The Informationist

Foray into Controversy

Yglesias hit one of my political buttons yesterday. I decided to post something controversial--the beginnings of my take on the war in Iraq. It seems to have earned me my first fan.

Yglesias thinks that some of the effusiveness thanking Lindsey Graham, the war’s newest critic, is, well, effusive: “Liberals have developed a slightly unfortunate habit of praising to the skies every Republican legislator who goes slightly off-message in Iraq.” My comment?

The problem is that from day one on Iraq, most vocal Republicans simply lined up behind the administration and most vocal Democrats lined up in opposition. The leave very few people with any credibility to say anything intelligent. In 2002, anyone willing to look at our bankrupt Iraq policy would have concluded that BushBaker screwed it up royally in 1990, and Clinton simply lived with the mess. Early in the game, we had acceded to Syria’s invasion of Lebanon, told Israelis to absorb missiles without retaliating, turned Kuwait back over to an absolute monarch, watched the restored crown exile 300,000 mostly Palestinian workers (putting tremendous stress on Jordan, where most of them landed) and told Saddam that he could massacre as many Shiites, marsh Arabs, and Kurds as he wanted, as long as he didn’t use air power. We then settled into a “comfortable” status quo in which we controlled two-thirds of Iraqi airspace, strangled the Iraqi economy, set up a puppet state in the north, and basically left most Iraqis as the mercy of a totalitarian dictator. (And that’s ignoring the debatable intangible impact on the flow of Middle Eastern politics and Arab public opinion).

That’s the status quo that the anti-war movement supported (as one European friend recently asked me, “As long as it was mostly Iraqis who were getting hurt, what was the problem?”). Anyone with even a modicum of concern for human rights should have been screaming to end this abomination, but no one much cared; it would have made either Papa Bush or Clinton (or both) look bad. When Bush stepped up in 2002 and started talking about changing things, the opposition let him off the hook. Rather than agreeing that change was necessary and arguing that he should do it right, the opposition simply supported the status quo. We did hear a few voices making strong cases, but none of them gained much traction. Bob Graham opposed the war because he felt that it was out of order; the appropriate next step, he claimed, was military action to clean Hizbollah out of Southern Lebanon. Joe Lieberman warned that Bush risked giving a bad name to a just war, and advocated more of a focus on democratization and nation building. To a lesser extent, John Edwards echoed that theme. When Eric Shinseki explained what it would take to do the job correctly, most Dems used it as an argument against intervention. To the extent that Dem voices were willing to move forward anyway, most of them pushed for UN oversight—essentially repeating the fundamental BushBaker mistake of 1990.

In 2002-03, there was absolutely no organized voice arguing that Bush was proposing to do the right thing, in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons, with inadequate resources. (I know that no such organized voice existed, because it was my position at the time and I spent a long time looking for one with no success). One of my concerns at the time was that this across-the-board abdication of responsibility would destroy the credibility of later critics, and neuter all future criticism. Alas, that’s what has happened. Three years after Iraq resurfaced as a major issue, the Bush administration continues to muddle through with ambiguous results, and critics on either side of the aisle are left without either credibility or meaningful suggestions other than “do it better.”

I figured I’d tread gingerly. Potentially controversial on a Democratic site, but hardly over the top. Besides, this is the same stuff that I’ve been yelling at Democrats since 2002, and though I’ve won few converts no one has banned me from any events either.

I earned four comments, all civil though two expressed strong disagreement. Then there was a good one. According to someone named Petey, “Wow! The Informationist has the single best comment I’ve read here at TPMCafe.”

Blog and learn.

Posted by Bruce Abramson from on 06/12 at 05:05 PM in Foreign Affairs and the World beyond Our Borders