Want to know why people won't come out and say they were wrong? This is why. If you are obnoxious to people who admit you were right, you guarantee that doing so is one mistake they will never make again.
Update To everyone who asked "Why would the behavior of the people you're arguing with matter?" I can only respond: so what have you learned during your visit to our planet?
I have no particular interest in the opinions of my harsher critics on this topic; the only interesting criticisms of my thought process so far have been made by me. But surely you have noticed that America has now hardened into two opposing camps who are often less interested in getting the right answer than in sticking it to the people on the other side? Both sides are guilty of this, and I wish it would stop, because this isn't improving matters in Iraq. Indeed, if you want us to stay there for another hundred years or so, the best way to do it is to completely alienate the moderates.
I am not immune to the charms of unleashing your fiery sense of righteousness upon the sinners of the world, but I try to limit my outbursts to largely lost causes. If I were that sure that I was a foreign policy genius, I would probably try to avoid doing things that manufacture more McCain voters.
Something else to keep in mind is that unless you are planning to die soon, you are going to get some major policy question badly wrong in the future, because no one is as smart as some of the war opponents have decided they must be. And every word that you type mocking the repentant supporters of the war will, I guarantee, be hauled up and thrown in your face. It is best not to fling calumny about other peoples' decisions unless you are very confident that you will be able to bat a thousand for the next forty years or so.
I just clicked through and saw the title of the post. I am about to go back and read the post and the comments, but I have to note that if you intend a sincere mea culpa, the weasel form "Mistakes Were Made" is a poor start.
Shorter Megan: You may have been right, but you are still DIRTY FUCKING HIPPIES!
That doesn't say particularly good things about you, though, does it Megan? If you are interested in pursuing the truth, rather than self-aggrandizing, why do you care how people react to your admission of failure? If your point is to actually interrogate your own bad assumptions and mistakes, it shouldn't matter one iota. If your point though is to appear to be a deeply serious and self-critical thinker-- if your apology is just another opportunity to flaunt your own seriousness-- then, yeah, what other people say about it matters. So which are you really interested in?
I have little patience for people who pretend to be making a mea culpa and then become deeply offended when others actually hold them responsible for the mistakes they claim they are admitting.
Slightly longer Megan: Hundreds of thousands of lives, trillions of dollars, US's reputation: Irrelevant. All that matters are my feelings!
Freddie, I'm not going to change my mind about what happened because other people act like jerks. But one of the reasons that the debate in this country isn't moving is that we've turned into two hardened camps who are arguing more about how much we hate each other, than about the war.
Nor do I think you can argue that the people in the comments are making incisive contributions, or holding me accountable. Their entire response is: "I hate you" and "You're a moron".
Now, I am well in touch with my faults, but a low IQ is not among them. The tendency of human beings to believe that correct decisions validate their brilliance while incorrect ones must be due to some malign and unforeseeable outside influence is on full display among the anti-war side. No one is as smart as they now think they are.
I am more than willing to concede that they were right, and that I made clear decision-making errors. They want me to concede that they must therefore be right about everything. As a graduate student in science, I'm sure you know exactly how . . . what's the word I'm looking for? . . . yes, moronic that kind of cognitive belief is. The guys at Bear Stears were all right up until the point where they weren't. Past performance no guarantee of future results. What matters is having a good process, not a good person, or even a good outcome. You can get the right answer by a stupid method, and vice versa.
I got the wrong answer by a stupid method. But the world isn't going to get better if people who got the right answer decide that they are therefore incapable of making major mistakes. The people who conceded at Munich learned the lessons of World War I, and the people who fought Vietnam learned the lessons of Munich.
And now I've read the post and the comments. Making jokes about France while discussing uncounted unnecessary deaths does not lend credibility to you.
Jesus Christ, she had an opinion. She was not in a position of power nor did she vote on the issue personally.
I'm not sure how her culpability is any lesser or greater than any of the critics at the time or any of these yahoos who are sanctimously shocked and appalled to hear any joke ever made about anything remotely related.
I'd like to her from all these people how Megan is actually at fault for the Iraq war in any sense greater than "she help shaped public opinion via this blog." The amount of vitriol displayed here is just shameless.
But if everyone wants to make sure Megan remembers that they're smarter, cleverer and morally superior to her, I guess this all makes sense...
Have you read Jim Henley's post? Was that inappropriate? Moreover, why the heck are antiwar people getting mad at me for poking fun at the war supporters?
"Now, I am well in touch with my faults, but a low IQ is not among them. "
You can uncheck humility too.
"Want to know why people won't come out and say they were wrong?"
Um, 'cause they're weak of character? Or too weak of mind to know they were wrong?
Here's kind of the opposite take:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/25/war_opponents/index.html
See, a lot of us who were right about the war still get no respect from the people with the megaphones. And we'd really really really not see another disastrous, trumped up, unnecessary to say the least invasion happen again. And I'm not just talking about the true libertarians here.
Maybe I am just becoming calmer in my mid-40's, but I have a hard time getting worked up about the original post. Strike that, I find it impossible to get worked up about it because I admire it.
The art of correcting oneself has been lost of late, a victim of a political culture (driven by the internet) of declaring the stupidity of those who disagree with them.
Call it Kevin's Corollary to Godwin's Law:
A necessary condition to a thread degenerating to someone being called a Nazi is to first call them an idiot.
Heaven forfend that someone admit error and by doing so open themselves to the charge of being a flip-flopper. It must be so comforting to those who criticize to have the comfort of hindsight. It's easy to look at the broken window, see the kid on the sidewalk and say "I knew that was going to happen" and quite another to look through your unbroken window, see the kid and say "That kid with the baseball is about to break my window".
Megan,
A word of advice. Obnoxious people are best ignored. By complaining about their obnoxiousness, you are giving them exactly what they desire. Leave their immature comments unanswered, and their comments themselves will stand to discredit their characters.
And now I've read down to yesterday's post "The Art of Explanation": that there was no way to tell ahead of time that things would go badly, so we had to try things out and see. Now that we know, the people to listen to are the ones who underwent this learning experience, not the ones who are prevented from having learned anything by having been right all along.
feh
For those taking book recommendations, I suggest Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly". It looks at various foolish decisions governments have made over the centuries. She imposes fairly strict criteria, including that the folly of the decision must have been accurately foreseen. The last chapter is on Vietnam. We need an updated edition.
Megan, do you still stand by your 2007 comments about how you were right to be wrong in 2002 while others were wrong to be right in 2002?
This has been the most successful war and reconstuction ever. And it has made the world a safer place and a nuclear exchange less likely. That is why W hasn't been constrained or impeached and convicted. See the ending of the Mission Earth Series by L. Ron Hubbard to understand why so many are emotionally over the top.
I have no particular interest in the opinions of my harsher critics on this topic; the only interesting criticisms of my thought process so far have been made by me.
I thought you'd read Jim Henley's blog post.
"I have no particular interest in the opinions of my harsher critics on this topic; the only interesting criticisms of my thought process so far have been made by me."
*splorf*
Does your blog utility show you the poster IP address? It's hard to believe there are that many assholes reading your blog. Perhaps it's one or two trolls with a vendetta?
Many people keep returning to your blog for your thoughtful, analytical process. Don't let the bad apples get to you.
"Something else to keep in mind is that unless you are planning to die soon, you are going to get some major policy question badly wrong in the future, because no one is as smart as some of the war opponents have decided they must be. "
I think your ideas are much more dangerous than one botched war in Mesopotamia. You were just warming up. The worst is yet to come.
Sigh. Thoreau, I never said that. What I said is that when I look back at the decision I made then, it's not clear to me how I could know that Saddam didn't have WMD. That having been my primary concern.
If you think--as I think is fairly indisputable--that the antiwar side would now be in the despised minority had Saddam had a nuke program, then it is worth considering that unless it was actually predictible, in 2002, that Saddam did not have a nuclear program, there existed in 2003 an alternate future in which you would now be enduring exactly the same self-righteous "told you so's" that you are currently heaping on those of us who supported the war. We would be 100% certain that it was obvious we were right. But since we know for a fact that his behavior could be consistent with *not* having a nuclear program, we know that this would have been gross overconfidence. I ask you to consider the fact that if there was a nonzero chance that he had a nuclear program, then you are overconfident in your abilities to predict the future. Guessing on a random outcome will produce a correct result 50% of the time; if you only do it one time, people who guess right are prone to think that they are geniuses.
I'm not saying that this was a random game. The antiwar side was clearly right about many things. But many of the other metrics upon which they based their arguments did not come to pass, and have dropped out of their discourse. I think the antiwar side has become grossly overconfident in their ability to correctly predict foreign policy outcomes, and I think that this is just as dangerous as our overconfidence would be in the same position.
"Something else to keep in mind is that unless you are planning to die soon, you are going to get some major policy question badly wrong in the future, because no one is as smart as some of the war opponents have decided they must be."
I don't know anyone who claims to have opposed the war because of his huge brain providing deep insights. The vast majority of war opponents, including me, hold that it was blatantly obvious that this was a bad idea: that the justifications were shakey and a disasterous outcome far likelier than not.
When former war supporters defend their earlier support on the grounds that they were taken in by Jedi mind shit, we remember Jabba the Hutt's opinion on the subject.
Overall, it doesn't matter to me whether Megan was right or wrong about Iraq. She wasn't in charge of sending us to war. She may have been a cheerleader for a group of people that in retrospect to her (and at the time to me) did not deserve it, but that doesn't make her morally inferior or any such judgement on her character.
All it does is mean that she was a mistaken supporter of a project that has ended up causing a catastrophic loss of life.
What would bother me more than anyone being "I told you so!" about being wrong, would be how you could come to trust anyone to engage in such a project--especially one involving war and nation building and such things--that had the clear risk of going so horribly wrong.
That is the question I have.. and it's one that I had from the beginning. I didn't question the desire of people to want to do something "right," but I never understood how they could look at Bush and crew and think that they were the ones capable of doing it. What in Bush's history made them think he was, at all, competent... or that he could be trusted?
The 27 million people who live in Iraq now have a representative government and live in a society which is getting more safe by the month.
Most of 'mistakes' you point out where simply unknowable at the time of invasion. Even the people screaming 'I was right! i was right!' could not have know how things would turn out. Did they not also predict the surge would be a failure? They were wrong in that, where they not?
We will never know what might have happened if we did not invade, but it is reasonable to say that it is highly unlikely (to say the least) that Saddam would be gone and Iraq would be a republic which has held multiple free and fair elections.
I think the price paid had been worth it. Granted, I did not have to live in Iraq through the worst of times. But knowing myself like I do I know I would rather live in a dangerous country with a bright future than live under a dictator's heel.
The one reason only I would not support a similar action in the future is because the American people are clearly not willing to pay the costs associated. If it were up to them we would have left Iraq when things looked worst, right before they started to improve. Which in my mind would have been the worst of all possible outcomes.
Ah, the "both sides are guilty" cop-out! Last refuge of the truly wrong.
I didn't say they'd only been made by me; I said that so far, my critics haven't come up with anything I haven't said to myself, many times.
I think taking a ribbing for finally barely admitting you might have gotten one or two things sort of slightly a little incorrect but were still really on the right side of things overall, is more than justified by the outrageous slanders which rained down on opponents of the war at the outset of the invasion. It is less important that you won't admit you were wrong in the future than it is imperative that a real debate about foreign policy occur when decisions are being made without one side being accused of treason for disagreeing with the president. That is the object lesson here.
Exactly, Richard. You didn't have to be a genius to see the errors in 2002, you just had to pay attention and not be completely stupid.
Megan, part of what's going on here has to do with the "dirty hippies" issue that has been raised in your comments section, by Atrios, and by many others. Those of us who opposed the war from the beginning -- and for anti-60s-aesthetic reasons, especially those of us who marched against it -- were insulted, dismissed, laughed at, accused of treason, and on and on, right up through about mid 2006, when all the admissions of wrongness from war supporters started. We've heard a lot about errors in judgment, and your list is as good as any, but I think what many of us want is an apology to us personally. I didn't read you back in 2003 so I don't know if you were insulting hippies, but I think that's the one element that's been missing from, for example, Andrew Sullivan's many detailed posts on how he go this wrong. We "hippies" want former war supporters, especially our fellow liberals, to get get down on their knees an apologize for spitting on us and for dismissing the anti-war stance out of hand. Maybe it shouldn't be personal, but it is. Then, far more important: we want a real seat at the table. As many others have pointed out, it's all well and good that so many war supporters have admitted they were wrong, but we still see very few war opponents on the TV.
In short, we war opponents still have a right to be pissed.
Hubris?
OK, so only you are capable of interesting criticism of yourself.
But wait..
WTF Meghan? You just explained that only you the only smart one here right? So surely you mean "no one but me is as smart as war opponents think they are".
So lets sum up this diatribe.
Meghan was wrong on Iraq, but only she is smart enough to point out her wrongness.
And unless you can guarantee that you will never be wrong on any subject for the next forty years, you have no business pointing out that:
A: Meghan was wrong.
B: It took Meghan a hell of a wrong time to understand and admit she was wrong.
C: Even though Meghan was wrong, she's still the smartest person in the room and her past mistakes are no indication of her wrongness.
Or something like that I guess.
I should rethink my title.
How about Forrest Gump Hubris
From a pragmatic point of view, it is more important to discuss what you learned from this venture than to admit that you made an error in judgement. That is what was really wrong with the previous post on this subject, that you didn't really want to learn why you were wrong whereas others were right.
Still, I won't hammer you on this because there are still so many neocons trolling here repeating the Bush line who don't even see anything wrong, let alone realize why.
Well, I can hardly apologize for the dirty hippy calumny, because in 2003, I was saying that both sides should be civil to each other, rather than accusing the others of being venal morons. On that, I haven't changed my mind and that's because I was right.
"Well, I can hardly apologize for the dirty hippy calumny, because in 2003, I was saying that both sides should be civil to each other, rather than accusing the others of being venal morons."
Remember your joke about clubbing war protesters with two-by-fours? That's civility.
Well, Megan, I'm glad you've come into the fold. As a brief exercise I'll post an abbreviated score card of my reasons for opposing the war.
1. Invading is the best way to assure Saddam uses WMD or gives them to terrorists. I was wrong on that one, since he had no WMD.
2. The Kurds will want their own state and Turkey will be pissed. It looks like I was right on that one, though it's taken a long time to develop and hasn't been as dire as I would have expected.
3. Saddam is a secular thug, and he has no connections with Islamist terrorists; the Islamists have been operating in areas of the country he has little control over. Seems like I was basically right.
4. Urban warfare is no picnic, and Saddam's forces will be able to inflict more casualties than we're expecting. A mixed bag here. It's not the Iraqi army that caused the trouble, and the violence started later than I was expecting. Also I was probably expecting more soldier casualties on our side, but I forgot to factor in that unlike Vietnam, these guys were trained professionals, not conscripts. (Also there were no WMD, which factored into my thinking on casualties.)
5. Iraq is majority Shia, and those guys are crazier Islamists than Sunnis. Do we want to hand Iraq over to them? Looks like I was wrong about the "crazier" part. "Just as crazy" seems more accurate.
6. I don't trust the people responsible for the Post Office and the DMV to build nations. This was probably my best call. (And note that it holds whether Bush, Gore or Saint Peter is in the White House.)
I have no particular interest in the opinions of my harsher critics on this topic; the only interesting criticisms of my thought process so far have been made by me.
Megan, there cerrtainly have been some dumb criticisms made. Still, if you really believe this, I think it's more self-revelatory than a comment on the replies.
Nice sound bite, Megan, but what on earth does it mean? On the first part, are you really suggesting that Baldwin and Chamberlain had a better understanding of WWI and its ill effects than Churchill did? Surely you jest!
Same with the Vietnam bit: all the temporizing, all the nuanced "sending of signals" and the like, sounds a lot more like the anti-war crowd of the 30's than it does like the "unconditional surrender" that ended up being official Allied policy.
Still, I won't hammer you on this because there are still so many neocons trolling here repeating the Bush line who don't even see anything wrong, let alone realize why.
freddiemac, if they're anything like me, we'll shut up after a while. If you're not having a conversation, one saves one's energy. Your comment does sound like the conversation we're supposed to have about race though which should go, 'You're wrong, wrong, wrong. I was right, right, right, moral, and you're an evil idiot. Shut up, I didn't ask you to agree yet.' It's a lot like listening to what I believe at the Catholic Church but without the soaring brilliance.
"I was probably expecting more soldier casualties on our side, but I forgot to factor in that unlike Vietnam, these guys were trained professionals, not conscripts. (Also there were no WMD, which factored into my thinking on casualties.)"
Another factor is that body armor technology has vastly improved since Vietnam. This lowers the overall casualty rate, and the ratio of dead to injured.
People who opposed the war in 2002 and 2003 were not just accused of being venal morons -- they were accused of being un-American, traitorous, terrorist-sympathizers. And as Glenn Greenwald has noted (see Ed's post above), people who opposed the war are still marginalized in the debates about current Iraq policy by members of the media who were wrong about the war but still label the opponents as "unserious." So it shouldn't be a surprise that many opponents were, and still are, incensed by the arrogance of the war's proponents and enablers. This isn't a grievance about past behavior -- it's a current grievance. Many of the "apologies" from war's former supporters sound a lot like "You were right and I was wrong; now shut up and go away and let the grown-ups (including me) decide how to sort out this mess."
Perhaps it is unfair, dear Megan, to lump you in with that crowd -- but if it is, I don't think you've made the sale.
What I would like is for someone who voted for Bush to come out and say "I was opposed to the war from the beginning because ___". That's someone I want to hear from because their reasons are probably legitimate.
If you didn't vote for Bush and didn't support the war, there's nothing more you can add. You didn't support the war BECAUSE Bush supported it, and whatever justifications you had (or think you had) were simply invented to ease your opposition to Bush. Stop pretending you were so prescient - you're like the joke about the economist who has predicted 10 of the last 3 recessions. If you oppose everything someone does, unless that person happens to be infalible, you'll be right at some point. It doesn't mean we should listen to you the next time or that you have any particular insight into how to not f*** up.
Personally, I'm quite glad the war opponents are still pissed. Anything to bring their blood pressure up. That alone is reason enough to vote for McCain but fortunately I won't have to -- he'll certainly take Texas without my help.
I know, it's been harped on above, but it has to be quoted again:
"I have no particular interest in the opinions of my harsher critics on this topic; the only interesting criticisms of my thought process so far have been made by me."
MUAHGAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHA
part of what's going on here has to do with the "dirty hippies" issue that has been raised in your comments section, by Atrios, and by many others. Those of us who opposed the war from the beginning -- and for anti-60s-aesthetic reasons, especially those of us who marched against it -- were insulted, dismissed, laughed at, accused of treason, and on and on, right up through about mid 2006
Well, sure -- stopped clocks are rarely regarded for their prophetic abilities, even when they are kept around for sentimental reasons.
The simple fact is, a very large chunk of the Day One antiwar group never made any original or prudent insights from which they can claim to have "been right" in any meaningful sense of the word. They simply opposed the war from nostalgic force of habit and never had a good answer to the historical context that had been building up for at least thirty years. Then they repeated the same canards over and over, and now they want credit that some of them can be spun as accurate?
This is wholly uncovincing to those of us who have an attention span longer than five years, but that seems to be a rather small minority of the American public these days.
Nonsense, and a deeply pernicious argument as well. We had many respected experts at the time articulate many good, well evidenced reasons that the war was a bad idea. To the best of our ability outside of actually invading, we knew there were no WMDs (and so did the Bush Administration, with its tacit admission of such by not bothering to secure any weapons sites). No one could know how it would turn out, but we had lots of reasons to predict that it would go exactly as it did, and lots of respectable figures made that prediction.
This is what's so frustrating for those who were right in the first place: now that the mea culpas are plentiful, there's still no admission that they were right, for the right reasons. The mea culpas all have a bitter flavour of acknowledging that some were right because a stopped watch is right twice a day. "You were right, and I was wrong, but that still doesn't mean I should hear you out and consider what you say."
No, they were right: The surge is failing. The political reconciliation that was the whole purpose of the surge has not happened, and now the ability to sustain the surge of troops is ending. I think it unlikely that a miracle coming together will occur between now and July, but I could be wrong--stopped watches usually are.
And just this morning come news stories that the Mahdi Army are in direct conflict with Iraqi government forces, having called for 'civil revolt'. 22 are dead as of noon EST.
AMW:
"Invading is the best way to assure Saddam uses WMD or gives them to terrorists."
Yeah, this is the one that I called in the opposite direction. I was thinking that as time went on the WMD question would get worse not better (and I was thinking nukes, to be honest, which can't usually be made in really large numbers fast by groups still learning).
Do I consider the other reasons good -- yes. But I weighed them against nukes and decided that invasion was a difficult but rational decision.
That a man who had actually USED WMDs against internal opponents (nerve gas) actually had none of any kind was a complete shock. I really had expected regulators (weapons inspectors) to be less effective.
But I was wrong, I knew I was wrong shortly after the invasion and still don't have a good idea how to fix things.
Maybe that would be a good way forward: who has an idea about what to do now that Humptey Dumptey has fallen off of the wall??
The problem as I see it, and Megan touched on it, is the adamant refusal of the DFH crowd to accept anything other than total unconditional surrender. Folks, that's not going to happen. People who supported the war may eventually admit they were wrong; but despite your fondest wishes that they would then go away and leave the policy discussions to those who were right about Iraq, they are still citizens and still are entitled to give their opinions. They may even be right on something other than the desirability of invading Iraq. These are very intelligent people who have studied the world for a long time; go ahead and lambaste them when they get it wrong, but I think you need to stop short of demanding they cease being experts. (Not that this will ever happen either; it's human nature, but the attempt must be made regardless...)
Eliminationism (as described by Dave Neiwert) is ugly wherever it occurs, not just when practiced by people we don't agree with.
Meagan, I know the tone of the people who were right about the war is sort of off putting, but you have to understand that in the comments to the posts where you try to seriously examine what you got wrong with your decision there are loads of people arguing that sadaam was going to attack america and that we did a good thing killing hundreds of thousands of people. It was kind of shocking, I expected your readers to be less crazy.
And a larger chunk did have prudent insights; they were right in the meaningful sense you identify. But they were lumped in with the dirty hippies reflexively in order to marginalize and dismiss them.
In all the admirable reflection of war supporters identifying how they were wrong, I've seen not one admission that amounts to "I should have listened to Scott Ritter and David Kay. I should have listened to Juan Cole and Fareed Zakharia." They all analyze their own mistakes without ever acknowledging that vast amount of actual expertise and evidence that they ignored.
"I trusted Bush too much" is one half the equation. The other half should be "I distrusted the anti-war crowd too much."
But Megan, you’re being much too easy on yourself for two important reasons:
1) It wasn’t hard to get it right. Until Bush started warping reality and hyping the case, just about everybody other than extreme neocon hawks felt that attacking Iraq was stupid. So you fell for spin, and transparent spin at that. Those of us who didn’t fall for it watched in amazement as the country suddenly agreed that the sky was green and the grass was blue. It was clear to any rational observer that a) the case for Iraq having WMDs was tenuous at best, and b) even if Iraq did have them, it had not threatened us with them, and was not a clear and imminent threat under any reasonable assessment, and c) withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, where we had already bungled the hunt for UBL, in order to attack the non-threat of Iraq was strategic nonsense, and d) the so called Pottery Barn rule still applied. You say that everybody will make a policy mistake at some point in their lives, which is of course true. But this was not some close call, with little data. This was rather clear to anybody not subject to neocon spin. It made no sense. I could see that clearly. Why couldn’t you?
2) The consequences of getting it wrong are enormous. You’re assessing what you got wrong as if it were a bad choice on a wine pairing at a dinner party, rather than a matter of massive death and destruction. Getting this decision wrong has meant hundreds of thousands of dead men, women and children, including 4000 US troops, countless more wounded, millions of refugees, a weakened US security situation throughout the world, 3 trillion wasted dollars, etc. But now you complain that people are being rude, and feel people should be glad that you admitted that you were wrong. In fact, you should be grateful (astonished, even) that you have any career or audience at all after such an absurd and catastrophic failure of judgment.
After this catastrophe, if you can explain why anybody should value your judgment or listen to your opinions over, say, mine (a total amateur who got it exactly right), I’d like to hear it. And no, I’m not saying everybody should trust my judgment either. But then again, I wouldn’t presume to ask anybody to, as you do by writing this blog.
So no, people should not be rude to you. But they should also never again take you seriously. I certainly don’t.
Megan:
What you are have attempted to express is known in decision theory as the exploration vs. exploitation dilemma, exemplified in the two-armed bandit problem.
The two-armed bandit goes as followed: you are given a slot machine, and told that one arm pays off more frequently than the other. Pulling an arm comes with a cost, and the two arms do not need to cost the same amount. The question is, what is your best long-term strategy for minimizing your costs and maximizing your payoff? How do you decide which arm to pull?
Ideally, you'd discover the arm that has the best long-term payoff, and keep pulling that arm until it falls off. But any decision about which arm pays off the best is predicated on an estimate of the frequency with which it pays off, which in turn is predicated only on your knowledge of how well it has paid off in the past. Your knowledge (based on past performance) is therefore never sufficient to achieve absolute certainty.
After a sufficient amount of pulling both arms, you can get an estimate of the payoff frequencies. At any point in the future in which you need to decide which arm to pull, you can therefore choose to either exploit your existing knowledge base by pulling the arm you currently believe to be the best, or explore and potentially acquire new knowledge by pulling the other arm.
The optimal strategy depends, of course, on the relative frequencies and costs. But here's a clue: if it costs 4,000 American lives, 200,000 Iraqi lives, $3,000,000,000,000, and our standing in the world to pull one arm to see if the DFH were wrong:
Don't fucking do it.
squeak:
I assume you lump in Brent Scowcroft as one of these "nostalgic" war-opposers?
You're right that some of the antiwar crowd was against the war because it was war. But there were also some very "serious" people who were opposed to the war, if not in principle then at least in the timing and process leading up to March 2003. The problem was that many more people who were accorded "serious" status were in favor of marching off the cliff immediately if not sooner; and some of those people happened to be in charge of the nation. To a degree, they still are.
Which leads me to Justin JJ:
I see this complaint all over the Liberal/Progressive Web, and it pisses ME off. No, that's too strong; it SADDENS me. "I'm sorry, I was wrong" isn't good enough; the demand is that everyone who supported the war should put on sackcloth and sit in ashes for 40 years, and leave the running of the country (and the world) to those who were right. I have to ask, when has that EVER happened? What leads you to believe that it will happen this time? Given that it manifestly will NOT happen, why are you wasting time (and as Megan illustrated, wasting an opportunity to convert people who disagreed with you) insisting on it? Take the apology for what it is, and build a bridge to the other side.
Let the admission that they were wrong on Iraq be a lever to getting them to admit they might be wrong on other things. Don't demand they cease participation in the discussion.
Exactly the point I identified above: The mea culpas ring a bit hollow because they're eternally paired with "stopped clock" crap.
The anti-war crowd was not a "stopped clock". It was full of experts, of knowledgeable people who repeatedly argued against the war, only to be dismissed as having Bush Derangement Syndrome.
This is why Megan is getting a rude reception from the anti-war crowd. Even now, even after being dragged by circumstances to admit that the war was wrong, they still won't admit that the anti-war crowd was right.
David, yes, being an asshole is, in fact, being an asshole. But by the same impeccable logic, being wrong is being wrong. So forget the stopped clock nonsense. There was more than enough information to know that invading Iraq was a bad idea. Those who were unable to interpret that information showed poor judgment on this critical decision. Those who were showed good judgment. It's quite simple. This idea that it was not "foreseeable" just because you couldn't foresee it is merely another example of the Bush administration's "nobody could have predicted" excuse. Plenty of people did predict. But that makes them stopped clocks, i guess, as opposed to merely being right.
I'm sorry that it saddens you, but how else should I push back against the "stopped clockers" who are still refusing to acknowledge any merit in the anti-war case? David Nieporent just used the phrase above to dismiss the anti-war crowd.
I've never seen anyone suggest that the pro-war crowd should go home, should absent themselves from public life entirely, should leave the hippies in charge. But the point remains that a mea culpa that fails to acknowledge that the anti-war crowd was fundamentally, meaningfully right; that they had real expertise and real input to make; that calling them traitors and unserious was a mistake (at best); a mea culpa that refuses that is only half done.
Megan,
On the one hand, you are right: highly emotional and personal attacks do not generally lead to productive outcomes. On the other hand, Iraq was no ordinary foreign policy decision, it was a radical overturning of nearly 100 years of American foreign policy principle and practice, and it was pursued by the administration in a way that was and is *intended* to make people react emotionally and personally. It's unrealistic to hope that most people will react dispassionately now, while we're still embroiled in the mess, to any analysis that carries a whiff of self-justification or implicit rationalization of further adventures in pre-emptive war.
I argued strongly against the war from the beginning. To me, you had to believe 3 things to justify the invasion:
1. Saddam had WMD.
2. Military intervention would make it less, rather than more, likely for those WMD to be used against us.
3. Assuming 1 and 2, the opportunity costs and blowback risks did not overwhelm the case for intervention.
I had no trouble believing 1, although the case for nukes was transparently flimsy, and I'd made far too many corporate PowerPoints to be impressed by Powell's presentation. On 2, I had strong reservations - I'd read far too much military history to believe that, in the chaos of war, we'd find all of those WMD needles in the haystack before they were snapped up by bad guys with far less disincentive to use them than Saddam. On 3, where do I start? Putting Iraq at the top of the priority list, at a time when Osama was still on the loose, numerous potential weapons of assymetrical warfare remained unprotected, Afghanistan was still unsecured, etc, etc, seemed crazy to me. And the possibilities of blowback: I remember reading in enraged astonishment Wolfowitz's "hard to believe" statement that we wouldn't need more troops for post-war security than were necessary to defeat Iraq's much-diminished military. Surely, he was smart enough, and well-read enough, to know how unhistorical his analysis was. Compounding
the possibility of blowback was the amateurish, sometimes hysterical, and highly political approach the administration took toward selling the war. Having basically called a large part of the American citizenry, and most of the rest of the world, naive or cowardly required putting up
a large portion of American credibility as collateral on an already risky bet.
When the war finally started, I remember being astonished that we were actually going to do it. I thought at the time, and still do, that it was analogous to what happened in the dot-com bubble: A large number of normally smart, responsible people had become convinced that one signal event changed all the rules, overturned all the lessons of history, and rendered invalid all conventional old-school criticism. If there is one meta-lesson we might all take away, it is that we have to put in place mechanisms for avoiding the same kind of group-think the next time we have such a signal event.
By way of comparison, Andrew Sullivan and John Cole have both gone through this exercise of saying why they were wrong, and received much better responses because there wasn't the air of moral reservations, of only grudgingly admitting that "mistakes were made".
So did Megan actually call any anti-war supporters traitors? Because I've seen people complain about that repeatedly as if Megan had something to do with it.
You want her to apologize for something she didn't do? You want a satisfaction she can't honestly provide.
I am deeply sorry, Megan, that you have to deal with asshats like most of the people commenting above.
(If it helps, I think you were less "wrong" than you do - and I put no onus on being wrong with the best information available at the time.)
Justin JJ: Remember "we shouldn't invade Iraq because Saddam will use his WMDs and kill lots of people and poison the Iraqi environment"?
I remember that one.
Were those the "experts" and "knowledgeable people"? Maybe, but they sure were wrong, weren't they?
Clock looks stopped to me.
John: "Our standing in the world"? Which "standing", expressed how? Our European Betters oppose the US when it suits them and support the US when it suits them, according to their perceived interests.
Please explain what this "standing" consists in, in your mind, and what good it does, contra those interests?
Is it the goodwill of random Canadians? The opinion of German newspapers? What is it, and what effects does it actually have?
Remember Scott Ritter and David Kay, saying that were no WMDs, that the intelligence supporting the presence of WMDs was flat wrong on actually checking?
Remember Joe Wilson saying that the Niger Uranium connection was bogus?
Remember the very public media debunking of the Prague connection between Saddam and the 9/11 hijackers?
Looks to me like the clock was running fine at the time.
Undoubtedly there are public statements by the anti-war crowd that were wrong in hindsight; also statements that were only accidentally correct.
There was also a vast amount of "serious" objections to the war that were justified at the time by the available information, and were correct. They were valid predictions that were borne out in fact. And they were ignored.
Ed and the "Megan is the Devil" crowd et al.,
Do none of you see no value in an honest and civil discussion about how intelligent people arrived at the wrong decision on Iraq? Or that it will help persuade people against supporting the next ill-advised war?
Apparently not. Perhaps it is more important to satisfy your adolescent urge to crow about how "right" you were and how evil Megan is. Well, bravo then. Terrific work. Yay you.
Meanwhile, you've made it more difficult to learn anything about why intelligent people chose to support the war and how you can persuade them next time.
John Bates said: The optimal strategy depends, of course, on the relative frequencies and costs. But here's a clue: if it costs 4,000 American lives, 200,000 Iraqi lives, $3,000,000,000,000, and our standing in the world to pull one arm to see if the DFH were wrong:
Don't fucking do it.
Hindsight is always 20/20, John.
What if we pulled the arm and we found WMD and Iraq slipped into a comfortable democracy? Would it be worth it then?
How about if we pulled the arm, 1000 died in the invasion but the country was pacified and we no longer have troops there? Worth it then?
You can't do a cost/benefit analysis without knowing the costs and the benefits. I don't think we even know the full extent of the benefits yet.
What I would like is for someone who voted for Bush to come out and say "I was opposed to the war from the beginning because ___".
I already posted my "I was opposed to the war from the beginning because ___" above. I did not vote for Bush in either of the last two election cycles, but then again I didn't vote for anybody in the last two election cycles. I haven't voted since 1996.
But, I did support Bush over Gore in 2000, and if I voted, would have voted for him. I did not support Bush in 2004, and if I had voted, I would not have voted for him (though I probably wouldn't have voted for Kerry either).
If you didn't vote for Bush and didn't support the war, there's nothing more you can add. You didn't support the war BECAUSE Bush supported it, and whatever justifications you had (or think you had) were simply invented to ease your opposition to Bush.
For some people that's probably true. But for plenty of others who didn't vote for Bush I'm sure that's not the whole story. And dismissing people's opinions on the basis of their past votes like that is one reason you see all the vitriol from my fellow war opposers above.
You can't do a cost/benefit analysis without knowing the costs and the benefits. I don't think we even know the full extent of the benefits yet.
Or the costs.
Whoa, wait a minute. Scott Ritter wasn't exactly credible because he left Iraq in 1998 swearing that it was working on WMDs and something needed to be done, and then, after not being there for 5 years, was in media swearing that Iraq didn't have WMDs and that nothing needed to be done.
That's not a convincing narrative.
David Kay investigated Iraq after the invasion, so I'm not sure of the relevance to pre-war decisions.
The meaning of Wilson's findings are debatable, but again, that was several months after the invasion.
Sure, the Prague connection was nonsense, but I don't recall the Bush Administration ever stating a definitive link between Iraq and 9/11 anyway.
So, JJ, I think your memory is more than a little faulty here. You want credit for anachronism, and you're angry that you're not getting it?
That honest discussion is being had now, in many places and by many people. Those who are getting a warm response are those whose mea culpas didn't start with the tepid "mistakes were made" formulation.
Megan's analysis is actually pretty good--forthcoming and relatively unflinching. A lot of the ire of the anti-war commenters here is directed at the pro-war commenters who still spout bullshit about stopped clocks.
You can't do a cost/benefit analysis without knowing the costs and the benefits.
Sure you can; you just need an idea of the range of possible costs and benefits, and their respective probabilities. War opposers thought the probabilities for heavy costs to be high and the probabilities for large benefits to be low. War supporters thought the reverse. The dice came out more closely to the opposers' estimates than the supporters.
Of course. You were right because you knew what David Kay and Joe Wilson would say months after the invasion
You complain about "stopped clocks" being bullshit, but yet a lot of your reasons didn't even exist before the invasion. The ones that did aren't that convincing and reasonable people can disagree.
That's why I don't understand the level of indignation. You're mad at Megan because other, unspecified, people called you cowards and traitors. You're angry because people wouldn't listen to evidence that didn't exist yet. Ok...
I can't get behind a demand for an apology that expects Megan to apologize for something she didn't do because she ignored things that didn't exist. Call me crazy.
Justin and Ely: I wasn't speaking specifically of Iraq, but of the more general point that any given act is "folly" because there existed people beforehand who said it was a bad idea.
But wrt Iraq, shouldn't we look at the whole track record of those who opposed action in Iraq, and not just that one decision? People who opposed action in Iraq tended to be people who reflexively oppose action everywhere. Not all of them, by any means, were/are pacifists; many were/are isolationists or realists. Many of them were wrong (at least in terms of practical considerations) on Bosnia. Some of the more extreme ones, on the left and right, were even wrong on Afghanistan. No, they weren't all stopped clock types. But many were, and those are the ones most vocally insulting people who were wrong on Iraq.
OK, I will admit that I was skeptical of the WMD claims and I STILL resorted to the "If we invade, that's the scenario where Saddam is most likely to use WMD" argument. I don't see it as a contradiction, but rather as a rational response to uncertainty. I didn't know for sure what sorts of weapons Saddam had or didn't have, but I saw basically 3 scenarios:
1) He doesn't have WMD. No threat to us. No need to invade.
2) He does have them, and we rely on deterrence. We know that he's able to stay alive and in power in a divided and unstable place, suggesting that he's rational. (In the sense of understanding where his self interests lie, not in the sense of fair or reasonable.) He's hence deterrable. Similar assessments applied to the Soviets (ostensibly ideological folks, in fact just power-hungry evil bastards).
3) He does have them, and we invade. In that scenario, he has nothing left to lose, and so he might as well use the WMD.
What I argued was a rational response to uncertainty, and one that would have had a much lower body count than what the hawks wrought.
To Megan: Yes, in this post you talk about what you learned. Great. However, in other posts you talk about how this war was basically an exercise in testing hypotheses. That suggests that you don't really perceive that this is about actions and consequences.
Probably my memory is faulty--it's been five years, and I'm not an encyclopedia of the anti-war case.
But then, I don't want credit for being right. I'm not looking for a personal apology, nor do I actually have a lot invested in helping the pro-war crowd dig itself out.
But if the point of these mea culpas is to have an honest discussion by the two sides of how we got to where we are, then part of that discussion is understanding why the anti-war crowd isn't always greeting these mea culpas like the return of the prodigal son.
There's a deep frustration in the anti-war community, especially those who were right at the beginning, about the extent to which they were dismissed and maligned throughout, at the same time as they watched a disastrous war unfold that they knew was wrong but couldn't stop. Even today, a lot of the mea culpas refuse to grant that there was any validity to the anti-war case--two different commenters here have called them "stopped clocks".
So if the responses to Megan's mea culpa are less than warm, it may not be right, but I think it's understandable. Moreso in the presence of pro-war commenters who still dismiss and malign.
"What if we pulled the arm and we found WMD and Iraq slipped into a comfortable democracy? Would it be worth it then?
How about if we pulled the arm, 1000 died in the invasion but the country was pacified and we no longer have troops there? Worth it then?"
Other questions to ponder:
What if weak-minded fools didn't get caught up shamefully transparent jingoistic fear-mongering to rah-rah an unnecessary invasion? (Say, has that ever happened before?)
What if The Bush Administration had heeded the infamous PDB from August 6, 2001?
What if the National Security Advisor in 2001 had had the slightest bit of qualified competence?
It seems to be increasingly difficult to change the past. One hopes we can learn from it.
In addition to what Nieporent was saying, many of those same people have constantly been predicting a disaster in Iraq far and beyond what actually occurred. From claims of a "quagmire" during the conventional invasion, to constant claims of imminent civil war for years now.
If you're right about one thing, does that excuse how you're wrong about everything else?
Thoreau,
I had the same reasoning, except I was quite sure he had WMD. Guess I didn't do a lot of research in that area, but I figured it didn't really matter. His (supposed) possession of them was a reason not to invade.
Well, I guess I meet Josh's criterion- voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004, and thought both invasions were ill-conceived strategies.
Why?
(1) It is not the United States responsibility to build functioning republics in foreign lands. Iraq was stably governed by a thug for sure, but if the Iraqis wanted something else, then it was their responsibility to bring it about. This criticism also extends to Afghanistan.
(2) Unlike Megan, I did not forget how inept government is at doing pretty much anything.
(3) I thought Hussein may have some chemical weapons, but I did not believe them to be a threat that was dire enough to justify the costs and the risks the US was taking in invading, deposing the tyrant, and rebuilding Iraq.
(4) I did think casualties on the US side would be much greater by now than they have been. I got this one wrong by almost a magnitude.
(5) The Bush Administration clearly had no plan for what comes after Hussein. I predicted ethnic violence between the Sunnis and the Shia majority, and I got this one right. I still view the only workable solution now to be partition.
(6) I knew that if we went in, it would take at least a decade to make it work by the lowest standards of success. It was an easy call to say that Americans would not be that patient. I thought it better to not take on the responsibility at all if we would not be willing to last it out. I am guessing that I got this one correct as well, but the issue is still in doubt.
Here's an idea. Next time we're in the run up to something controversial like the War, commentators should write down a simple list of reasons they support or oppose the action. That way everyone can go back and check to see where they were right and where they were wrong.
Almost everyone will be wrong about something. But people on one side of the argument will probably be right about more things than the people on the other side. I expect this would lead to less posturing on both sides. Those who were wrong about much would have difficulty equivocating to insist that they were in the right. Those who were right about much wouldn't be able to claim sanctimonious prescience ex post facto.
I think scientists to something like this. It's some sort of method or something . . .
Risk analysis is always based on subjective assignment of costs and likelihoods. For any decision, one examines as full a range of possible outcomes as can be predicted, assigns a utility to each outcome, and assesses the probability of that outcome.
So, yes, when we make a decision, we should take into account the magical pony possibilities, and accord them the weight that they deserve.
So JJ, in other words, you're excusing how people are unfairly treating Megan's moment of candor and honesty as a opportunity for catharsis?
Why should anyone even bother to try and engage their mistakes if they are going to get massively dumped on for things that really have nothing to do with them (Megan didn't call people cowards or traitors)?
When it comes to adding reasons why she was wrong or what she could do different next time, there is almost nothing of use provided. It's just indignation about how she didn't grovel sufficiently or tweak their egos enough.
When you do try and critique her mistakes you get the important details so hilariously wrong that you're literally expecting her to heed evidence that didn't exist at the time. It sort of sinks your complaint about how the phrase "stopped clock" is unwarranted.
You wonder why people don't engage the anti-war supporters seriously? Maybe, just maybe, this sort of thing is why.
"Richard, the problem is that for any decision that gets made in life, there will be naysayers. And in a country with 300 million people, there will always be people saying, "That's a bad idea." That doesn't mean that the foolishness of any particular decision was foreseeable, just because someone said so. Stopped clocks are right twice a day."
I hear that shooting heroin is fun. You might get addicted, but that doesn't mean the foolishness of any particular decision is foreseeable, so why not go for the fun?
We are in the midst of March Madness. Would you want to bet some guy even money on a slate of games, where the other guy gets to pick which teams he is betting on? Some people might say that not all teams are equally likely to win, but that doesn't mean the foolishngess of any particular decision is foreseeable, so go for it!
Been out drinking? It sure would be more convenient to just drive home than to call a cab. Sure, you might end up killing innocent people, but that doesn't mean the foolishness of any particular decision is foreseeable, so grab those keys and get going!
The stopped clock argument says that the future is unknowable, so there is no point in considering the consequences of our actions. Do you really believe this? I doubt it.
I agree that the existence of naysayers alone is not an argument against a course of action.
But it seems to me that a critical component of any real analysis of how the serious pro-war crowd got it wrong should involve asking "who got it right, and why didn't I believe them?" Megan's analysis amounts to "my assumptions and predictions were wrong", as if the root of the problem is that her sensors weren't calibrated correctly.
There were people who got it right, and for various reasons. It always seemed to me that part of the reason the cause of war advanced was because too many bought into the Bush Administration's marginalization of critics that shouldn't have been marginalized. One of the enduring lessons of this whole exercise should be to listen to critics and to not dismiss them lightly.
Acknowledging the valid case that the anti-war crowd had isn't a matter of making them feel righteous retroactively. It's a matter of identifying the assumptions, the predictive methods, and the analytical viewpoint of people who we can say now that we should have listened to; it's also a matter of digging out our own blind spots that kept us from listening in the first place.
The stopped clock argument says that the future is unknowable, so there is no point in considering the consequences of our actions. Do you really believe this? I doubt it.
No it doesn't. Not even remotely. It's just saying that they were right in this case because they consistently suggest the same thing so many times that eventually they'll be right at least once or twice.
It is not, in any way, a claim that no one could have known, no one did know, and no one should try and predict. That doesn't even fit the clock metaphor for heaven's sake. You are so completely wrong about the argument I have trouble believing that you are honestly misconstruing it.
Glorious,
Jim Babka & friends put up a site 7 weeks prior to the invasion that was opposed to the war. They claimed there were no WMD. Their reasons are listed here . The site has not been altered since 2003, but has been kept up as a testimony that at least some who opposed war had some genuine insight.
"Those of us who opposed the war from the beginning -- and for anti-60s-aesthetic reasons, especially those of us who marched against it -- were insulted, dismissed, laughed at, accused of treason, and on and on, right up through about mid 2006"
Absolutely wrong! It didn't stop in 2006.
I think there's a lot of justification for the anti-war crowd's frustration, and that tepid mea culpas, intentionally or not, just reinforce that frustration with the same actions that caused it in the first place, in addition to avoiding things that should be part of the mea culpa. The feelings of the anti-war crowd aside, looking back at the ones who got it right and why they were right (and whether they were right meaningfully or accidentally) is part of any good analysis of how the pro-war crowd was wrong. Megan doesn't touch at all on why she didn't accept the critics of the drive to war.
Sorry if I came off as a bit of a jerk in the prior thread; that wasn't (totally) my intention.
On one hand, it was really disappointing for me to see so many otherwise educated people taken in by all the nonsense that Bush was spewing back in 2003 to sell the war. My response to you wasn't entirely personal; a lot of people made the same mistake as you did. Certainly nobody's perfect. I guess my biggest hope is that people learned something from all of this. In the wake of Vietnam the American public in general became a lot more skeptical of government, but it seems that it only took a few decades for the memories to fade and the lesson to become lost. Endorsement of the Iraq war, to me, implies rather questionable analytics, an imperialistic view of the world, or perhaps a little bit of both. It's easy to look back in hindsight and say that mistakes were made, but what happens the next time Bush - or our subsequent president - tries to sell the public on some similar hare-brained scheme? Will we learn the true lesson at hand here; that we should be more critical of our policymakers; or will we again fall for it, hook, line, and sinker?
On the other hand, I do want to give you credit for writing about your change of heart, and you make a lot of good points in doing so. Internet political punditry is like a shark tank (would it be so fun if it were otherwise?) and I am sure that it is not easy to come out in front of people like me - and the more vociferous posters - to say that you were wrong on such a touchy issue. Ultimately, regardless of what you thought about the war, you were just as powerless as any of us outside of the oval office to stop it even if you wanted to; so it is absurd to try and hold you responsible in some way for the situation in which we now find ourselves, as some folks have been doing.
That's true, and it's all the more frustrating when the people you know are wrong are vilifying you and calling you "traitors" and "un-American" and constantly saying "why don't you move to France if you hate America so much." That's still not a license to demand equal degradation in reverse. We're supposed to be better than them, aren't we? Let's not be the mirror image of Free Republic and Little Green Footballs.
Be frustrated, fine, I understand. Just know that it doesn't advance your agenda to be vindictive, any more than it ultimately advanced theirs.
It always seemed to me that part of the reason the cause of war advanced was because too many bought into the Bush Administration's marginalization of critics that shouldn't have been marginalized.
How exactly were they marginalized? Because the Bush Administration didn't listen to them? Huh?
One of the enduring lessons of this whole exercise should be to listen to critics and to not dismiss them lightly.
How is this not just saying that the Bush Administration should have listened to them? How is that really an applicable lesson?
It's a matter of identifying the assumptions, the predictive methods, and the analytical viewpoint of people who we can say now that we should have listened to;
Except that when you try and derive an applicable lesson you don't really have anything particular to say. It's just "Listen to the anti-war folks because we were right."
When you try and show why we should have listened the results are pitiable.
Gee, I wonder if the obnoxious tone has anything to do with that. You mean acting like giant douchebags patting yourselves on the back and slinging mud at people who freely admit their errors fails to earn you respect? Shocking!
I mean, what's the deal with all these people shrugging and thinking "stopped clocks and all that" when they should be constantly kicking themselves in the ass and praising you for being so effing brilliant?
When you try and show why we should have listened the results are pitiable.
Glorious, did you read the link I posted?
"No it doesn't. Not even remotely. It's just saying that they were right in this case because they consistently suggest the same thing so many times that eventually they'll be right at least once or twice."
So you seem to be saying that sometimes the foolishness of a decision is foreseeable, but this isn't one of them. So far, so good. But how are we to tell the difference? All you can offer is that some people oppose all wars, so we cannot rely on their opposition to this particular war. Well, sure: but what about people who are not ideological pacifists, but who opposed this war? The strategy from the start has been to conflate these groups. I have been characterized as a "pacifist" (a risible assertion) on precisely these grounds.
This is all a mighty spin to avoid having to confront the reality that some intelligent and informed people opposed the war for reasons that have largely turned out to be correct. That some people also opposed the war for other reasons is irrelevant. When you invoke the stopped clock argument regardless of this reality, the effective result is the claim that nothing is foreseeable, so you can do what you want regardless of consequences.
eli wrote: After this catastrophe, if you can explain why anybody should value your judgment or listen to your opinions over, say, mine (a total amateur who got it exactly right), I’d like to hear it.
So many people are tripping over themselves to congratulate their excellent prescience with regard to the war. How about some discussion on the path Iraq was on under the old sanctions approach? Up to a million Iraqis (mostly children) died, dramatic increase in child labor, rampant growth in illiteracy, unspeakable torture, etc, etc. Per capita income dropped from $3510 in 1989 to $450 in 1996. Almost half of children under the age of 5 suffered from diarrhoea.
I wouldn't deny that the poorly executed post-war effort has created suffering. What is difficult (if not untenable), however, is showing that the no-war approach would've netted *less* suffering.
Thoreau, I don't even understand what you mean. Do you have some other way for deciding what action to take than formulating a hypothesis about possible outcomes and then acting on it?
AMW: You also probably need to get everyone to write down why they have the reasons they do. Bring it down two levels deep, at least. Otherwise, the best "theory" you can come up with is trust through authority: trust that guy because he was right last time. We all know of people who were right one day and wrong the next.
As for me, I found the opinions of war opposers distasteful, as it was peppered with a hate for Bush that overpowered any leavening it might have had from bona fide expert arguments. It spoiled the whole thing. It still does. If there is anyone out there who considers international terrorism a grave danger, worthy of U.S. action, could offer a strategy beyond merely calling for more diplomacy, considered the Iraq invasion to be unwise, and could discuss it without devolving into rants and raves about why they hate neocons and Bushitler so much, then that person was long ago shouted down by the likes of Breasts Before Bombs.
I find myself still allying with the likes of Christopher Hitchens. Where did I get it wrong? I am fairly sure I didn't. At least, not the basics. I figured Saddam would fall. I figured we weren't going to be greeted with parades. I figured it would take at least a generation to repair the dysfunction in Iraq. (As in, 25 years from now, we'll look back and say, "wow, remember when we thought Iraq was a hellhole?".) If I got anything wrong, it was thinking the other Middle Eastern nations would all respond belligerently (I honestly never expected Qaddafi to back down); Iraq's physical and cultural infrastructure was in better shape than it seems to be; and underestimating the inertia of the anti-war narrative.
Perspective can be an amazing thing. Both of the "main" sides of the war issue seem to believe they had to kick and scramble for mainstream acceptance, but were ridiculed and cast aside, and, well, NOW you see we were RIGHT, and boy are you gonna get it now! ...and in this corner of the web, apparently it's the war opposers' turn to deliver their righteous homilies, even while acknowledging some of the truth therein. I suspect I'll be here next year, reading similar tripe from war supporters, even while agreeing with some of it, too.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get going. According to right-minded, rational people, I apparently need to have my head examined, and I'm late for my appointment.
SeanH: "Gee, I wonder if the obnoxious tone has anything to do with that. You mean acting like giant douchebags patting yourselves on the back and slinging mud at people who freely admit their errors fails to earn you respect? Shocking!"
Hey, whoa there fella. Settle down and read Teh Greenwald as to why those of us who got it right still get no respect from Big Megaphone. It doesn't seem to correlate with any obnoxiousness from the anti-Iraq Invasion contingent. And by the way, the ones accusing Those of Us Who Got Iraq Right of being traitors and worse are still holding megaphones. Say, were they, obnoxious in any way?
Lastly, there's no need for name-calling. I haven't called anyone any names, nor should you. Just because you were (and possibly are still) too weak-minded to fall for easily dismissable jingoistic fear-mongering, you don't have to take it out on ToUWGIR. Thanks in advance for your future civility.
Where did I demand degradation in reverse? Where did I call for the tarring and feathering of Megan? Where did I agree with the poster above who said Megan's opinion is now worthless?
What I've been responding to is the posters like Glorious who think that any criticism of Megan's mea culpa is just more evidence of how churlish and stupid the anti-war crowd is, and so "pitiable" and safely ignored.
It's not like the people who were right might have anything useful to say about how we got into this mess. Apparently it's only those who were wrong who are still "serious" enough to have an opinion worth considering.
Megan,
As someone who opposed the war when it was launched but not as vehemently as I should have (and nor was I necessarily opposed to an invasion after March 2003 if concrete evidence of WMD had been uncovered or more serious obstructions to the inspections had occurred), I can relate to where you are coming from in your "mea culpa" thoughts. I certainly made a lot of mistakes in assessing the situation, even if I can look back and say that I thought the invasion in March 2003 sure seemed like a bad idea.
But I think it is also worthwhile to understand the anger and frustration among people who oppose the war. As I have come to oppose the war more and more stridently (because we are compounding our basic strategic error and consequently making a bad decision even worse in my judgment), it has been very frustrating that the debate of the occupation as played out in most conventional media outlets (television, newspapers, the blogosphere) has largely followed the pattern of "We can't leave if we are making progress because we need to hold our gains and we can't leave if things get chaotic because we need to make them better or risk a safe haven for al Qaeda [who I guess are assumed to be wanting to leave their safe haven in Pakistan for a more scenic safe haven in Iraq?]." There are SOOOOOO many foolish and naive arguments put forth by those who favor continuing the occupation and yet they are subject to almost no critical analysis. It is terribly frustrating to see a vast swath of Americans who possess various combinations of ignorance of the basic facts on the ground, an indifference to critically analyzing the strategic impact of our foreign policy decisions, and a surge in nationalistic feeling which discourages criticism of American policies.
Now part of the problem is that the anti-war crowd has engaged in the behavior that you highlight. Overall, I would say that the anti-war movement has not succeeded in framing their arguments in ways that moderate Americans can agree with. Yes, public sentiment has slowly moved against the war, but not nearly as much as it "should" have, given the actual circumstances on the ground.
But I don't think this is a matter of "both sides are doing it." It's more complicated than that. The political climate has been one in which opposition to the war has been viewed through the lens of questioning one's patriotism (even though most opposition of the war is based on reverence of distinctly American ideals); the (primarily right-wing) war machine has managed to use the emotional responses of Americans to the fear that terrorism invokes to make it substantially harder for war opponents to present their case. You don't see many bumper stickers that say "be concerned about Iraqi civilians" but you do see a lot that say "support our troops." Now of course our military servicemen and servicewomen should be supported and it is a natural result of war for patriotistic fervor to increase; the problem is that a major side effect of such sentiments is the conflation of criticism of American policy with acts of (metaphorical if not literal) treason.
So in short, yes a lot of people who oppose the war are acting in a counterproductive manner. But a large reason for that is the horrid intellectual climate in which debate about the war has been stuck in since it began. That is not to defend the obnoxious behavior (everyone being an agent of free will), but only to explain it as a sociological phenomenon.
How about some discussion on the path Iraq was on under the old sanctions approach?
I was against the old sanctions approach, and figured it could only strengthen Hussein's grip on the country. I supported lifting sanctions. Threat of retaliation probably would have kept Hussein from starting more shooting wars.
One thing to remember is that our choices weren't status quo vs. invasion. They were status quo vs. any number of alternatives.
Oh, and Paul Brinkly, you bring up a good point on Qaddafi. I didn't see that happening; I expected tyrants to scramble for nukes, not disarm. My revised hypothesis is that nuke-less tyrants who are close enough to attainment will scramble (ala Iran), while those who are not will try to make peace (ala Libya).
Glorious, did you read the link I posted?
Yeah. It details reasons for believing that Iraq didn't have WMDs. Ok. I know people believed that at the time. All I am saying is that people could have reasonably disagreed, particularly with someone like Scott Ritter (someone the link heavily relies on).
Yes. You are right. Iraq didn't have WMDs. This issue was rather settled almost five years ago now. The point is that, at the time, there were reasons to believe they did and that they didn't. Reasonable people could disagree. That's all.
I'd be interested in a discussion about how similar mistakes could be avoided, but it seems like people are more interested in other things...
What I've been responding to is the posters like Glorious who think that any criticism of Megan's mea culpa is just more evidence of how churlish and stupid the anti-war crowd is, and so "pitiable" and safely ignored.
I'm just making the obvious point that you probably shouldn't hit her over the head, during her apology, for ignoring evidence that didn't even exist at time. That's what I was calling pathetic.
You continued in that error for multiple posts before I corrected you. It's hard for me to listen to you complain that people aren't taking the anti-war folks seriously when in that very complaint you are demonstrating why they don't.
And, yeah, if the anti-war crowd is deeming Megan's Mea Culpa as inadequate because she doesn't apologize for the perceived sins of the entire anti-war movement, well, that's bullshit criticism. She didn't call the anti-war supporters traitors. She didn't "marginalize critics." She isn't personally responsible for any of the dead. She just had an opinion. You want to blame Bush and his administration? Fine. But she wasn't on it.
So why are so many anti-war supporters dumping all over on her real and sincere moment of public introspection? What purpose does that serve? How is that not self-defeating?
Any legitimate criticism you had was lost in the inaccuracies, misplaced blame and the cloud of indignation.
Aie. That should be "the perceived sins of the entire PRO-war movement
We had threat of retaliation hanging over various organizations of terror for decades. It didn't seem to deter them. Since the 60s, the history of terrorism seemed to amount to a series of acts, by multiple unrelated parties, growing in severity.
When a sovereign national government goes on the record defending terrorism, then we need to seek its disposal and/or replacement, as soon as possible to prevent spread, and as safely as possible. I'm still thinking this equation resolved to the invasion option in the case of Saddam.
Oh, if only hypotheses such as AMW's could be truly tested! The truth is, we don't have anything nearly like a physics lab. We can't create and destroy hundreds of nations to test these theories, and every nation on earth today is different. Appeasement may fail horribly on one government and succeed stupendously next door, and fail if you try it a week later. I've had biologists tell me they face similar frustrations in the lab - cells are just too chaotic to conduct really thorough tests. (At least you can grow hundreds of cells, though.)
It may be that a swift and well-planned reconstruction program in Iraq, coupled with an equally swift revision of our military ROE for handling insurgents, would have shocked and awed the world so fundamentally that it secured Republican victories in the White House and Congress in 2008, 2012, and sadly, 2016, when up and coming governor Rodney Fortescue Blevins was elected President, instituted sweeping deregulation of the synthetic drug industry, which directly made the US vulnerable to a virus strain that killed 10% of its urban population. I mean, who knows. We do our best with the information we have.
"Something else to keep in mind is that unless you are planning to die soon, you are going to get some major policy question badly wrong in the future, because no one is as smart as some of the war opponents have decided they must be."
Matt Yglesias is; at least that's what he says.
Megan,
And every word that you type mocking the repentant supporters of the war will, I guarantee, be hauled up and thrown in your face.
A deep breath might be in order.
For myself, I opposed the Iraq invasion because it seemed to me that a secular monster such as Hussein would be more hostile to a global Jihadist insurgency (for reasons having nothing to do with the US) than any Democratically-elected Iraqi government, which would surely be more religious and, therefore, more sympathetic to Jihad. I certainly didn't see Iraq becoming the Hobbesian "war of everyone vs. everyone" it has, so I don't begrudge many non-Foreign-Policy-Professionals for failing to foresee that either.
Anyway, should the most vocal critics of "repentant supporters of the war" get their way in leaving Iraq and invading the Sudan, I suspect they will have at least as much to answer for on those two fronts as they insist the "repentant supporters of the war" do on 2003's invasion.
Leaving Iraq will not, as they say, allow the Iraqis to get along with each other (genocide is all but guaranteed, with regional war another--I hope less-likely--possibility).
Invading Sudan will just give us another insurgency in another Muslim country, though this time, in a strategically irrelevent one, and make messier the on-the-ground situation in an ally of our primary competitor (China).
Megan-
I agree that for any decision you make you should hypothesize what will happen for that course of action. My objection is to what you wrote in an earlier thread:
Maybe I'm just not getting tone (something that doesn't always come through in this format) but it seems like you're trivializing the colossal mistake that is this war, framing it as an intellectual exercise rather than as a huge loss of blood and treasure. Also, framing it as an exercise in hypothesis testing sounds dangerously close to the excuse offered by some hawks regarding WMD (that the war gave us information that we didn't previously have, i.e. 100% certainty that there's no WMD) and that is valuable. (Apologies if I'm misinterpreting you on that.)
I agree that a substantial number of war supporters were as obnoxious as anyone. I was in the mushy middle at the time and think it's clearly been a mistake now. That said, the reason for my sarcasm earlier is that I think Greenwald and an awful lot of ToYWGIR are being very disingenuous in claiming the lack of respect "doesn't seem to correlate with any obnoxiousness from the anti-Iraq Invasion contingent".
Coming from a moderate perspective, there was and is plenty of ridiculous rhetoric from the war supporters, but the "illegal", "blood for oil", "Bush as war criminal" rhetoric from the antiwar side seems commonplace where the "traitor" rhetoric seems the exception. If you and Greenwald aren't aware that the anti-Iraq Invasion contingent does have a reputation for obnoxiousness with most people to the right of Hugo Chavez, then I've got to believe you're completely blinded by some kind of confirmation bias.
Again, I didn't mean to come off as nasty, it wasn't what I intended at all. While I apoligize for that, I absolutely don't apologize for making fun of wondering why ToYWGIR fail to gain respect in the middle of a couple of threads full of folks childishly slinging mud at MM for not being right soon enough.
I mean, who knows. We do our best with the information we have.
True. And the information we had said that 1) If Saddam had had WMD in 2003, he would have been in posession of them for 25 years, (about half of which time he was our bitter enemy) yet he had never used them on us nor given them to a third party so that they could do the same 2) Saddam had only ever used WMD on targets that could not retaliate in kind (i.e. the Kurds and Iran), and 3) Saddam was a secular thug reviled by Islamists and would be an idiot to hand any WMD he had over to a third party.
He hated the U.S., but he also knew that using WMD against us (or giving them to others to use against us) would mean his annihilation from the face of the earth. And because he was a thug whose main goal has always been self-preservation (and not a zealot for some cause "greater" than himself), we could be reasonably sure that he was not a serious threat.
As far as I was (and am) concerned, it was case closed.
To Megan: Kudos for having the stones to come out and say that you were wrong. I apologize that many of my internet brethren have responded so negatively.
To pretty much everyone else: Debate on this issue is pointless considering that Megan has already admitted that she made mistakes in her decision making process. Therefore, the only function that you serve is to inflate your ego by bragging about your 'rightness' Furthermore, the decision to enter was not one made by stupid people. Whether or not you think the president's intelligent, his decisions were guided by intelligent cabinet officials and you must remember that the resolution authorizing force in Iraq was passed nearly unanimously. So unless you can prove that all of these people were morons, then your thoughts are clearly clouded. In fact, nearly everyone here suffers from hindsight bias, the major difference being that Megan is aware of it. Moreover, those who brag about being right from the start are also suffering from confirmation bias as you largely ignore many of the factors that led to the decision to enter, and instead look only at all of the flaws that came to light after we had invaded.
I'm not chastising those who spoke out against the war, for their criticisms certainly are valid, but to those who claim that the decision to enter was a stupid one need to examine their own biases and stop harassing those who have the courage to admit their own flaws.
Zeus,
Read the posts above and decide for yourself whether it is the pro- or anti-war posters who have given more "I was wrong on point X" caveats. I know that Thoreau, Yancey Ward, and myself have (all of us anti-war). I can't recall any pro-war posters who have.
This would, incidentally, be a good way of showing me my own confirmation bias. It could well be that I've subconsciously decided to forget pro-war posters admitting their predictions didn't pan out.
"So why are so many anti-war supporters dumping all over on her real and sincere moment of public introspection?"
Perhaps because the title of the post, "Mistakes were made," conveys the tone of what follows. Real and sincere introspection is not normally put in the passive voice.
Perhaps because the title of the post, "Mistakes were made," conveys the tone of what follows. Real and sincere introspection is not normally put in the passive voice.
I thought it was pretty clear the title was meant to be a joke.
In my ideal world, I'd make everyone who supported the war watch the PBS Frontline miniseries "Bush's War" (which is airing Part 2 tonight). All those who thought that the administration was trustworthy, that "top men" were making the decisions based on careful consideration of actual facts, should be horrified at the actual events leading up to the invasion. Petty turf wars between Rumsfeld and Powell; pre-existing assumptions dictating policy in the face of evidence to the contrary; Cheney's machinations to shape the President's decisionmaking in his preferred direction; nit-picking, undermining, and character assassinations carried out against non-conformists; it's a litany of one abuse of power after another, one shameful outrage after another, one forseeable and avoidable mistake after another. Rumsfeld in particular deserves to be one of the most reviled Americans in history to date, followed closely by Cheney, for their subversions of our government for their own personal vendettas.
I hope Megan is watching this show. It is available online if you missed Part 1.
Thoreau, I'm not quite sure what any of the critics in these threads want, except perhaps a full throated grovel where I roll about on the floor and take personal responsibility for every one of the Iraqis who died, while proclaiming that I grievously wronged each of the commenters, personally.
It seems to me that the only worthwhile thing to do with the current disaster in Iraq is to figure out how not to do that again. The way to do that is to look at the decision process that led to it. And decisions consist of forumulating hypotheses, and then acting on them. And then, hopefully, examining your actions to see whether your hypothesis was right.
I don't view this as an intellectual excercise. But you seem to have me confused with Jesus. I don't have the power to cause Iraqis to rise from the dead through my repentance; if I did, you can be sure that I would repent as thoroughly as required. In fact, I am immensely saddened that I supported a war that has caused all this destruction. But my actual contribution to the deaths of those Iraqis was extremely marginal, since I did not have any decision-making or even opinion-making power. I did not engage in the various name-calling and well-poisoning activities that y'all are taxing me for. I am not willing to be the target of your rage merely because no one else will listen.
I think that figuring out what went wrong in Iraq is so important that it surpasses even the need of those who opposed the war to believe that anyone with two brain cells to rub together and an ounce of moral fiber would have come to exactly the same conclusion they did. I understand the frustration at arguing with the war's nastier supporters. But the insane arrogance displayed in these threads, wherein everyone congratulates themselves that there was no uncertainty, just blind malice and stupidity on the part of the war supporters, just sets us up for some equally catastrophic failure elsewhere.
That is, after all, how the neocons got where they were--by observing the colossal fuck-ups of people who disagreed with them, and concluding therefrom that they must be infallible. Since they never actually tested any of their counterfactuals, they grew more arrogant with each of their opponent's mistakes, and hello, Iraq. I think many of those who opposed the war are taking a dangerously wrongheaded lesson from its aftermath.
Zeus: points well taken.
AMW: I also agree that Saddam was at odds with many Muslims, and that he leaned toward secular values. (In fact, this probably contributed greatly to the US posture toward him: as bad as he was, he also formed a barrier to the very theocratic Iran.)
However:
- I think Saddam had mustard gas only since 1983, making his time of possession only 20 years at the longest. As you say, though, he hates our guts for about 12 of those years. Still, that's not a terribly long span, and it would certainly be possible for him to be biding his time.
- Saddam gave weapons to no third parties as far as we know. This is exactly the sort of thing I would expect us to not know about for many years (or it could be that the CIA knows of at least a few positive and negative cases, and they are classified). Of course, I don't expect us laymen to borrow trouble. We shouldn't act purely on suspicion, but then, we also should remain suspicious.
- Meanwhile, Saddam was definitely paying money to families of Palestinian suicide bombers. He was subsidizing terrorism. I suppose that's not the same thing as giving them actual weapons, but if I use your reasoning, it fits your model of Saddam's interests - it helps Saddam avoid having a WMD used against himself - but it also favors a point I've made: it proves Saddam fomented international terrorism.
Given that, I consider the case much less than closed. I don't think the Iraq invasion monotonically increased terrorism in the world. Rather, I think we are suffering a temporary rise in violence that will eventually settle into a much lower level, with an added safeguard against future violence, in the way of a prolonged American presence in Iraq, military for now, commercial in the future.
I stand corrected in my last post. Paul Brinkley and JD both admitted some error, and both were pro-war. Glorious could be interpreted as admitting error when she says that the WMD question was resolved 5 years ago. (I am not counting Megan's comments in this tabulation.)
Upon a re-reading it looks like Thoreau's comment is more admitting to playing both sides of the WMD question than admitting an erroneous prediction.
However, add to my list Mike and Shinyk as war opposers who had some admission of erroneous predictions.
So at the end of the day, I guess I suffered some confirmation bias, but was still right that the majority of the error admission came from war opposers. Much like my predictions on the Iraq War itself. This must be the second time of the day when my clock is accurate.
one of the reasons that the debate in this country isn't moving is that we've turned into two hardened camps who are arguing more about how much we hate each other, than about the war.
Five years ago, I tried to engage with war supporters in reasoned argument about how the war was likely to end in disaster. I got called a traitor for my pains, got asked over and over why I hated America--why one blogger even said I and people like me should be beaten with 2X4s!
Now, it's clear that the war was a blunder of catastrophic proportions. Actually, that's been clear for quite a while, but now things have reached the point at which even the "flat earthers" on the right can't really make much of an argument to the contrary. Do we get apologies? Does anyone say, unqualifiedly, sorry, you were right and I was wrong?
Of course not. Instead, we get weaselling, insults and complaints about our lack of civility. Where the heck was civility back in the 2X4 era?
Shame on you Meagan McArdle, on you and all your ilk.
And yes, I'm perfectly capable of being wrong on major policy issues. But (1) I've never gotten anything wrong to the tune of a million dead and $3 trillion down the drain, not to mention the permanent damage inflicted on the country's reputation and "soft power" in the world, not to mention the shear dishonor of our actions a Guantanamo and Abu Grahaib, and (2) I've never in my life called for violence agaisnt my domestic political opponents, and never will.
And Meagan, the traditional condition of absolution is, "Go, and sin no more." Calling for war against France, a country whose leaders had the bad taste of being right about the war, and which tried its hardest to save us from our own folly, and which has been our faithful ally everywhere from Yorktown to Afghanistan, does not qualify as "sinning no more." And yeah, you say now it was a joke, just like the business with 2x4s was a joke. Well, they were bad jokes, not funny, and likely to have bad consequences in the real world.
Liberalrob
it's a litany of one abuse of power after another, one shameful outrage after another, one forseeable and avoidable mistake after another. Rumsfeld in particular deserves to be one of the most reviled Americans in history to date, followed closely by Cheney, for their subversions of our government for their own personal vendettas.
I prefer Fiasco but agree that Rumsfeld (and Bremer), in particular, should be viewed by Americans with all the respect shown by the British towards Neville Chamberlain.
It's also true that pointless infighting, bickering, dysfunction, etc. have been particularly poignant in the Bush administration.
I recommend another television special, HBO's John Adams. It does a good job illustrating that pointless infighting, bickering, interdepartmental dysfunction, etc. have been present forever, and the existence of such is separate from the question of whether power is being abused.
This might be nitpicking, but I guess I mean to say that I find this true:
The Bush administration is a pretty good (bad) example of this and a pretty good example of powers abuse.
and this false:
The Bush Administration is a good example of abuse of power as evidenced by its bickering, infighting and dysfunction.
Megan, I think I misinterpreted some of what you were saying. I thought you were treating the war itself as a process of discovery (as some hawks have, saying that even though it's a bloody mess and the WMD weren't there, at least now we know that the WMD aren't there). I apologize for my ire at you (but I don't apologize to those commenters who are stuck in Baathist Dead-Ender mode).
Still, while I'll agree that it's important to identify the mistakes that were made, it's also important to pay at least some attention to those who were right all along. Knowing what could have been done right is valuable, and having examples of it is also valuable.
This isn't just about my ego (although I do admit that it's infuriating that some people still take the dead-enders seriously). The point we doves are trying to make is that what we did actually wasn't that hard to do. There's no need to pat me on my head and say I'm smart. Just say that what I figured out in 2002 was actually pretty easy to figure out. I think it's crucial for the future that we recognize how easy this is to get right. Yes, it's easy to get it wrong, but it's also easy to get it right, and we should make that clear. There's no deep mystery to this, and that's an important thing to realize the next time they come and spin a web of deception.
Finally, I'll admit that some of the doves were indeed broken clocks. All those people at the anti-war protests whose signs are about Mumia, vegetarianism, global warming, capitalism, patriarchy, race, abortion, organic food, etc. are indeed broken clocks. Some of the paleocons (not all of them, but some of them) are also broken clocks. But some of us actually had a point, and it wasn't that hard to figure out.
Again, I don't want anybody to pat me on the head for getting it right. I didn't figure out anything particularly challenging. I just want to get it out there that in some ways this was actually pretty simple, and keeping that in mind will make it easier the next time the lies are flying thick in the air.
Paul Brinkley,
I have no idea what Saddam would be biding his time for. A limp-wristed Democrat in the White House?
My understanding is that chemical and biological weapons don't store very well, unless you have some pretty sophisticated storage facilities. (Correct me if you know otherwise.) So if he did give them to anyone, I would have expected them to have been used by now.
As far as Palestinian suicide bombers are concerned, those are nationalist terrorists who pose no known threat to the United States. And they invariably use conventional weapons to wreak their havoc.
In short, it was within the realm of possibility that Saddam could have been up to nefarious plans against the U.S. with WMD (if he had only had them). But it was very, very unlikely. Certainly (in my opinion) not likely enough to go to war over.
Which side the admissions came from is irrelevant. My goal in posting here is to get people to realize their biases, and to cut the self-serving BS. It seems to me as though some people may need to read the first sentence in the paragraph directly above the 'Post' button.
Rea, first of all, if you'll go back and read that post, instead of what other people wrote about it, you'll see that it was a joking comment about violent response to people who were protesting with violence. Protesting, mind you, the WTO, not the war. It was in no way a call for people to beat up peaceful protesters. I think protests are pointless, but the right to have them is a precious civil liberty. Also, I have been a peaceful protester who almost got hit in the head, so I have a particular sensitivity to this danger. I think people who behave violently should be violently restrained, but not with a 2X4, which sounded smaller than it turned out to be.
Second of all, I wasn't incivil. I am not going to apologize on behalf of those who were--any more than I expect you to apologize for the people who called me a fascist and worse. The delusion that they are the only ones who were called names during the run-up to the war is one of the more inexplicable plaints of the war opponents, particularly the ones who themselves called me names. (You know who you are--or ought to.) The incivility was a process, not a universal victimization of war opponents as "dirty hippies", a phrase I never would have used because I am a hippie.
Third of all, if you think that a) I was actually calling for us to invade France and b) that if I did call for us to invade France, this would actually have any consequences (other than making me a laughingstock)--well, I'm certainly not going to concede that your mental powers are better than mine.
Fourth of all, the irony impairment on both threads is amazing. The title of that post was a joke--at the expense of weaselly "I wasn't really wrong" people. The comment about France was a joke--at the expense of the crazier war supporters. You are firing on your own side.
Well, I can hardly apologize for the dirty hippy calumny, because in 2003, I was saying that both sides should be civil to each other
NO, you were not. February 13, 2003:
And I think some in New York are going to laugh even harder when they try to unleash some civil disobedience, Lenin style, and some New Yorker who understands the horrors of war all too well picks up a two-by-four and teaches them how very effective violence can be when it's applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner.
http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/003959.html
Once more, Megan, I apologize for rude comments to you. I've let some of your commenters (who are indeed just like the Baathist dead-enders) get to me, and I took some of it out on you. My apologies.
Rea,
Five years ago, I tried to engage with war supporters in reasoned argument about how the war was likely to end in disaster. I got called a traitor for my pains, got asked over and over why I hated America--why one blogger even said I and people like me should be beaten with 2X4s!
That's present on all sides. Five days ago I was called a Holocaust-Denying Zionist (not sure how that's possible) by some moral-relativism-spewing leftist for daring to suggest that Saudi legal treatment of women constituted a form of barbarism, then told to kill myself and burn in hell. I don't think it's right to hold that against, say, Arianna Huffington as you seem to be doing, in your case, to McCardle.
Rea, you're misreading it rather violently. If you read the whole thing, it was clearly talking about people who were working themselves up to wreak mayhem on NYC. "Civil disobedience, Lenin style" was an ironic reference no non-civil, violent activity.
I still shouldn't have said it--but I was not urging anyone to attack peaceful protesters.
picks up a two-by-four and teaches them how very effective violence can be when it's applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner
Well, that knocks down my Huffington analogy.
I don't see any real 'apologies' here. If the pro-war folks want people to believe they are sincere, they need to say, publicly, that they will defer to the superior judgment of those who Got It Right (modulo for the right reasons).
Megan, Glorious, liberalrob, I don't see any of you making this sort of concession; it's as if after totaling someone else's car in an accident that was entirely your fault, you think it's enough to offer up an admission of error, and you're indignant that the victim is demanding monetary compensation for damages. Or perhaps a better analogy would be someone who loses a hand of poker, and they think that if they admit that they lost, they can pull their money out of the pot.
I think that is what has the anti-war crowd up in arms, that once again, people are trying to sleaze by on the barest possible minimum.
One thing pointed out by thoreau a while back is that there are those who got it Right for the Right Reasons:
http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2008/03/25/8040
One of the things that would make it a bit easier to credit Megan at this point would be if she were to stop pretending that everybody who got it right was in the Kucinich camp rather than the Obama camp.
Scent, that's a false analogy. You can only make that claim if your judgment is superior 100% of the time, which it can never be. Instead of issuing a de facto referral to everyone who opposed the war, the proper thing to do is analyze your mistakes and attempt to correct them. It's thinking like yours that puts us in situations like the one we're mired in.
Also, it's not even about apologies. People should never be punished for their thoughts unless either they act on those thoughts and someone gets hurt, or they incite people to intentionally harm others.
Rea, you're misreading it rather violently. If you read the whole thing, it was clearly talking about people who were working themselves up to wreak mayhem on NYC
Those people never existed anywhere except in your head, Meagan.
How would you have felt if you'd picked up the paper next day and read a headline, "Anti-war Protestor Beaten to Death"?
Through hard work and a certian amount of talent, you've gotten a national reputation as a poltical pundit, and made, probably, a certain amount of money along the way. With great power comes great responsibility as someone once said.
Then you're claiming that there can be no authorities, no experts, no specialists whose opinions should be treated as deserving special consideration. That is . . . a rather different point of view, to be charitable.
No. The claim is that you should defer to people whose judgment has been superior to yours in a majority of the cases; if, for example, they've been right eight out of ten times, and you've only been right on the same set of issues 2 out of ten times, then you'd best be served by listening to them respectfully and defering to their judgment on the first cut.
What you're suggesting is nothing more than a fig leaf to let these people who have been wrong so often to have just as much say as those who have been right - in fact, more at the level of national discourse.
Uh-uh. _That's_ what a lot of people are really upset about, imho: the people who are admitting they were wrong at this point are just saying the obvious. And they think that by saying that since they aren't with the dead-enders that this amounts to some sort of get-out-of-jail-free card that puts them back at parity.
To say that this is refusing to take repsonsiblity in any meaningful way is to put it mildly.
Rea, I was responding to reports that there were such people. Whether they actually existed is irrelevant; indeed, if you were right, I would be guilty only of advocating the beating of a figment of my imagination, and if I don't have a right to beat up my figments, who does?
Either way, the fact remains that I did not advocate beating up peaceful antiwar protesters, as you and about twelve million gullible illiterates have claimed. Are you ready to retract your . . . why, your misjudgement about what I wrote? Or are apologies only to be the province of those of us who were wrong about the war? You've falsely accused me of being something damn near a sociopath. Where's the full on grovel that you deem the only expiation for the crime of incorrect judgement?
It's particularly rich that you accuse me of weaseling; your last response to me indicates that you know damn well that I didn't say anything about hitting peaceful protesters, which is the point at which you should stop and say "oops", not continue to press forward will a claim you know to be false.
As for my alleged powers as a pundit, at the time we invaded Iraq I was a freelance technology consultant writing a blog in my spare time. I have responsibility for being wrong, but as far as I know, this blog has never caused anyone to do anything except buy kitchen equipment. And even that wasn't true in 2003. All of which is again irrelevant, because I did not advocate beating up peaceful war protesters, and therefore could not possibly be responsible for anyone else doing so.
Megan, I have never encountered a writer more insistent than you are that your readers fail to understand what you wrote. In the post that Rea links to, you say you're laughing at the war protesters and will laugh even more after some New Yorker beats them with two-by-fours. That is what the words you wrote actually say. Don't deny it.
Now you say it was a joke, and that you were just "responding to reports that there were such people." Give me a break. Tell me what exact words from your post five years ago actually communicated to your readers that you were "responding to reports." There are none. If you were responding to reports, why didn't write that you were responding to reports, e.g., "Some people are advocating for violence against the anti-war marchers." With a wink and a nod, you were advocating violence against peaceful protesters--stop denying it.
Megan, we are not idiots. Words have meaning. This is the third time today when you tried to explain away your offensive comments by saying it was just a big joke--that none of your readers are smart enough to get. Please, stop telling jokes--period.
Megan, you might not have been influential in 2003, but it's clear that nowadays you enjoy a high profile, and based on comment threads it seems that the dead-enders have attached themselves to you. What would you say to them?
Then again, I shouldn't critique a blogger based on her commenters. Under that precedent, I could be considered an economic leftist.
Rea, I was responding to reports that there were such people. Whether they actually existed is irrelevant; indeed, if you were right, I would be guilty only of advocating the beating of a figment of my imagination, and if I don't have a right to beat up my figments, who does?
Either way, the fact remains that I did not advocate beating up peaceful antiwar protesters, as you and about twelve million gullible illiterates have claimed. Are you ready to retract your . . . why, your misjudgement about what I wrote?
M: "Libertarians abuse babies, and ought to be killed."
R: "Why, that's a horrible thing to say! You shouldn't advocate killing people. And anyway, Libertarians don't abuse babies."
M: "Well, if Libertarians don't really abuse babies, I haven't advocated killing anyone. Don't you owe me an apology?"
You claimed, without the slightest evidence, that antiwar protestors were going to engage in violence, and you advocated beating them with 2x4s. That was a shameful thing to do. You don't get to excuse yourself on the basis that you were wrong about the facts. For crying out loud, it's your error on Iraq in miniature. In both instances, you were not only wrong about the facts, you had no real evidence to support your view of the facts. In both instances, you acted out of ignorance to advocate violence. If you don't understand why your postion was not merely wrong, but morally repugnant, you have a deficient sense of morality.
I thought the post on what you got wrong about the war was quite good. Particular the note about the shift since the '90s from appreciating markets and democracy as default settings to understanding the cultural and institutional underpinnings that make markets and democracy possible, and how this relates to the chaos that ensued within a few days of our victory in Iraq and that has never really abated.
However, I've never been accused of being slow to grasp irony, and I didn't get that the anti-France plank was a joke at the expense of the Freedom Fryers. I just found it kind of weird. Because francophobia is one of those "last acceptable prejudices" in the US, it kind of bugged me. So I'd cut those who were similarly confused about your intent some slack.
Thought I'd try to reconstruct my thoughts on the war. Seems like the thing to do.
1. I was never very convinced on WMDs. It seemed like the Bush Administration released any evidence they could possibly find on WMDs and what I did see didn't really convince me. I was worried about the off chance that Sadaam had biological weapons that were hidden in RVs, but it seemed like the only reason he would use them is if he was backed into a corner.
2. I wasn't really concerned about toppling Sadaam - it was easy enough the first time and 10 years of sanctions wouldn't have helped.
3. Speaking of sanctions, they were fucking terrible. I'm actually surprised that we don't talk about them anymore, but I think the war may have done a lot of good by removing them.
4. I thought that building a democracy would be really expensive and that it probably wasn't worth it. But, I didn't really think failure was that likely, just that it would take a lot of money and time.
5. Didn't appreciate the ethnic conflict. At all.
6. I never thought it was in America's interest, but I've gone through phases on how good I think this was for the Iraqis. Freedom, democracy, no sanctions, questionably utilities, random violence, general choas. I dunno.
7. I had no idea the extent that we embraced torture. Abu Ghraib was crushing.
"Thoreau, I don't even understand what you mean. Do you have some other way for deciding what action to take than formulating a hypothesis about possible outcomes and then acting on it?"
I do. War is a last resort. You don't start out by thinking "hmm, is it worth it to attack this country, or will it be too much trouble?" You start out by thinking "am I currently being attacked by this country?" If the answer is no, war is not justified.
You call yourself a hippie?
Well, now, folks! It really doesn't matter who was wrong and who was right. The important is that we all learned something from the process.
Why, we hadn't had to deal with the social crisis of PTSD-afflicted amputees returning home in volume since at least the 1970s.
So maybe we're a bit rusty, but I'm sure we're all grateful we have the chance to brush up on mass psychological displacement all over again!
Rea, that is the weakest defense of a clearly indefensible position that I have ever heard offered in these comment threads, and that includes the whack jobs claiming that they're entitled to endanger other people's children by failing to vaccinate theirs. I made a joke about responding violently to people who were violent. Whether or not I was wrong about people planning to be violent, or whether or not I should have made this joke, for which I have repeatedly apologized, five years ago, this does not validate your clearly false claim that I advocated beating peaceful protesters. Your illogical flailing is not saving your face; it makes you look worse. You're criticizing me? I admit my errors. You're not only persisting in yours, but claiming that it's my fault that you are doing so. Teaching you to read was your mother's job, not mine.
Megan--
You were right to support the war way back when, and you're wrong to apologize now for having done so.
Saddam was a monster intent on genocide (the Kurds), ruthless suppression of a religious majority (the Shia), and conquest (Iran and Kuwait).
Sometimes it's necessary for the adult nations of the world to step up and kill the monsters before it's too late.
Yes, it's costly. But the USA alone lost over 290,000 troops in World War II because the adult nations of the world didn't step up until it was too late. Russia lost what, 20 million civilian and military combined? And the world lost 6 million Jews.
It's right and moral to put the monsters down as early as possible. Our big mistake was not taking out Saddam Hussein twenty years ago.
The anti-war types will criticize me for this, so I'll just say that if it weren't for them, we would almost certainly have taken military action to prevent, or at least mitigate, the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur.
Interesting theory, KODjr. I will say that if you think our troops don't particularly like fighting a war in the desert, put 'em in sub-Saharan Africa for a few years ...
"People who opposed the war in 2002 and 2003 were not just accused of being venal morons -- they were accused of being un-American, traitorous, terrorist-sympathizers"
No, they weren't, at least not as a matter of course. There are boatloads of you who honestly believe you were, or universalized the inevitable "someone kinda sorta said that to someone somewhere" incidencets, and interpreted any number of rejoinders as such, but that doesn't mean that's actually what happened.
(Just as sharks aren't deadly threats to the populace every summer, despite the numerous stories and headlines.)
In fact, it's this fabricated martyr complex so many "progressives" propagate and wallow about in that has pushed me, at least in terms of much online discourse, further to the right than my actual positions and voting history. I voted for Clinton in his second term. I live in a state with a Democratic governor, for whom I voted, and I've voted largely democratic in 'local' politics. But this collective-think, the paper-thin skin, the hypocrisy, the "we can dish it out be can't take a speck of it" behavior is illogical, unsupportable, and consequently really disturbing.
Stinky flowers:
Speaking for myself, I reject any and all responsibility for the Iraq War. It was not my decision; I voted against the people who did make the decision, before and after; and while as a private citizen I did at the time support the action (or rather, acquiesced to it), I quickly came to oppose it once all the shenanigans leading up to the invasion began to be revealed. So your "car accident" analogy does not apply, because it was not my fault. Nor was it Megan's, nor Gloriouses'.
Fine. The DFHes have been right ONCE (Iraq was a bad idea). That's one. Come back when you've been right 8 times, and then I'll give your demand that everyone else defer to the DFH analysis serious consideration. Heck, nobody listens to me whenever I'm right, and I've been right LOTS of times...
I am not an economist. Megan is, or at least has had much more extensive training and experience in that field. I have my opinions (that Megan is wrong in her economic analyses in some instances) and I state them as best I can; but I am under no illusions that a third party who only knew our relative credentials would choose to take my word over Megan's on a question of economics. It would be absurd for me to demand Megan quit offering up opinions that differed from mine if for some reason on a particular question my analysis turned out to be provably true. At the same time, it would be illiberal and un-American of Megan to insist that I defer to her judgment in all things economic, regardless of her demonstrated superior knowledge and experience. The whole idea of free speech hinges on the ability to offer up your own opinions in the public square and subject them to scrutiny.
The non-expert may not be right 9 times out of ten, and the expert may only be wrong one time in ten; but you have to allow room for both to speak if you want to account for that one instance where expertise might fail or amateur talent (or luck) might succeed.
I don't know what planet you come from, but here on planet Earth war opponents were and are constantly slimed as un-American, Al-Qaeda sympathizers, traitors, and on and on.
"Liberals spent most of the war on terrorism in a funk because they didn't have enough grist for the antiwar mill. They nearly went stark raving mad at having to mouth patriotic platitudes while burning with a desire to aid the enemy." --Ann Coulter, in her bestselling book "Treason" (reviewed by Joe Conason at Salon.com, July 4th, 2003)
Bill O'Reilly, from the June 20, 2005 broadcast of Westwood One's The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly (from Media Matters):
From Think Progress, Nov. 1, 2007:
A very small selection of the avalanche of bile heaped on war opponents. Never mind venturing into the depths of Free Republic and LGF.
liberalrob-
I hates me a hawk as much as any other decent person, but I just take it as an axiom of life that there will always be dumb stuff posted on Free Republic and LGF. If you are going to let it bother you that those sites are posting dumb vitriol, then you're never, ever, EVER going to be happy.
I'm more upset about the way that the allegedly mainstream institutions handled this war. I don't really care what the nutjobs said about folks like us.
EDIT: Forgot to add Bill ORLY and Ann Coulter. Those 2 are clowns. It's what they get paid for. The fact that a clown said nasty stuff about us never bothered me. What bothered me is that the people who allegedly aren't clowns were falling for the BS coming from the administration. That's a more serious problem than Ann Coulter doing her nasty clown act.
Too much to catch up on.
Generally though I think it's possible to dislike both the war and the anti-war movement. I argued against anti-war people even though I always had some reservations on it. Then I came to think the war was a total error.
Did I feel bad for arguing with those people? A little, but not much and it didn't last. Their reasoning was still generally flawed. Most of the people I argued with were against the war for mostly socialist or Anti-American reasons. They believed we were going to invade all oil producing nations or that either the oil cartels or the Zionist neoconservatives control foreign policy. Or that the war was the stepping stone to make America a Fascist state. They didn't believe in the Afghanistan war either. They were very much like the people who took over that Catholic Cathedral even though it had nothing to do with the war. They were and are kooks. I do feel bad for doubting the more reasonable critics of the war though.
This is why politicians never admit error: all it does is dismay the politician's supporters, while the politician's enemies are not impressed:
GWB: "I may have made some mistakes."
Dems: "Ah-HAH! He admits it! Impeach!"
GWB: "Aren't you impressed that I was man enough to admit my mistakes?"
Dems: "Hell, no! Impeach! IMPEACH...!!"
The key word in Megan's 2X4 "joke" was "preemptive." She was imagining protesters might do bad things, and suggesting - ha ha - that some New Yorkers beat the cr*p out of them pre-emptively.
Wow... this blog is turning into one of those alternate realities where we've already lost the Iraq War and the anti-war protestors were right and Chimpy McBushHitler and the Cheney-Military-Industrial-Oil Complex run the country and hippies bathe.
Ironically, the war in Iraq is going better than the war in Afghanistan and the war in Afghanistan is probably more justified. The war in Iraq is probably more important, though.
Either way, we need to stick with both, finish them, and make sure we stabilize the region.
My problem with the war in Iraq is that it happened so late. We should have finished the fight after we threw him out of Kuwait. Heck, if we'd done that, Al Qaeda might have been attacking our soldiers there instead of our investment bankers here.
Thomas R: unfortunately the people who had organizations in place ready to stage anti-war protests tended to be people on the far left of the American political spectrum. There were a huge number of people who supported the invasion of Afghanistan and opposed the Iraq War, but that wasn't so clear in the anti-war demonstrations in 2002.
However, the discussion taking place right now has nothing to do with the people who opposed the war because they're anarchist critics of global capitalist imperialism or whatever. It's about the fact that the op-eds are still being written by Tim Noah, Roger Cohen and Thomas Friedman, rather than by Juan Cole and Richard Clarke. Cole and Clarke are not exactly flaming hippies; they're mainstream pro-American pro-capitalism guys who correctly deemed the invasion of Iraq to be a wacko idea. Yet somehow they are still the fringe-y outsiders, and all the people who got the war wrong are the mainstream. Why is that?
Also, it has become increasingly clear over the past 5 years that the statement "It's all about the oil", while oversimplified and a little hippy-ish sounding, was by no means entirely wrong.
"I thought it was pretty clear the title [Mistakes were made] was meant to be a joke."
If so, it is a bad one on many levels. Let's start with the poor taste of joking about thousands of deaths. [Hah hah! Funny stuff!]
Beyond that, it is part of the non-apology apology that is so fashionable nowadays. It reminds me of the game that Isaac Asimov used to play. He had this outrageously egotistical public persona. It was so over the top as to convey the message that it was a joke. He was winking at his audience, bringing them in on it. But of course beneath that, he actually was outrageously egotistical. Even as a kid who really like Asimov, I got that. The game here is the same. The title of the post is the Nixonian formulation, winking at the readers and inviting us to chuckle indulgently, while still serving the same purpose it did in Nixon's day.
But hey: we all hate France, right? So why the petty bickering over thousands of deaths? Hah, hah!
But one of the reasons that the debate in this country isn't moving
Public opinion on the war has gone from strong support to overwhelming opposition, mirroring the president's approval rating. In what way has debate not moved? Just because you haven't moved doesn't mean the rest of us haven't.
(I supported the war. I was wrong.)
"rather than by Juan Cole and Richard Clarke. Cole and Clarke are not exactly flaming hippies; they're mainstream pro-American pro-capitalism guys who correctly deemed the invasion of Iraq to be a wacko idea. Yet somehow they are still the fringe-y outsiders, and all the people who got the war wrong are the mainstream. Why is that?"
That's a good question. This might say more of the world of punditry or journalists than anything and the importance of that world might be overstated.
Pelosi was consistently against the war, but it doesn't seem to have hurt her career any. She could probably get printed or interviewed most anywhere she wants. Many billionaires who opposed the war are still powerful billionaires who oppose the war. Why punditry would be different I'm not sure.
Although perhaps punditry has similarities to show-biz and in show-biz you can be "finished." Cole and Clarke said things that made people at the time mad. (The majority of Americans supported the war at first) So they were "finished", in some sense, and you can't get that undone because things changed. People blacklisted under McCarthyism didn't get limelight back very easiy regardless of changing circumstances. Whereas with elections or markets you can go through a cycle of winning and losing. This is just a theory, actually I'm not entirely sure. And now for something completely different.
"He was winking at his audience, bringing them in on it. But of course beneath that, he actually was outrageously egotistical." Richard Hershberger
To a large extent, but there are letters he wrote to other writers that show a more humble side. Privately he praised Clifford D. Simak a great deal and said things like he only hoped he could be as good as him. And I think that was for real too. Interestingly I would guess the majority of people who've read Asimov have never even heard of Simak.
If you didn't vote for Bush and didn't support the war, there's nothing more you can add. You didn't support the war BECAUSE Bush supported it, and whatever justifications you had (or think you had) were simply invented to ease your opposition to Bush.
And what of Bush supporters? Do you think if it had been Clinton behind it they would've supported it? Doubtful.
And what of people who didn't vote for Bush but supported the war (me)? Are we the most legitimate of all?
Oh yeah - and what if the reason you opposed Bush was because you didn't trust war-mongering Neocons in general. Is that opposition to the war "invented?"
It doesn't matter. If you supported the war, regardless of your reasons, you are culpable. So why pick on those who didn't? Unless you're feeling defensive for being wrong.
Sigh. I had thought the analogy naturally applicable: the car accident corresponds to supporting the war, not actually engaging in it.
If you really did not see this, then your judgment really is suspect . . . on a variety of topics.
Also dishonest . . . or at least showing an appalling lack of judgement. Many people have been right over and over again on many issues concerning the war: There were no links between Saddam and Al Quaida; there were no viable WMD; there was no viable program to make a nuclear device, no attempt to buy yellow cake from Nigeria. The invasion and occupation was under-supplied and understaffed. There were no realistic rebuilding plans. Oil revenues will not pay for this war. The costs of war will not be less than 100 billion. The occupying forces will not be greeted as liberators. There was massive corruption and lack of responsible oversight in the use of American dollars . . . . on and on and on.
I repeat, to lump these all together as 'one' mistake is dishonest.
(Oh, and btw, I was right on every one of these issues. It wasn't particularly hard to be, given the actors and the information available.)
That's funny, because a lot of the 'serious' people who get air time (and that includes Megan) don't have any particular expertise in these matters. Why should I listen to the likes of Broder, Will, et. al. then, or treat them as 'serious'?
Nor am I suggesting in the slightest that opinion be muzzled; I am suggesting that after being spectacularly, brilliantly, repeatedly wrong on issues that (imho) were so easy to get right that perhaps a little humility is called for.
Frankly, I don't see it. In fact, all I see is some face-saving excuses about why it was easy to make those mistakes, and anyway, we're plenty smart and 'serious'. Not like those goobers who 'accidentally' got it right.
And here again, you seem to be insisting that those who Got It Right sorta lucked into their position, and that no particular credibility attaches to them. While those who Got It Wrong deserve as much air time as ever. Iow, you and yours haven't given the other side room to speak; you think that an acknowledgment that 'mistakes were made' is enough, and a return to business as usual with the usual round of Sabbath gasbags with no added dissenting voices is just peachy. I know you don't see this, but this has some people genuinely peeved - deservedly so.
Particularly since - do you have any idea on how easy it was to be right? How little analysis was needed? You might start with some basic research into the backgrounds of the people pushing for war - all readily available - starting with Ivin's 'Shrub'. You might proceed into investigating such affairs as the first election fiasco, or Bush's message that departing Clinton staffers 'trashed' the Whitehouse.
Really. None of this was particularly difficult to discern.
I've come to the conclusion after reading these comments that the vast majority of people who take the time to comment on blog posts are pompous, insufferable assholes. Really, would any of you dare to talk to someone's face the way you talk to them on a blog post? And if you would, how is it possible that you haven't had the crap kicked out of you at least once? How is it possible that you have any friends at all? What do you do to your friends when you disgree with them? Are you this obnoxious? Civility really is dead.
I would wager that I'm a little to the left of Thomas; that being said, I very seldom encounter people of the mindset he describes. Which is odd; you'd think I'd encounter more people like that instead of less(this sort of thing 'coincidentally' happens with a lot of conservatives, btw: all the 'liberals' that they know just happen to eternally frozen in time and space, Berkely, 1967.)
Most of the people I know, Republicans included, didn't support the war because they thought there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. Not surprisingly, being the bleeding hearts that conservatives are always attributing to 'liberals', we knew that a lot of innocent people were going to die should such a war be prosecuted. Probably many more than were originally killed on 9/11 (us 'liberals' got that one right too - big surprise.)
In any event, the reasoning seems to be that since some people were against invasion for the wrong reasons, even though they were right, the people who were right for all the right reasons still don't get air time. While those who were wrong made understandable 'mistakes', and so they get just as much play as ever.
Yeah, that is just a little bit galling. Particularly for a lot of us who really aren't all that 'liberal'.
Or the vast number of clowns that Dixie Chicked the Dixie Chicks.
Wow, do your commenters suck!
More to the point, why aren't people like Megan who are making 'apologies' condemn this?
Because they really don't think they made a 'mistake', that's why. Or rather, the 'mistakes' were completely understandable ones, on a par with me subtracting nine from forty-five and getting thirty-four instead of thirty-six. Iow, not a fundamental lapse in judgement.
So what should be done in Afghanistan? AIUI, Afghanistan is the war that even (most of) the anti Iraq war folks supported. It presents all the same issues that Iraq does (we've bombed and occupied the country, we're intervening in a civil war, there are rival ethnic and tribal groups, there's an active insurgency, etc.) plus a few additional strategic challenges (it's landlocked - a logistical nightmare, it has no meaningful natural resources, it's terrain is exceedingly insurgent-friendly, Afghanis are generally less educated and less secular). What is the reasoning that says Iraq is unwinnable and our troops should be withdrawn, but Afghanistan is worth persisting?
Let me be clear, I'm not arguing about the wisdom of invading Iraq initially. While I supported the war and I still think it was a defensible position given what wasn't known at the time (lack of WMDs, lack of post-war planning, state of Iraqi infrastructure, lack of even 18th century Western values by the Iraqi polity), at this point in time I concede that invading Iraq was not the best decision. But even if it was a mistake to have started the war, that doesn't make withdrawal the best option now.
Certainly by the standards set by the Bush Administration (reconstruction will pay for itself; weeks, perhaps months, certainly not years, etc.), Iraq has been a dismal failure. By historical standards however, it's not so bad.(*)
But, as I admit to being wrong about the wisdom of the initial invasion, I may be wrong about this as well. Can someone paint the picture for me how US and Iraqi interests would be best served by a rapid US withdrawal from Iraq at this point in time?
----
(*) I assert that the US and the South Koreans are better of for the US having fought the Korean War, but this was a hard argument to make in, say, 1955. Was the Korean War a mistake then, after ~50,000 US troops had died and all that was achieved was a partition? Is so, when did it stop becoming a mistake? If not, why was it not, and how sure can anyone be that Iraq can't travel a similar path?
One additional thought, if you are confident that Iraq (and does this extend to the Middle East and perhaps even Islamic people generally?) simply can't transition into liberal democratic republics, doesn't that strongly imply that we ought to disengage to the greatest extent practical (which isn't much until there's a replacement for oil) and inflict massive destruction in response to any future provocations? Make a desert and call it peace? If for whatever reason, conquer, occupy and gradually stand down leaving a democratic ally can't work, what other options are there?
That brings up the interesting point of what the scenario would be if the positions were reversed. Let's say that the pro-war people were exactly right - it was rigorously confirmed that Saddam had large stocks of WMD, an advanced nuclear weapons program, and that he was directly responsible for the attacks on 9/11. Suppose that the invasion and it's aftermath were equally swift, that the war ended up costing no more 60 billion dollars, that we were greeted as liberators, that a functioning democratic society was successfully implanted into Iraq, and that the troops then left with an impeccable record of humane treatment of the populace. Oh - and all those government contracts turned up to be the best possible way to get the job done.
So what happens when the other side hangs their heads in shame, admits that they were wrong, and avers as to how all that being said, we should just 'move one'?
Does anyone doubt for one scintilla of a second that the likes of Megan, Reynolds, et. al. wouldn't be vigorously and tirelessly promoting this as evidence that the 'liberals' are out of touch, and can't be trusted in any position of importance not to do the chunder-headed thing, regardless of how good their intentions are?
Or does anyone want to seriously maintain that these worthies would generously allow that the 'liberals' made honest and understandable mistakes, and that their opinions are just as reputable and worthy of consideration as their opposite numbers?
Puhleeze.
You know and I know that if the positions were reversed it would be a blood-bath.
So all of this whining is just a little on the hypocritical side.
Well, Megan is a woman, after all.
That being said, you're right - I'd bet that the people being so smarmy right now about just making a few eensy, understandable mistakes, and really - how was it put - "Now, I am well in touch with my faults, but a low IQ is not among them. " Yeah, people would think that's a seriously obnoxious attitude.
Paul writes: "...the vast majority of people who take the time to comment on blog posts are pompous, insufferable assholes."
Then, a few sentences later: "Are you this obnoxious? Civility really is dead."
Paul, not only civility, but self-awareness seems to be dead as well. Suggestion? Be the change you want, baby.
Sorry Frito, but the way some of you are addressing Megan for attempting to be self-critical, my "asshole" comment is in fact something I would say to your face, should you address me in a like manner. I can assure you, you're not going to find me on blog comments anywhere on the internet belittling someone because their views differ from mine or because they came to the wrong conclusion on an issue. I'm wrong too often to be that kind of jerk.
I know it would have been more civil to just call people "pompous and insufferable" and drop the "asshole" part of it, because really the first two adjectives imply the third. I'll endeavor to do better, though I rather doubt anyone else here will. The vanity oozing from my monitor requires some heavy solvent to cut through.
I have no particular interest in the opinions of my harsher critics on this topic; the only interesting criticisms of my thought process so far have been made by me.
Apart from the fact the words "thought process" seem especially lonely in the above, that's one of the most ludicrously self-involved things I've ever read.
Kudos...
Paul, you're hypocritical blowhard. And not a critical thinker. As you've amply demonstrated in just a few short posts.
I got no problem saying that to your face.
If you say so Scent. I'm not about to enter an internet pissing match to prove you wrong. Have a nice day.
I do say so.
Good day. Sir.
Just to pick a few...
There were definitely links between Saddam and Al Qaeda and they have been documented. Saddam also supported other terrorists.
We have actually found some WMD in Iraq, mostly chemical weapons. But he also had WMD programs ready to restart as soon as the sanctions/inspections were over. In addition, it's very likely he would have been able to get plans from the A.Q. Kahn network or Syria or North Korea if we hadn't invaded.
Saddam did try to buy yellowcake from Africa. Wilson went on his little mission, came back and told the papers one thing but his official report said another.
A simple request, Megan: when it comes to opining on war, sit out the next one. Just the next one. It'll suggest that you've learned something.
Really? That's news to me. They really were conspiring together then? Let's see your evidence.
What we have found look to be old, left-over, and badly-degraded 'chemical weapons'. Not even the Bush administration is calling them WMD's.
And again, you post no evidence.
That's the problem with these lines of inquiry: a lot of us were skeptical because of a lack of solid evidence. One technique used to discredit those against the invasion is to call for proof that there were no WMD; which is impossible to produce, just on the grounds of logic alone. An analogous technique was to spread the ominous phrase "We can't afford to be wrong." Feh.
I can't help how ignorant you are. I'm not privy to any secret or hidden sources so you can find out anything I find out.
I did not say they are conspiring together. They had contact, though.
Thank you for making my point - I must say it wasn't difficult to maneuver you into doing so. Just this way of playing with words was yet another reason to suspect that the administration didn't have any solid evidence for their claims.
When the administration seems to be promoting the line that Saddam had 'links' to Al Quaeda, that he had weapons of mass destruction, in fact was well on the way to acquiring nuclear weapons, that he is a grave, an imminent, a 'gathering' threat, people take that description at face value.
To try to pretend that those words mean something else is just silly.
I don't think you really believe that if Bush had said that Saddam had some left-over armaments from the previous war, gas that was in all probability deteriorated into uselessness, and that maybe sometime down the road ten years from now he might actually have some concrete plans for a nuclear enrichment plant, and he and the leaders of Al Queada had occasional contact but did not plan and were not planning a coordinated, cooperative attack on America, but he had contact with other extremist groups in the area that did not mean Israel any good, well, I don't think most Americans would be all that concerned about His Nefariousness.
Saying that's what was really meant by the above inflammatory rhetoric is, I repeat, just silly and counterproductive.
"sort of thing 'coincidentally' happens with a lot of conservatives, btw: all the 'liberals' that they know just happen to eternally frozen in time and space, Berkely, 1967"
TR: I was talking online discussions. I'll get you the link and you can judge for yourself.
http://nightshadebooks.com/discus/messages/258/1602.html?1153112876
Also when the war started I was in grad school so I really was seeing some academic Leftists. Still the woman professor I knew personally who opposed both Afghanistan and Iraq is a lovely old Episcopalian woman who I consider a friend. She was a history prof and something of an Anglophile. She figured that the history of the British there meant that the places would be turbulent and a nightmare to try to fix or run. She was largely right and I'd be happy to apologize to her if she ever asked. (I still support Afghanistan, but I concede it still has instability. Also I think I was respectful of her so don't need to apologize)
Also when the war started I was in grad school so I really was seeing some academic Leftists. Still the woman professor I knew personally who opposed both Afghanistan and Iraq is a lovely old Episcopalian woman who I consider a friend. She was a history prof and something of an Anglophile. She figured that the history of the British there meant that the places would be turbulent and a nightmare to try to fix or run. She was largely right and I'd be happy to apologize to her if she ever asked. (I still support Afghanistan, but I concede it still has instability. Also I think I was respectful of her so don't need to apologize)
Posted by Thomas R | March 26, 2008 9:50 PM
Yet she was your moral and intellectual better in every sense.