In my RSS feed this morning, I have three blog entries from otherwise normal-seeming people who suggest that maybe it’s somewhat unusual to invade foreign countries without a really good reason. There was mine, of course, and Ron’s - it was Ron who gave me the courage to blog about a dream - and Scott’s (I was going to blog about what big balls Condi Rice has after seeing her on Meet the Press, but Scott has that covered). The other two were a little more subtle than mine - but, then, I am an extreme moderate.

Such a happenstance reminds me of that September morning a few years back when I really, really wanted to do something but there was nothing I could do. I had a brain flash. I found the huge Stars and Stripes in the back of the cupboard and went to hang it outside. I felt just like that dude in the Tony Orlando song when, on his way home from prison, the whole damn bus is cheering because there are a hundred yellow ribbons.

Maybe I am not the only moderate?

I know almost nothing about Lamont except that he is very, very rich and that he just won the Democratic primary for the senate seat in Connecticut that Joe Lieberman considered his own. For all I know, Lamont may or may not be of the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party.

But this much I do know. Support for an illegal, unprovoked invasion of a foreign country is not a moderate position and opposition to that same invasion is not extreme.

Support for the invasion of Afghanistan - and most people in most countries did support it - was a moderate position. Support for the first Gulf War - and most people in most countries did support it - was a moderate position. Support for the invasion of Iraq - opposed by most people in most countries - was extreme.

It was a distraction from the important business of fighting terrorism. It destroyed the unprecedented global cooperation with and sympathy for America. It has weakened America’s standing in the world and has resulted in the radicalization of large parts of the Muslim world. The Middle East is in flames and the parts that are not burning are supposedly developing nuclear-powered flame-throwers. It turned out that fighting them over there and fighting them over there were not - Surprise! Surprise! - mutually exclusive and there are now rather more of them than there were before.

The people who are responsible for this immoral and disastrous policy - and the people who claimed that criticism of the policy was somehow dangerous or unpatriotic - should not be allowed to escape without consequences. One consequence for politicians in a democracy is that they can lose elections. Joseph Lieberman just lost and for that, for now, I am glad.

I want to address Rob’s comments to my previous post more fully by quoting from Robert Wright’s contemporary analysis from March 2003.

Rob makes two related claims:

1. It’s disingenuous to claim that we knew he didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction at the time because
2. he was ignoring UN inspection demands.

It’s true that we didn’t know for sure whether or not Saddam had WMD but 2) is outright false.

It was thus a surprise to many observers when the Bush administration started agitating for war even though inspectors had been allowed to go wherever they wanted but hadn’t yet found anything.

I don’t remember anyone claiming at the time that Iraq definitely did not have WMD. I did hear lots of frustrated people complaining that, if Bush&Co had any evidence at all, they should just hand it over to Blix and Baradei and catch ‘em red handed. There were also lots of people - some of them French, one of them English - claiming that a second resolution authorizing an escalation of the inspections with specific triggers for war would settle the matter one way or another. Robert Wright suggests that this was all beside the point:

So why didn’t the administration try such a resolution? Lots of reasons, but the biggest one may have been fear of success. From the beginning, Bush wanted not just disarmament but regime change, and he worried that the former would preclude the latter; if inspectors actually found weapons, the world would insist on giving them time to find more weapons, ad infinitum. (Indeed, Bush seems to have signed onto Resolution 1441 on the assumption that Saddam wouldn’t let inspectors into Iraq.)

That was certainly my opinion - that Bush would settle for nothing less than regime change - at the time. Ultimately, I share Wright’s sorrow that this golden opportunity to prove that multi-lateralism - even acting through the oh-so-inept UN - can be successful was squandered. Not squandered, sabotaged.

The question is whether the United Nations offers an institutional framework through which the United States can pursue valid goals–such as disarming and sometimes even deposing regimes that have weapons of mass destruction in violation of international law–more effectively than it can pursue them outside the United Nations. The answer is that, in this case, it almost certainly could have.

I came across this from 2003

It has been a week of some vindication for hawks, but doves are right in denying that their full arguments — about the dangers of preemptive war, fomenting terrorism, destabilizing world alliances, and so on — are thereby proven wrong.

That’s an understatement to say the least (except the first bit). This is the saddest part though…

Ultimately, the best reasons for supporting the war were liberal, humanitarian ones. Will antiwar leftists be able to accept that?

Sully was dead right about that. The tragedy is that America would never have gone to war for liberal, humanitarian reasons but, if it had, it might have found a way to do it in a liberal, humanitarian and - most importantly - multi-lateral way. And now that we have post-hoc justified the war in terms of liberal, humitarian reasons - the others having turned out to be phantom reasons - I fear most of all that America will shy away from ever going to war for liberal, humanitarian reasons ever again.

While searching for a cite to back up the bold assertions in my rant about Andrew Sullivan - i had pangs of guilt that the blog entry I linked to did not support my boldest assertions (still looking) - I came across this at The Daily Howler. Taking it at face value, it shows how, even back in 2002, the conservative cheerleaders for the war were dismissing anyone who councilled caution. Not by addressing their arguments head-on, but by constructing grotesque charicatures of their arguments and addressing those instead.

This bit (from 2002, remember) stood out for me :

KRAUTHAMMER: But, ah, there is a third way. It is the position of Democratic Party elders Al Gore, Ted Kennedy (both of whom delivered impassioned speeches attacking the president’s policy) and, as far as can be determined, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. This third way accepts all the premises of the antiwar camp. It gives us all the reasons why war could be catastrophic: chemical or bio-weapon attacks, door-to-door fighting in Baghdad, alienating allies, destroying the worldwide coalition of the war on terror, encouraging the recruitment of new terrorists, etc.

Moreover, they argue, deterrence works. “I have seen no persuasive evidence,” said Kennedy, “that Saddam would not be deterred from attacking U.S. interests by America’s overwhelming military superiority.” So far, so good. But then these senior Democratic critics, having eviscerated the president’s premises, proceed to enthusiastically endorse his conclusion—that Saddam Hussein’s weapons facilities must be subjected to the most intrusive and far-reaching inspection, and that if he cheats and refuses to cooperate, we must go to war against him.

“This is utterly incoherent,” Krauthammer rails. After all, if deterrence works, why would you need to conduct inspections? Why would you ever need war?

It is jarring to note that most of the opinions that Krauthammer was so quick to ridicule back in 2002 - in the no-one-could-have-predicted era - have come to pass. It turns out that deterrence and inspections did work. If we had continued with the inspections - as Kennedy and Chirac and Blix among oh-so-many-others were arguing back then we would have discovered that, in fact, deterrence and inspections had worked and Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction. We might also have less alienated allies, recruited less new terrorists, lost less coalition soldiers to door-to-door fighting and we might still have a worldwide coalition in the War on Terror. I am not brave enough to predict what might have happened in Gaza, Lebanon, North Korea, Afghanistan and Iran had an intact coalition with the full force of the pre-emasculation United Nations been behind the War on Terror. Remember the pre-war support for America ?

If this sounds like a big I-told-you-so, I half-heartedly apologize for that.

It still bothers me a great deal that conservative commentators like Andrew Sullivan still manage to criticize the motives of pre-war critics, even while apologizing for their part in the process. Quote :

Observing this, many of us have gone from denial to despair to grim hope to acceptance that the scale of the task was greater than even the pessimists foresaw and the means deployed to achieve it almost pathetically unequal to the goal. I guess a miracle may eventually emerge. Maybe a de facto Iraqi partition after more bloodshed and sectarian massacres may pave the way for a more peaceful future. We can hope. But Baghdad is fast turning into what Beirut once was - a cualdron of unrestrained sectarian hate and violence, fomented by a few empowered by the incompetence in Washington. I’m left with contrition at my own small contribution to the misunderstanding; and abiding, deep, and furious anger at the administration who conducted this war with such arrogance and negligence.

Day after day, Sullivan repeats the same, sad lines about how no-one could have predicted the situation in Iraq and that those who did predict it either didn’t understand what they were talking about - like these guys

In late 2002, Mr. Ricks reports, 70 national security experts and Mideast scholars met at the National Defense University to discuss the looming war and concluded that occupying Iraq would “be the most daunting and complex task the U.S. and the international community will have undertaken since the end of World War II.”

- or predicted it for narrow partisan reasons. This is the first time that he hasn’t hedged his apology with the one about how Iraqis are better off because Saddam is no longer in power so it was all worth it after all. I wonder when Blair, Rice et al will stop doing that too.

I have tried to stay away from books about the war because it is all too depressing but this one looks like it might be worth the read, if only to remind myself of the reasons for starting the war before they are redacted from the official history. I don’t think we’ll be hearing much about “Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” during this election cycle. I hope it goes the way of “we’ll be greeted as liberators” and “the war will pay for itself”. That is, I hope people will stop saying it as though they believe it, but I hope the full list is on display somewhere prominent so that the voters can peruse its contents.

Platform 7 addresses misunderstandings over this paragraph in the manifesto.

… the proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, to create after decades of the most brutal oppression a life for Iraqis which those living in democratic countries take for granted - rather than picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention.

This one made me hesitate before putting my name to the manifesto. It makes it sound like desire for a successful conclusion of the war in Iraq procludes criticism of the reasons for starting it.

One of the drafters, Norm, takes responsibility for the misunderstanding and clarifies :

It has not in fact been the position of those blogs which took the initiative leading to the Euston Manifesto that discussion of the origins of the war, or the planning for its aftermath, was somehow out of bounds. As just one piece of evidence for this I refer to a post of my own (old normblog site, ‘But where is the green parrot?’, August 21 2003) on the question of whether the Bush administration or the Blair government deliberately misled their publics. This is obviously a legitimate matter for discussion; more than that, it is a very important one.

The manifesto needs to be amended on this point.

I have been reading through NormBlog’s criticism of the criticism of the Euston Manifesto. In platform one, he points out something that I noticed too. So many of the commentators have missed what seemed to me a central point :

The founding supporters of this statement took different views on the military intervention in Iraq, both for and against. We recognize that it was possible reasonably to disagree about the justification for the intervention, the manner in which it was carried through, the planning (or lack of it) for the aftermath, and the prospects for the successful implementation of democratic change.

Many supporters of the manifesto explicitly point to the fact that it is a pro-war document as the reason for signing it. Many commentators on the right snearingly claim that a few leftists are finally starting to realize that it’s better to be pro-war than pro-terrorist as though those were the only two options.

For whatever reason, the MSM and the conservative establishment have found it convenient to pretend that the nonsense spouted by Galloway’s Respect, A.N.S.W.E.R. and other fringe organizations like the SWP represents the majority of anti-war opinion. Perhaps it’s easier to argue against shouting lunatics than to confront the quiet voice of reason and moderation? Perhaps it sells more newspapers ?

Anyway, for whatever reason, a lot of people have bought into this narrative. The Euston Manifesto is important because it provides an opportunity to make it clear that opposition to the war is not anti-american or pro-dictator or anti-democratic or pro-terrorist. It gives us a chance to say what we stand for not just what we oppose. That’s why I signed it.

Sign the Euston Manifesto here

The meme travelling through blogs from Scott Adam’s to Andrew Sullivan’s this week is that the high cost of oil proves that the war in Iraq was not about oil.

The proof goes something like this

1. If we (the US) wanted cheaper oil
2. Invading Iraq was a bad way to go about it because
3. Oil prices are now higher
4. QED

That first step is a doozy. I don’t believe that the US invaded Iraq for any single reason and I certainly never believed that the US invaded Iraq to get cheaper oil. But, consider this.

Most people would probably agree that america’s foreign policy is closely tied up with its energy policy (as it should be) and most people would probably agree that both are closely related to america’s relationship with the middle east.

My theory is that the administration thought they could replace an unfriendly dictator with a friendly democracy thus increasing america’s influence in the region and improving america’s future access to the region’s oil. Doesn’t make it a war for oil - doesn’t make it not a war for oil either.

On one point, I do agree with Andrew though :

The high price of gas is the best thing to have happened to the U.S. in a very long time. It alone, given the paralysis of the government, will force a market-driven push into new energy technologies, deter SUVs, and provoke the kind of technological research which will benefit us in the future.