that is in our parochial interests, that should be an awfully big clue that we shouldn’t do it.
