I'll stick with Iraq, but try to find something a bit different...we've heard plenty from Democrats who supported the Iraq War in 2002/2003 and are now apologizing for it; we've also heard a fair amount from Democrats who opposed the war then and are pointing out now that they were correct to do so. So putting all that aside: for liberals those who opposed the war then, were there any lessons that they should have learned from what happened, either in the run-up to the war or after it began?
I would hope what they learned that they needed to be more vocal about their opposition and skepticism. From what I remember, the opposition was pretty quiet during the lead up to the war.
ReplyDeleteAli Olomi, UCLA
Quiet? Because it needed to be made quiet.
DeleteThe opposition to the Iraq war put more people in the streets than any other protest movement in this nation's history, in absolute terms. Probably in population-relative terms.
The Very Serious People -- and it's their country, we just get to live in it -- wanted their war, though, and they were going to get it, come hell, high water, or half-a-million people in the streets of Manhattan, or on the Mall in Washington.
So while all those people could be in the streets, or on the Mall, under no circumstances could they be in the news.
What liberals who opposed the war should have learned is that their fellow-countrymen, the more they matter, the more money they make, the longer their titles, the more they love themselves a good war,
Iran will shortly give liberals a chance to exercise this hard-won knowledge -- if it was won at all -- by ceasing to be merely liberal.
Quiet? February 15 was the biggest anti-war demonstration in US history. Just because nobody was listening doesn't mean it was quiet.
DeleteI'm with these guys.
DeleteAs to the question, what should we have learned from being right? Obviously that it doesn't matter. Not when there is money to be made.
"It" apparently doesn't matter because somehow American liberals can believe, for decades on end, that expressing their individual opinions within the context of their private, non-public lives is a significant political action.
DeleteEventually, people will learn that organization is what creates significant political action. Eventually, American liberals will understand that they can no longer hand over their power to corporatists, militarists and opponents of civil liberties just because those "leaders" are members of the organized Democratic Party who occasionally give some lip service to democratic/populist values, while voting and acting to continue destroying those values.
We have to get organized and primary these false Democrats just about every time -- and that includes Hilary Clinton in 2016. Today there are indeed dangers as the far-right Republicans can create tremendous damage in some offices, yet it is still necessary to constantly remind "establishment" Democrats their performance is not actually satisfactory to us, the citizens and voters they use to gain their offices.
That opposition matters. The war was fought, but it was fought on terms that mitigated what would have been the worst results, because an engaged worldwide opposition made the warmongers work desperately hard for it.
ReplyDeleteWhat are the worst results that were mitigated?
DeleteI'd say liberals should be more willing to criticize public figures they don't agree with. Just because someone is in some high political office or is a public figure of great stature doesn't mean that person necessarily has a clue what they are talking about. Also liberals should be more willing to criticize the reasons people do bad things. Andrew Sullivan admitted this week that much of his support for the war came out of his emotional state at the time and a desire for revenge against "the left" after some scummy people published details about his personal life. Pointing these things out, or Karl Rove's involvement in the lead up to war to win the 2002 midterms, are much more damaging than saying that you just disagree with someone's reasoning.
ReplyDeleteLessons? Only that there is no end to delusion. Presidents always say that the last thing they want is to go to war. And pundits always accept this line as though they haven't heard it from every president ever. I don't think that anti-war liberals could have been more pointed or vocal in their criticism. And I don't even like the idea that the onus is on those of us who got it right.
ReplyDeleteAnd for the record, I am tired of all the pseudo-mea culpas I had to put up with all last week. Either admit error or shut up. I'm not interested in all the reasons that liberals had for being wrong about Iraq. It wasn't a difficult issue.
I'll give my personal perspective. I opposed the war from the start. But I can't really say it was an informed opinion. I didn't predict how big a disaster it would be, and in fact one of the reasons I was a little muted in my criticisms was that I feared I would have egg on my face if the war turned out to be a success and to do some good in the region. I wasn't thinking much about the issues that made the war seem so foolish in retrospect, such as the quagmire, the power struggle left in Saddam's absence, the strengthening of Iran. I wasn't literate enough in geopolitics to consider these issues (though unlike Bush. I did know the difference between a Sunni and a Shi'ite). I was mainly reacting to how out-of-the-blue it all seemed. I knew Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, and I felt going after him was a big distraction from our fight against Al Qaeda. It was as simple as that. But I also got the sense that most people defending the war were reaching that conclusion after the fact--Bush proposed taking out Saddam, and many people seemed to be saying, "Hey, that sounds like a good idea." Even though I was right and most people in the country were wrong, I still learned a lot from the debacle, but perhaps my biggest personal lesson was to have more strength in my convictions.
ReplyDeleteDon't really consider myself a liberal, though I did oppose the war from the start. What I learned most is how difficult it is to oppose the Executive once their mind is made up. They've got access to the CIA and can cherry pick the reports that are released. The media, especially at the time, had messed up incentives and had to weigh being shut out and losing access against the need to be right. The only check was Congress and they were all led by Republicans who wanted to back the president more than anything else.
ReplyDeleteIf we were picking a fight with a country that could threaten us, I think there would have been more examination, but the people in charge at the time seemed to have forgotten the lessons of Vietnam and had convinced themselves that it would be easy.
So it's no use being right unless you can get ahold of convincing data to combat the information they're releasing. I do think the Internet disruption has made it easier to get ahold of that data, even though it's also made it easier for some to wall themselves in and ignore that data.
The pseudo mea culpas are better than the fiery talk from David Corn and Lawrence O'Donnell about how hard it was to speak out against thee war when they were pretty wishy washy at the time.
ReplyDeleteThis speaks to My Name's point that the media had bad incentives in the run up too y the war. They may have been genuinely against the war at the time, but they weren't that vocal about it.
Next time, I think anti-war liberals will be even more insistent that Democratic leaders and the Democratic party (broadly speaking) join their opposition. They won’t be satisfied with simply being “right” after the fact.
ReplyDeleteHopefully, Democratic politicians have also learned the importance of taking a potentially risky stand against a war that they believe to be wrong -- important both for their country, and for their future political career.
On the other hand, the Iraq fallout may have created a perverse partisan incentive to not really try to stop a bad war -- with the knowledge that, at least they’ll be back in power once everything goes wrong.
Hopefully they learned that it is stupid to base support for a WAR on short term politics.
ReplyDeleteMyName mentions the people who have forgotten Vietnam. What concerns me are the people who have forgotten Iraq and want to jump into Syria. They all seem to think that as soon as we get there everything will calm down.
ReplyDeleteI don't think military engagement in Syria is very popular by the left or right. At most, some feel we should supply weapons and provide drone support.
DeletePerhaps better use of imagery would have helped people to think about how bad it could be. Vietnam, Soviets in Afghanistan, even Northern Ireland and Somalia provided lessons. Americans (including policymakers) did not and are unlikely to ever choose to enter into a lengthy war against guerrilla forces. They also too easily associate such warfare only with jungle areas. At a minimum, properly warned, they probably would have demanded effective plans to prevent it, or else.
ReplyDeleteI wonder whether those who voted for Nader in 2000 learned not to do that ever again. I also agree with MyName that this all snowballed from Bush's decision, and it would have been incredibly hard to stop except from the top. What military decision that the president has made has been blocked? Neither surge, not Libya. Clinton tread carefully in Bosnia, and Reagan was prevented somewhat in his support of the Contras, but there isn't much success in standing between the president and a war he wants.
ReplyDeleteActually, I'm wondering why no one mentioned alternate candidates and primary challenges so far. That seems to have a decent effect on the republicans, why wouldn't it do so for the democrats?
DeleteI think Democratic politicians with presidential aspirations have probably learned something from watching John Kerry waffle his way to a narrow loss in 2004, then Barack Obama beat front-running HRC for the nomination in 2008, largely on the strength of his brief but recorded opposition to the war and her blatantly obvious calculation in voting for it. (I still remember her egregious speech in the Senate explaining this. It sounded like a speech of opposition, then led up to the non sequiter, "And so I support this resolution....." Between that and her apologias for WalMart, I was rooting for her to lose the primaries just so political vice wouldn't be rewarded.)
ReplyDeleteI would hope that everyone has also learned that the executive should not be trusted because it has seen the secret intel and, after all, an American president would never mislead or lie the country into something as serious as a war, would he? The credulity and deference of elected Dems toward George W. Bush, of all people, remains for me the most baffling element of the whole sorry saga. The guy steals an election from you, and you still don't get it? It's kind of amazing that the party survived that era; I'm not sure it deserved to.
As to a lesson that I think people should have learned that hasn't been much discussed: Don't ever trust impressions left by the last war. I think lots of Democrats remembered Tom Foley (himself probably remembering Vietnam) predicting 10,000 casualties in Iraq in '91 and being wrong, so they imagined another war there as equally easy -- or even easier because of 12 years of sanctions that had degraded the Iraqi military. They also remembered Bosnia / Serbia / Kosovo, and also how quickly the Taliban had been routed (or so it seemed). These events seemed, even to people like the prominent military historian John Keegan, to disprove Keegan's own warnings that Afghanistan was the graveyard of empires and that wars can't be won just with air power. It looked like maybe the lessons of Vietnam had been over-learned, and that in fact wars could now be waged and won quickly and cheaply.
As it turned out, Iraq 2 was unlike all these wars, or rather like each of them in part and therefore, in total, something entirely different. It involved a dictator and a weak state, a la Serbia, and a lightning victory against a national army, plus relatively low US casualties, like Iraq 1. In the end it was like Vietnam in becoming a war against an insurgency, but (unlike in Vietnam) the insrugency wasn't already in progress before the US invasion -- it was hiding in the woodwork and came out only afterward. In that regard, Saddam was no Ho Chi Minh, i.e. the insurgents' ideological leader, but he was also no Slobodan Milosevic, a temporary throwback to the politics of interwar Europe who could (more or less) easily be deposed in favor of conventional politicians in charge of a (more or less) stable country. He was..... Saddam. The situation was different.
In shot, the lesson for next time should be: Don't count on it to be like last time, or like any of several last times -- wars are highly contingent and unpredictable, so basically don't get into them unless you're facing down Hitler (the real one, not some neoconservative min-Hitler du jour). And don't vote for them if you want to run for president as a Democrat. If the other guy's not Hitler, you, for sure, are not Winston Churchill.
Make that "in short." Freudian slip there, I guess. :-)
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DeleteCongress had access to the same information that the President had, and they all voted in favor of war (87% of congress, including both Democrats AND Republicans). It was also the same evidence supported by intelligence organizations from Britain, France, Spain and others. It is true that the executive branch had a lot of influence, but this decision was held to a democratic vote with ALL of the evidence on the table.
DeleteSo contrary to popular believe (due to weak reporting), there was no secrecy in the intelligence in and of itself.
And while yellow cake uranium was never found, a very large stash of once highly potent WMD ingredients WERE found. They were not potent when discovered, but chemists determined that this was only due to a lack of proper storage and upkeep after war operations began.
With that said, I am still not convinced that this was good enough reason to go to war. There were too many unknowns about the actual threat to justify risking our greatest treasure - life. I just feel that we should acknowledge all of significant facts before drawing conclusions about lessons learned.
To be clear, I was referring to the kinds of excuses that politicians, mostly Democrats, made in the aftermath. I wasn't saying those excuses are valid; quite the opposite.
DeleteFor a minute, I thought you were going to ask about Democrats who supported the war then...and don't apologize for it. I know I am in a minuscule minority, but I still believe that Halabjah and the utter brutality of Sadaam's regime and Iraq's aggression toward its neighbors, not to mention the scary, scary sons of Sadaam, were ample justification for the war. I don't know where Iraq is headed now, but it was going nowhere good then.
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