Lack of Progress

[billroper]

The thing that saddens me most about the election tomorrow is that I see people -- who I like -- posting things that are patently untrue, things that are echoes of things that were said about a person that I suspect that they revere, the late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Certainly there were many people who felt that he would do anything to get us into World War II, up to and including lying about foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack.

And despite anything bad that the current President may have done, nothing that he has done quite compares to herding the entire population of American citizens of Japanese descent in the Western United States into detainment camps. Yeah, I know we'd all agree now that what he did then was a pretty bad thing, but some things are easier to figure out from a distance than they are at the time that you're doing them.

And who could argue with the idea that the right thing to do was to go to war to remove a crazed dictator who was murdering tens of thousands of his own citizens? The biggest question, I suspect, in either case ought to be, "What took you so long to save us?", a question that we might well be correctly putting to the United Nations on the subject of Darfur.

Governments are made up of imperfect men and they will make mistakes.

So will the rest of us.

And maybe some time in the next 75 years, we'll figure out how to do it better. God knows, we haven't figured it out yet.

Comments

[tanac.livejournal.com]

So we're not allowed to complain until they fill the detention camps that they are now, at this very moment, building*?

It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to be angry that every justification they gave for wanting to go to war in Iraq was a bold-faced lie that they have since said they never meant to say.

*http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=eed74d9d44c30493706fe03f4c9b3a77 is one link, but many places have reported on this so far.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Why do you hate freedom?

B

[billroper]

I was unaware that I did. If you actually think that I do, I suppose I should go somewhere else.

[billroper]

By the way, have I ever accused you of anything? Did I do something to deserve this response? Or is your faith in your positions so weak that it can't stand the least suggestion that the partisanship in this country is completely out of control?

I've honestly responded to your posts in the past. I've made suggestions about places where I thought that you might be able to improve your arguments, even if I didn't necessarily agree with your position, because I think it's important that people be able to discuss issues in a rational fashion.

And I get this crap.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

[billroper]

I see that many places have commented on this, but I view them as having about the same degree of reliability as, say, Talon News.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

It is a bloody (and I mean that literally) disgrace that nothing's being done in Darfur.

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

Amen to that.

[patoadam]

And who could argue with the idea that the right thing to do was to go to war to remove a crazed dictator who was murdering tens of thousands of his own citizens?

That was not Bush's primary justification for the invasion.

Invading a foreign country because you disapprove of its form of government is, indeed, arguable.

Grotesquely mismanaging the occupation of a foreign country after you have invaded is both incompetent and negligent.

I've read that Saddam Hussein killed approximately 500,000 Iraqis. George W. Bush started a war in which approximately 650,000 Iraqis have died, with no end in sight.

"Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda... a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country... It was as if Usama [sic] bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting 'invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq'."
-- Richard A. Clarke, _Against All Enemies_, p. 246

"The acknowledged gain of the war was that a treacherous and murderous dictator was removed, but the rest has been tragedy and failure. It has stimulated terrorism."
-- Hans Blix

"To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day hero ... assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an un-winnable urban guerilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into even greater instability."
-- George H.W. Bush

[billroper]

The 650,000 figure comes from a study that many people believe has exaggerated the numbers.

I've pointed out to you before that Bush said in his speeches immediately before the invasion of Iraq that one of the major goals was establishing a free, democratic society in that country. I understand that we could have done a better job of it, just as we could have in any non-trivial war that we've ever been involved in.

And the situation during the first Iraq war was substantially different than the situation that existed when the current war began, so quoting Bush I on the situation then doesn't have a lot of applicability to the later situation.

By the way, I note that -- according to the New York Times! -- Saddam had a number of documents that provided a lot of information useful in building an atomic bomb. All he would have needed was the enriched uranium to fuel it.

Fortunately, no one from Iraq ever set foot in nations that might have been capable of supplying them with the yellowcake which could be used to make that enriched uranium, let alone having actually investigated whether they could manage to get it from them.

[patoadam]

The 650,000 figure comes from a study that many people believe has exaggerated the numbers.

Yes, the 650,000 figure surprised me, and it has a large margin of error, but after reading both their reports, I think that they may have underestimated the number of deaths. See my post on the subject for more details. I was also surprised to find out that the air in my office weighs more than 100 pounds, but it does.

I've pointed out to you before that Bush said... before the invasion of Iraq that one of the major goals was establishing a free, democratic society in that country.

Yes, I remember that, but it was not the primary justification.

I understand that we could have done a better job of it.

Rumsfeld threatened to fire anyone who did post-war planning, by which he meant post-overthrow-of-Saddam-Hussein. The State Department did careful post-war planning, all of which was ignored when Bush put the Defense Department in charge of the occupation. The de-Baathification program was a disaster; it sounded plausible, but it put tens of thousands of unemployed, angry, armed Sunnis on the streets.

quoting Bush I on the situation then doesn't have a lot of applicability to the later situation.

Don't you think that Bush I would have had more justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein than Bush II did?

By the way, I note that -- according to the New York Times! -- Saddam had a number of documents that provided a lot of information useful in building an atomic bomb.

You mean the documents that the Republican administration put up on the web, where anyone with a knowledge of Arabic could read them?

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"By the way, I note that -- according to the New York Times! -- Saddam had a number of documents that provided a lot of information useful in building an atomic bomb."

That's a Republican talking point, not a truism. The documents --- the ones the Administration posted on a public website -- were from the first Iraqi invasion. We know about his weapons programs back then. That's what were dismantled between the wars. There's no news there, and no "ah ha" WMD evidence either.

All the documents prove is that the Bush Administration was extremely careless when they decided to allow the Republican blogs -- oddly, that was the reason -- to be able to look over the documents for a smoking gun. I get the value of open source intelligence, but not in this way.

The open question is whether any terrorist organizations downloaded the documents. Sometimes I think it's unlikely, other times I think it likely.

But...wow...what a dumb thing to do.

B

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"I've pointed out to you before that Bush said in his speeches immediately before the invasion of Iraq that one of the major goals was establishing a free, democratic society in that country."

Can you help me understand this. It seems obvious to me that the overwhelmingly primary justification for the Iraqi invasion was WMD: in Bush's speeches, in Powell's U.N. visit, in Rumsfeld's speeches, in the press conferences, in the neocon writings. Again and again: "Saddam has WMD!!!" I find the blatant rewriting of history offensive, because...well...because it's untrue.

Do you think I am 1) lying about the recent history, or 2) misremembering the recent history? Or something else?

This is not meant to be a baiting question. I really do want to understand what I view as a group delusion.

B

Re: The 650,000 figure

[patoadam]

The Iraqi government now estimates that "only" 150,000 civilians have been killed.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061109/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_061109164757

[demoneyes.livejournal.com]

Be fair - that quote from George senior (from 1998) refers to his belief at the time of the 1991 war, not to the political situation prevailing over a decade later. Indeed, I note it carefully omits the "I firmly believed..." which might otherwise place the quote more in historical context.

I'll admit it reads well as a sound-bite if read out of context, but that very fact only makes it the more dishonest to quote it as if it were.

I'm no great fan of the hypocrisy and lies used to justify the invasion (on both sides of the Atlantic). But that's no reason to stoop towards their level.

[patoadam]

When I first saw this in someone else's post, I thought it was obvious which Bush it was and to which war it referred. I think it is even more applicable now, because, as I pointed out above, I think GHWB would have had more justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein than GWB had.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

You don't actually believe that the Iraqi people are now saying, "What took you so long to save us", do you? if you think that, where do you get your information?

K. [because, you know, I'm going to go read whatever sources you point me to]

[billroper]

The Kurds, yes, I believe that they're certainly saying that. They certainly took the brunt of Saddam's revenge after the first Iraq war. And from what I understand, they're pretty close to having the security situation in that area of the country under control.

[jrittenhouse.livejournal.com]

My reaction to the events at Manzanar and likewise - is unspeakable.

We have a mutual friend whose family was picked up in all of that; his dad fought in the war in the Nisei Regiment that got the hell shot out of it in Italy, and it burns the hell out of me that any of that had to happen.

I have no use for any of that kind of crap. I remember the Shoe Room in the National Holocaust museum, where the dead smell of the long-unused huge pile of shoes from the camps hits you with the realization that All. Those. People. Died. Because. Of. Their Ethnicity.

I have a Chinese daughter, and I sometimes worry as to what would happen if there was some sort of conflict in the future with the Chinese, and she were (as a young woman) taken out and beat and raped by some jerks who want to 'nail a slant' in revenge.

Or the Sikhs who were beaten because they looked ay-rab. Stupid takes a long time to breed out of the human race.

The real problem is - how do we, ourselves, fix everything?

The answer is that we can't. Tried and failed in Somalia, and we never did much in Darfur or the Congo or Rwanda. Go check out the south Sudan for some real nightmares, and that's been going on since you and I were in grade school.

Oh, yeah - there's the various messes in West Africa, like the horrors in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, and Nigeria, starting with the slaughter of the Ibo in Biafra in the late 1960s.

Sometimes our screwups bring on the slaughter - ask the Sunnis in Iraq, the Marsh Arabs, the Kurds, or the Khmer who died at the hands of Pol Pot. Sometimes, you just have no way to do anything, like the millions who have died in China from 1935 to 1976 in wars, purges and mass starvation as murder.

The United States has done many good things in the world, and saved many from a horrible life. But not all things have an easy solution, and Dubya's dad was aware that callous as it was, the alternative to Saddam was - this. Or something much like it. It wasn't rocket science to figure that out.

The trick is to work things out the smart way. That is something that I have yet to see Bush do.

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

This entry came in my flist right after this one. It was interesting, reading the two in succession.

I honestly believe that you are mistaken, and I expect you believe the same of me. I hope that, if the side you support wins, your faith in them turns out to be justified.

[kestrels-nest.livejournal.com]

It's true. Governments are made up of imperfect men. I've never been an apologist for FDR. He brought a terrified, demoralized country out of the Great Depression, something that marked not only those who lived through it but their children. But it's not his efforts to get us into WWII that I decry; it's that he ignored clear evidence of genocide in progress and did nothing to even slow it down.

No one now argues whether it was necessary to destroy Hitler, and I think the primary difference between him and Saddam Hussein is only one of scale. So no, it is not the act of taking us into war I decry. It is the utter lack of plan as to how to rebuild after the destruction was complete. It is the race to dismantle all our civil rights - and neither Bush nor FDR managed that alone; the legislators of their respective times helped them. It is the utter father-knows-best hubris the man displays. FDR had most of the rest of Europe not only with him, but begging for help from the U.S. Most of the citizens of this country supported FDR and what he was doing as well. Bush, on the other hand, has most of the rest of the world against him, along with a large percentage of his own constituency, and still insists that means nothing and that he knows best. There is the failure to provide enough resources in either Iraq or Afghanistan for the troops sent to actually accomplish the stated mission...though truly I am not sure there are enough resources in the world for it, and I question the wisdom of undertaking what was arguably a Sysephian task to begin with. Alexander could clean the Aegean Stables by diverting a river. The scale now is much larger, and there is no river great enough. There is a great deal more - the efforts to combine Church and State, the denouncement of those who dare to disagree with him publicly almost as traitors. There is the sophistry of Guantanamo Bay, and the holding of foreign nationals for years without charge, or contact, or counsel. To me, the U.S. should not be a country in which people disappear at the behest of the government, but Bush has made it so.

So those are the things I hold against him, and against the current Congress, and the reasons my vote goes where and as it will. But overthrowing a genocidal maniac? Having the very personal perspective on genocide that my family history gives me - no. Doing that was right.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"And who could argue with the idea that the right thing to do was to go to war to remove a crazed dictator who was murdering tens of thousands of his own citizens?"

I think everyone should argue with it, and that everyone should make up the own mind. But almost everyone -- on both sides -- does the analysis wrong. Look at the comment above: would more people have died under Saddam then died under the occupation? Or the more common: the world is better off now that Saddam is not in power.

Of course the world is better off, but that's only one small part of the story. These comparisons only look at the different outcomes, without factoring in the cost to get to them.

The Iraqi War has cost Americans $340B* + $300M/day, 2800 American lives + 2.4/day**, 20,000*** Americans wounded + some number per day, between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and something like ten times that number wounded plus some number per day, our credibility on the world stage, increased hatred in the Arab world and a less stable Middle East, a greater risk of terrorism****, and an emboldened Iran and North Korea*****.

The analysis is this: if, back in 2003, you had $240B and 2800 American lives and all those intangibles, what would the best thing to do what those resources. If you would have looked around at all the national and international priorities, at all the possible good you could have done in the country and the world, and said "We need to liberate the Iraqi people," then yes, the war was worth it. If you wouldn't, than the war wasn't.

Yes, it's a 100% hindsight analysis, but it's a 100% hindsight question. That certainly wasn't the way the war was sold. It was supposed to be an order of magnitude cheaper, it was supposed to have taken weeks or months, we were supposed to have been welcomed as liberators, it was supposed to bring democracy to the Middle East. And liberating the Iraqi people was just a side benefit of the real purpose: to take WMDs away from a madman.

That was the analysis in early 2003, and even then some thought it wasn't worth it. More did, and public support for the war was pretty high. There were some who disagreed with the analysis -- Howard Dean comes to mind -- and disagreed with the war because they thought the cost was greater than the Administration thought. But that was then. Now we have the benefit of hindsight, and any analysis needs to make use of it.

Was the Iraqi War worth the trade-off? Was it the best possible use of those resources? Was it a good use of those resources? Should we have made better use of them?

Those are the questions we need to be debating. And yes, everyone should debate them. And everyone should decided for themselves.

I don't think the war was worth it. I have my own list of priorities that I think make a better use of $340B -- or $700B, or $1T, or whatever. I'm sure it's different than yours, but that's okay. This is a subjective analysis.

B

* Total, past and future, is estimated between $600B and $700B. I'm starting to see estimates in the $1T range -- it still stuns me to type that number. And this is U.S. cost only; I can't find any data on world-wide costs.

** I estimated based on the past 12 months, because it seems unfair to estimate based on the previous month.

*** Almost certainly a low number.

**** If we can't trust our own intelligence agencies on this, we should just disband them.

***** If you disagree, just delete this. It's tangential to the main point, anyway.

[billroper]

It's certainly possible to choose not to do something that is right, because the cost of doing the right thing is too high. And that can be a rational decision.

I agree that we would not have gone to war with Iraq if we had known that they did not have WMD. Based on the information that was available at the time, most rational people concluded that Iraq probably did have WMD. In doing a cost-benefit analysis, even in hindsight, it's necessary to factor in the costs that would (might?) have been incurred if the WMD analysis had been correct.

With reference to your comment about our intelligence agencies, it seems clear to me that having bad intelligence is damned expensive, no matter how much you have to spend to get good intelligence. Good intelligence has probably got to be less expensive than any of the figures that you quote above on the cost of this war.

[scarfman]

Where the analogy to FDR fails for me is, for example, that there's a difference between suckering a bully into a fight with all your pals, and breaking into the bully's house alone because your pals won't come with you. Roosevelt may have been everything Bush is, but Bush is not everything Roosevelt was. Remember what Frank Miller wrote about Roosevelt? I doubt anyone will ever say anything Bush did was too big.

[billroper]

Actually, the bully was already fighting all of our pals before he was stupid enough to drag us into it too, if I recall correctly the history of World War II. I'm assuming that Canada and Australia were already fighting on behalf of England before Pearl Harbor without checking, so I may be wrong about that. Russia was already at war. China was already at war. France was already defeated.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

And who could argue with the idea that the right thing to do was to go to war to remove a crazed dictator who was murdering tens of thousands of his own citizens?

Others have made part of my argument: Saddam is small-fry compared to some places in the world, including most of Africa. I'll presume you have the same feelings about those places as well.

Another part of my argument is: What makes you think we know better about the situation at hand? I've heard some pretty convincing arguments that Iraq, as a country, was *only* held together because of an iron fist. Some of the country's reaction post-"liberation" is arguably just a reaction against occupiers; there always is. The rest of it, like some of the Balkan states, is countless years of hatred of people of other people. Should we not act? I wouldn't argue that. I think it's very wise of us to be realistic about what stability brings to the situation vs. what is likely to happen when we kick the pile of cards.

Is it justifiable to go to war against evil men? Sometimes. This time, we chose poorly.