Drawing Distinctions

My friend Justin Logan sounds a call for the United States to abandon the concept of nation building. I'm sympathetic to the impulse here -- I find it enormously frustrating that a lot of people look at Iraq and say to themselves "we need to get better at this." No, we don't. What we need to do is to not do that again. But that still raises the issue of what "this" is. As my other friend Mark Goldberg says:

That said, I still think that there is a great need for nation building and post conflict reconstruction in today's world. Enter UN Peacekeeping, which has a demonstrated (if under-appreciated) record of success in post conflict zones. Rather than trying to do a better job of invading and occupying countries, it may make more sense to broaden our support for the one organization that has some experience and expertise in this line of work.

It's worth saying that this isn't because of some kind of UN pixie dust that makes blue helmet missions work. Institutional knowledge factors are in play, but as I argue in Heads in the Sand a big peace of the puzzle is simply that it's very different to get involved in post-conflict reconstruction when you're talking about acting as a third party who steps in to keep the peace after a conflict ends, and getting involved in post-conflict reconstruction when the conflict that you're "post" was an invasion. In other words, helping to keep the peace when the parties to a conflict in a failed state are looking for a way out of the abyss is very different from deliberately smashing up a bunch of eggs and then deciding you need an omelet recipe.

On top of that, there's the matter of structure and legitimacy. The U.N., precisely because of many features that sometimes annoy Americans (universal membership, clumsy decision-making structure, etc.) is an exceedingly poor tool for domination, which makes it a good tool for reassuring people that you're not there to dominate them. Doing more to support these blue helmet missions would be much cheaper than another year in Iraq and would do more good besides.

Comments

I have a proposal for the visitors here. Let's sign a pledge not to buy Matt's book until he starts proofreading his blog posts. Please let Matt know that you've taken the pledge.

Matt, it's an insult to your readers to put forth the mangled crap that purports to be English prose day after day -- misspelling, bad syntax, bad diction, and so on. Sometimes it totally distorts your meaning; other times it just makes you look semi-literate. I'm not buying your book until you change your ways -- I'm sure others will follow my example.

Posted by David in NY | April 9, 2008 11:47 AM

why don't you stopping reading his blog then?

Posted by ann | April 9, 2008 11:51 AM

Cheap is dear.... ever heard the phrase? And have you ever heard of the Marshall Plan?

Posted by robertl | April 9, 2008 11:56 AM

"why don't you stopping reading his blog then?"

Because of the basketball. Now, if he'd written a book about basketball ...

Seriously, Matt's ideas are really intersting 50% of the time, but he shouldn't insult his readers by requiring them to be cryptographers. Some comment threads consist largely of attempts to figure out what the hell he was saying (c'mon, out there, you other commenters, I know you agree with me!).

Posted by David in NY | April 9, 2008 12:02 PM

Matt: I think you mean "state-building;" nation-building is impossible. How does an outsider "build" a nation, except as a common object of hatred--speaking of which, in that sense we might be accomplishing something in Iraq.

Posted by David | April 9, 2008 12:06 PM

You've got to be kidding me. We're not standing in Bosnia, post-intervention, wondering if grand experiments in multi-lateral intervention and nation-building might be a slippery slope, despite some modest successes. We're at the bottom of the damn hill, having slid all the way down it, engaged not in one, but in *two* theaters attempting to spread the most historically contingent and thus far short-lived form of government in the history of the world. Unless you're willing to cede a substantially greater amount of sovereignty to a multi-national body like the UN, nation-building will inevitably lead to disasters like Iraq. It only took 25 years for someone to wonder if maybe Vietnam could be done "right."

Posted by tw | April 9, 2008 12:14 PM

Maybe I'm not up on the terminology, but as I understand it, what is called "post-conflict reconstruction" is a much more modest task than what is called "nation-building". Post-conflict reconstruction just means things like rebuilding the bridges and hospitals you bombed, getting the electricity and waste treatment systems running again, and re-establishing some semblance of order and government. Nation-building is something much grander, isn't it? It is said to involve creating a whole "civil society", establishing entirely new institutions of government and law, and socially re-engineering the habits of social and political behavior that are required to give life to the social blueprint. The UN might be able to do the first rather well, but I doubt it can do the second.

I don't know if the US ever really has been in the business of nation building, although they made a half-hearted effort at it in Iraq. So there is no business to get out of here. However, legions of think-tankers, NGO folks, academics and all-around global busybodies have written many papers, and commissioned many studies on nation-building. They're going to be very bummed out if spoilsports like Justin and Matt won't let them experiment on some real populations and put their bright, shiny plans into action.

Posted by Dan Kervick | April 9, 2008 12:15 PM

I'm a big fan of your writing, and have been reading your blog for some time. But I've got to say that your frequent mention of your book is getting a little annoying. I think we all get it, you wrote a book. I've ordered a pre-copy, and am looking forward to reading it. But you don't need to mention it every time you mention something related to foreign policy. Put a little image with a link on the right hand side of your page and forget about it for a while.

Posted by Cassandre | April 9, 2008 12:18 PM

I'm a big fan of your writing, and have been reading your blog for some time. But I've got to say that your frequent mention of your book is getting a little annoying. I think we all get it, you wrote a book. I've ordered a copy, and am looking forward to reading it. But you don't need to mention it every time you mention something related to foreign policy. Put a little image with a link on the right hand side of your page and forget about it for a while.

Posted by Cassandre | April 9, 2008 12:19 PM

The U.N. ... is an exceedingly poor tool for domination

Except insofar as its Security Council has a way of passing resolutions against member states which give the George W. Bushes and Robert Powells of the world the appearance of legal justification for launching de facto wars of aggression.

Posted by Anonymous | April 9, 2008 12:46 PM

Cassandre,

But you don't need to mention it every time you mention something related to foreign policy.

I'd be very suprised if mentioning the book at every opportunity were not actually a requirement imposed on Matt by his publisher.

Posted by Ryan | April 9, 2008 12:50 PM

Ah, the Marshall Plan. I guess a Marshall Plan might have worked for Iraq if Iraq consisted mostly of one ethnic group, if the Iraqis had surrendered unconditionally after years of total war, and if the Iraqis had not spent the last five years resisting our occupation. Or do you think the Marshall Plan would have worked if the Germans had spent the first five years after the end of the war vigorously resisting the American occupation?

Posted by mwg | April 9, 2008 12:56 PM

By the way, no wonder there are so many double/triple comments here. I loaded the dish washer and took a shower to clean off the cheetohs, but the page I should get after posting the comment above is still loading in another browser tab.

Posted by mwg | April 9, 2008 1:39 PM

It's always good for a chuckle when we get suggestions to "use the UN" by the same people who think enforcing its most important Resolutions is "illegal" unless we get a permission slip from people like Jacques Chirac.

The League of Nations failed spectacularly because it didn't have a credible enforcement mechanism. This is now the situation at the UN.

Posted by Robert Powell | April 9, 2008 2:08 PM

An insult to readers? That's a little ridiculous. Besides, after all this time it just wouldn't be Yglesias without the typos.

Posted by Ricky B | April 9, 2008 2:29 PM

it didn't have a credible enforcement mechanism. This is now the situation at the UN.

Oh, I don't know, ask 4000+ dead Americans and countless thousands of dead Iraqis how credible it is.

Seems to me the problem is that it lacks a *consistent* enforcement mechanism. Only violators that the world's only superpower has a grudge against get targeted, which makes the whole exercise appear illegitimate.

Then again, if the UN had an enforcement mechanism that was either credible or consistent, the current U.S. administration would find its members in the dock, at a minimum for violating international laws regarding treatment of detainees. So be careful what you wish for, Mr. Powell. (Not that I believe you actually favor the U.S. ever being subject to international law.)

Posted by Anonymous | April 9, 2008 2:29 PM

The Marshall Plan went hand-in-hand with massive programs of repatriation, that helped. Traditionally, "nation-building" = ethnic cleansing.

Posted by Senescent | April 9, 2008 2:37 PM

"Nation-building" is a complete misnomer. No one else ever "builds" a nation. People build their own nations - just as people build their own peace and their own “civil society”. A good first step for us is to get out of the mindset (and stop using the laguage!) that WE are the builders or that some group of outsiders (like the UN) can be the builders.

Post-conflict reconstruction makes no sense if the conflict isn't post. An occupying army can't effectively rebuild the stuff it knocked down. However, any steps by local combatants to end a conflict will already be steps toward a "nation" of some sort. Recognizing this as a reality would another step.

Posted by NGO worker | April 9, 2008 3:05 PM

Some of us global busybodies have even written a paper or two based on the actual experience of trying to do post-conflict reconstruction. Those are sometimes worth reading. Sadly, over the past decade and a half, we’ve had altogether too many opportunities to try out ideas on actual populations. On the whole, I would prefer to have less work.

If we’re being honest, and we seldom are with people outside the profession, whatever good we do is at the margins. Building that school or clinic or kickstarting that microfinance program or providing that wheat or whatever it is that we did are all great things to have done for those individuals we interacted with, but solve larger issues those programs did not.

Political problems have political solutions. Governments have to get involved at some level. Where the UN has succeeded, it has been able to marshal the political will of its members.

Posted by NGO worker | April 9, 2008 3:09 PM

"It's always good for a chuckle when we get suggestions to "use the UN" by the same people who think enforcing its most important Resolutions is "illegal" unless we get a permission slip from people like Jacques Chirac.

The League of Nations failed spectacularly because it didn't have a credible enforcement mechanism. This is now the situation at the UN.

Posted by Robert Powell | April 9, 2008 2:08 PM"

The world was against things like the Iraq War and seemed to think that the disarmament of Iraq had been satisfactory. The lack of an enforcement mechanism was a lack of an ability to prevent the US from unilaterally going to war. Considering that the pro-American Sarkozy is in charge in France right now, you are just throwing up a bunch of conservative masturbation. According to the RAND Corporation, UN peacekeeping efforts actually have a better track record than American nation-building efforts (in fact, the only time we successfully made a state mostly from scratch was in South Korea and even there we relied a lot on Japanese imperialist bureaucrats and Koreans who had worked with the Japanese against their own people). An enforcement strategy that was consistent would simply anger the neocon hyperpolar moment fetishists, so they basically argue against the UN out of bad faith.

Posted by Reality Man | April 10, 2008 2:23 AM

Much as it's probably a waste of time to try having a fact-based argument with someone who makes statements like "The world was against...seemed to think..." etc, this is a pretty important subject, and a few facts couldn't hurt.

For starters, anyone still imagining that the US has been acting as some kind of outlaw should read up on the actual history. Start with UNSCR 678, the one that authorized member states to use "all available means" to reverse the invasion, rape, and annexation of Kuwait, as well as to "restore the area to peace and stability". Then there's all the other Chapter VII Resolutions passed about Iraq afterwards, culminating in the diplomatic masterpiece of 1441 which stated clearly that it represented Iraq's "last opportunity" to comply with all the other Resolutions. Hans Blix's final report made in unequivocally clear that Iraq had not, at which point Chirac decided that "final opportunity" and "serious consequences" translated into "one more chance ad infinitum" and "yet more unenforced Resolutions".

Lord Goldsmith's finding for Parliament (published in The Guardian March 16,2003) is required reading.

Bernard Kouchner, human rights hero founder of Medicines Sans Frontiers, and current French Foreign Minister has been very clear, as he was at the time, that this betrayal made the invasion inevitable because only a united front, as promised in Resolution 1441, could work against Saddam.

Subsequently, the governments of nearly every important democracy in the world (minus a few like France whose leaders had clear conflicts of interest as Saddam collaborators), supported the idea of enforcing the Resolutions.

UN peacekeeping efforts have a good record because they don't do anything difficult. They come after peace has already been established with the permission of the antagonists. Actually making peace in the case of aggressive, genocidal totalitarianisms like Ba'athist Iraq is a different matter, and one made more difficult by the dupes of such abominations posing as "peace advocates". Tell it to the Kurds, the Kuwaitis, the Marsh Arabs, and all the Shi'ites massacred while some people continued to make excuses and run interference for one of the worst dictatorships of the last century. They usually presume to speak for "the whole world".

Posted by Robert Powell | April 10, 2008 8:09 AM

There are certainly those people who argued in the past and still argue that the existence of certain UN resolutions had some sort of causal effect on the U.S.' decision to invade & occupy Iraq.

That is of course ridiculous and not the sort of thing which anyone should demand that others should join in assuming, else they are somehow in favor of genocide and all the rest of the nonsense which follows.

It is definitely true that many of those advocating for the invasion & occupation of Iraq cited those resolutions as a justification.

The latter is an actual avenue of argument; the former indicates a fundamental misplacement of causal mechanisms over public relations and diplomatic maneuvers -- and that is true whether or not you endorse or dispute that certain UN resolutions gave permission for a U.S. invasion & occupation of Iraq.

Posted by El Cid | April 10, 2008 8:43 AM

Robert Powell has a very selective regard for the United Nations.

He has a very high regard for Security Council resolutions. If the US has those on its side, it can do no wrong.

But the opinion of a veto-holding member of that Council? Doesn't count! Illegitimate! Conflict of interest!

Never mind that UN deliberations were strongly influenced by out-and-out lies told by the US government. Never mind the many cynical levers of influence that the US government had and used over the votes of US members.

He also has a very selective understanding of 'conflict of interest'. He does not admit that the US had any. Half the Republican administration had a history as "Saddam collaborators". Saddam Hussein allegedly tried to kill the current US President's father. US oil companies stood to make great gains in the aftermath of Saddam's overthrow. The US itself stood to gain military bases. Dick Cheney's former (and no doubt future) employer likewise stood to reap great rewards. Do none of these count as conflicts of interest?

The UN Security Council served its purpose well, acting as a legitimizing agent for an American war of conquest. Which is bound to be its function as long as the world has only one superpower.

Posted by Anonymous | April 10, 2008 10:07 AM

I believe El Cid knows perfectly well that for many people (including this one), and a large number of responsible democratic governments at the time, Iraq's unprecedented, decade-long defiance of the numerous legitimate Security Council Resolutions (including the 1991 ceasefire) represents the primary legal case for the 2003 invasion. "Some sort of causal effect" indeed.

Of course there is not a shred of evidence to support the popular but risible claim that these Resolutions going back to 1990 were somehow the result of "American lies". Iraq's behavior, the resulting Chapter VII Resolutions, and Iraq's comprehensive violation of them are indisputable matters of historical record.

It's certainly true that important US conflicts of interests were damaging in Iraq during the CPA reign of error, but none of them had anything to do with supplying material support for the Ba'athist regime. France, on the other hand, was a major weapons supplier to Saddam, ranking fourth after former Soviet states and China; and had an enormous stake in dropping the sanctions based on the Total/Fina/Elf deal signed in 2002 in violation of the existing sanctions. I'll defer to current French Foreign Minister Kouchner on the impact of Chirac's duplicity. Suffice to say that the proper authorities in Britain, Spain, Italy, Poland, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Holland, Denmark, and a number of other important democracies agreed with the US rather than with Mr. Chirac on this matter. Many of them were quite explicit in doing so about referencing their appalling national experiences which resulted from the collapse of the League of Nations' efforts to confront other fascist aggressors in the '30's.

It is simply hilarious to accuse the US of a "war of conquest" while attempting to gloss over the very real wars of conquest launched by Iraq which killed well over a million people directly, and led in an unbroken legal and logical line to the 2003 invasion.

Posted by Robert Powell | April 10, 2008 11:40 AM

risible claim that these Resolutions going back to 1990 were somehow the result of "American lies".

The lying, as you well know, was in and around 2003.

It is simply hilarious to accuse the US of a "war of conquest" while attempting to gloss over the very real wars of conquest launched by Iraq

Who's glossing? It's irrelevant. What, he launched a war of conquest so that entitles us to do the same? I'd like my United States to be governed by a higher standard of honorable conduct than that.

Plus, the first of his wars of conquest, against Iran, WE ENCOURAGED, so we can hardly use that as justification for overthrowing him. Nice 'glossing', bub.

His second war of conquest, well, that's unclear -- only April Glaspie knows for sure -- but we rolled it back as we were right to do. The crime of aggression was punished. That should have been the end of it. The bulk of the conditions imposed on the Hussein regime in the 1991 ceasefire were illegitimate. I don't care how many SC members voted for them -- the international community had no business denying Saddam Hussein full sovereignty over Iraq. If it was going to leave him in power -- which it chose to do, though a great mistake in my view -- it had to let him rule. Instead, it hamstrung his ability to rule and gifted the United States a whole set of pre-signed invasion warrants. Whenever its leaders felt like it, they would have ample legal grounds to reinvade, since Saddam could not possibly have functioned as a ruler without violating one or more of the ceasefire terms. Your precious "peace and stability" clause was, and has been used as, a blank check.

So long as there's only one superpower in the world, which picks and chooses the UN resolutions it will enforce and ignore (WMDs and torture for me but not for thee, etc.), international law will be a joke, and no quantity of SC resolutions will change that. Your precious legalistic justifications may allow you to tell yourself that your (I assume) honorable Gulf War service hasn't been squandered and its achievement perverted by cynical, imperialistic leaders, but that doesn't make it not so.

Posted by Anonymous | April 10, 2008 2:21 PM

I'm glad we agree on the most important point--that it was "a great mistake" to leave Saddam Hussein in power in 1991.

On your other points:
--check your dictionary on the definition of "lie". Hint: it's not saying things which you believe to be true even if they're not.

--there's not a shred of evidence to support the basically anti-American propaganda that we "encouraged" Iraq's invasion of Iran, or of Kuwait. Or, incidentally, that we provided any meaningful material support for either.

"International law" as currently understood probably is a joke. This is not good, nor should it continue to be accepted. We need a basic international set of norms that are consistently and effectively enforced. States that behave like Ba'athist Iraq, although Iraq is an extreme example, are test cases.

Posted by Robert Powell | April 10, 2008 6:15 PM

Matt: "helping to keep the peace when the parties to a conflict in a failed state are looking for a way out of the abyss is very different from deliberately smashing up a bunch of eggs and then deciding you need an omelet recipe."

Matt does occasionally do an excellent turn of phrase.

Kudos, Matt.

Powell, on the other hand, remains a lying asshat.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | April 11, 2008 4:26 AM

I believe El Cid knows perfectly well that for many people (including this one), and a large number of responsible democratic governments at the time, Iraq's unprecedented, decade-long defiance of the numerous legitimate Security Council Resolutions (including the 1991 ceasefire) represents the primary legal case for the 2003 invasion. "Some sort of causal effect" indeed.

I believe Robert Powell knows perfectly well the difference between holding that a powerful actor such as the United States made what it and its supporters argued -- wrongly in my view -- was a legal case for the invasion & occupation in Iraq, and any conception that in the abstract UN resolutions or the generalized body of democratic nations required this.

Powell supported the invasion & occupation, and supported the US' making of that case, and he knows also that had the US not chosen to make and push that case, the UN would not have required the invasion and occupation of Iraq, nor would any other democratic nation have pushed such through the security council.

Nor were other democratic nations arguing that had the US not chosen to push through an invasion & occupation of Iraq would the UN, the Security Council, the General Assembly, and other subsections be illegitimate.

Sure, people such as Powell or the U.S. government or various pundits could (and did) make that case, but this is something precisely tied to the power and the central actor role of the U.S., not to the principles in the abstract.

Posted by El Cid | April 11, 2008 5:20 AM

I don't really disagree with you here El Cid. The UN not only would not have required the invasion, etc minus the US and perhaps Britain "pushing", it wouldn't exist at all.

Currently no one is "pushing", and it's business as usual in places like Sudan, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Burma, etc. This is not the world order I would prefer.

There are genuine and legitimate "principals in the abstract" that are worth fighting for. Certainly confronting crimes of the sort perpetrated by Ba'athist Iraq are at the top of the list. In my view we should be using our certainly temporary position of power to encourage the development of reliable institutions with which the international community can do this confronting, but at the end of the day the United States needs such institutions less than most of the rest of the world. That realization seems to have been the main motivation for the support our action in Iraq got from most of the world's important democracies.

Posted by Robert Powell | April 11, 2008 8:35 AM

Currently no one is "pushing", and it's business as usual in places like Sudan, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Burma, etc. This is not the world order I would prefer.

This isn't about the world order anyone would prefer. I would "prefer" a lot of things.

This is about the real world consequences of taking particular actions, often which are justified by high-minded moralizing and or legalistic terms.

Zimbabwe is a really good example, too, as is Sudan. As easy it is to divide the issues between tyrants' boot lickers and heroic moralists committed to democracy, it is simply reality that -- as I would and have argued in the case of Iraq -- that those who would take the presumably heroic interventionist approach often make observable reality worse.

You would argue and have argued that the reality in Iraq is better than it was before the destruction of the previously existing tyrannical state system. I disagree.

But both Zimbabwe and Sudan are at the very precipice of making a horrible, horrible situation far, far worse -- and all parties on the ground in those states recognize that, too. Zimbabwe is teetering at the edge of complete state collapse, and Mugabe himself would very likely be willing to push it over, and no Zimbabwean and none of its neighbors prefer that, either. Would I prefer Robert Mugabe vanish, or even simply succumb to his advanced age? Sure. Is recognition of this reality some sort of cowardice or lack of gumption? Hardly.

Do I have lots of fantasies about how I'd rather things be? Sure. Do I have to go along ignorantly with someone's argument simply because they assert that they are more democratic, more moral, and more legal than I? Of course not.

Posted by El Cid | April 11, 2008 9:01 AM

Mr. Powell, you seem to be a smart guy and a principled guy, so your parsing of the meaning of "lie" seems beneath you. The administration sent its intel agencies on a full-court press to gather evidence to support what it "believe[d] to be true", publicized that evidence as if it were hard fact and did all it could to suppress contrary evidence. This much we know at a minumum. You may stand on your dictionary and refuse to call that a lie, but it is very, very far removed from honesty. Moreover, recent journalism strongly suggests (without being definitive) that the administration also lied about its own intentions -- e.g. its willingness to ever let the 'crisis' end in any manner but war.

I never said "we "encouraged" Iraq's invasion of Iran" -- I said we encouraged the war, i.e. its continuation. Iraq got economic aid, it got weapons, it got diplomatic recognition and it got the U.S. Navy fighting on its side directly against Iranian forces on more than one occasion. Don Rumsfeld did not go to Baghdad for his health. The Reagan adminstration made a formal decision not to let Iraq lose the war. It encouraged Saddam to keep fighting a war which he had started. All this means is that the U.S. has no right to hold up Saddam Hussein's history of making war on his neighbors as grounds for deposing him. (I recognize, though, that that's not the sum total of the legal case against him which you habitually cite -- but it is a disengenuous part of it.)

(And yes, the evidence for Kuwait conspiracy theories always seemed thin to me. I'm not fully up on the current state of evidence about that.)

I basically agree with you that:

We need a basic international set of norms that are consistently and effectively enforced.

and that

we should be using our certainly temporary position of power to encourage the development of reliable institutions with which the international community can do this confronting

But I see the Iraq War as a step backward in that regard, not a step forward. Iraq was not a hard test case, it was the easiest of easy cases. Iraq was a very bad actor, and already greatly weakened, and already isolated. There was never any chance that anyone was ever going to come to its defense beyond what amounted to empty posturing, and it could barely even defend itself. Iraq was Panama or Granada on a larger scale.

If the US wants to have any credibility as a leader in the work of building the kinds of institutions and norms you describe, it needs to take on the hard cases -- cases involving its friends -- and not just those cases involving regimes it's already hostile to, or which happen to sit on oil reserves, or which are in regions where it wants more military bases. And it needs to actually show respect and deference to a range of international institutions -- Security Council vetoes, conventions against torture, ABM treaties, non-proliferation rules, etc. etc. -- and not just the ones which are convenient to its capacity to project power unilaterally.

Basically, it's the old mantra -- the greater the power, the greater the responsibility. Instead the Bush Administation's motto seems to be 'the greater our power, the less accountability we need to show either domestically or internationally'.

When the world's only superpower rains its wrath down on a bad actor, the world needs to be assured that it's doing the right thing for the right reasons. (Granting for the moment that deposing Saddam was the 'right thing' in the sense of legally defensible.) Transparently, though, the Bush administration did the 'right thing' for the wrong reasons. This has robbed the Iraq War of its capacity to represent good internationalist precedent.

Posted by Anonymous | April 11, 2008 10:14 AM

El Cid:
The "better off?" question is one that needs to be asked, and the answer should as much as possible come from quantifiable data and from Iraqis themselves.

Casualty numbers are notoriously politicized and unreliable, but looking at all the studies as I have tried to do it seems safe to say that Saddam's regime was far more destructive of human life than the invasion, most likely by a factor of ten or more even if we get all the blame for the killings since 2003, by far the majority of which were not done by us. Ditto for the effect on Iraq's infrastructure. Nutrition in Iraq is dramatically better across the board, infant mortality is way down, and the average income of Iraqis is almost 500% greater than in 2003. There is more freedom of the press and politics than in any other Arab state as opposed to one of the world's most suffocating police states. Moreover, the trend lines are up while under Saddam things were only likely to get worse, and maybe much worse.

It's certainly possible to find Sunnis who think things were better under Saddam, and much of the media seems to have made an effort to do so. But for the more than 80% of Iraqis who aren't Sunni, and didn't benefit directly from Iraq's dictatorship, it's not even close. Most of the Iraqis I've heard from on this consider the question itself to be a sort of offensive joke told by ignorant foreigners.

I don't make any attempt to minimize the damage done by American mistakes, which has been catastrophic. Not least is the damage done to the idea that there really ought to be enforceable norms about invading the neighbors, carrying out genocidal repressions at home, developing and using wmd's, etc as Iraq surely did to an extent unmatched by any contemporary state. But the fact remains that if a state with a record like Iraq's, which was objectively and quantifiably unprecedented in the history of the UN, is able to flout the most serious Resolutions of the Security Council, there is just no hope at all for a serious system of international law. I still think we need one, and it won't happen without someone "pushing".

Anonymous:
You seem pretty smart and principled yourself, but I'm afraid that there's just no evidence to support the destructive assertion that this war was about "lies". The Bush people certainly did everything they could to make the case for a policy they sincerely believed to be in the nation's best interest, as all administrations do. They created a lot of confusion and said a lot of stupid things--I'm on record complaining about it at the time. But there's no record of FDR saying that Charles Lindberg might have some good points about the Nazis, or that lots of people thought the trade restrictions on Japan were provocative and could lead to war, either. It's not the job of leaders to make the case for people they think are wrong. And I would just point out that those weren't "its intelligence agencies". Those were OUR intelligence agencies, and the consensus was overwhelming. When the Director of the CIA (a Clinton appointee) tells you it's a "slam dunk", no president imaginable is going to qualify that with "but there are a few cranks in the back room with unproven doubts".

One of the common mistakes here is turning reality on its head and insisting that it was somehow the responsibility of the international community to prove the negative on wmd's in a police state the size of Texas. In fact, it was the specific responsibility of Iraq to prove that it had disarmed "pro-actively and transparently", and Hans Blix made it expressly plain in his last report that Iraq had not done so in the "final opportunity" provided by Resolution 1441. The obvious fact is that Saddam Hussein could have pulled the plug on the invasion almost up to the last minute by simply complying with his legally binding obligations. Lot's of people were furious with Bush at the time for allowing Saddam such an easy escape route.

This is getting too long, and I apologize for wordiness. You significantly exaggerate the amount of encouragement we provided to Iraq after its invasion of Iran, and mis-state my position on it as a legal ground for our second invasion, but let's save it for another time. Suffice to say that I agree that the Iraq War, at least the part of it that's played out since the first invasion, has been a step backward, if probably not for all the same reasons you have.

Posted by Robert Powell | April 11, 2008 12:41 PM

Fair enough, Mr. Powell. If I were to continue to quibble, my starting points would be your phrases "sincerely believed" (i.e. re. whether the WMD threat was real) and "no president imaginable". Imaginable presidents gather facts before determining policy, not after. And as I've said, I don't believe the "legally binding obligations" in question were in fact legitimate (nor that complying with them would have satisfied the Bush administration in any case). But I'm glad to approach at least some sort of common ground with you on the larger issue. Stimulating stuff, if also dispiriting.

Posted by Anonymous | April 11, 2008 3:46 PM