Musings on politics, foreign affairs and culture.
20th
JUN
When Doves Cry
Posted by Kevin Sullivan under Uncategorized
I could spend all day going back and forth with other bloggers on this "liberal hawk" topic, but it’ll just turn into an endless cycle. However, Ron at Liberal Values has taken the time to once again make a nice counter-argument, so I’d like to quickly address that.
Sullivan plays the label game himself….
And…
Not only is getting out of Iraq the actual liberal position, it has become the opinion of the majority of the American people. This is not because we are isolationists or are shirking any moral obligations. It is because getting out of Iraq is what is best for both the United States and for Iraq.
1. I would love for Ron to elaborate on how it is the liberal position to leave Iraq. I think he and I can both agree that civil war, sectarian violence and religious tit-for-tat murder would undoubtedly continue. I am continuously baffled like Ezra when occupation critics claim that we are the impetus for the sectarian violence. Do occupation critics (different than invasion critics, Ron) truly believe this? What is the logic?
Not only will we have invaded against the international community’s wishes, but we will have left a mess for other nation’s to clean up. The Saudis already hinted at it last year, and the Turks have repeatedly "not" entered northern Iraq. What would prevent them from doing so in our absence? Furthermore, what would prevent Iran from doing so? The notion that matters would improve once we left is, again, baffling.
2. Arguing how unpopular the war is now doesn’t make leaving Iraq the liberal thing to do. As you may recall, Americans felt differently prior to the war. The American public that now hates the war gave its architect glowing reviews over a year after the invasion.
I, perhaps as you did, opposed the invasion. I didn’t buy the intelligence argument, and I saw Iraq as a distraction from more important issues (mainly finishing the job in Afghanistan, catching or killing Bin Laden, etc.). I was in the minority then, and I’m clearly in the minority now as well. Popular opinion doesn’t necessarily add validity to an argument, and this certainly wouldn’t be the first time president’s pushed us through unpopular wars.
Iraq is not like South Korea or Europe as Kevin argues. Staying in Iraq only gets us more bogged down in a civil war.
Why is it not like those cases? Was rebuilding Europe easier than rebuilding Iraq? Why so? If you’re going to dismiss the parallel, you might as well explain why. Again, did dropping Afghanistan after Soviet withdrawal lead to peace? Did it become any less of a terrorist training ground once we turned away?
After all this time, if the Iraqi government cannot stabilize the country over the next year, it is doubtful that staying additional years will make any difference. There’s no doubt there will be serious problems if we leave in the next year, but there will also be serious problems if we leave in two years, five years, or ten years. In the meantime, we will have more dead Americans, more money wasted, and far more people hating the United States.
Once again–baffled. It took several years for functional governments to form in (insert one of countless examples that apparently don’t matter), and they did NOT have all of the strife and conflict that Iraq has. Anyone who thought this would be a cursory bombing exercise like Desert Fox wasn’t paying attention. The goal wasn’t just to topple a dictator and split, it was to aid Iraq in her recovery and democratization. The Bush administration has failed at this…miserably…and didn’t plan properly for what an anarchic, sectarian Iraq would look like. Well here it is.
There were other traditional methods that could’ve been used here. We could’ve, as I mentioned, gone in and just bombed the heck out of everything like Wesley Clark. Or, we could’ve invaded and supported any Iraqi coup that wasn’t Saddam, and maybe just have turned a blind eye while they implemented Sharia law. What was being attempted here was without question Wilsonian interventionism (apparently another thing liberals don’t like anymore). Centralizing federal power in Baghdad. Protecting minorities while honoring the majority. Revenue sharing. Holding actual elections.
This wasn’t out of the typical Middle Eastern playbook, which incidentally has been filled with arrogant and condescending assumptions about how Arabs "can’t do" democracy for decades. This was bold and stupid all at the same time. The invasion went quite well, but it’s the occupation that has left our leadership embarrassed.
No other war in the history of mankind has been "live blogged" such as this (although I would mention the GOP and the Korean War were I not risking bafflement and uproar). This doesn’t mean that any loss of life is marginal, it simply means that America has historically lost an awful lot in both victory and defeat. The bi-polar nature of reporting on the war makes it harder for anyone to reach an objective take on it, and it doesn’t help that war critics often seem more interested in being more right than our president than they are in doing what’s truly right.
My apologies, Ron. Nothing about that was even remotely quick.
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June 20, 2007 -
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Was rebuilding Europe easier than rebuilding Iraq? Why so?
Because there wasn’t an insurgency. For openers.
Your analogy is absurd.
My problem is that I don’t trust liberal hawks. Let’s leave aside their initial decision to favor going into Iraq– though I have a feeling that was influenced as much by factors such as not being on the same side as “peaceniks” who liberal hawks don’t respect, and looking “tough” as it was influenced by any actual need to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Let’s just look at what happened thereafter. It was very obvious, very soon, that the occupation of Iraq was in fact a huge mistake. By late 2003 this was certainly apparent. Yet most liberal hawks spent all of 2003 arguing, a la Herbert Hoover, that prosperity was just around the corner (hence the snark about a “Friedman”, i.e., the six months that Iraq was perpetually going to supposedly take to turn the corner). They spent 2004 sinking a presidential candidate (Howard Dean) who was right about Iraq in favor of a supposedly more electable one (John Kerry) who turned out to be unelectable because he wouldn’t admit he was wrong.
Even in 2005, liberal hawks like Hillary Clinton continued to swear that the war was the right thing to do.
In 2006, they finally stopped making that argument but instead switched to the claim that whether the Iraq War was right or wrong was water under the bridge (easy to say when the hawks were dead wrong!) and that the important thing was that we couldn’t afford to withdraw. That’s where we still are now, even though it is increasingly clear that we aren’t accomplishing anything except killing more of the apparently expendable lives of American servicemen and women by staying there.
The point is, I haven’t seen any evidence that liberal hawks– or conservative hawks– are acting in good faith here, that they are actually willing to say “OK, OK, we were wrong, pull out the troops” if the evidence shows that doing so will do the most good. I cannot say exactly why this is– my theory is that liberal hawks correctly perceive Iraq as a big-time repudiation of a lot of their foreign policy theories and figure that we stay in, there’s some vain hope that the thing might turn around and their ideas will maintain currency and their position in history will be vindicated.
But whatever the reason for their reluctance to withdraw, I’m not willing to listen to liberal hawks until I hear some actual acknowledgment that they got a huge issue wrong, that the position they advocated led to the needless deaths of 3,500 American servicemen and women, and that they are reconsidering their ideas about foreign policy as a result. And then, within that prism, if you want to tell me why we have to maintain permanent bases in Iraq or we have to bomb Iran, fine, but I want you to understand that you have a bigger burden of proof now than you did in the fall of 2002, because not only of what happened then but what happened in the ensuing years in which a lot of false claims were disseminated by liberal hawks about Iraq, even after the invasion, in what was almost clearly bad faith.
“Was rebuilding Europe easier than rebuilding Iraq? Why so?
Because there wasn’t an insurgency. For openers.
Your analogy is absurd.”
Are you honestly comparing insurgent militias in Iraq to the Soviet Union? No, there was no insurgency, there was only an encroaching superpower waiting at the doorstep.
There were also Communist insurgents in South Korea folowing the end of the Korean War, so you might want to revisit your history books and get back to me.
When a snarky riposte to a question specifically referencing “Europe” involves a reference to “Korea,” I am somehow alerted to the fact that I am talking to an idiot.
Son, you’re outclassed. Sorry.
I also mentioned Afghanistan, and South Korea. Were you simply confused, and working under the assumption that Afghanistan is a part of Europe?
Please go back to your board, where you can “play an asshole” as you put it, and entertain the fourth graders.
Why American Policy Should Shift to Diplomacy and Leaving Iraq
…
“Are you honestly comparing insurgent militias in Iraq to the Soviet Union? No, there was no insurgency, there was only an encroaching superpower waiting at the doorstep.
There were also Communist insurgents in South Korea following the end of the Korean War, so you might want to revisit your history books and get back to me.”
I think, Kevin, that if you were less interested in snark and more interested in substantive replies, you would come off as more credible, and less like someone who just wrote a term paper and now considers themself an expert.
You asked an explicit question, to which someone replied by pointing out the obvious loophole in the question. And it was a huge loophole, which, in getting defensive, you have made worse. For you have done the ridiculous thing you have accused your attacker of – compared the encroaching Soviet Union of the 1940’s-60’s with the domestic insurgents of post-war Iraq as a security threat. What the original question implied was that you are drawing analogies that don’t work. (West) Germany of the 40’s, for the most part, was an extremely hospitable place to be an occupying army, because we were offering force protection against a palpable threat of invasion from an entirely unwelcome bordering superpower. As you pointed out. But you don’t seem to notice that that poses some serious problems for your original argument that rebuilding Europe was not any easier than rebuilding Iraq.
Also, while I have no doubt that there were some communists who continued to resist the western-backed autocracy in South Korea after the war was over, would you really suggest that the situation there was comparably anarchic, chaotic, strife riven, and civil-war-esque? Really? That’s your argument? Cause that doesn’t really fly either, according to what I know. I am willing to examine new evidence, but I don’t know of massive, daily, concerted efforts, for years after the major conflict, to disrupt the extant power structure and completely discredit and demoralize the occupying army.
Your analogy just doesn’t work.
The Soviet Union and its agents were indeed nothing like the insurgency currently disrupting the establishment of order and law in Iraq, and whatever Communist insurgency existed in Korea never had the foothold on the local population that the insurgency in Iraq has now.