Last week, my intellectual betters, Peter Bienert and Bjorn Staerk both posted apologies for their early support of the Iraq war.
So, let me open by suggesting that in spite of my desire to find a way out of this, I’m really unimpressed by both Bienert’s and Staerk’s posts.
In Bienert’s case, it’s a national apology; the United States simply isn’t good enough, darn it, to be allowed to go around the world and hurt people and change things.
It begins with a painful realization about the United States: We can’t be the country those Iraqis wanted us to be. We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war. That’s why a liberal international order, like a liberal domestic one, restrains the use of force–because it assumes that no nation is governed by angels, including our own. And it’s why liberals must be anti-utopian, because the United States cannot be a benign power and a messianic one at the same time. That’s not to say the United States can never intervene to stop aggression or genocide. It’s not even to say that we can’t, in favorable circumstances and with enormous effort, help build democracy once we’re there. But it does mean that, when our fellow democracies largely oppose a war–as they did in Vietnam and Iraq–because they think we’re deluding ourselves about either our capacities or our motives, they’re probably right. Being a liberal, as opposed to a neoconservative, means recognizing that the United States has no monopoly on insight or righteousness. Some Iraqis might have been desperate enough to trust the United States with unconstrained power. But we shouldn’t have trusted ourselves.
In Staerk’s case, it’s more personal.
This mirror of “What Went Wrong” wouldn’t be a story on the same scale, but it has the main theme in common. It would be about Westerners who had their reality bubble pricked by people from an alien culture, and spent the next couple of years stumbling about like idiots, unable to deal rationally with this new reality that had forced itself on them. Egging each other on, they predicted, interpreted, and labeled – and legislated and invaded. They saw clearly, through beautiful ideas. And they were wrong.
Who were these people? They were us. “Us”? This seemed a lot clearer at the time. Us were the people who acknowledged the threat of Islamist terrorism, who had the common sense to see through the multicultural fog of words, and the moral courage to want to change the world by force. It included politicians like George W. Bush and Tony Blair, it included the new European right, it included brave and honest pundits, straight-talking intellectuals in the enlightenment tradition.
There is a nexus of failure in each case; Bienert explains that he was intoxicated by hope;
I was willing to gamble, too–partly, I suppose, because, in the era of the all-volunteer military, I wasn’t gambling with my own life. And partly because I didn’t think I was gambling many of my countrymen’s. I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought. It’s a truism that American intellectuals have long been seduced by revolution. In the 1930s, some grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, some felt the same way about Cuba. In the 1990s, I grew intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the United States.
Staerk is ashamed of his amateurishness
Among the bloggers there was a sense that there were all these brilliant people, who knew so much about history, war and society, who had previously been without the tools to express themselves. Thanks to the wonders of amateur media, we could now finally exploit this huge reservoir of expert knowledge. And when you contrasted the lazy neutrality of the old media with the energy of the new, it certainly could seem that way. Here were people who regularly would write thousands of words about the historical context of Islamist terrorism, who could write brilliantly about freedom and democracy, who commented boldly on the long trends of history. How could such people be wrong?
But what we saw was not expert knowledge, but the well-written, arrogantly presented ideas of half-educated amateurs. This, too, went all the way from the bottom to the top. It often struck us how well the writing of the best of the bloggers measured up to that of pro-war pundits and intellectuals. We thought this showed how professional the amateurs were, when what it really told us was how amateurish the professionals were.
Each of these apologies makes me think hard about my own positions. I’m not the smartest or best-informed person on the planet, and I make it a habit to look for people smarter and better-informed than I am to try and learn from. But one thing adulthood has brought to me is the observation that smart and well-informed people are often amazingly blind to obvious facts. The list of geopolitical analysts who predicted the peaceful implosion of the Soviet Union was damn short, and if you had polled the Conventional Wisdom for the twenty years up to the fall of the Wall, I don’t think it would have mapped well to reality. When Nixon flew to China, how many people thought a Chinese technology company would be buying IBM’s personal computer business?
Accepting that your ideas about the world can be – and often are – wrong is critical to being any kind of a useful or serious thinker.
So where does that leave me in my own position on Iraq?
There’s an easy out that I can take…in 2003, I wrote:
So if the Democrats want a response to the war, here it is:
#. We won’t take Iraqi oil as booty;
#. We will work to wean ourselves from Middle Eastern oil through efficiency and domestic sources (but this time, unlike the Alaska pipeline, we won’t lie to Congress and the people and go sell the oil to Japan)
#. We’re in this for the duration.
If we can’t answer all three as a solid “yes”, we shouldn’t go. We should just close out eyes, hunker down and hope for the best.
If we can, we should. We’re in a fight, and wishing it away won’t make it disappear.
We aren’t meeting any of the 3 criteria, so I could throw my hands in the air and say “well, we didn’t do it like I said, so it was wrong and we shouldn’t have done it” and go stand with the cool kids.
But that would be a bullshit answer.
Sadly, as hard as I look, so are Bienert’s and Staerk’s. Neither of them looks at the situation in the world and argues how it would have been better had we refrained in Iraq.
Look, the jihadi movement feeds on a base stock of alienated, unhappy young men who are discovering the attractive power of Bad Philosophy (as opposed to Bad Religion, which is one of my favorite bands…). They are attracted when they see it as a noble struggle – so yes, the war is attracting them to the movement.
But they are also attracted to winning; and a steady stream of jihadi victories against Western interests – answered with arrests of the perps and pinprick attacks – is as powerful a recruiting tool as a call to battle. In fact, I’ll suggest that it was historically a more powerful one.
Yes, the United States isn’t morally pure enough to remake the world through preventative war. But we are morally pure enough – wise and virtuous enough to go kick jihadi ass, and maybe, just maybe create the space for a decent society to grow up in a few places around the world.
Hilzoy also had a powerful article last week that ties to this –
It seemed to me that at the heart of this disagreement was this one fact: that the women from India were from a country that had already achieved independence, and were living with the problems that came afterwards, whereas the women from South Africa were trying to achieve that self-government in the first place. The South Africans seemed to think that the women from India had forgotten what it was like to be subjugated. We need to win our freedom as quickly as possible, they seemed to say. We realize that it would be preferable to win that freedom in the best possible way. If we could win it just as quickly through non-violent means, we would surely do so. But you would not ask us to wait if you really understood what it is like to live in slavery.
By contrast, many of the arguments made by the Indians turned on the effects that achieving self-government through violence had on one’s own people. Don’t do this, they seemed to be saying: once you win your freedom, you will find that you and your people have grown accustomed to settling disputes by force and to demonizing your opponents. Think now about how to use the struggle you are waging to teach yourselves how to become citizens and to practice self-government. Do not wait until you win your independence to discover that self-government requires not just political power, but political responsibility.
I think that’s an incredibly important point. I’ve talked endlessly in the past about the notion that a Palestinian Gandhi would have not only attained independence for the Palestinians but would have built a viable and admirable society. And about the notion that a violent kleptocracy cannot easily transform itself into a democracy just because they vote (something I neglected when I watched the Iraqi elections…).
But here’s the rub – Gandhi himself felt that German Jews should have protested nonviolently even it meant they were all slaughtered.
Nonviolent action builds the bonds trust that make a civil society. But how do you practice nonviolent action in the face of those who lack any compunction about killing? There is the $64,000 question.
The only answer I can see is that a space for it must be somehow created by violence.
To paraphrase Team America, sometimes you need dicks in the world.
Which brings us neatly back to Iraq.
We’ve opened the seam of instability in the Middle East, that’s for sure. And I could see why that’s an issue. Except…we’ve had a ‘quasi-stability’ for the last 30 years there. And what, exactly, has it bought us?
Thirty years of peace, to be sure. And a bigger and more violent jihadi movement.
We could have just invaded Afghanistan – but what then? Do you think it would be better with 100,000 more US troops? Do you think that Iran (and Iraq) wouldn’t be funding an insurgency there in the hopes that we’d walk down the same path as the Soviets?
Would the world really be better? If someone can make a good argument about that, I would have to shift. Until then I am stuck here, calling it as best I see it, and looking to see more clearly.