{"id":336,"date":"2004-02-08T07:07:58","date_gmt":"2004-02-08T07:07:58","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:30","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:30","slug":"no_atrios_we_werent_wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=336","title":{"rendered":"No, Atrios, We Weren’t Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

Atrios, my fellow pseud-blogger, has a tough-talking piece up<\/a> on the aftermath of the war.<\/p>\n

This is quite creepy, really. Hundreds of urban professionals have been assassinated in Iraq in the past year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The existence of an open civil society requires that the vast majority of people, for the most part, choose to be civil. There are so many scores to be settled, so many competing factions, so many reasons for general popular discontent for the current state of affairs, that I really don’t comprehend how we’re really going to be capable of doing much of anything to improve things. Maybe – just maybe – there was a narrow window in the immediate aftermath of “major combat operations,” when if we’d done things just right, used the existing institutions including the military and much of the Baathist bureaucracy, had an army of engineers in to fix the place up the way all those breathless NPR reports kept promising us, etc… when we could have put things on the right course. But, they just lost the thread pretty quickly.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…<\/p>\n

There’s a cancer in our press right now, and it’s going to continue to grow and grow. Even now anti-war critics, despite being ABSOLUTELY RIGHT, are being marginalized because for some reason in order to criticize the war you have to have been for it to begin with. I have no idea why this makes any sense, but there it is. It’s aided and abetted by the “liberal hawks” who for the most part seemed to just want to prove they have bigger testicles than the rest of us. But, why the hell should anyone listen to them? They were wrong, and I don’t really care about reading their tortured essays of self-evaluation. The issue isn’t simply that they were wrong, but they were wrong in a particular offensive manner. They, too, for the most part encouraged the marginalization of war critics with their smarmy condescending “we know best” tone. You know what, guys, it ISN’T ALL ABOUT YOU. Stop with the narcissistic navel-gazing. The consequence of your crap wasn’t a wee bit of embarassment at cocktail parties, it was this<\/a>.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Boy, I guess the simple answer is that either Atrios is a) consumed by partisan desire and intends to look at the world in whatever way he has to in order to fulfill that desire; or b) someone whose sense of history has been overly shaped by the neat wrappers we put around events when they’re reduced to inevitable narrative after the fact.<\/p>\n

Look, let’s set a few things out. I can’t tell you how sincerely I hope that no one within a kilometer of power in the Administration genuinely believed that once we took the palaces, that the people in Iraq would rise up, hand over Saddam and his henchmen, join Rotary and Toastmasters, and start figuring out how they could underbid high-paid American workers for jobs. Nothing in recent history – well, maybe Granada – would prepare any thoughtful person for that belief. It may well be that someone did, or even that many of them did, but I have a basic rule which is to never assume that people who are rich or powerful are truly stupid; the ones who are are usually out of cash and out of office amazingly damn fast.<\/p>\n

I don’t doubt (and have written about here<\/a> and here<\/a>) the case that the Bush administration -as has virtually every Administration since Truman, at least – has undersold the difficulty of the war we face, and failed to put together the broad and compelling case for why and what we’re doing.<\/p>\n

But, jeez, Atrios, what<\/u> did you<\/u> expect? By any measure the war is going stunningly well for our side. We are engaged in what is going to be a protracted low-level battle against groups within Iraq. We do have a tough political bridge to cross in that Bush has set some amazingly aggressive dates for the transfer of political power, which unless symbolic, are going to be impossible to meet without in effect cutting and running. And if they are symbolic, they will build local resentment that we will then have to defuse.<\/p>\n

As I’ve said in the past, if we had a set of facts in the ME that compared to recent news from Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan – except was opposed to our strategic goals as opposed to aligning with them, there isn’t a chance in hell that Atrios & co. wouldn’t be trumpeting them as conclusive evidence that the Administration’s plans had failed and that we faced the long-feared but never seen ‘uprising of the Arab street’. While I’m not prepared to look at these partial steps as anything but conditional, it’s nonetheless true that they are conditionally breaking our way.<\/p>\n

But Atrios is ready to call it defeat; the problem in accepting his judgement of events today is that, of course to him it was a defeat before it started.<\/p>\n

In the past, even as I’ve supported him, I’ve dinged him for being part of the ‘Jackie Goldberg, lemming wing of the Democratic Party’ and I’ll suggest that we’d probably disagree on a number of policy issues but that even in our disagreements we would be far closer together than I am to GWB and his Administration<\/i>. But from what I can tell, he (and he’s far from alone) believes somehow that with a dash of Kyoto and a bit of ICJ, we’d somehow have managed to pull together a coalition of Western states willing to – well, willing to do exactly what? Invade North Korea? Invade and hold Pakistan? Start a campaign of covert action and assassination throughout the Arab world?<\/p>\n

I wish I knew. And I genuinely wish that I could see a way to support him, because I’m all too damn sensitive<\/a> to things like the real costs of wars<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Atrios, my fellow pseud-blogger, has a tough-talking piece up on the aftermath of the war. This is quite creepy, really. Hundreds of urban professionals have been assassinated in Iraq in the past year. The existence of an open civil society requires that the vast majority of people, for the most part, choose to be civil. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}