SADDAM OR DESTABILIZATION:

There Was No 'Smart' Way to Invade Iraq (Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias, 2/17/07, The American Prospect

Though defending the competence of the Bush administration is a fool's endeavor, administrative bungling is simply not the root source of America's failure in Iraq. The alternative scenarios liberal hawks retrospectively envision for a successful administration of the war reflect blithe assumptions -- about the capabilities of the U.S. military and the prospects for nation building in polities wracked by civil conflict -- that would be shattered by a few minutes of Googling.

The incompetence critique is, in short, a dodge -- a way for liberal hawks to acknowledge the obviously grim reality of the war without rethinking any of the premises that led them to support it in the first place. In part, the dodge helps protect its exponents from personal embarrassment. But it also serves a more important, and dangerous, function: Liberal hawks see themselves as defenders of the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention -- such as the Clinton-era military campaigns in Haiti and the Balkans -- and as advocates for the role of idealism and values in foreign policy. The dodgers believe that to reject the idea of the Iraq War is, necessarily, to embrace either isolationism or, even worse in their worldview, realism -- the notion, introduced to America by Hans Morgenthau and epitomized (not for the better) by the statecraft of Henry Kissinger, that U.S. foreign policy should concern itself exclusively with the national interest and exclude consideration of human rights and liberal values. Liberal hawk John Lloyd of the Financial Times has gone so far as to equate attacks on his support for the war with doing damage to "the idea, and ideal, of freedom itself."

It sounds alluring. But it's backward: An honest reckoning with this war's failure does not threaten the future of liberal interventionism. Instead, it is liberal interventionism's only hope. By erecting a false dichotomy between support for the current bad war and a Kissingerian amoralism, the dodgers run the risk of merely driving ever-larger numbers of liberals into the realist camp. Left-of-center opinion neither will nor should follow a group of people who continue to insist that the march to Baghdad was, in principle, the height of moral policy thinking. If interventionism is to be saved, it must first be saved from the interventionists.

They frame the choice rather well--in an artificial country like Iraq, you can either have totalitarian stability or else you have to unleash the pent up furies along the way to achieving a more natural set of nations. The folks on the decent Left who wish to believe that they'd have handled things better are just kidding themselves. If Iraq's Sunni refused to be governed by the will of the majority the rest followed inevitably from freedom.

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Liberals are now the appeasers of hate: In the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, the Left's conscience has failed the world (Nick Cohen, February 17, 2007, The Australian)

Saddam was against everything represented by Amnesty International and all the other admirable nongovernmental organisations. No anti-liberal, anti-democratic tyrant could be further from the professed principles of the British Liberal Democrats, the European Social and Christian Democrats and the African National Congress. He was an embodiment of the mass terror and racism of the 20th century which they said they wanted to escape. When a war to overthrow him came, the liberals had two choices.

The first was to oppose the war, remain hypercritical of aspects of the Bush administration's policy, but support Iraqis as they struggled to establish a democracy. The policy of not leaving Iraqis stranded was so clearly the only moral option, it never occurred to me that there could be another choice. From the point of view of the liberals, the only ground they would have had to concede if they had stuck by their principles in Iraq would have been an acknowledgment that the war had a degree of legitimacy.

They would still have been able to say it was catastrophically mismanaged, a provocation to al-Qa'ida and all the rest of it. They would still have been able to condemn atrocities by American troops, Guantanamo Bay, and Bush's pushing of the boundaries on torture. They might usefully have linked up with like-minded Iraqis, who wanted international support to fight against the American insistence on privatisation of industries, for instance. All they would have had to accept was that the attempt to build a better Iraq was worthwhile and one to which they could and should make a positive commitment. A small price to pay; a price all their liberal principles insisted they had a duty to pay. Or so it seemed.

The second choice for the liberals was to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. To look at the Iraqi civilians and the British and American troops who were dying in a war whose central premise had proved to be false, and to go berserk; to allow justifiable anger to propel them into "binges of posturing and ultra-radicalism" as the 1960s' liberals had done when they went off the rails.

As one critic characteried the position, they would have to pretend that "the United States was the problem and Iraq was its problem". They would have to maintain that the war was not an attempt to break the power of tyranny in a benighted region, but the bloody result of a "financially driven mania to control Middle Eastern oil, and the faith-driven crusade to batter the crescent with the cross". They chose to go berserk.

In 2003, while his friends in Washington were enjoying their brief moment of triumph, the neo-conservative thinker Robert Kagan tried to warn Republicans that the apparently feeble liberals of Europe had a latent power. On the face of it, Europe and by extension the countries and organisations that favoured the multilateralism associated with the ideals of Europe was a joke. It talked loudly and carried a small stick.

For all the high-sounding speeches from the inhabitants of "Paradise" about "never again" and human rights, they relied on the Americans to stop the atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo and condemned them when they didn't intervene in Rwanda. Militarily, the US could have won the war in Iraq without the support of a single ally, including Britain. Economically, it could afford to rebuild Iraq, even if the task took decades, as it did in Western Europe and Japan after World War II.

But Kagan warned that politically a split in the democratic world would be calamitous. The European opponents of the war in Paris and Berlin, and all the organisations and liberal-minded people there and elsewhere who said they supported human rights, had the power to deny America moral legitimacy by saying the war was "illegal".

Logically, they should then have followed through and demanded that the Americans release Saddam from prison and restore him to the presidency that the invading forces had "illegally" stolen from him. But, as the theorists from the universities' cultural studies departments of the '80s and '90s had anticipated, there wasn't much call for logic in a postmodern world that welcomed self-righteous fury without positive commitments.

In defiance of the stereotype, Americans have always cared what the rest of the world thinks about them, said Kagan. Their Declaration of Independence said they must have "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind". Paine, Jefferson and Franklin said from the start that American democratic values should be universal. "Because Americans do care," argued Kagan, "the steady denial of international legitimacy by fellow democracies over time will become debilitating and perhaps even paralysing."

He didn't think of a further consequence - maybe because it was too scandalous to imagine. What would be the effect of pretending that it was illegal to overthrow a genocidal regime on Iraqis who were struggling to build a better country? The answer came soon after the invasion when the liberals gave aid and comfort to the Islamists and the Baathists. The "insurgents" were able to use the liberals' slogans - "It's all about oil!" "It's illegal!" - and to taunt their opponents with the indisputable fact that even their supposed liberal allies in New York, London, Berlin and Paris didn't support them.

The push for a democratic Iraq had American military and financial power behind it, but liberals the world over denied it moral support and legitimacy, which matter more. In the eyes of liberal opinion, the millions of Iraqis who voted for a new government were little better than the receivers of stolen goods.

Richard Dawkins was a typical case. A polemical scientist who had pulverised religious fundamentalism in Britain and the US, he couldn't see beyond Bush to an Iraq that was being pulverised by Islamists. In a letter to the press just after the war he summed up the liberals' raging indifference when he gloated, "Now Bush is begging the United Nations to help clean up the mess he created in Iraq, there is a temptation to tell him to get lost. It is a temptation to which I hope the United Nations will succumb. US armed forces are 'overstretched', and that is exactly how they should be."

The short point is that the ideology of the new far Left or new far Right, or however you wish to characterise the nihilist mentality we saw developing in the universities and the anti-globalisation movement, was now mainstream.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 17, 2007 7:30 AM