I'll be straight, here -- I'm so mad I could spit. It is simply breathtaking to behold the complete unwillingness -- not just "reluctance", but blanket
unwillingness of the pro-Iraq War media and pundit class to acknowledge the quite rational and, in the end,
completely correct reasons for predicting that the Iraq War was going to be a disaster from the outset.
Here's a quote from Peter Beirnart's book as provided by Kevin Drum, whose own attempt at thoughtful refutation of an obviously insulting and vaporous argument is, I fully admit, quite frankly a bit infuriating itself:
A November 2005 M.I.T. study...found that only 59 percent of Democrats -- as opposed to 94 percent of Republicans -- still approved of America's decision to invade Afghanistan. And only 57 percent of Democrats -- as opposed to 95 percent of Republicans -- supported using U.S. troops to "destroy a terrorist camp." George W. Bush, in other words, has used the war on terror to cover such a multitude of sins that for many liberals the whole idea of focusing the nation's energies on defeating global jihad (whether you call that effort the "war on terror" or something else) has fallen into disrepute. Just as Vietnam turned liberals against the cold war, Iraq has now turned them against the war on terror.
Ignoring whatever merits the book may or may not have, ignoring whatever merits Beinart and Drum themselves have, ignoring the entirety of the larger debate, the ongoing jackassery of this strawmanned liberal position is, at this point, almost a parlor game. And quite frankly, I'm long past done being polite in responding to it.
Now, let me say this again, knowing full well that it will be ignored again by every pundit, reporter and politican who duct taped George Bush, apple pie and themselves to the flag over the Iraq War: liberals are not opposed to the War on Terror. If anything, opposition to the Iraq War and to the transparently self-serving, hollow premises on which the war was predicated was based on a quite accurate understanding of the implications of those actions.
We are not against the war against international terrorism. We are infuriated by the Iraq War because of its obvious, predictable and catastrophic damage against the War on Terror.
Now, I've tried to make the argument before (see that above recent link), and in fact a great many people have made the same argument over the past few years, over and over, and it has amounted, in the minds of the supposedly expert and in-touch pundits of the world, to a hill of beans. Atrios makes it. Kos makes it. Nearly every blogger who has ever touched the issue makes it. It never gets a response; it never gets a passing reference; it never gets acknowledged.
And I'm sick of it, and I don't intend to let it pass by yet again.
Even Beirnart's reply to Armando,
earlier today, competely endorses the strawman position that, if I can reasonably accurately strawman Beirnart's own reply, since liberals don't acknowlege that "national greatness" on the world stage is predicated entirely on which countries you blow the holy smoking crap out of, and on no deeper nuance then that, liberals and progressives are therefore diametrically opposed to the current Iraq foreign policy catastrophe, and that somehow we are unserious in the "anti-jihadist struggle".
If the war on terror "doesn't rank high on the list of things liberals care about these days", as Kevin observes in his own post, it's probably because the War on Terror, as defined by the Bush administration, has turned into such a monsterous, counter-productive self-inflicted wound that those polled do not want anything to do with the current policies. The Bush administration -- and the pundit brigades in which Beirnart himself marches -- made it an essential point of their argument that the Iraq War and the "War on Terror" were one and the same thing. That's how it was packaged, and sold.
That conflation is a critical point -- perhaps the critical point -- and one that cannot simply be glossed over.
And now we're going to complain -- in all seriousness -- that people are conflating them? What, is there some aspect of this argument that we're actually supposed to be taking seriously, or is this argument simply intended to be transparently insulting?
Nobody is "against" fighting terrorism, but if the current fiasco of actual isolationism, retreats from the U.N., dismissal of international efforts and endorsements of unrelated "sweep it up" trophy conflicts is what "fighting terrorism" entails, it's pretty clear why people have lost faith in what the administration and pundit class is selling. The president had the country's undivided support after 9/11. He had it in Afghanistan. He had it in the worldwide actions against terrorists undertaken by other nations. And then he lost it, in drips, drops and eventually torrents, based on his unpredictable, unilateral and very obviously damaging actions from then on in.
More and more, I'm seeing pro-war figures look for a healing, of sorts, between those who supported the Iraq War and those who decried it. But this healing seems to take exactly one form -- the pro-war pundits perhaps begrudgingly admitting their errors, but simultaneously continuing to dismiss opponents of the Iraq War as being against it for supposedly shallow or insincere or offensive reasons.
No. No dice. Honestly, this is not an argument that deserves respect, and I'm more than a little peeved at Kevin Drum for even engaging it politely, for the umpteenth dozen time -- and at no point do I expect, given Beirnart's reply, Beirnart to be the one to first acknowledge credible internationalist progressive critiques of counterterrorism policies. There's a point in which debate is reasonable, and then there's a point where it's pretty damn clear that one "side" of the debate has no interest other than repeating the same tainted excuses and accusations and rationalizations over, and over, and over, in an attempt to find that media sweet spot where the conventional wisdom will set up and take hold for future decades.
Isolationism or a lack of the "will to fight" has jack-all to do with it. It's an insulting argument, because it is such a provably false argument if one takes even the slightest sliver of time to look at all the very public, very available mainstream progressive and liberal critiques of the war effort -- critiques based on the predictable, decades-long damage to the larger international fight against terrorism.
We were right: Iraq War advocates were very, very wrong. We are still right: Iraq War advocates are still wrong. We are confident we know the way forward: you are continuing to wrap your past catastrophies of botched advocacy, advocacy which is now responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people for no apparent long-term so-called "opportunity" whatsoever, in ever-deeper layers of nuance and obfuscation and self-promotion.
No. Let me set this straight, again, for the vast majority of liberals I know, the ones I converse with, the ones I discuss the matter with. The actual people, as opposed to these magical high-flying hippie liberal winged centaurs with Michael Moore beards and anarchist T-shirts that the press, to this day, imagines swarming around their heads like pixies -- these real people consider the "War on Terror", though asininely named, to be a critical fight of the next few decades. Terrorism is real; it is worldwide; it has the support of some governments; it is going to spread. As the technologies of mass destruction spread around the world, the opportunity for devastating attacks by small bands of radicals with an axe to grind against overall world progress is going to continue to increase. There's no question that it needs to be fought. There's only a question of how badly we've screwed it up, and what it's going to take to get it back on track.
And the Iraq War was a boondoggle from the start (1) because it did not address the most serious actual roots or supporters of global terrorism, (2) because it wasted resources that needed to be expended in Afghanistan to assure the success of war and post-war efforts there, (3) because it inflamed tensions that didn't need to be inflamed, (4) because it shredded international support for the real War on Terror -- support that had reached nearly unprecedented levels of global unity, before the war, and which represented the only real way to combat international terrorist organizations and movements, and (5) because it represented a wider Arab conflict with the West that was the expressed goal of Osama bin Laden's terrorist movement. And that's just for starters.
That hardly represents an "isolationist" or other dismissable strawman argument. It represents a not terribly difficult to understand internationalist view widely held by experts in terrorism and regional diplomacy. It represents, point of fact, the proven correct analysis of the current conflict.
I honestly have no patience -- none whatsoever -- for this premise that opposition to the Iraq War is predicated on a new liberal isolationism. Horseshit. Progressives aren't the ones cowering in terror of some terrifying "New World Order" government to be based out of the U.N. and ostensibly poised to strip United States autonomy on the world stage. They're also not the ones mortified that NATO actions to stop violence and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia were in fact simply window dressing to distract the country from the reality show Big Media autopsies of Clinton's personal life. They're not the ones currently hyperventilating that people who speak a different language have suddenly been discovered to be immigrating to this country in, gasp, a wave of ethnic immigration not seen since, well, every other similar migration in American history. They're not the ones providing opposition to Darfur rescue efforts. And yes, the progressive opposition to "free trade" policies that paper over severe economic discrepancies and damages is hardly a kneejerk isolationist policy either.
I honestly don't know how, exactly, to shove a basic amount of intellectual integrity into the so-called "liberal-conservative" debate in this country. I don't see how to make it happen. I don't see any actual interest in seeing it happen, only these bursts of entirely self-interested, self-congratulatory mea culpas for being entirely, devastatingly goddamn wrong but at least somehow nobly entirely, devastatingly goddamn wrong.
This seems an unsolvable problem. This seems, more to the point, a problem destined only to get more vicious as the battle for shredded credibility and long-term conventional wisdom becomes America's most asinine new reality program.
You know what? I don't expect this post to be any more linked to than any of the other entirely ignored dismissals of this insulting, projectionist strawman argument. Not going to happen. Never has, never will. But if pro-war supporters want to insincerely heal themselves, and patch over their own horrifically botched advocacies, and conveniently ignore the years of calling opponents of the Iraq disaster "unserious" and "kneejerk" and, even that word below all others, "traitors", then knock yourselves out. But you're not going to get the slightest bit of respect or "healing" from me.
Some words, like unserious and kneejerk and traitors, are worth remembering. They're worth remembering for a long, long time.
Update [2006-6-2 22:6:55 by Hunter]: As many posters describe below, however, a great many liberals do have an underlying problem with the phrasing of international anti-terrorism actions under the numbing catch phrase "The War on Terror". Myself, I'm willing for the sake of argument to grant the simplistic phrase the status of placeholder for the larger concept, as I said here -- in a vain attempt to get to the meat of the underlying issue -- but I also think that those pointing out the underlying hollowness of even the phrase used to describe this conflict do, of course, have an entirely valid point.