What I learned from the Iraq War, Part 1

The personal really is the political

Fair use.

Is this Iran War like the Iraq War? Maybe in a few ways. I look back on something I wrote on March 30, 2003:

TRICKLE-DOWN DIVISIVENESS. Fight the real enemy, cries Andrew Sullivan: “The day of reckoning is not just coming for Saddam Hussein. It’s coming for the anti-war movement.”

Further down, Sullivan advises on “what the anti-war movement must do now if it is to regain credibility.” If his ultimate goal is to give millions of his fellow Americans the Saddam Hussein treatment, why would they listen to him?

In Saturday’s New York Post, Adam Brodsky writes, “When the big bombs went off in Baghdad on the first night of this war, I felt like beating my chest.” He explains: “It tells the world -- in the only language it understands -- that America will defend itself.” (emphasis mine)

Intelligent people can disagree about the war on Iraq, but in the war of a handful of American conservatives against pretty much everyone else on the planet, it would appear the sides have been chosen for us. “With us or against us” is having a most ominous trickle-down effect.

(Those links are dead as Saddam, but are Wayback Machine’d here and here. Note the Brodsky one is headlined “Burn, Baghdad, Burn.”)

Two things strike me about this: First, the macho posturing by these two desk jockeys and how common it was in those days of “Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!”; second, how much I hedged with that “intelligent people can disagree.”

Sure, by April I’d had enough (“The much-vaunted Iraqi WMD seems, so far, to either be non-existent or available in such feeble conditions and quantities as to make any complaint of their imminent threat comical. The liberation of the poor Iraqis — which became, in the later phases of the war, the new, cuddlier justification for the conflict — is, as the ashes cool, beginning to manifest its absurdity: Iraq as a Republican-run human rights initiative that cost about a hundred billion dollars...”). But I should have known from the outset that there was no moral case for the war, no matter who thought so.

I knew the nutcases were, well, nuts. And I wasn’t really swayed by the intellectual liberal hawk arguments of the time (“Hoping to emancipate men and women from all manner of domination, America’s greatest social movements have sought to extend liberalism’s promise to every sphere” etc.).

Really, I was just chickenshit: I didn’t want to say that not only the nuts who rammed it through but also the (apparently) sane people who said it was (despite the absurd rationales others were giving) a defensible moral choice were wrong. It wasn’t like I wanted to be buddies with these people, but I thought that, intellectually, we were in the same corner, and maybe they even knew something I didn’t. (Maybe that was my first mistake!)

Though my flat-out opposition came soon enough, it took longer for me to get the point about those guys. I was busy for years having a grand time with the nuts, making fun of the sophistries of Jonah Goldberg and Eleventy-‘leven Star General Ralph “Blood ‘n’ Guts” Peters, and even razzing some of the great Lefty Belligerents like Christopher Hitchens. But I didn’t bother to interrogate the Yglesiases and Kleins. I mean, they were good on other issues, like gay rights, right? And they had (very) eventually come around on Iraq.

After a while I caught on, as nearly all of those people turned fink — as they were foreordained to do, being gutless careerists. In fact it became clear that we had never been in the same corner at all, because the only corner they wanted was their own corner on the market of received opinion. I’d had a failure of nerve, whereas they had nothing but.

Right now, as Tubby freestyles his war, most of his supporters are unmistakably outright lunatics like Erick Erickson and/or neocon blood-lusters like Bret Stephens. But eventually you’ll see someone you thought was OK — or a liberal-looking type who comes out of nowhere, or one of those super-reasonable abundance centrists — talk about the potential benefits for world order that may come from this war, despite the crackpots waging it.

It may seem a soothing thought — maybe all those Iranian dissidents will not have died in vain! Intelligent men can disagree! My friends, don’t let them hornswoggle you. In a few years, as the wreckage is being cleared, these guys will explain in the pages of the Atlantic and the New York Times how, despite their best intentions, they got it wrong and have learned their lesson, leaving you embarrassed for having taken them seriously in the first place.