Sunday, September 04, 2005
DEFENDING THE WAR.
Dove Taleby Jonathan Chait Post date: 09.02.05Issue date: 09.12.05
As the situation in Iraq started deteriorating last year, I kept waiting for war opponents to go after the liberal Iraq hawks. Months went by, though, and the doves appeared more interested in slapping around fatter and juicier targets like the Bush administration and its starry-eyed neoconservative backers. I started to think we might escape unscathed.
But now it's open season on liberal hawks. A recent Nation feature, by Ari Berman, attacks a coterie of liberal hawks who "found a way to profit from its errors, coalescing around a view that its members had been misled by the Bush Administration and that too little planning, too few troops and too much ideology were largely to blame for the chaos in Iraq." Meanwhile, the cover story in the latest American Prospect chides pro-war pundits as "the journalistic equivalents of Donald Rumsfeld--authors of disaster, spared from accountability, still bewilderingly in place." (The story focuses on conservatives but has a section on Thomas L. Friedman, as a proxy for liberals who crusaded for a democratizing war despite the fact that Bush had no intention of prosecuting the war as they preferred.)
Well, OK, fair enough. Given that things have not gone terribly well to date, a certain degree of humility is in order here. (In 2002 and 2003, I wrote a tnr cover story and a couple of editorials defending the war in fairly strident terms.) I'm tempted to accept the chastening and slink away. The trouble is that things aren't quite as clear-cut as the doves would have it. And more is at stake here than pundit bragging rights. The clear implication of this dressing-down is the view that the Democratic Party needs to nominate a war opponent in 2008 in particular and to stop listening to its hawkish foreign policy intellectuals in general.
Obviously, Iraq remains dangerously unstable. But, even if, for the sake of argument, we concede that the war is an abject disaster, it doesn't necessarily follow that the liberal prescription was wrong. Liberal complaints about mismanagement of the war have centered on the Bush administration's refusal to send as many troops into Iraq as the Army, and nearly any expert, thought would be necessary to carry out an orderly occupation. Could more troops have really made a significant difference? Yes, because, as The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell has famously argued, sociological phenomena are often governed by "tipping points" rather than proportional returns. This is often the case with crime or other antisocial behavior, and it seems to apply to Iraq. A sufficient number of troops would likely have provided enough security to carry out reconstruction projects, which would have reduced the supply of unemployed, desperate males, which in turn would have created more political stability. Instead, Iraq has endured a vicious cycle of insecurity, failed reconstruction, economic stagnation, and political instability.
Many Iraq doves have dismissed this alternative as wishful thinking, a way for liberal hawks to transfer the blame completely onto the Bush administration and spare themselves. Yet the most prominent advocate of this view, Larry Diamond, is not only the most prominent expert on the subject (as a specialist on democracy-building who consulted with the Coalition Provisional Authority), he opposed the war in the first place. Obviously, we can't know for sure how a competently executed occupation would have fared. Yet the certainty of the doves has little to recommend it. History is filled with examples of occupations--East Timor, postwar Germany, and Japan--that had sufficient troops and did not lead to the sort of chaos endemic in Iraq.
To this, the Iraq doves reply that we hawks should have known all along that Bush wouldn't prosecute the war the way we wanted. The administration's incompetence and devotion to fighting a war on the cheap, they say, was blindingly obvious from Afghanistan, whose rebuilding had already suffered from too few resources and attention by 2003. But, I figured at the time, the invasion of Afghanistan was executed within a matter of weeks. The buildup to the Iraq war lasted far longer. And various government agencies--State, Defense, and others--had engaged in copious planning. When Bush and his mouthpieces blithely insisted the war could be waged quickly and cheaply--even though authorities like economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey and General Eric Shinseki had confessed that the war might be costly and require a quarter of a million troops--I simply thought they were lying. The administration has routinely minimized the cost of its initiatives, in order to keep deficit hawks from worrying about the size of its tax cuts. Who could have guessed that, this time, the Bushies actually believed their own propaganda? After all, the administration appeared to have an excellent grasp of its political interests, and obviously a chaotic Iraq would hurt Bush's reelection campaign. It seemed logical to me that they would do what they needed to do to safeguard their own standing.
I should probably note at this point that my argument for the Iraq war, unlike that of many liberals, did not hinge upon democratization. I wasn't sure creating a democracy in Iraq right away was feasible, and I figured that the Bush administration would settle for a stable, less repressive but still illiberal government in Baghdad. My rationale hinged upon Saddam Hussein's failure to disarm. While the weapons of mass destruction rationale has gotten an even worse rap than the democracy rationale, I still believe the logic made the most sense given what we knew at the time. Let me explain.
The truce terms of the first Gulf war called for Saddam to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction program under the watch of international inspectors. Throughout the 1990s, Saddam played a cat-and-mouse game with the inspectors, alternately extending and withdrawing cooperation, depending mostly on how much diplomatic and military pressure he faced. It reached a crisis point in 1998, when Iraq stopped cooperating altogether. In response, the Clinton administration ordered three days of bombing, but--in part due to the impeachment--essentially let the issue drop. And, yet, even as Clinton left office, the reasons for enforcing the truce terms remained compelling. Iraq under Saddam posed a major regional menace and harbored ambitions to obtain a nuclear weapon. Saddam's dreams of regional domination and history of irrational aggression suggested that allowing him to obtain such a weapon would be extremely dangerous.
Worse, containment was clearly breaking down. Iraq had successfully rebuffed international inspectors, and the will to enforce economic sanctions was rapidly eroding. As Brookings scholar and liberal Iraq hawk Kenneth Pollack notes, "The oil-for-food program was a massive sieve," allowing billions of dollars to filter up to Saddam and his henchmen. Rather than toughen the weapons inspections, the political pressure in the U.N. Security Council pushed in the direction of weakening or altogether lifting the economic sanctions. The "smart sanctions" enacted in May 2002 represented the Bush administration's attempt to retrench weakening international support--doing a better job at alleviating the suffering of Iraqis, but not doing anything to stem the flow of cash and illicit goods into Iraq.
The Bush administration recognized two basic truths. First, the cycle of threats, partial cooperation, and confrontation would simply go on forever until Iraq developed a nuclear weapon and (in Saddam's view) could no longer be deterred. Therefore, the United States had to demand full cooperation with the truce terms of the Gulf war, not salami-slicing. Second, because economic sanctions and bombings had failed to produce full cooperation, only the threat of war had any chance of compelling it. Diplomatically, this strategy unquestionably worked: By threatening to invade Iraq, the Bush administration succeeded in forcing the U.N. Security Council to demand renewed inspections.
A certain revisionism has taken root over the last couple of years as to just what those inspections achieved. As most liberals now recall it, Saddam was cooperating with the inspectors, yet Bush short-circuited the process with a precipitous invasion. Nothing of the sort happened. Saddam failed to provide a full accounting of what had happened to Iraq's unconventional weapons, denied the inspectors private interviews with scientists, and hid crucial documents in private homes. As Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, reported in January 2003, Iraq "appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament that was demanded of it."
Subsequently, Iraq offered a greater degree of cooperation. It never fully complied, though. And, despite the fact that Blix and nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei were making progress at tracking Iraq's weaponry, there is only so much you can learn without the full cooperation of the host country. (Inspectors thought they had a handle on Iraq's WMD programs in the mid-'90s, too, until Saddam's brother-in-law defected and revealed that his biological program was far more advanced than the outside world thought.) The "progress" reported by inspectors did not represent Iraq taking its final chance to completely foreswear its WMD programs. Instead, it was simply another example of Saddam strategically calibrating his level of defiance. At moments of maximum pressure, Saddam would come most of the way toward the demands of the inspectors, only to relapse inevitably when the heat was turned down. His partial compliance with Blix reflected the same strategic assumption that he could simply wait out the United States and the Security Council.
Saddam's goal was to split the Security Council and reveal the war threat as a bluff. And, when French President Jacques Chirac declared, in February of 2003, that "disarmament must happen peacefully," he revealed that it was a bluff. France supported tougher inspections only as a gambit to head off war. Even if Iraq did not disarm, France (and, hence, the Security Council) would never support an invasion. Had diplomacy and inspections continued, they would merely have headed back into the same cycle.
e all know, of course, that Iraq turned out to have abandoned its weapons of mass destruction programs. In retrospect, going to war to save the world from a nonexistent weapons program was an enormous mistake. Yet the conclusion the most radical doves take from this proves more than they think. Berman's Nation story acidly notes, "It's more than a little ironic that the people who got Iraq so wrong continue to tell the Democrats how to get it right." The same article concludes, "Unless and until the [pro-war] strategic class transforms or declines in stature, the Democrats beholden to them will be doomed to repeat their Iraq mistakes."
Did the doves know this all along? There was a smaller, fairly radical category of Iraq doves who did not share the hawks' concern about Iraq's pursuit of WMD. They include left-wing icons like George Lakoff and Michael Moore, who, unlike virtually the entire Democratic Party, opposed the war in Afghanistan as well. They see the Iraq war not as a departure from the broader struggle against terrorism but as its apotheosis. (The Nation would fall into this category, including Berman, who writes with evident disgust that some Democratic centrists still want "to make fighting Islamic totalitarianism the central organizing principle of the party.") Many of these leftists never accepted that Iraq posed any appreciable unconventional threat, and they can justly crow at their vindication.
And, yet, their general record of foreign policy predictions is not exactly stellar. Simply take The Nation as an example. Its handwringing over the Afghanistan invasion--"airstrikes and other military actions may not accomplish the ends we endorse and may exacerbate the situation"--seems somewhat overwrought. Its fierce denunciation of the war in Kosovo--"nato's war on Yugoslavia has failed catastrophically"--has not worn well. And its editorial take on the Gulf war--"Sanctions have a much better chance of forcing Iraqi concessions in a shorter time and with much less misery than war.... The death toll [from fighting] could rise to Korean War levels, or higher"--missed the mark rather badly. So perhaps the left should rethink this idea of choosing foreign policy intellectuals on the basis of their predictive accuracy.
Most Iraq doves, though, did not share the Nation/ Moore worldview. They shared the basic assumptions of the liberal hawks. In the lead-up to war, almost nobody suggested that Iraq had completely given up its WMD programs. While U.S. intelligence agencies did not bear out the alarmist interpretation peddled by the Bush administration, they--along with the major European intelligence agencies--believed that Iraq still harbored biological and chemical weapons and a nuclear program. Ted Kennedy believed it. ("The biological and chemical weapons Saddam has are not new. He has possessed them for more than a decade.") The New York Times editorial page believed it. ("What really counts in this conflict ... is the destruction of Iraq's unconventional weapons and the dismantling of its program to develop nuclear arms.") There was no good reason not to believe it. Saddam had spent a decade thwarting weapons inspectors and paid an enormous economic price for doing so. Moreover, on two previous occasions (after the Gulf war and in 1995), Western intelligence discovered that they had been underestimating Iraq's WMD capability.
It's this moderate liberal critique that didn't hold together. These Iraq doves conceded that Iraq had a serious WMD program and conceded that letting Saddam acquire a nuclear weapon would be a disaster. Yet they assumed, against all evidence, that the rest of the U.N. Security Council had a good-faith interest in enforcing effective containment and that measures short of war would persuade Saddam to abandon his WMD deterrent. We now know that Saddam was so determined to keep his neighbors and his own people guessing about his WMD capability that he endured a full invasion rather than openly disarm. The moderate Iraq dove analysis, if anything, looks far worse in light of what we now know. It just happens that the moderate doves were bailed out for reasons they didn't foresee.
One way to think of it is to imagine a known murderer walking down a dark alley with his hand stuck inside his jacket. The police shout at him to put his hands up, yet he continues to walk toward them. After he ignores still more warnings, they shoot him dead, only to discover he was unarmed. Were they wrong to shoot him? Certainly they should not have shot him, but based on what they knew at the time, their decision was correct. It would be hard for those arguing to hold one's fire to make a compelling case that their advice ought to be heeded in the future. Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at TNR.
Dove Taleby Jonathan Chait Post date: 09.02.05Issue date: 09.12.05
As the situation in Iraq started deteriorating last year, I kept waiting for war opponents to go after the liberal Iraq hawks. Months went by, though, and the doves appeared more interested in slapping around fatter and juicier targets like the Bush administration and its starry-eyed neoconservative backers. I started to think we might escape unscathed.
But now it's open season on liberal hawks. A recent Nation feature, by Ari Berman, attacks a coterie of liberal hawks who "found a way to profit from its errors, coalescing around a view that its members had been misled by the Bush Administration and that too little planning, too few troops and too much ideology were largely to blame for the chaos in Iraq." Meanwhile, the cover story in the latest American Prospect chides pro-war pundits as "the journalistic equivalents of Donald Rumsfeld--authors of disaster, spared from accountability, still bewilderingly in place." (The story focuses on conservatives but has a section on Thomas L. Friedman, as a proxy for liberals who crusaded for a democratizing war despite the fact that Bush had no intention of prosecuting the war as they preferred.)
Well, OK, fair enough. Given that things have not gone terribly well to date, a certain degree of humility is in order here. (In 2002 and 2003, I wrote a tnr cover story and a couple of editorials defending the war in fairly strident terms.) I'm tempted to accept the chastening and slink away. The trouble is that things aren't quite as clear-cut as the doves would have it. And more is at stake here than pundit bragging rights. The clear implication of this dressing-down is the view that the Democratic Party needs to nominate a war opponent in 2008 in particular and to stop listening to its hawkish foreign policy intellectuals in general.
Obviously, Iraq remains dangerously unstable. But, even if, for the sake of argument, we concede that the war is an abject disaster, it doesn't necessarily follow that the liberal prescription was wrong. Liberal complaints about mismanagement of the war have centered on the Bush administration's refusal to send as many troops into Iraq as the Army, and nearly any expert, thought would be necessary to carry out an orderly occupation. Could more troops have really made a significant difference? Yes, because, as The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell has famously argued, sociological phenomena are often governed by "tipping points" rather than proportional returns. This is often the case with crime or other antisocial behavior, and it seems to apply to Iraq. A sufficient number of troops would likely have provided enough security to carry out reconstruction projects, which would have reduced the supply of unemployed, desperate males, which in turn would have created more political stability. Instead, Iraq has endured a vicious cycle of insecurity, failed reconstruction, economic stagnation, and political instability.
Many Iraq doves have dismissed this alternative as wishful thinking, a way for liberal hawks to transfer the blame completely onto the Bush administration and spare themselves. Yet the most prominent advocate of this view, Larry Diamond, is not only the most prominent expert on the subject (as a specialist on democracy-building who consulted with the Coalition Provisional Authority), he opposed the war in the first place. Obviously, we can't know for sure how a competently executed occupation would have fared. Yet the certainty of the doves has little to recommend it. History is filled with examples of occupations--East Timor, postwar Germany, and Japan--that had sufficient troops and did not lead to the sort of chaos endemic in Iraq.
To this, the Iraq doves reply that we hawks should have known all along that Bush wouldn't prosecute the war the way we wanted. The administration's incompetence and devotion to fighting a war on the cheap, they say, was blindingly obvious from Afghanistan, whose rebuilding had already suffered from too few resources and attention by 2003. But, I figured at the time, the invasion of Afghanistan was executed within a matter of weeks. The buildup to the Iraq war lasted far longer. And various government agencies--State, Defense, and others--had engaged in copious planning. When Bush and his mouthpieces blithely insisted the war could be waged quickly and cheaply--even though authorities like economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey and General Eric Shinseki had confessed that the war might be costly and require a quarter of a million troops--I simply thought they were lying. The administration has routinely minimized the cost of its initiatives, in order to keep deficit hawks from worrying about the size of its tax cuts. Who could have guessed that, this time, the Bushies actually believed their own propaganda? After all, the administration appeared to have an excellent grasp of its political interests, and obviously a chaotic Iraq would hurt Bush's reelection campaign. It seemed logical to me that they would do what they needed to do to safeguard their own standing.
I should probably note at this point that my argument for the Iraq war, unlike that of many liberals, did not hinge upon democratization. I wasn't sure creating a democracy in Iraq right away was feasible, and I figured that the Bush administration would settle for a stable, less repressive but still illiberal government in Baghdad. My rationale hinged upon Saddam Hussein's failure to disarm. While the weapons of mass destruction rationale has gotten an even worse rap than the democracy rationale, I still believe the logic made the most sense given what we knew at the time. Let me explain.
The truce terms of the first Gulf war called for Saddam to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction program under the watch of international inspectors. Throughout the 1990s, Saddam played a cat-and-mouse game with the inspectors, alternately extending and withdrawing cooperation, depending mostly on how much diplomatic and military pressure he faced. It reached a crisis point in 1998, when Iraq stopped cooperating altogether. In response, the Clinton administration ordered three days of bombing, but--in part due to the impeachment--essentially let the issue drop. And, yet, even as Clinton left office, the reasons for enforcing the truce terms remained compelling. Iraq under Saddam posed a major regional menace and harbored ambitions to obtain a nuclear weapon. Saddam's dreams of regional domination and history of irrational aggression suggested that allowing him to obtain such a weapon would be extremely dangerous.
Worse, containment was clearly breaking down. Iraq had successfully rebuffed international inspectors, and the will to enforce economic sanctions was rapidly eroding. As Brookings scholar and liberal Iraq hawk Kenneth Pollack notes, "The oil-for-food program was a massive sieve," allowing billions of dollars to filter up to Saddam and his henchmen. Rather than toughen the weapons inspections, the political pressure in the U.N. Security Council pushed in the direction of weakening or altogether lifting the economic sanctions. The "smart sanctions" enacted in May 2002 represented the Bush administration's attempt to retrench weakening international support--doing a better job at alleviating the suffering of Iraqis, but not doing anything to stem the flow of cash and illicit goods into Iraq.
The Bush administration recognized two basic truths. First, the cycle of threats, partial cooperation, and confrontation would simply go on forever until Iraq developed a nuclear weapon and (in Saddam's view) could no longer be deterred. Therefore, the United States had to demand full cooperation with the truce terms of the Gulf war, not salami-slicing. Second, because economic sanctions and bombings had failed to produce full cooperation, only the threat of war had any chance of compelling it. Diplomatically, this strategy unquestionably worked: By threatening to invade Iraq, the Bush administration succeeded in forcing the U.N. Security Council to demand renewed inspections.
A certain revisionism has taken root over the last couple of years as to just what those inspections achieved. As most liberals now recall it, Saddam was cooperating with the inspectors, yet Bush short-circuited the process with a precipitous invasion. Nothing of the sort happened. Saddam failed to provide a full accounting of what had happened to Iraq's unconventional weapons, denied the inspectors private interviews with scientists, and hid crucial documents in private homes. As Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, reported in January 2003, Iraq "appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament that was demanded of it."
Subsequently, Iraq offered a greater degree of cooperation. It never fully complied, though. And, despite the fact that Blix and nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei were making progress at tracking Iraq's weaponry, there is only so much you can learn without the full cooperation of the host country. (Inspectors thought they had a handle on Iraq's WMD programs in the mid-'90s, too, until Saddam's brother-in-law defected and revealed that his biological program was far more advanced than the outside world thought.) The "progress" reported by inspectors did not represent Iraq taking its final chance to completely foreswear its WMD programs. Instead, it was simply another example of Saddam strategically calibrating his level of defiance. At moments of maximum pressure, Saddam would come most of the way toward the demands of the inspectors, only to relapse inevitably when the heat was turned down. His partial compliance with Blix reflected the same strategic assumption that he could simply wait out the United States and the Security Council.
Saddam's goal was to split the Security Council and reveal the war threat as a bluff. And, when French President Jacques Chirac declared, in February of 2003, that "disarmament must happen peacefully," he revealed that it was a bluff. France supported tougher inspections only as a gambit to head off war. Even if Iraq did not disarm, France (and, hence, the Security Council) would never support an invasion. Had diplomacy and inspections continued, they would merely have headed back into the same cycle.
e all know, of course, that Iraq turned out to have abandoned its weapons of mass destruction programs. In retrospect, going to war to save the world from a nonexistent weapons program was an enormous mistake. Yet the conclusion the most radical doves take from this proves more than they think. Berman's Nation story acidly notes, "It's more than a little ironic that the people who got Iraq so wrong continue to tell the Democrats how to get it right." The same article concludes, "Unless and until the [pro-war] strategic class transforms or declines in stature, the Democrats beholden to them will be doomed to repeat their Iraq mistakes."
Did the doves know this all along? There was a smaller, fairly radical category of Iraq doves who did not share the hawks' concern about Iraq's pursuit of WMD. They include left-wing icons like George Lakoff and Michael Moore, who, unlike virtually the entire Democratic Party, opposed the war in Afghanistan as well. They see the Iraq war not as a departure from the broader struggle against terrorism but as its apotheosis. (The Nation would fall into this category, including Berman, who writes with evident disgust that some Democratic centrists still want "to make fighting Islamic totalitarianism the central organizing principle of the party.") Many of these leftists never accepted that Iraq posed any appreciable unconventional threat, and they can justly crow at their vindication.
And, yet, their general record of foreign policy predictions is not exactly stellar. Simply take The Nation as an example. Its handwringing over the Afghanistan invasion--"airstrikes and other military actions may not accomplish the ends we endorse and may exacerbate the situation"--seems somewhat overwrought. Its fierce denunciation of the war in Kosovo--"nato's war on Yugoslavia has failed catastrophically"--has not worn well. And its editorial take on the Gulf war--"Sanctions have a much better chance of forcing Iraqi concessions in a shorter time and with much less misery than war.... The death toll [from fighting] could rise to Korean War levels, or higher"--missed the mark rather badly. So perhaps the left should rethink this idea of choosing foreign policy intellectuals on the basis of their predictive accuracy.
Most Iraq doves, though, did not share the Nation/ Moore worldview. They shared the basic assumptions of the liberal hawks. In the lead-up to war, almost nobody suggested that Iraq had completely given up its WMD programs. While U.S. intelligence agencies did not bear out the alarmist interpretation peddled by the Bush administration, they--along with the major European intelligence agencies--believed that Iraq still harbored biological and chemical weapons and a nuclear program. Ted Kennedy believed it. ("The biological and chemical weapons Saddam has are not new. He has possessed them for more than a decade.") The New York Times editorial page believed it. ("What really counts in this conflict ... is the destruction of Iraq's unconventional weapons and the dismantling of its program to develop nuclear arms.") There was no good reason not to believe it. Saddam had spent a decade thwarting weapons inspectors and paid an enormous economic price for doing so. Moreover, on two previous occasions (after the Gulf war and in 1995), Western intelligence discovered that they had been underestimating Iraq's WMD capability.
It's this moderate liberal critique that didn't hold together. These Iraq doves conceded that Iraq had a serious WMD program and conceded that letting Saddam acquire a nuclear weapon would be a disaster. Yet they assumed, against all evidence, that the rest of the U.N. Security Council had a good-faith interest in enforcing effective containment and that measures short of war would persuade Saddam to abandon his WMD deterrent. We now know that Saddam was so determined to keep his neighbors and his own people guessing about his WMD capability that he endured a full invasion rather than openly disarm. The moderate Iraq dove analysis, if anything, looks far worse in light of what we now know. It just happens that the moderate doves were bailed out for reasons they didn't foresee.
One way to think of it is to imagine a known murderer walking down a dark alley with his hand stuck inside his jacket. The police shout at him to put his hands up, yet he continues to walk toward them. After he ignores still more warnings, they shoot him dead, only to discover he was unarmed. Were they wrong to shoot him? Certainly they should not have shot him, but based on what they knew at the time, their decision was correct. It would be hard for those arguing to hold one's fire to make a compelling case that their advice ought to be heeded in the future. Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at TNR.
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