I’ve been a fan of Peter Beinert’s for some time (and may even forgive him for caving on Iraq).
His recent book is on the list, and recently he went – I was going to say mano-a-mano, but it was described as ‘a pissing match’ and so that’s probably the wrong body part – with Michael Tomasky over at Slate.
Go read the exchange, it’s kinda amusing to watch public intellectuals try and out-Jim Harrison each other.
But the telling quote for me was this, by Tomasky:
Is that will there now in either Democratic leadership or the American people? It is not. And the fact that it isn’t is not the fault of the “abject pacifists.” It’s the fault of the warriors. It’s because of Iraq. The war in Iraq is why we “missed” Darfur, a moral error that your magazine (under new editorship) recently lamented. And the war in Iraq looms over our national future. I fear that it renders the grand visions for liberal internationalism that you and I share useless nullities, for a generation, maybe more. That is the tragedy of Iraq; that’s why I dwelt, and dwell, on it. And I tremble with fear—not for “my” side, but for the country and the world—that, should a Bush administration and an Iraq come around again, we will have forgotten everything I just said.
This segues neatly into Mark Schmitt at TPMCafe, talking about Beinert:
I think that in the long run, getting worked up about the very few who say silly things about Islamic terrorism itself or reject use force is going to be seen as the equivalent of anti-anti-communism: fair, but a distraction from the big moral issue of the day. The big moral question for our time, the one we have to get right just as the postwar liberals had to get totalitarian communism right, is the Iraq War and the ideology that underlies it.
[emphasis in the original]
Once again, what’s the issue? Us, our behaviour, our “helpless strength”.
I’m just puzzled here…
…there are other actors in the world than us, right?
[Update: In a related discussion, James Joyner is asking if the Democrats have become a ‘one-issue party’.]
I believe your title for this post sums the situation up perfectly AL.
In 2004, Democrats said that Iraq was a distraction from the war on terror.
In 2006, Democrats refused to let the war on terror distract them from Iraq.
Vote Democrat in 2008. Always distracted. All of the time.
You’re an American, dude. Of course no-one else really exists in the world… they’re just extras Hollywood brings in.
If the American people don’t have the will because of Iraq, why don’t the Europeans have the will? Or the Africans?
I agree that the will to act is missing. I just don’t believe it would have been there had Iraq been out of the picture. We’d have been engaged in Afghanistan or protecting the border or something else.
And what would Saddam Hussein have been doing in the meantime as his neighbor, Iran, developed nuclear weapons? (their development program preceded 2003 by many, many years)
Just for the record: I opposed both the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. But claiming that because we invaded Iraq we aren’t doing anything about Dar Fur seems to be overreaching.
The World hates the Americans for their militarism. Except when troops with the best military virtues are required for peace keeping.
The Ivory Coast folks weren’t asking for Russian peace keepers and they certainly didn’t want the French.
I don’t think the will to act is missing in the U.S. You have to distinguish between the easy-to-recognize will to act in an individual and the will to act in the population of a democracy. A psychologically-healthy individual identifies a need or an opportunity, forms a plan for responding, and then responds. There may be some interior dialog, but as individuals we can demonstrate our will to act rather easily. That may subtly bias our perception of the will to act in a population.
In a democracy, large numbers of people have to converge on a significant plan or program in order for it to be implemented. That process necessitates lots of exterior dialog, which itself may be taken as evidence of absence of will. But the great democracy in the United States has extraordinary power, so the dialog on the use of that power must be long and complete. I see the extended discussions in the U.S. – was the invasion of Iraq the right thing to do? is Bush a warmonger? should we nuke Iran? did we bring 9/11 on ourselves? – as evidence of psychological health, the recognition of the gravity of the use of all America’s power and the desire to get that use right. In fact, you could use the breadth and extent of the “what to do” discussion in a country as a measure of that country’s power.
It isn’t simple, but reaching decisions through extended, animated, even bitter debate is far more likely to produce good results. Democracies always win wars over dictatorships, and part of the reason is that dictators have lots of “will to act” but not much idea of what to do with it.
I like a lot of things you’re saying, Patric (#6)
I tend to view the U.S. (and the west) as one big dysfunctional family. Whenever a problem arises, it seems to always become a big slam-out fight with everybody joining in. Seems like everything is fair game — slanted histories, accusations of impure motives, name-calling, whatever.
I do not think, however, that this always leads to a decision. Far from it. Many times it can be just a bunch of noise. I believe that is the beauty of having a representative republic — whilst the rest of us can rant at will, a select few must use their executive (and leglislative) powers. This gives us the best of both worlds: the ability to act when needed, and the ability to self-criticize and form new policies going forward. It’s a great mix of action and analysis which is not found in other forms of government.
Analysis alone does not suffice, as AL points out, because it has a tendency to become self-absorbed. There’s been a lot of belly-button studying going on in recent years by some.
I would add to my last comment that the obsession with seeing all events as a result of American action, as if there were no other actors in the world, takes advantage of the fact that the world is complex and that important decisions take time in a democracy. The world is presented as a giant game of whack-a-mole so that American strength is really weakness. A similar logic is on display in this this repulsive Toronto Star article in which everything wrong between Israel and the Palestinians is presented as Israel’s fault – the Palestinians are presented as just bystanders responding to Israel’s actions. And pseudo-scientific justifications (with numbers!) are adduced to make it look good.
Daniel, #7, I agree with what you said about having the best of both worlds. But that “bunch of noise” is part of the process, just as it is in a stock market where prices for shares or commodities are set.
Tomasky: The war in Iraq is why we “missed” Darfur
Tomasky demonstrates the soft underbelly of Political Science, which is that it dwells on a thousand little facts that may be true but are not useful: Darfur was missed a helluva lot earlier than the Iraq War ([whisper] – United Nations), and, furthermore, that Darfur was missed overlooks that Iraq, in its time, was also missed ([whisper] – United Nations).
So it would seem that Tomasky’s telling quote may not be telling after all.
BTW, when anyone uses the word “moral” in a sentence, suspect snake oil.
I read a more disturbing theme in the pieces cited by A.L. — purge.
Whose fault is it that liberal / humanitarian interventionism is not going to happen now or for a generation? _It’s the fault of the warriors._ Which is why its important for Beinert to have changed his position on Iraq, but he should have made his change clearer and addressed his error _at considerable (and painful) length._ Because the *big* moral question of our time is not only that you say the right things on Iraq, but that your ideological framework is vetted to protect against covert Iraqi War sympathies. Only then do your books and articles deserve discussion without misquoting them.
Left to Beinert: Purge us? We purge you.
AL
I think this illustrates the strategic mistake Beinart made in “caving” on Iraq. He thought by doing so he could move on. But the anti-Iraq left will allow no such graciousness – they will take the concession and beat you over the head with it. They think theyve been proven right on Iraq, and they wont let go – why should they, when Beinart conceeds them to be right? For them this is the chance to shut up their enemies for a decade, if not a generation.
I think Hillary has made the wiser choice, to focus on the mistakes the admin has made in implementation, but to insist on the fundamental rightness of what we as liberal hawks said and did.
Doesn’t Beinart’s caving on Iraq as soon as it became too politically difficult (domestically) to stand by his decision pretty much disprove the thesis of his book?
I fear that it renders the grand visions for liberal internationalism that you and I share useless nullities, for a generation, maybe more.
Sure, just like Vietnam (a war we should not have lost) doomed us to losing the Cold War and prevented any liberal interventions for a generation. Oops, no, wait, it only doomed us to four years of Jimmy Carter and the concept of unilateral surrender as a serious foreign policy. Then Reagan took over and gave the Evil Empire a sound rhetorical spanking while intervening all over the place (even in places he wasn’t supposed to) and arms-racing them into bankruptcy — a feat widely regarded as impossible at the time.
But that’s not even the main problem with Beinart’s statement. The much bigger issue is that it’s based on the lefty assumption that we’ve failed in Iraq. We have accomplished our major goals: Saddam is on trial, a constitution has been agreed to by referendum, a democratic gov’t has been elected, and more than a quarter million ISF are serving that gov’t. All that remains is resolving some power politics with the militias and addressing the violent pathology of Sunni Arab society, which may take decades to remedy but will not prevent the rest of Iraq from progressing (note the formation of trade unions, rights groups, etc.). Iraq may be violent and messy and corrupt, but a mere three years after Saddam it’s nevertheless one of the freest countries in the Mideast (they’ve moved up to 5 on the Index of Political Freedom as of 2005, surpassing all but Lebanon and Israel).
TallDave wrote:
What do you expect from someone who wrote a book entitled “The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again”? Someone who starts from that particular premise isn’t going to be able to intellectually process the successes of policies enacted by people who aren’t in his political party. Which is ironic because that’s precisely the sort of thing that neoconseratives are accused by people like Peter Beinart of doing.
Absolutely. The Webb thing is almost beyond belief, if you think about it.
13
Im not sure he caved out of cynicism – he is probably honestly troubled by the course of the war – with reason – and rather than hang on to a glass half full, as I and others have, he thinks admitting repsonsibility for the glass half empty will help to make a muscular policy on clearer cases stronger. I explained why he may be wrong on that – i dont know that disproves his larger point – though i have yet to read his book and so dont know.
16 – the turn out here was ridiculously low. Webb one essentially with Northern Virginia, and with a chain of “scots Irish” counties along i-81. Virtually all of southern and central VA, including Richmond and Hampton Roads voted for Miller, but the turnout was even lower down there.
AFAICT most dems up here thought simply – hes ex-reagan, he can beat Allen, thats it. I dont think all were even aware of the whole Iraq-Kos thingie. And again, even if they were, the turnout was dismally low, so i dont know it says all that much.
LH: I meant more the fact that on every non-Iraq issue he’s clearly Republican. Dems are willing to swallow that?
Day two:
Beinert is not deserving of forgiveness for a few sentences of apology. He should have written a book about the lies and deceits he and neoconservatives propagated — _a lengthy exegesis of the nature of this lie -— how it grew, who formulated it, and so on._ The American Prospect holds the keys to returning to the fold and its not going to be easy for Beinert or for any of the other liberal war supporters.
When did Beinert become the James Frey of the Moral Left? And who made Tomasky the Oprah?
_Your words were divisive, unleaderly, aggressively accusatory, and quite unfair_
Etc. and etc.
18
Im not sure its that cut and dry – remember in Va Republican positions on issues like abortion and gays are a tad different than they are in NY or Mass.
In any case, while Miller tried to make that case, Webb could just call Miller a “lobbyist” not all that popular a profession this year. To some folks it sounded like neg campaigning. And to some it wasnt really that bad a thing – I mean whats the good of dem positions if allen wins anyway. We may win the state house, but at the Senate level dems here are pretty dispirited.
And I suspect that Dems who are in a lather about Iraq are rather more motivated to vote in a primary called for early summer than are run of the mill dems.
Look again at where Miller won. In sections where the largest piece of the Dem vote is African American. But the turnout there was low – why should they turn out en mass for a nice Jewish IT industry lobbyist theyd barely heard of?
Hey, I happen to agree with the title’s sentiment. With the caveat, of course, that my definition of Liberalism is quite different from his, and coincidentally it excludes the vast majority of the current Democratic Party.
The main thing i’ve learned from this war is that, at least in Washington, Republicans can hawk up a war and toss it to the bean counters in the Pentagon and State like a CEO deligating a lunch order to his assistants, and Democrats will still get the vapors at the thought of literally taking a wanted terrorists and stringing him up from a lightpole. Somewhere between these two disasters there must be a warrior mentality.
It doesnt always come from x-generals either, Lincoln and Roosevelt were two of the best the world has ever seen. There is some combination of relentless (even brutal) focus on total victory, but also the ability to shrug off setbacks and keep the nose to the grindstone while bringing the country along with. I hope that individual is out there somewhere come 08. I gravely doubt he or she is to be found in Washington though.
Only 56% of Democrats now believe that the use of force in Afghanistan was right. (January “Pew”:http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=268 poll) Once Beinert gets done apologizing for Iraq, he’ll have to start over again.
Sure, the Democrats are in danger of becoming a one-issue party. That’s because its become a moral issue.
Look, I’m glad to welcome Beinart back from the Gamma Quadrant. I guess what rankles is that he (and more so Hillary) talks of people like me as premature anti-Iraqists, in the sense of the premature anti-Fascists who supported the Spanish Republic. Beinart owes some explanation of why he thought Iraq would become something other than the current mess (see below). Did he just misoverestimate Bush’s abilities as a wartime leader? Does he recognize that most of the ulterior motives of the invasion (e.g., the bases) didn’t justify it? These are all interesting issues. Pardon me if I’m not so enthusiastic, though, about a condescending view that although the I was much more correct than the hawks in that security of the USA appears to be worse now than when we invaded Iraq, all my thinking was mistaken.
Now, another approach is taken by Armed Liberal, which is simply to deny that Iraq is a failure. Yeah, the CPA didn’t manage security, it didn’t manage reconstruction…there’s little sign of pro-American views in the government and a lot of Iranian influence…the security situation is so bad that WoC commenters are reduced to mis-comparing it to Detroit while dishonestly botching the statistics by a factor of at least five…like the sucker in a Nigerian scam, it’s hard to let go of the dream. But reality intrudes. The Death of Zarqawi will follow the Capture of Saddam and the Death of Saddam’s Sons as another silver bullet that hit no targets.
Keep those fingers crossed, Andrew.
Andrew, where I’m coming from was explained back in October – here.
I didn’t think we’d lost then, I don’t think we’ve lost now, and it really doesn’t matter how many time John Kerry or Matt Yglesias say we have, the people who matter are sleeping on cots in Iraq and Afghanistan tonight, or else in the White House (he keeps being right about that one thing).
I’m trying to do my part in the (too small) chorus of voices supporting their commitment.
A.L.
What a load of total crap. Look folks. It is simple. Americans don’t like to be lied into supporting a war. That is what Bush and his administration did. They lied to us. The war on Iraq is over, lost, won, who cares? It is over because it was never worth fighting in the first place.
Let’s not let Ken hijack the thread into rehashing that discussion again. We’ve spent enough time and bandwidth debunking his claim.
Facts are facts folks.
You are entitled to your own opinions but not entitled to your own facts.
The American people supported the war on Iraq only because the Bush administration lied to them about the danger Iraq poised to them.
We all know, don’t we, that Iraq was not the danger Bush claimed? No wmd, no al quida connection, no connection to the attack on our homeland. Right?
Is that the real ken or parody?
Aw, what the hell…either way it’s hilarious.
ken –
So the only reason the American people supported the war was because of the belief that Saddam had WMD?
Wow, quite an assertion. The Gathering Storm, which is generally conisdered to be one of the seminal works that crystallized thinking about Iraq, never said he posessed WMD. It said that containment was collapsing, and when it collapsed, Saddam would get WMD.
If I get some time, I’ll try and do a tour d’horizon of what pro-war bloggers were saying before the war. i know what I was saying, and it had little to do with WMD.
So, along with the declaration that “the war is over, it’s a disaster” which presumptively becomes truth, we’re left with the “the only reason the American people supported the war was WMD” which is the climbdown from the canard that Bush claimed that the WMD threat from Saddam was “imminent”.
A.L.
A.L.
What tickles me about this WMD argument is the nature of its circularity. I remember these long pre-war discussions very clearly (from other boards)
At the end of the day, war opposers wanted a simple clear reason to go in and assurances that it would be easy to do. In short, they were pressuring war supporters to over-state both the reasons for the war and the nature of war itself.
Some folks took the bait. I did not. As far as I’m concerned, the administration did not. But people hear what they want to hear. I remember quite clearly telling somebody how ironic it would be if Saddam did not have WMD, but that we should invade anyway. I also remember quite clearly saying that it may be very easy, and it may be very difficult. But if you’re only fighting a war because it is easy, you are fighting for the wrong reasons, imo.
Now that we’re in and wrapping up, the call goes out from these same folk that the case was overstated and that the war was a lot tougher than people promised! LOL!
As far as what the American people did and why they did it, good luck condesning that into one nice little blurb. I imagine each person has their own reasons for supporting the war or not. After all, that’s the whole point of living here, right?
#23 from PD Shaw: “Only 56% of Democrats now believe that the use of force in Afghanistan was right. (January Pew poll) Once Beinert gets done apologizing for Iraq, he’ll have to start over again.”
Yes, that’s right.
And 31% think it was wrong. (Good link. Ta.)
There is no politics of splitting the difference on offer. There is no natural stopping point to concessions in the post 11 September, 2001 landscape.
To be driven back is not to be driven back onto entrenchments but out upon a plain. Each concession weakens your position and gives the opponent something more to beat you over the head with, endlessly, while empowering the same people who were protesting against any prospect of taking the war to Al Qaeda, and who have not in their hearts changed sides (and never will), and whose preferred level of American power and influence is less, always less.
It’s a darn shame. But that’s what we have to deal with, now and until that generation dies off, at least.
As long ast there are lots and lots of people who think it was wrong to strike the drug-funded terror lords of Taliban Afghanistan, how can there be an inclusive consensus? there can’t. The best we can hope for is to keep getting that bitter but life-giving 50%+1 in elections.
I think none of us will live to see the end of the 21st Century jihad struggle, and entailed by that, a defensive domestic struggle with a large portion of the population that can comfortably swap talking points back and forth with Osama Bin Laden, Janjaweed genocidal rapists, and Hamas spokespersons for terror.
And that’s the optimistic option; a less optimistic guess being that nukes will impose a day of reckoning that we can’t put off except on ruinous terms.
But, hey. it could have been much worse. We could so easily have been discussing instead whether we could have prevented a high intensity global jihad, the rapid radicalization and militarization of nearly all Muslim states and polities, the collapse of a lot more of our allies and an inexorable slide to general war if only we had acted much, much more decisively after 11 September, 2001. After the first plane hit the building, we’ve been living for the most part in the good possible telling of history’s tale.
/rant
One of the major reasons you people have absolutely no credibility is your continuing defense of the war on Iraq.
Look. A war based upon lies is not worth fighting.
I think it is general principal than any action whose rationale depends upon lies for acceptance is not worth doing.
Once you come to terms with the lies of the Bush administration you may be taken seriously. Until then, you are nothing but loser war shills.
“Look. A war based upon lies is not worth fighting. ”
So if, in the next 12 months, the insurgency disappears, Iraq turns into an ideal, multicultural democracy, and this spreads throughout the region (IE a much more optimistic scenario than I expect) you would STILL say it wasnt worth fighting cause Bush (according to you) lied about some of the intell on WMD? (oh dear, those vans really WERE for making balloons, liberating millions of people doesnt count) Cause what happens in DC trumps what happens on the ground in the ME?
Thats what sounds so weird to some of us.
WE dont think you can call Iraq a mistake or not till you know how it ends IN IRAQ. And right now we DONT know. Thats why calling it wrong before we know IS premature. And why Hillary Clinton is right.
The problem, ken, is that other than waving your hands and saying “Bush lied” you can’t point to concrete examples. You’d think, in this era of the Internet, that proof would be all over the place.
Funny how it isn’t. And I can’t believe you’ve got me defending Bush’s credibility.
A.L.
Ken: make sure you give credit for someone else’s quote (“You’re entitled to your opinions, but you’re not entitled to your facts.” –Daniel Moynihan)
Once you come to terms with the inconvenient fact that Bigfoot has more solid documentation than the claims you’re making, and stop calling everyone who disagrees with you “loser war shills”, you may be taken seriously. Until then, you are nothing but an unoriginal troll.
(Somewhere my high school debate teacher is cringing, but oh well. He never did tell us what the proper response to endless ad hominem was, so I’ve been winging it ever since the ascension of BDS.)
#11, PD:
I guess I’m no longer a Democrat, because I don’t even understand what that’s about.
Oh yeah, now I remember. But the thread keeps getting away from me. Oh, to be pure in heart!
It is not just BDS. It is more general than that.
It is the Causen Effect:
The Causen Effect: Anything bad that happens is (name of current or former President)’s fault.
http://powerandcontrol.bl*gspot.com/2006/06/causen-effect.html
And I can’t believe you’ve got me defending Bush’s credibility.
He sucked you in. Be careful with that. When some troll can get you to defend the opposite stupid mistake, you might lose a lot of credibility with reasonable people.
Assuming they see your stand out of context. Since this sort of thing happens to practically everybody one time or another, reasonable people are likely to cut you a lot of slack if they look deep enough to see the circumstances. But then, a lot of times people don’t look that deep.
Anyway, in general when you find yourself saying “I can’t believe you made me….” it’s a strong sign you’ve been had.
(Somewhere my high school debate teacher is cringing, but oh well. He never did tell us what the proper response to endless ad hominem was, so I’ve been winging it ever since the ascension of BDS.)
The proper response depends on your goal, and your audience.
If your audience consists of people who don’t want to pay attention and who’re already on your side, and your goal is to keep them on your side, then you can keep them entertained by doing bigger and better ad hominems back. They won’t mind. They’ll think it’s fun.
If your audience wants to deal with some substantive issue, then it’s enough to remind them of the issue and propose something substantive about it. If you ignore him and they ignore him, he might not go away but it won’t matter much.
If his comments are actually on topic and others are taking him seriously, then it might work to point out his unworthy ad hominem arguments and let it go at that. However, it will almost inevitably turn out that some of the people on your own side (if you have a side) have been doing similar and maybe worse ad hominems. So you need to establish that his particular arguments are worthless ad hominems, but not that he’s a worthless scumbag for making them. Otherwise — unless of course the large majority of the audience want to agree that he’s a worthless scumbag and will accept any argument that implies it — it can get very ugly with accusations and counter-accusations about which side is worse. And the stupidest guys on your side turn into a big embarrassment. You don’t want to just tell them to go away, and yet it would be a lot easier if you did…. But when there’s a consensus that your side is right and the trolls are way wrong, then it’s no big problem. If anybody points out the similar ad hominems on your side you can just laugh at them.
Moynihan was wrong. People do feel entitled to their own facts, and if there are enough of them then they all get to believe it. Note for example TallDave’s claim that Reagan successfully started an arms race with the soviet union that bankrupted the soviet union. A lot of people believe this is a fact. It can be argued back and forth depending on whose data you believe about what the soviets did. Who’s right? I am, of course. 😉
Look at David Blue’s rant. He takes seriously the idea that the whole muslim world might have gotten quickly radicalised and militarised and a lot more of our allies collapsed with an inevitable slide toward world war. I don’t see any way to know whether this was ever really in the cards. I can figure that “militarising” the whole muslim world would be a big slow job requiring a whole lot of oil money spent buying weapons from their enemies. Etc. I don’t think it was ever really likely, though it could become likely at some time in the future and it could have seemed plausible given what we knew then. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe all that was set to happen and we did precisely the right things barely in time to stop it.
We do get to choose our facts, and then when we meet people who chose differently, we sort of goggle at each other in mutual incomprehension. How could they be so stupid and so willfully blind? Why can’t they see reality?
And then every now and then reality comes up and bites us in the ass. And we look around and make up interpretations. But before the interpretations get elaborated and confirmed by groupthink, we look around in amazement and say “What the hell was that?”. And that’s reality.
J Thomas’ #41,
No, J, you don’t get it. AL did not make a “stupid mistake” and did not lose any credibility. He demonstrated how the commenter was the one losing credibility with over the top rhetoric. Discussing the matter like an adult does not remove anyone’s credibility, even if the result might be defending the position of someone you disagree with on other matters.
Robin, you are welcome to your opinion.
Still, we’ve all seen by now that when something Bush says matches up to reality, it’s coincidence. Defending Bush’s credibility at this point is emphatically a stupid mistake.
Defending some particular action by Bush is often not a mistake. Given a set of yes-no decisions you can’t expect Bush to be wrong more than 90% of the time, so just because Bush did it doesn’t make it wrong. But implying that Bush has some sort of credibility is wrong.
We all know, don’t we, that Iraq was not the danger Bush claimed? No wmd, no al quida connection, no connection to the attack on our homeland. Right?
There are so many problems with that statement, it practically screams BDS. First off, it wasn’t just Bush saying those things. Most of Congress got up and repeated just about everything he said based on their own sources.
The WMD justification was based on the fact Saddam would not come clean about his WMD and WMD programs, not so much the claims he had stockpiles of WMD (really, the latter is irrelevant in any practical sense if he intends to begin producing more anyway). There were intel failures re stockpiles, but they were not lies by any stretch. And the intel failures went the other way too: the Kay report judged the brutal former regime as actually more dangerous than thought because he had hidden production capabilities. We know what regimes disarming look like: S. Africa, Ukraine. Iraq wasn’t disarming.
The Al Qaeda connection is pretty well-established now. Iraq may not have operationally assisted, but was funding Qaeda affiliate Abu Sayyaf and was friendly with Zarqawi.
Bush did not claim Iraq had a connection to 9/11. There is, however a lesson to be learned from 9/11 and applied in Iraq: rogue states that support terrorists can kill thousands of Americans if not dealt with.
And all that’s besides the fact there were numerous other reasons cited in the war authorization.
http://www.yourcongress.com/ViewArticle.asp?article_id=2686
Pretty much everything in there is accurate.
Ken I could care less about what is moral to Daily Kos “Screw em” or Ted Rall or Ann Coulter or Michael Moore “Al Qaeda are Minutemen and they will WIN! Mr. President” …
I want an effective foreign policy that uses all aspects of American power including military power to deter future 9/11 attacks and figure the most likely way that will happen is making examples of people and nations.
The WORST thing about GBW (and why Liberals hate him so) is that he is at heart just as PC multi-culti a weenie as they are. Why would anyone actually CARE about “immoral, unjust war based on lies?”
Only if your primary concern was achieving higher status than other folks by superior moralizing.
The rest of us want an effective means of deterring Ahmadinejad, Pakistan, Al Qaeda in Indonesia, and the loathesome House of Saud. Those of us who are more concerned with avoiding catastrophe than how good we feel moralizing.
Failure to act now and a nuclear Pearl Harbor will unleash the entire energies of America in a focused wave of destruction. I expect you won’t like it much.
And this is why Democrats are doomed. Arguing about moralizing instead of how to be more effective (a better “deal” for the American people) in National Security. JFK promised to outbuild the Soviets on missiles (the Missile Gap) and basically more Cold Warrior activity than the Republicans. No Democrat at any time and any place can propose aggressive military action because …
Moralizing about how superior they are is the primary purpose.
Wretchard’s analysis of how the corpse of the Cold War has exerted a noxious influence on the debate is wise (he’s also written about Beinart-Tomasky). If the threat is distributed nuclear terrorism … neither Beinart nor Tomasky offer much; while the threat of a big stick at least promises to possibly WORK.
A Democrat who offered a policy of even nastier pre-emptive strikes (and the threat to invade Saudi and pump that nation dry if they don’t play ball) could wipe the floor with namby-pamby Bush. The likelihood of that is about the same as Santa Claus showing up.
J Thomas (42)
Sorry, but
is, at the very least, seriously misinformed. The only real debate is “how much did actual Soviet military spending exceed the official worst-case estimates?”
Jerry Pournelle writes, in an updated edition of The Strategy of Technology, how he and his co-authors were routinely pilloried for their estimates of Soviet military spending, which were higher than “official” US Government estimates, and also reveals that their published estimates in the book were at the very low end of their estimates (in a vain attempt to forrestal that criticism.) Since the fall of the USSR, we’ve come to understand that their actual rate of spending was even higher than the authors’ higher, afraid-to-publish rates. The assertion that Reagan’s defense buildup and missile-defense initiatives had nothing to do with keeping that spending rate up is, in my view, simply not serious.
Kirk Parker, this is a low-bandwidth medium where it’s hard to track things in detail — it’s a lot of typing that will bore most readers. So it’s hard to do real substantive arguments on complex topics.
I’d welcome actual links to credible sources. Jerry Pournelle is a partisan hack who has been so wrong so often that he’s useless except occasionally as an inspiration for unusual ideas. Quoting Pournelle is almost like quoting Chomsky, but with a different bias.
J,
Uhh, one man’s hack is another man’s tireless advocate, I guess. Not that I have any vested interest in defending Pournelle, but I would note
I’d say the ball is in your court. Ad-hominem away, if that’s your preference.
Kirk, what I was asking for was a more recent, credible, estimate of soviet military spending.
I suppose I might provide you with a recent low estimate. It isn’t an area of central concern to me so I don’t have that ready already.
You say there’s no disagreement about this fact, and I claim that it is in dispute.
This covers the basic claims, but it appears to assume that the CIA estimates were correct. You of course argue that they were extremely low. “Link here”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Politics/fitzgerald.html
“These are the professionals.”:http://www.cia.gov/csi/books/watchingthebear/article05.html
CIA’s estimates of the economic burden of Soviet defense spending were controversial in the 1970s and 1980s, and the issue remains unresolved even today. The estimates that defense spending amounted to about 15 to 17 percent of GNP were almost certainly low, although the extent remains unclear. In the Soviet command economy, prices and costs were set arbitrarily; even Soviet leaders did not know the real extent of the burden. Accordingly, even the opening of Soviet records does not provide an answer. It does, however, seem clear that while Soviet leaders were not precluded from pursuing a wide range of military programs and were not compelled to seek negotiated arms limitations, they had strong incentives to seek to lower the defense burden, and this affected both their military programs and their foreign and arms control policies.
Here’s an explanation why access to soviet records hasn’t cleared up the problem.
From 1976 to 1983, it was estimated that Soviet defense spending was growing at a rate of 4-5 percent per year. In short, there was a serious “spending gap.” Then in 1982, analysts of the DI in CIA determined that in fact the rate of growth of Soviet defense spending since 1976 had been an average of only about 2 percent, and in weapons procurement the rate was almost flat, zero percent growth. While an encouraging finding from the standpoint of comparing performances between the Soviet Union and the West, it was a political embarrassment from the standpoint of the administration’s campaign to boost support in the United States (and in NATO) for higher defense spending. In 1983, the new findings were made known without fanfare in testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. Administration spokesmen such as Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger simply stopped referring to the matter. The “spending gap,” no longer useful, was quietly buried.
While Team B was estimating a relentless, continuing buildup at a growing pace, it was later learned that, in fact, Soviet leaders had just cut back the rate of spending on their military effort and would not increase it for the next nine years. To be sure, the Soviet Union continued to spend a great deal on its large military programs, but it was not the limitless buildup in pursuit of a war-winning capability that Team B ascribed.
While there is no agreement how much of the soviet economy was military (since many of their production figures — both military and civilian — were vaporware), it’s clear that soviet military growth was slow and steady, not an increasing fraction of their slowly-increasing economy, throughout the Reagan years. CIA estimaes show a sharp increase in 1985 which is not due to a change in soviet production but to a recognition that CIA estimates had been systematically low for decades.
There was no soviet response to Reagan’s vast spending increases, beyond diplomatic attempts toward treaties, glasnost, perestroika, that kind of thing.
So the CIA claimed then and continues to claim that the Soviets did not overspend on their military in response to Reagan’s overspending on our military. Instead they had already been spending more than they could reasonably afford on their military, they made no attempt to increase that spending, and they collapsed due to their long-term structural weakness particularly aided by the indirect costs of their afghan war (and, I say, of Chernobyl).
These facts are in dispute. On one side we have the CIA. On the other side we have Jerry Pournelle the science fiction writer.
Uhh, one man’s hack is another man’s tireless advocate, I guess. [….] Ad-hominem away, if that’s your preference.
I guess. My last experience with Jerry Pournelle was back in the days he had given up arguing that there was no increase in UV radiation at the earth’s surface, and was arguing that the increase had no effect. Some biologists had published an experiment that got a lot of attention. They put tadpoles in containers covered with plastic film on top, and put them in a stream. Some of the plastic film blocked UV light, some did not. The ones that were exposed to the UV light from the sun died, the others lived.
Pournelle claimed that this was bad science, that the biologists had no idea how to do an experiment, that it was all wrong. I asked him what was wrong with the experiment. I didn’t see anything wrong with the experimental protocols they published. Tadpoles that were exposed to the UV-admitting film didn’t die from it in the lab, it wasn’t poisoning them. The difference between the ones that died and the ones that lived was just the UV-transmitting film exposed to the sun.
He responded that he knew how to do science and they did it wrong. There was no way that a 20% increase in UV would kill tadpoles so they had to have done it wrong. Then he shut up about it on that forum, but continued saying they were wrong and unscientific elsewhere.
Clearly, he started with the result he wanted and he threw out the data when it didn’t give him that result. If he did that with controlled experiments, when would he not do it? Since then I have treated him as a source for interesting ideas only. When he says something is known I discount it. Jerry Pournelle knows a lot more than I do but some of what he knows is not so.
J,
Rereading the whole thread of comments, I don’t think it’s fair to read TallDave’s statement as claiming Reagan started an arms race with the Soviets; he merely continued what had been a bipartisan-supported arms race (and something that Carter appeared in some ways to want to give up.) Simply keeping it up was what mattered; Gorbachev was desparate to “restructure” things and if we hadn’t kept up the pressure….
Public rhetoric matters, too, to the extent it influences public perceptions and, ultimately, public will. Even if careful study of US military procurement shows minimal differences between the Carter years and the Reagan years, it mattered hugely that Carter talked of malaise whereas Reagan talked of America besting the Evil Empire.
As far as Pournelle et al, even the article you quote agrees with his basic assertion that the official CIA estimates where too low: The estimates that defense spending amounted to about 15 to 17 percent of GNP were almost certainly low, although the extent remains unclear.
Kirk, the original claim was that Reagan got the USSR to respond to his spending. There’s essentially no evidence for that, soviet military spending was pretty much flat during the time Reagan ramped up spending.
When you look at the estimates in detail, it’s striking that they were trying to do the impossible. Not only were they making estimates based on inadequate data (probably, they might have had secret sources that still haven’t been revealed, but it looks increasingly unlikely). But also they were trying to present that in a simple form that politicians could easily understand. The US and USSR militaries were fundamentally incomparable, but they were supposed to find a simple way to compare them.
Since the soviet economy wasn’t comparable to ours, they tried to estimate military costs by how much they’d cost *us* to do similar things. So for example, russian soldiers were paid 8 rubles a month, compared to US soldiers paid in significant amounts of real money. We looked at what it would cost us to pay those soldiers. When US military pay went up, the estimates of soviet spending went up more.
We had civilian laundry services etc. The russians did not, their laundry and everything else was done by soldiers. Their numbers were higher but they didn’t spend as much time training as we did, a lot of their time was put into mainenance tasks we offloaded onto the civilian economy. And yet in a crunch they could have their cooks etc fight, while our civilian support people couldn’t do that until after they were drafted and trained. How do you compare the two? We compared them by simply counting every cook as a soldier. Etc.
By estimating what their army would cost us in dollars if we were paying for it, we came up with giant dollar costs. But it didn’t cost the soviets nearly that much.
At the time we supposed that everything the soviet economy produced was shoddy except their military stuff which was first-rate. But looking back, it turns out their military stuff was mostly shoddy too. They could do excellent work, but mostly not excellent on a mass scale.
We did everything we could to puff up the soviets as a threat. We kept doing it until *after* they collapsed. We spent a while there arguing about whether they were pretending to collapse to trick us, but it finally got just too stupid to keep up the pretense. It wasn’t until then that we came up with the idea that Reagan’s arms race made them collapse, when it turns out they mostly ignored Reagan’s arms race. Sheer revisionist history.
So, Pournelle aided the rush to Star Wars, which spent very large sums of money on systems which could not be made to work with 1980’s technology and which still don’t work with 2006 technology. He presented ideas for “winning” a global thermonuclear war. It was a pleasant fantasy. It was completely unjustified by the existing soviet threat, so Pournelle imagined what kind of soviet threat might be worth that response, and then asserted that it existed.