I assume everyone has read the report in the New York Times telling the story of how the Generals who gave independent assessments of the war in Iraq were fed their lines, monitored and punished with loss of access and contracts by the Pentagon?

“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.

If you haven’t, go read it now.

Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. “Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

“They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. “This has been highly honed.”

No doubt it was all very innocent.

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. “That’s not something that ever crossed my mind,” he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. “We assume they know where the lines are,” he said.

You remember the Strategy for Victory? How about Stay the Course or When They Stand Up We’ll Stand Down ? What about Cheney’s light at the end of the tunnel or - my personal favourite - a few dead enders?

EJ Dionne has a nice article in TNR arguing that someone - 5 years later - needs to start defining what victory means .

Here is Petraeus’ memorable and candid account of where we stand: “We haven’t turned any corners, we haven’t seen any lights at the end of the tunnel. The champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator.” Tell me again: What does success look like?

Supporters of the war say its opponents are locked in the past, stuck on whether or not the war was a good idea in the first place. Whether the war was right or wrong, they say, it’s time to move on and focus on the future.

This has it backward. It’s the war’s backers and architects, including the president, who are trapped in the past. They are so invested in the original decision to invade Iraq that they won’t even consider whether the United States would be better off winding down this commitment, relieving our military of the war’s enormous burdens, and redirecting our foreign policy.

Saint Frank’s column today notices how we are all turning our back on Iraq, even the most passionate among us. But it’s not sustainable.

General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker define victory as “sustainable security” in Iraq. But both Colin Powell and Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice chief of staff, said last week that current troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan are unsustainable and are damaging America’s readiness to meet other security threats. And that’s not all that’s unsustainable. An ailing economy can’t keep floating the war’s $3-billion-a-week cost. A Republican president intent on staying the Bush course will find his vetoes unsustainable after the Democrats increase their majorities in Congress in November. No war can be fought indefinitely if the public has irrevocably turned against it.

NYT has a nice piece about the absurdity of the campaign trail. People are asking the candidates about all kinds of shit like whether to get rid of the penny and the dollar bill and trying to make them eat crap like onion rings and chocolate cake - “Go on! Just have half a fish!” - and all the time the reporters are there with their mics making sure that the candidate doesn’t say anything interesting.

Obama had to deal with this

In Lancaster, Mr. Obama, talked to a woman in tears because disability had left her impoverished, then fielded a question from an impatient fellow convinced that the secret world government was about to impose the Amero, a joint American-Mexican-Canadian currency. Mr. Obama explained that he could not do anything about the Amero because, alas, it did not exist.

immediately followed by this

The pivot comes fast. One minute you are talking about an imaginary currency, and the next you hear life rubbed raw. In Lancaster, Linda Hassel rises, hesitant and pained. Her son is an Army lieutenant. What can you say to mothers and fathers who fear that their sons and daughters have died in vain?

Mr. Obama stood silent before answering. He said that he wore a yellow wristband given to him by a woman in Green Bay, Wis., whose son had died in Iraq. He spoke of crying with her and recognizing the futility of offering comfort. “I meet parents all the time who have lost sons and daughters, but their service to our country is never in vain,” he said. “They have performed magnificently. Our military has acquitted itself with all the honor you could expect. That’s never a waste.”

“Getting rid of Saddam Hussein,” he continued, “that is an accomplishment; trying to reduce and contain violence, that is an accomplishment.”

He stood perched on the edge of the riser. “The failure is on the part of the civilian leadership who did not think through this war and its consequences.”

We want to honor that service going forward, he said; we want to care for maimed veterans and those who remain haunted by war. We will end the countless tours of duty, he said.

“We revere your sacrifice,” he said to Mrs. Hassel. “I am going to make sure that we as a nation are as great as those who sacrifice for us.”

I know it was rehearsed, but still…that was pretty good.

My fellow Americans,

By the end of today, American, Australian and British forces will have launched a large scale invasion of Iraq - a country in the Middle East about which you know very little.

We have tried, over the last weeks and months, to convince you that there is a gathering danger - we never said ‘imminent’ - and that Saddam Hussein will launch an attack using Weapons of Mass Destruction but the reality is that we have very little evidence of that. We do have photos of two suspicious looking Winnebegos that some of our experts tell us could be used to launch weather balloons (but that’s exactly what Saddam would want us to believe if he were trying to conceal chemical weapons!)

You’ll note that we never actually said ‘nuclear weapons’ and if some of my staff have mentioned ‘mushroom clouds’, it’s not their fault if the more gullible among you connected that with our claim that Saddam has nuclear weapons because, clearly, she was thinking of something else.

It’s also not Tony Blair’s fault if, when he said that Saddam could launch a chemical attack with 45 minutes, people would somehow associate that with the whole Weapons of Mass Destruction claim. How was he to know that the press would put it on the front page without noting that he was talking about battlefield weapons?

No, the truth is that the WMD claim is just the ‘bureaucratic reason’ for the invasion. We have been planning this thing for years - despite our recent protestations to the contrary - and the 9/11 attacks, although unrelated to Saddam or to Iraq gave us just the pretext we needed.

We are pretty confident that we’ll find a WWII era shell or two and we’ll claim that that’s what we were talking about all the time and, if we don’t find one of those, we’ll claim that he probably moved them all to Syria. Heh! Heh!

With any luck - and a bit of help from Fox News - 63% of you will become convinced that we did actually find WMDs after all! As for the remainder, we’ll claim that everyone believed Saddam had WMDs - even the French. After all, you won’t remember the distinction between ‘we need to let the inspectors finish the job’ and ‘we are sure he has nuclear weapons’. And he certainly did have chemical weapons back in 1988 - he used them on his own people - back when we were treating Saddam as a friendly. You’ll certainly forget that Rumsfeld claimed to know exactly where they were - ‘in the area of Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat’.

‘Weapons of Mass Destruction program related activities’ by themselves are not nearly scary enough to get the American people behind us which is why we have been playing up the ‘Al Qaeda has ties with Iraq’ angle. We only have one questionable account of someone meeting someone or other in Prague but, if the worst comes to the worst, we can just repeat the story about a senior Al Qaeda operative who went to hospital in Baghdad- that’s clearly a link! And perhaps our invasion will attract a whole bunch of Al Qaeda sympathizers to Iraq - maybe it will even create some - and then we can claim that we are fighting in Iraq to defeat the people who wouldn’t be in Iraq if we hadn’t invaded in the first place? It sounds silly now but, trust me, in a couple of years people will be saying this stuff with a straight face.

Both of these reasons, though, will soon be forgotten and we’ll be justifying the war by referring to the terrible attrocities that Saddam committed while he was ‘Our Man’.

It’s funny how, when you think about it, all the realists, for years to come, will be justifying this war for humanitarian reasons and, if it goes badly, it will discredit the idea of liberal intervention for decades! Hope no other situations arise in the next couple years where a humanitarian intervention really is required or we’ll look pretty silly. <gulp>

The good news is that the costs are expected to be low - Wolfie expects that the war will pay for itself. It certainly won’t cost $100 billion like some people are saying (we fired Lindsey already). Rumsfeld says he’s not sure whether it will last six days or six weeks - it certainly won’t last six months - and the idea that it will take several hundred thousands of troops to secure the country…well that’s just laughable (we fired Shinseki too).

No, my fellow Americans, we are at a turning point in America’s history. After 9/11, when we have the overwhelming support of almost every country in the world - when even Jaques Chirac said that ‘Today, we are all Americans’ - and after the invasion of Afghanistan when even all the muslim countries were cooperating to overcome the Taliban - when there was unprecedented cooperation in the War on Terror and we vowed that we would catch Bin Laden ‘Dead or Alive’ - it is unthinkable that we would squander that goodwill or that our approval rating in pro-American Jordan will drop to 9% or that Bin Laden’s approval rating will exceed mine or that or that tensions between Europe and America will rise to the levels not seen in 50 years or that our armed forces would be stretched beyond sustainable levels or that my administration will routinely slur our political opposition as pro-terrorist or that 4000 American soldiers will die or that the war will cost several trillion dollars or that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis will die or that the occupation of Iraq might continue for decades to come.

Given that all of those things are unthinkable, my fellow Americans, I hope I can count on your support until January 2009 when the whole deal becomes the next president’s problem.

But, my fellow Americans, when times get tough and those liberals are reminding you of all these facts and you vaguely remember that you believed my lines and that you questioned your fellow American’s patriotism and that you can barely keep straight all the various justifications and the Plan for Victory and the Strategy for Victory and the temporary surge that lasts for years, just remember that you were all for it and that there was no way to know then what you know now!

God Bless America!

I have wanted to say something like this for a long while, but this letter to the NYTimes editor says it perfectly.

As a longtime peace activist who was opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning, I deeply resent Thomas L. Friedman’s reference to us as “antiwar activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in.”

We were bitterly opposed to the notion of pre-emptive war and to a devastating attack on a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. But one of our major arguments against this ill-planned, ill-executed tragic war was that it would distract energy and resources from a truly effective attack against terrorism and Muslim extremism.

This is exactly what has happened.

The Iraq war (and sadly, now the war in Lebanon) has only strengthened the terrorists, worsened hatred toward us and rendered us less rather than more capable of fighting terrorism.

Ann Edelman
Los Angeles, Aug. 16, 2006

I stopped my subscription to TimesSelect a while ago so I don’t know what Ann is replying to (maybe its time to renew?). It’s good news that the likes of George Will, Thomas Friedman, Andrew Sullivan etc etc etc et al are finally starting to ask the question “What was it all for?” but why do they feel such a strong need to malign the motives of those of us who asked the same question four years ago?

I hasten to add that I have no idea what comes next. I broadly agreed with Kerry’s prescription back in 2004 but it’s not 2004 any more, sadly. Staying will be a disaster, leaving will be a disaster. I hope there will finally be an honest debate and less of the debate-only-encourages-the-terrorists nonsense that Cheney and Bush (and, now, Lieberman) are STILL coming out with.

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 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.