Nicholas Kristof's Circular Logic

Nicholas Kristof recently wrote a column attacking Obama for his previous policy of not getting heavily involved in Syria's civil war. I think it encompasses a lot of the poor thinking that got us into the whole Iraq mess in the first point, and is filled with his naive tendency to divide the world into what Adam Curtis has called "goodies and baddies", but this one passage jumped out at me:

His [Obama's] “red line” about chemical weapons turned out to be more like a penciled suggestion. His rejection of the proposal by Hillary Rodham Clinton and David Petraeus to arm moderate Syrian factions tragically empowered both the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

Nick is rolling out the classic circular thinking of American military adventures: if war works then that shows that war is awesome and should be done more often. If war doesn't work (as it didn't in Iraq) then that means that what we need is more war. In short war can never fail to improve things, it can only be failed by presidents that don't do it enough or do it well enough.

Hence the idea that giving more weapons to various Syrian factions would have automatically made things better that Nick cites. There's no evidence of this at all in the real world, for example nobody has ever even suggested giving the Syrian rebels the weapons they would actually need to turn the tide of battle, that is sophisticated anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles. And rightly so! In Ukraine rebels used such weapons to shoot down a Malaysian jet liner recently. In fact the whole reason ISIS is so powerful right now is they were able to capture a huge amount of weapons this summer that we supplied the Iraqi Army with!

But in Nick's military adventure world this contention proves itself. Since things are bad and we didn't give weapons to Islamic extremists not named ISIS (which is basically what a lot of the "moderates" are) Obama made a mistake, because weapons would automatically have made things better. And indeed in an alternative universe where we did give them weapons and things didn't get better Nick could say, "Obama didn't give enough weapons soon enough!" Or whatever. Likewise nobody thinks the bombing proposed by Obama last year would have ended the war, but again it was a failure because we didn't bomb and bad things happened.

In short, this is a bizarre way to think about the world. Unfortunately it's a pretty popular in our foreign policy establishment.

How Not To Write About The Iraq War

The Atlantic recently published a long expose about how terrible Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki is. It's not very good and frankly you can tell they've really missed the boat from their story's subhead, "How America empowered Nouri al-Maliki—and then failed to keep that power in check."

On a basic level that is correct. The US hasn't been able to control Iraqi politics. But the implied assumption in the subhead, and that runs throughout the piece, is that it was totally possible for the US to control Maliki or someone like him if we just did a few things a little differently. Personally I think it's interesting to think about what possible evidence could disprove analysis like this. Imagine a hypothetical scenario where a leader is picked who is destined to be a diaster. After he screws everything up you could always write this kind of piece saying "look at all the mistakes that were made!" And of course there would have been mistakes, what would a destined to fail but well run political regime look like?

Simply put when you set out to do something unreasonable or course terrible things happen along the way. It was always unreasonable to assume that the political reality in the Middle East was simply clay in the hands of the West, ready to be changed and molded as we see fit. The Bush Administration spent years trying to tear down the Palestinian Authority so something better, more American that is, would rise in it's place. Instead they got Hamas taking over Gaza. American presidents have pressured the Saudis to open their country to democratic reforms since the 70's, it hasn't worked. Name me one Middle Eastern country whose politics have been successfully controlled by Washington?

So yes Maliki was a terrible choice to lead a secular, democratic, liberal, and multicultural Iraq. But that doesn't mean there was some hypothetical better one out there that could have done it. How do you have a secular and multicultural democracy when most people vote for conservative Islamist parties that identify along sectarian lines? Indeed if eight years of occupation and a trillion dollars spent couldn't shape Iraqi politics they way we wanted, why would have Obama complaining to Maliki or "fewer missteps" have done any different.

This should be a pretty simple idea for most people to get, apparently they haven't learned that lesson yet at The Atlantic.

Michael Kelly's War

I just read a great piece by Tom Scocca in Gawker looking back on the death of Michael Kelly, and specifically how a lot of journalists are remembering him 10 years after his death.  Michael Kelly was the editor of The Atlantic and he was a huge proponent of the invasion of Iraq.  He was also the first American journalist killed there when the Humvee he was in came under fire and rolled over into a canal where both Kelly and the driver of the Humvee drowned.
 
The heart of Scocca's argument is that Kelly used his position as editor of one of America's more influential magazines to flog a war that became a disaster.  As Scocca put's it:

But: The driver was also killed. And so were more than 4,400 other American troops. And so were more than 200 other journalists and their assistants. And so were an uncountable number of Iraqis—so many that we do not even know how many tens of thousands of them there were, each one as alive and individual and human as Michael Kelly was.

This is as true as the fact that Kelly was by all accounts a loving family man and a great guy to work for.  While it is very sad that Kelly did in fact die, it is wrong to portray him as some tragic figure who stumbled into this fire fight while trying to go to Starbucks.  Kelly supported the war and used his powerful position as editor of one of America's more influential magazines to flog that war and then decided to put himself in harms way by "embedding" himself in a forward unit during the invasion of Iraq.  Of course no one deserves to die for their beliefs, but Kelly had a lot more say in the matter as to the risks to his own personal safety than troops "stop lossed" into repeated tours of duty or the Iraqi civilians whose opinion about the war nobody asked. 

Nor was Kelly some passive figure who merely "supported" the war. He repeatedly wrote and edited in a manner to exclude and bully people opposed to the war. Is that an overstatement? I don't think so:

[H]undreds of thousands of marchers—and many more millions who did not march—believe quite sincerely that theirs is a profoundly moral cause, and this is really all that motivates them. They believe, as French President Jacques Chirac recently pontificated, that 'war is always the worst answer.'

The people who believe what Chirac at least professes to believe are, in the matter of Iraq, as wrong as it is possible to be. Theirs is not the position of profound morality but one that stands in profound opposition to morality.

This is not an argument about how the war is a good idea, instead Kelly is making the argument that to oppose the war even on practical or historical grounds is to embrace an idea "that stands in profound opposition to morality."  It is one short step away from comparing anti-war protestors to terrorists.  It is not an attempt to have a debate about invading Iraq at all.  It is an attempt to stifle that debate and ridicule those who disagree with Kelly (who by the way were right while Kelly was wrong).  As well as an attempt to caricature all those who opposed the war as doing so because they were pacifists who think 'war is always the worst answer' or because they take their cues from Jacques Chirac.  This is cheap commentary par excellence (and for the record Chirac was right and Kelly was wrong).

Nor does his writing seem to contain much insightful analysis or grounding in reality, surely traits necessary to be a "great editor."  Indeed, some of his "analysis" sounds like it was based on talking points fired off by Karl Rove:

We are in a position of triumph, and potentially much greater triumph. A few months ago, all was still in tatters. Hussein still defied with impunity, still ruled unchallenged over his torture state, still schemed to advance his dreams of himself as the atomic Saladin... The will of one man, George W. Bush, changed all this.

Also, like Andrew Sullivan making up claims about Saddam's use of nerve gas, the "dreams of himself as the atomic Saladin" claim is just dead wrong.  Nor is this passage very accurate, even during the initial days of the invasion many of the problems that would plague the next decade were already apparent for those who cared to look.

Scocca points out that even the claim that Kelly was some great moralist because he was willing to put himself in danger is actually pretty weak beer:

That Kelly was brave in going to cover the combat does not change the fact that he chose to be bold with other people's lives. It was time to do something about Iraq—"to turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping," as Rupert Brooke wrote in 1914, in a sonnet celebrating the chance to go fight the Great War. A year later, Brooke died of an infected mosquito bite on a troop ship, taking his place among the 16 million corpses.

I guess that Kelly ranks higher than armchair generals like Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan, but in the end it's just not enough.  Kelly was a good man, but a good man in the service of a bad cause is not the type of hero we should look for.  

Me Me Me Me Me

I guess Andrew Sullivan reads this blog because he published a big mea culpa about the Iraq War today, I assume because he read my post yesterday. All kidding aside, it's a good piece and you should read it. It's very well written and contains a lot of self-criticism that is rare to see on the internet. Basically he admits that he supported the war for four main reasons:
1. Saddam was a wicked man.
2. His coworkers at The New Republic were mean to him after the whole election stealing thing in Florida back in 2001.
3. He was publicly humiliated after some scummy "journalists" published stories about his sex life.
4. He was horrified by 9/11.

Sully went to Oxford so he writes this in a much more fancy and better sounding prose than me, but all the points are the same:

My horror at 9/11, combined with crippling fear, compounded by personal polarization was a fatal combination. This is not an excuse. It’s an attempt at an explanation. And my loathing of the left had been intensified earlier that year by a traumatizing exposure of my own sex life by gay leftists determined to destroy my reputation and career because of my mere existence as a gay conservative.

Let me say that I am sympathetic to anyone who is willing to bare their soul publicly, especially a well known and polarizing public intellectual like Sullivan.  Let me also say that I am sympathetic to anyone who supported the Iraq War, simply because a lot of people supported it.  And I think he's a great writer with a great blog.  Let me also say that his mea culpa is frankly, bizarre.

This is a explanation for supporting (in Sullivan's case I'd say flogging) a disastrous war in which thousands of Americans died, tens of thousands were wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died and millions were made homeless by recounting how people were mean to him 10 years ago.  It is in short an explanation of his support of the war in a universe in which there is no war with no consequences, there is only Andrew and his feelings.

The worst part to me is that he seems to have learned nothing from the whole experience.  He hasn't said fighting land wars in Asia is a bad idea, or trying to dominate the Persian Gulf is unnecessary or that while the American military can do many things it can't turn a post-conflict country into a democratic utopia.  He doesn't say anything about that at all, instead all we get is me: Me Me Me Me Me.

To be sure, I don't blame Sullivan for the Iraq War.  It was going to happen no matter what he wrote about it and in that sense it really doesn't matter.  But it does matter in the sense that so many of our "experts" on foreign affairs seem to have learned nothing from the war.  Sullivan is just a convenient example of this. 

Iraq War Villains

Matt Yglesias has a great post about the Iraq War on his personal blog.  He points out that the "Iraq Question" back in 2002 and 2003 was fundamentally a misguied way of looking at the situtation:

On the actual policy, what holds up reasonably well from the old pre-war case is that the Clinton era “containment” policy on Iraq was crumbling. The endless sanctioning of Iraq was not a viable long-term strategy for the region. That left you with two kinds of options. One—the wrong option—was to get more aggressive. The other—the correct option—was to realize that the goal of military domination of the Persian Gulf is just fundamentally misguided. The project is motivated by fuzzy thinking about oil, and it’s been extremely costly over the decades. Protecting Kuwait from a direct and flagrantly illegal cross-border military attack is a defensible (though arguably not necessary) use of military force, but the whole rest of the undertaking dating back to long before Bush was a mistake.

I think this analysis is right on the money.  At the very least it seems to fall directly into the category of American foreign policy elite applying the lessons (or their constructed story of the "lessons") of the previous conflict to the current one.  Thus the American policy in the Middle East was obsessed with following some sort of absurd (in retrospective) "Cold War Lite" with Iraq being the Soviet Union and everyone else being poor weak Western Europe.  Indeed I've noticed a tendency among certain thought leaders and self style foreign policy experts to try and put Iran in the Soviet role over the past few years with a sort of NATO Alliance of Sunnis lead by Saudi Arabia aligned against Iran.  Obviously this didn't work, and we should have known from the start it wouldn't as the Middle East is a complicated environment with different powers vying against each other for power, a lot more like Europe in the 18th or 17th Centuries than the second half of the 20th.

I recently watched the Kevin Costner vehicle about the Cuban Missile Crisis "Thirteen Days" and one of the things I noticed was how so many people were obsessed in those days with "Remembering the Lesson of Munich" and thus were opposed to any compromises or negotiated solutions to the predicament they found themselves in.  Regardless if that is the real "Lesson of Munich" it certainly wasn't very applicable, because of course any war between the US and USSR would almost certainly destroy both countries.  Thus in the Cold War, war itself could be an enemy as much as the other side.  There's a great scene where JFK asks Dean Acheson to game out his solution to the crisis and Acheson basically says: "Your first step sir will be to demand that the Soviet begin to withdraw the missiles within 12 to 24 hours, they will refuse. When they do you will order the strikes followed by the invasion Cuba, they will resist and be overrun.  They will retaliate against another target somewhere else in the world, most likely Berlin.  We will honor our treaty commitments and resist them there defeating them as per our plans."  Kennedy then points out: "Those plans call for the use of nuclear weapons.  So what is the next step?"  And Acheson doesn't have an answer to him, only saying he hopes cooler heads will prevail at some point.  So basically applying the "Lesson of Munich" here means nuclear armageddon.  Which is a long way to say that the lessons (or the lessons we construct for ourselves in hind sight) of past global conflicts are not necessarily applicable to the present, unfortunately too many of our foreign policy elite haven't learned this lesson.

Party Factions and Protests

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a nice piece looking back on the 10 year anniversary of the Iraq War.  However, I think he gets a major lesson about the war wrong when he lionizes the original anti-war protestors a decade ago:

In fact it meant a lot. It meant that you got to firmly and loudly say, "No. Not in my name." It meant being on the side of those who warned against the seductive properties of power, and opposing those who would bask in it. It also meant pragmatism...And finally it meant the election of the country's first black president whose ascent began at an anti-war rally in Chicago.  I say all this to say that if I regret anything it is my pose of powerlessness -- my lack of faith in American democracy, my belief that the war didn't deserve my hard thinking or hard acting, my cynicism. I am not a radical. But more than anything the Iraq War taught me the folly of mocking radicalism. It seemed, back then, that every "sensible" and "serious" person you knew -- left or right -- was for the war. And they were all wrong. Never forget that they were all wrong. And never forget that the radicals with their drum circles and their wild hair were right.

While he is right that the protestors may have been right about some things (they were wrong about others) he completely misses the story of how the war actually ended.  It's pretty clear that neither the Iraqi Government or some other third party could have ejected us from Iraq and that because the war was financed by deficit spending and fought by an all volunteer military that an ongoing presence in Iraq was completely possible.  Indeed John McCain campaigned on a promise of US troops in Iraq through 2013 at least.  Furthermore, the Presidency of George W. Bush shows us that a determined political party, the GOP, could keep an unpopular war going for years.  In short, public protests and public opinion neither stopped the war nor shortened it, making their effectiveness pretty doubtful.

So why did the war end?  Well the answer is that a determined faction inside the Democratic Party made opposition to the Bush's Iraq policies a mandatory position for elected Democrats to stay in good standing in their party.  This in term meant that the election of a Democrat in 2008 ensured the end of the presence of American Armed Forces in Iraq.  As I recall, in the lead up to the war there were three main faction inside the Democratic Party, Hawks like Joe Lieberman who supported war, Doves like Paul Wellstone who opposed it and people who punted like then House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt who refused to vote categorically against a war but didn't seem to care too much one way or the other and deferred this matter of foreign affairs to the Presidency.  Between 2003 and 2004 it was the Deaniacs that advanced the anti-war cause by making opposition to the war a viable position for a Democratic presidential nominee, even though Dean lost for othereasons.  After that it was the anti-Lieberman people who turned support for the war into a political liability rather than a political strength (remember who voting for the authorization for use of force in 2002 was seen as the "smart" political move?)  So that by the time the race for the 2008 nomination was on, all the major candidates for the Democratic nomination were for some withdrawal strategy.  We might remember that Obama was anti-war as opposed to Clinton but in reality their positions on how to move forward were very similar, even if their record from 2002 was not.  In short, what ended the war was a faction of a political party working inside that party to make their views, end the war, the position of their party through the daily grind of politics and elections.  That's about as unradical as you can get.