Surge-go-Round

David Brooks writes about surge opponents:

They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

Now I think that captures an important part of the contortions around the debate. But if you really want to be intellectually honest about the surge debate, the essence of the matter is that the whole question of "working" or "not working" is avoiding the bigger debate. To its proponents, the surge is working so well that it sets the stage for years and years of further American military engagement in Iraq. And it's true -- the security gains of the past year do make the Bush/McCain strategy of perpetual military entanglement in Iraq look a lot more viable than it looked a year ago. But it's also true that the security gains of the past year make a strategy of leaving Iraq look a lot more viable than it looked a year ago.

Basically, when Iraq was hellishly violent, all possibly strategies seemed likely to lead to more hellish violence. The cliché was to start every discussion of Iraq by saying "there are no good options, but..." Now insofar as things look better, all options really do look better as a consequence.

Comments

since political "progress" was the official goal of the surge, it has failed, and i have no idea (well, ok, that's rhetorical, i have a very good idea) why brooks wants to play these games....

however, if brooks thinks we've won, that's fine: i agree, so yes, i'm ready to skip to the let's go home part.

Posted by howard | June 24, 2008 5:38 PM

so let's be honest then. since the anti-war folk have been bashing the war proponents for 5 years now, at least we can admit that even teh option of pulling out is better now that the surge has taken place. the US had no leverage in the region, so diplomacy would've been useless pre-surge. now obama's plan for negotiating with Iran actually can work, and we actually can leave a functioning state behind when we draw down.

Posted by jamie | June 24, 2008 5:56 PM

Well, we just had more violence in Iraq today. The surge may be working somewhat, but even in reducing violence it's far from perfect.

And of course, political progress was the goal, and that hasn't happened so much.

Brooks is a deceiver, just like the whole Republican elite who took us to war and wants us to remain there forever. Brooks is also a cheerleader for a war with Iran.

Posted by cm | June 24, 2008 5:57 PM

Why does this even matter?

The Iraq war was a terrible idea in the first place, and launched under largely false pretenses.

War supporters whining about how people don't appreciate the surge is like someone who comes to your house, proceeds to defecate messily all over your fine carpet, then expects praise because they managed to clean up a little bit of their own rancid shit.

Posted by Hlem | June 24, 2008 6:01 PM

The correct name of the Surge is "Hire and Hide." Hire is what we did when we put the tens of thousands of former Sunni enemies on our payroll requiring them to do nothing for their stipend as long as they don't attack us. We will have to keep paying them forever to maintain the peace. Ironically, the same people who resent people being on welfare at home don't seem to mind when it comes to Iraq. Go figure.

Hide suggests the military plans. The basic idea is to do things with overwhelming force so that our casualties are kept to a minimum so that the people at home will pay less attention to the war. It has worked brilliantly since the networks give the war less and less coverage each week especially as the economy tanks. Meanwhile the forces in Iraq stay on the bases only coming out in overwhelming force.

The Surge hasn't worked. No American soldier is safe outside his barracks. Iraq is still an unfriendly and unstable country today after five plus years. The safety for Westerners is the same as it was a year ago. Sure violence among Iraqis is down but much of the violence was related to ethnic cleansing which had pretty much ended as the Surge began.

As for Brooks's statement that the "the U.S. forces can quickly come home" that is nonsense. If that were the case, why are we seeking the fifty to sixty permanent basis in Iraq. We'll be there under Obama or McCain for the next decade.

I really cannot believe Matt buys into the Surge is Working bit. Carl Rove said: "if you assert something over and over again it will be accepted as true by most people." I guess he is right.

Posted by Llyonnoc | June 24, 2008 6:01 PM

"But it's also true that the security gains of the past year make a strategy of leaving Iraq look a lot more viable than it looked a year ago."

Then why were in favor of leaving a year ago if staying an extra year made leaving "a lot more viable?" Could it be that you were wrong a year ago about the surge? Could it be that you are wrong again (not to mention being wrong to favor the initial invasion)?

Some other interesting brooks quotes:

"And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility."

Well I have no doubt Matt will continue to be "cocksure" despite being incorrect about staying in Iraq for the last year.

and the following paragraph

"But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today."

The question is can Matt be honest or is he so invested in "the War is completely lost" narative that he can't admit he was wrong.

"the security gains of the past year do make the Bush/McCain strategy of perpetual military entanglement in Iraq"

This is a silly canard that makes you just look petty (the 100 year remark was misinterpreted as you yourself have admitted more than once). No one want's to stay in Iraq perpetually and you know we would leave in an instant if Iraq were stable.

Your analysis for the last year that any continuing presence of US troops makes things worse was simply wrong so you have to exagerate to the maximum extent possible your political opponent's views to make them seem equally wrong.

Shouldn't the test for leaving be the time when Iraq is stable enough that it won't backslide into chaos or be rulled as a puppet state by Iran ala Syria. Granted that time maybe different for different presidents, but as one Democratic presidential candidate named Barak Obama once said when it was politically expedient, there shouldn't be arbitrary time tables.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kFrFIFizkU&eurl=http://cobb.typepad.com/

Posted by Dave | June 24, 2008 6:03 PM

Obviously you don’t shy away from name-calling. You called David Brooks an “elitist fuckhead…”

Right, well he is…

Posted by ed | June 24, 2008 6:03 PM

It's as was predicted over a year ago. For the umpteenth time, Iraq apologists wish to move the goalposts closer so they can somehow declare "success". All those benchmarks Bush announced and that the GAO just said haven't been met no longer matter. There's less violence so we win.

Right now, the GOP is simply looking for a metric of success that can be met. The fact that we've met virtually none of the previous tougher metrics doesn't matter. And actually, success or failure don't really matter. The outcome is always "stay".

Kinda' reminds me of the GOP view on tax cuts. No matter what's happening in the economy, tax cuts are the answer.

Posted by LFC | June 24, 2008 6:06 PM

You can't talk about surge without talking about the ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods; the 2-4 million refugees; the militias now on our payroll NOT to fight us.

Fact is that the violence would have tapered off regardless due to the sectoring off of the major religious/political factions.

All it will take is for Al Sadr to drop the green flag.

Posted by El Tiburon | June 24, 2008 6:13 PM

Dave said... No one want's to stay in Iraq perpetually and you know we would leave in an instant if Iraq were stable.

Then why did Bush ask for nearly 60 permanent bases?

Why did McCain say 100 years, comparing it to Korea and Germany, both of which are quite stable? If we'd leave in an instant if it was stable, then why compare it to those other stable countries?

Dave, you are projecting your own desires onto Bush and McCain. The fact is that they definitely want to stay in Iraq perpetually, as their words and deeds have shown. Just look at PNAC's position on it. A permanent base of strength in the Middle East WAS the point of the invasion.

If you think a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq is a good idea, McCain is your guy.

Posted by LFC | June 24, 2008 6:26 PM

Here's a concept: why don't you Americans put a million troops in Iraq? I bet violence would be at an all-time low. And only a left-wing radical would disagree that's a winning strategy.

You know, assuming a "winning strategy" doesn't include meaningful political progress or anything of that nature ;)

Posted by Patrick | June 24, 2008 6:36 PM

Dave: "Shouldn't the test for leaving be the time when Iraq is stable enough that it won't backslide into chaos or be rulled as a puppet state by Iran ala Syria."

First, Syria is not a puppet state of Iran. They have allied with Iran because both of them are the targeted enemies of Israel.

Second, how do you tell when Iraq is stable enough so that it won't collapse later? What metric can be used to establish this?

What is presently happening is the Iraqi factions are organizing around the provincial elections this fall and the parliamentary elections next year.

The likelihood is that the existing government will either be swept away in those elections or at the very least a new coalition government will be formed. If the Sunnis and the Sadrists gain as much as expected, that might actually lead to some stability. The Iranians and Sistani will support any government that allows the Shia to continue to be the main political force in the country. The Sunnis may or may not go along with that - it depends on how much say they DO get in the government (which right now, is almost none.)

The problem for Bush and Cheney and the neocons is that any Iraqi nationalist government is going to demand a withdrawal timetable as their first act - and they're going to want it to be along the lines of six to 18 months, no longer. And they're going to want no permanent bases, no attacking Iran from Iraqi soil, no partitioning of the country, and no giving away oil to the US oil companies.

All of which the neocons cannot and will not agree to.

At that point, things will come to a head and the US will be driver out of Iraq by an insurgency supported by everybody.

However, if Bush attacks Iran this year, all this will be moot. The Iraqi Shia will support Iran, and the US will be driven out of Iraq within ninety days or destroyed in not much more time.

How anybody can say the Surge is a "win" with
these likely outcomes is rather bizarre.

This was the situation last year and this is the situation this year. Nothing fundamentally has changed, surge or no surge.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | June 24, 2008 6:41 PM

Pay off the insurgents and the murderers of Amaeicans.

Build walls around the neighborhoods.

Lay seize on the city with thousands of troops all around all the time.

Yeah that will work.

Posted by gregor | June 24, 2008 6:57 PM

dave, at risk of stating the obvious very slowly, the "test" is whether the benefits of maintaining the status quo until some nebulous future state of serenity are in any way commensurate with the costs.

they are not.

test complete.

Posted by howard | June 24, 2008 7:05 PM

One week ago today, fifty people were killed by a carbomb.

In the last forty-eight hours, some fifty more have been killed by acts of political violence.

I don't think we can talk about "hellish" in the past tense.

Posted by Jim | June 24, 2008 7:06 PM

Do you all enjoy proving Brooks' point?

Simply, some of you are not persuadable. It is too threatening to your egos, your relationships, your paper trails, perhaps even your jobs. Fine. We'll stop trying. And you're not going to be part of debates like this anymore. You'll be over at the children's table where you can amuse yourselves by finding funny new names for people you don't like. "Elitist fuckhead" was hilarious!

Posted by Vail Beach | June 24, 2008 7:13 PM

Brooks: Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress.

Exactly what political progress is Brooks talking about? And

In fact, when it comes to Iraq, Bush was at his worst when he was humbly deferring to the generals and at his best when he was arrogantly overruling them

Please--when it comes to Iraq, Bush was at his worst in pushing for invasion under false pretenses.

Posted by RSA | June 24, 2008 7:26 PM

The elephant in the room is that Americans are simply tired of the war. All the high level talk about strategic goals and tactical consideration and long term geopolitical agendas are irrelevant in the light of that simple, single point.

Americans no longer believe that the war is worth fighting and they want our troops to come home.

At this point it doesn't matter to most people whether or not the surge is working. It doesn't matter whether or not Maliki's government can get their act together. Nor do any of the other benchmarks that are put forth.

People just want it to be over.

Unless McCain and the GOP can convince people that there's a very, very good reason to stay, most people are simply going to tune them out, and appeals to the idea that we can still win the war (by whatever definition) are going to fall on deaf ears. Unfortunately, McCain seems to think that the promise of victory is the justification for staying and he is utterly failing to read the public's mood on this issue.

Posted by Andrew Lias | June 24, 2008 7:26 PM

I think this June 2007 NY Times article describing a new strategy of arming Sunni opponents of al Qaeda is worth looking at again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/world/middleeast/11iraq.html

One commander who attended the meeting said that despite the risks in arming groups that have until now fought against the Americans, the potential gains against Al Qaeda were too great to be missed. He said the strategy held out the prospect of finally driving a wedge between two wings of the Sunni insurgency that had previously worked in a devastating alliance — die-hard loyalists of Saddam Hussein’s formerly dominant Baath Party, and Islamic militants belonging to a constellation of groups linked to Al Qaeda.

Even if only partly successful, the officer said, the strategy could do as much or more to stabilize Iraq, and to speed American troops on their way home, as the increase in troops ordered by President Bush late last year, which has thrown nearly 30,000 additional American troops into the war but failed so far to fulfill the aim of bringing enhanced stability to Baghdad.

So, adding more military force failed. Then we tried negotiating with our enemies. That worked better. I am indeed surprised that violence fell. But there's some very dovish lessons to be found in the manner by which violence fell. It's not clear that the surge was actually necessary for this fall.

Still, Brooks is right about one thing. Predicting what happens in wars is hard. The fact that everyone across the spectrum has been wrong at some point or another is something we should take into account when making decisions about future wars. Nobody can predict what happens. They're just fundamentally chaotic. The only correct answer to the question "what will happen if we send troops into combat inside country X" is "nobody knows!". Sending troops into battle is just an inherently dangerous act of uncertain pay off. That is the key lesson to take home from Iraq, no matter what happens from here on.

Posted by Consumatopia | June 24, 2008 7:28 PM

Y'know, Vail, in most cases, patronizing condescension isn't a very persuasive strategy, but you pull it off so well that I was suddenly converted! Well done!

Which side of the argument are you on, by the way? I couldn't figure it out by reading your comment.

Posted by James Gary | June 24, 2008 7:29 PM

No one want's to stay in Iraq perpetually and you know we would leave in an instant if Iraq were stable.

Uh huh. Those on-base car dealerships are obviously designed to shutter after the three-year leases are done.

Of course, BoBo watches (and stars in) the media wankfests that Lara Logan would sooner shoot herself than watch.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | June 24, 2008 7:44 PM

There's no point in even acknowledging Brooks's arguments on this score, given the dialectical contortions of war supporters until now. If anything, the anti-war side comes across as most honest insofar as they're acknowledging that the situation is better. I can't think of any war supporters who haven't said that it was going swimmingly the whole damn time. They never acknowledged any difficulties except in the past tense to justify current improvements.

Posted by Justin JJ | June 24, 2008 7:49 PM

Ask Brooks to say the 2 little words: oil & empire.

Until he admits the war is about oil & empire, he's just a swine. (Well, actually, there's not much chance of him turning into a Not Swine so he's better off just pulling everyone's leg.)

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 24, 2008 8:41 PM

And you're not going to be part of debates like this anymore. You'll be over at the children's table where you can amuse yourselves by finding funny new names for people you don't like.

so.... what point did you think you were making?

Posted by Jim | June 24, 2008 8:41 PM

My point was that, contrary to what Justin JJ said, it has been an absurd struggle to get war opponents and much of the media to acknowledge that "the situation is better" in Iraq, until it became so blindingly obvious that you started to see begrudging acknowledgements. I suspect Brooks' column was seen by many left commentators is rubbing salt in the wound, hence the name-calling. At root, the war's opponents fear being proven wrong by history, and they want to make damn sure that doesn't happen. To give that viewpoint its due, I suppose it stems from not wanting future presidents to be tempted into following Bush's example.

But I guess I'm just sick of pretending to have policy debates with people who think they're entitled to control the narrative by omitting vital facts, who base their analysis on emotion, partisanship and a kind of adolescent scorn for experts, journalists and policymakers who present information they don't want to acknowledge (e.g. the daily "wanker" awards, the MoveOn Petreaus ad). You don't like the war. You're "sick of it." Fine. I totally understand. But in a debate, there has to be at least a chance to persuade you that you're wrong, using facts and reason. Instead, when the going gets tough, the namecalling starts. Who needs it?

As to "where I stand." I was for the war at the time it started. I believed Hussein posed an unacceptable threat. I don't think there's any evidence that I was "lied to" before forming this conclusion, except perhaps by Hussein himself. I think Bush/Rumsfeld/Brener/Franks completely screwed up the post-invasion occupation, which made the war a much longer, low-percentage slog than it had to be. However, if Hussein had never been deposed and had lived until he died of old age, the same "civil war" conditions would have prevailed, and the US would have had little choice but to intervene, under circumstances far less favorable than the ones we see now. But so long as you had the arrogant Rumsfeld mindset in charge of the war, I despaired of making any progress. However, I thought the surge made sense from the first I heard of it, and am glad Bush went ahead with it, despite the widespread and understandable skepticism his leadership had by then engendered. And: I happen to think the surge's success does mean we will be able to start reducing our presence in Iraq far sooner than anyone could have thought. We shouldn't stay one minute longer than we have to. I worry about Obama feeling he's committed to a rigid schedule; but really, I don't worry that much. When he's in office, which I expect, he'll make judgments based on the facts as they exist at the time. Perhaps he'll be able to withdraw even faster! But I trust him to do the right thing, either way.

Posted by Vail Beach | June 24, 2008 9:10 PM

Vail: How many of the administration's benchmarks has the Iraqi government met?

Posted by Dan | June 24, 2008 9:16 PM

My point was that, contrary to what Justin JJ said, it has been an absurd struggle to get war opponents and much of the media to acknowledge that "the situation is better" in Iraq, until it became so blindingly obvious that you started to see begrudging acknowledgements. I suspect Brooks' column was seen by many left commentators is rubbing salt in the wound, hence the name-calling. At root, the war's opponents fear being proven wrong by history, and they want to make damn sure that doesn't happen.

Exactly. When you've committed your soul to the proposition that the War in Iraq was wrong, is wrong, and always will be wrong as completely as have the more rabid anti-war lefties, you're going to do everything you possibly can to deny, obfuscate or otherwise refuse to confront evidence that you may be wrong. It's classic cognitive dissonance.

Any sign of good news in Iraq, any sign that Bush's decision to invade may be vindicated, is intolerable to the anti-war fanatics. That's why they so desperately wish and hope for more violence, more disarray, more suffering. Better that people continue to suffer and die than that George Bush turn out to be right. That's the insane mentality of the anti-war fanatics.

Posted by Mixner | June 24, 2008 9:38 PM

...the situation is better..

Everyone here would agree with the statement above.

The turd, having been polished, is more shiny.

Posted by gregor | June 24, 2008 9:43 PM

At root, the war's opponents fear being proven wrong by history, and they want to make damn sure that doesn't happen.

You still don't get it, Vail, and this is a form of character assassination against the anti-war faction. It's not some venal fear of being proven wrong. It's that the pro-war crowd continually complained about the 'liberal media' refusing to acknowledge progress; it's the number of Friedman units we've been through, the number of corners we've turned. It's the outright denial by the Bush Administration and its surrogates that anything was going badly. It's the fact that we don't trust the pro-war crowd's appraisal of the situation because they've shown not one wit of honesty. Call it lies or call it mistakes, the origin of war was in deception, and the incompetence of the occupation was never called as such until Petraeus started doing something right.

However, if Hussein had never been deposed and had lived until he died of old age, the same "civil war" conditions would have prevailed, and the US would have had little choice but to intervene, under circumstances far less favorable than the ones we see now.

Why would the U.S. have little choice but to intervene in a civil war in a foreign country that's in turmoil because of a dictator's rule? Why, when the pro-war crowd of today was the anti-war crowd of yesterday when the U.S. was intervening in Somalia and Bosnia? Why, when the U.S. didn't intervene in Rwanda or Darfur?

Posted by Justin JJ | June 24, 2008 9:45 PM

When I read reports about how the Taliban are regrouping in Afghanistan, I feel a lot better thinking about the current situation in Iraq! The Bush Administration's eight year long assault on security and prosperity has liberated us all from high expectations, I guess.

Posted by sweaty guy | June 24, 2008 9:51 PM

My point was that, contrary to what Justin JJ said, it has been an absurd struggle to get war opponents and much of the media to acknowledge that "the situation is better" in Iraq, until it became so blindingly obvious that you started to see begrudging acknowledgements.

Part of this is because it actually took a while for things to get better. It's less a matter of war opponents taking too long to say things were getting better as war lovers saying trying to turn the corner too fast. Violence was high as summer began and was only just barely improving when Petreaus gave his fall '07 testimony. Fatality rates in Iraq have been volatile throughout occupation, so it's unfair to blame war opponents for waiting until the data was in.

But in a debate, there has to be at least a chance to persuade you that you're wrong, using facts and reason.

It's also worth noting that the bar for war or surge defenders to pass is not just that things got better because of the surge (and the argument that surge was the only or best way to reduce violence is not yet won), but that things got so much better that it was worth the opportunity cost. More than a thousand lives lost and hundreds of billions of dollars spent since the surge began. I don't think any likely outcome in Iraq is worth that. That's what "sick of the war" means--not just sick of hearing about it, but no longer convinced that Iraq is worth sacrificing blood and treasure. The particular facts and reason you plan to cite won't be sufficient to convince me, because they're facts and reasons within Iraq, and I don't think Iraq is important. It is not resentment that compels me to ignore the facts within Iraq--rather, it is resentment that compels war proponents to obsess themselves with justifying the sunk costs we have spent in Iraq.

I believed Hussein posed an unacceptable threat. I don't think there's any evidence that I was "lied to" before forming this conclusion, except perhaps by Hussein himself

You'd better find some, because otherwise that was a very silly thing to believe. Even at the time, it was clear that Hussein had no weapons that were worth invading immediately to halt rather than waiting for inspections to continue.

As to "where I stand." I was for the war at the time it started. I believed Hussein posed an unacceptable threat. I don't think there's any evidence that I was "lied to" before forming this conclusion, except perhaps by Hussein himself. I think Bush/Rumsfeld/Brener/Franks completely screwed up the post-invasion occupation, which made the war a much longer, low-percentage slog than it had to be. However, if Hussein had never been deposed and had lived until he died of old age, the same "civil war" conditions would have prevailed, and the US would have had little choice but to intervene, under circumstances far less favorable than the ones we see now.

You think all that, huh?

However, I thought the surge made sense from the first I heard of it, and am glad Bush went ahead with it, despite the widespread and understandable skepticism his leadership had by then engendered.

Except it didn't make and sense and didn't work until we started making "enemy of my enemy" deals with Sunni insurgents in the summer--an entirely separate decision from the surge.

Posted by Consumatopia | June 24, 2008 9:55 PM

Sorry, but whatever dishonesty opponents of the war may attribute to Bush Adminsitration "surrogates," that doesn't excuse their own dishonesty in failing to acknowledge the benefits of the surge. Brooks has it exactly right.

Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator with a 20-year record of mass murder and aggression in an unstable part of the world. The United States has a vital national interest in the stability of that region. Saddam had already invaded two of Iraq's neighboring countries, provoking two major wars with hundreds of thousands of casualties. He had threatened to invade others, and had engaged in numerous other acts of aggression in the region. He had murdered tens of thousands of his own people. His actions had provoked sanctions by the Clinton Administration that are estimated to have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Whether or not the invasion was justified on balance, the idea that there was a clearly superior alternative policy for dealing with Saddam is ridiculous. There were no good alternatives to invasion, just a set of arguably worse ones.

Posted by Mixner | June 24, 2008 10:04 PM

Mixner, Obviously, the Clinton strategy had contained Hussein for eight years, at little comparative cost to the U.S. In comparison, the Bush strategy has been a disaster.

That you are still arguing these points illustrates the travesty of Brooks' column, and its upside-down nature. Just who is in denial about the invasion of Iraq?

Posted by putnam | June 24, 2008 11:41 PM

I, like Andrew Sullivan, originally supported the invasion. I have since owned up to having been grossly mislead, poorly researched and informed and have often regretted my decision. I do however recognize the undeniable positive short term benefits of the surge.
It is Brooks last paragraph that disturbs me most:

"Life is complicated. The reason we have democracy is that no one side is right all the time. The only people who are dangerous are those who can’t admit, even to themselves, that obvious fact."

The two people who are dangerous according to his definition are the two that have never wavered: BUSH AND CHENEY.

They are, in their own minds, right even when they are wrong. They is not a paradox; they are certifiably dangerous.

Posted by Perry Rubenstein | June 24, 2008 11:53 PM

I, like Andrew Sullivan, originally supported the invasion. I have since owned up to having been grossly mislead, poorly researched and informed and have often regretted my decision. I do however recognize the undeniable positive short term benefits of the surge.
It is Brooks last paragraph that disturbs me most:

"Life is complicated. The reason we have democracy is that no one side is right all the time. The only people who are dangerous are those who can’t admit, even to themselves, that obvious fact."

The two people who are dangerous according to his definition are the two that have never wavered: BUSH AND CHENEY.

They are, in their own minds, right even when they are wrong. They is not a paradox; they are certifiably dangerous.

Posted by Perry Rubenstein | June 24, 2008 11:54 PM

Mixner's post is so full of lies and misinformation it is hard to know where to start. But I love the bit about how Clinton started the sanctions (that would be a reasonable interpretation of "His actions had provoked sanctions by the Clinton Administration") in 1990 - two years before Clinton's election.

So, how do you explain your idiocy Mixner? If you can't even get basic facts right, why the fuck should we trust you to understand the policy options?

And, contra morons like you, Will Allen, and the ever stupid Thomas, it turns out that Iraq was far more stable under Hussein than it is under the iron boot of their current unelected dictator - George W. Bush.

I realize warmongering assholes like Mixner don't like to hear George Bush described honestly and think that it is provocative to point out the terrorist attack on Baghdad on March 19, 2003, or the hundreds of thousands of dead because of George W. Bush's assault on the people of Iraq, but that's because they are only interested in stealing the resources from the Iraqi people.

Yes, there were options, but none of those involved Halliburton getting a raft of no-bid contracts and the slaughter of Iraqis so I can see why Mixner doesn't understand them.

How many Iraqis died in car-bombs in the average year under Saddam Hussein? How many under George W. Bush? Which leader is therefore a better steward of Iraqi lives? How much electricity did Saddam Hussein provide? How about George Bush?

In the decade between 1992 and 2002, how many nations did Saddam Hussein invade? In the 8 years of his presidency, how many has George W. Bush?

Honestly Mixner, there really is no nice way to say this, but you are an idiot and a supporter of mass murder.

Posted by Not as stupid as Will Allen | June 24, 2008 11:59 PM

All this time I thought Mixner just showed up to be an idiot about transit issues, turns out he can be equally full of shit when talking about the war.

Posted by eric k | June 25, 2008 12:24 AM

Matthew Yglesias: Listen, please.

You are fuc*ing up the debate by accepting the frame that the surge "worked" - and the most important objection is notpolitical progress.

Violence is **down**. Well, hurrah. I'm not afraid to admit that, and neither is any liberal. But violence being down is NOT the equivalent of "winning" or the surge "working". "Things got somewhat better" should not be used as a club to beat war skeptics and withdrawal advocates, because violence is still way higher than in any kind of seminormal state, and it's not going to get fully better until we leave.

Every time you fail to make the point that Iraq is still a violent, dangerous, unsafe, place full of terrorists and insurgents pulling off attacks every single effing day, you perpetuate this bs meme - being blasted, if you hadn't noticed, 24/7 from every pair of lips - when you don't make that point, it is lost.

There is, being painted a whitewashed picture of Iraq's current conditions. Last month, the Greatest Month of US Soldiers Dying Ever, more soldiers died than in the entire Blackhawk Down incident.

We have to fight these lazy and low standards of factual accuracy and perceptual self-delusion being put out by David Brooks - not by tangential arguments, but by going after the main premise. Iraq is still way over par for violent attacks: the surge **did not work**!

How the hell did 250 US soldiers dying a year become "sustainable" because it isn't 1000?

Posted by glasnost | June 25, 2008 12:26 AM

putnam,

Mixner, Obviously, the Clinton strategy had contained Hussein for eight years, at little comparative cost to the U.S.

Not only is this not "obvious," there is no reason to believe it's true. Saddam was a continued source of aggression and instability throughout the 1990s. He threatened Kuwait again in 1994. He attacked Irbil in 1996, prompting Operation Desert Fox in 1998. He tried to move Iraqi ground forces to the Golan in 2000 to provoke a military confrontation with Israel--which, of course, he had previously attacked with missiles. And he continued his reign of terror over the Iraqi people. There is no indication that this would have changed had we not invaded. In fact, Saddam was grooming his equally thuggish sons to eventually take over from him.

As for the supposed "containment" policy of sanctions, the U.N. estimated that it had killed 500,000 iraqi children just by the middle of the 1990s. And countless more older people. Thanks to the sanctions, the nation was disintegrating towards third-world status. This is supposed to be a superior alternative to invasion?

Posted by Mixner | June 25, 2008 12:30 AM

Here's what President Bush said the surge would accomplish, with updates:

"To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November." That didn't happen. The Iraqi government is taking control of Anbar Province this week. It'll be the 10th province out of 18 that the Iraqi government has taken responsible for--but the first Sunni-controlled one, and the Kurdish and Shiite provinces were previously run by militias that were folded into the government. Security gains in Sunni areas are largely due to co-opting insurgents into the Sons of Iraq. The US military pays the 103,000 overwhelmingly Sunni members $300 a month, but fewer than 17,000 Sons of Iraq members have joined Iraq's security forces and 6,100 more have been approved, leaving around 80,000 unemployed armed men (again?) when the money runs out.

"To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis." That didn't happen. Talks are resuming this week. Meanwhile the Iraqi government is about to sign no-bid contracts with several U.S. and European energy companies. "We fear that any such agreements signed by Iraq's Hydrocarbon Ministry without an equitable revenue sharing agreement in place would simply add more fuel to Iraq's civil war."

"To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs." That didn't happen. Iraq spent a little over half of the $10 billion allocated in 2007. In 2005 the Iraqi government estimated the total cost of reconstructing Iraq at $200 billion.

"To empower local leaders, Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year." That didn't happen. Provincial elections are scheduled for October 2008, but could be delayed due to disputes over election law.

"And to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation's political life, the government will reform de-Baathification laws..." That happened, kind of. The re-Baathification law passed in January but the law isn't being implemented.

"...and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution." That didn't happen either, but it might happen in July.

Posted by kirkaracha | June 25, 2008 12:46 AM

Colin Powell, February 24, 2001: "He [Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."

Condoleezza Rice, April 2001: "Saddam does not control the northern part of the country...We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."

Posted by kirkaracha | June 25, 2008 12:52 AM

One of the most fundamentally dishonest arguments you see from warmongering morons like Mixner is this bullshit "humanitarian" case for assaulting the innocent people of Iraq.

It's almost as if they really think we are so stupid as to believe that Iraqis with fewer doctors, fewer medical facilities, more instability, and (it turns out that this is important too) less electricity are somehow better off because "well at least they don't have sanctions."

How do you imagine this works Mixner?

Posted by Not As Stupid As Will Allen | June 25, 2008 1:04 AM

Sorry, this article is insane. 20 percent of the population of Iraq are refugees, and they're not coming home. The surge is a total potemkin village.

I'm serious, the political discussion in this country is totally retarded.

Posted by Aaron | June 25, 2008 1:16 AM

Fareed Zakaria is interpreting our (apparent) gains the same way as Matt -- as a golden opportunity to pull out with a minimum of bloodshed. But there are also those little remaining imponderables:

(1) The October elections in Iraq. Al-Sadr is still very popular, and the biggest reason for the current drop in violence is that -- at the moment -- his forces are under orders not to fight. What if he wins -- or if al-Maliki gets caught trying to rig the outcome? (An article a few days ago reported that al-Maliki is now publicly talking about the need to delay the election for "operational reasons". Till after the American election, maybe?)

(2) The fact that our dear new friends, the Iraqi Sunnis, would have given al-Qaeda the boot from Iraq in any case, having discovered that they can't stand them (and they would have had little difficulty doing so WITHOUT our help; the Pentagon itself reports that only 7% of the Iraqi Sunni insurgents it's arrested are a-Q). With the connivance of the Bush Administration -- which desperately needed the a-Q boogeyman to persuade the American public of the need to stay in Iraq -- they have now acquired massive amounts of cash from us with which to buy weapons, ostensibly for use against a-Q, but in reality perfect for resuming the civil war against the Shiites the moment we pack up and leave.

(3) The fact that the best we can probably hope for in Iraq, even in optimal cirucumstances, is a Shiite dictatorship (probably with strong pro-Iran sympathies) to replace Saddam's Sunni one. Talk about Pyrrhic victories. (And I've been talking about the likely outcome of this war being a Pyrrhic victory for a long time -- to be joined now, I see, by the likes of Joe Klein.)

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | June 25, 2008 2:07 AM

As for the supposed "containment" policy of sanctions, the U.N. estimated that it had killed 500,000 iraqi children just by the middle of the 1990s. And countless more older people. Thanks to the sanctions, the nation was disintegrating towards third-world status. This is supposed to be a superior alternative to invasion?

So... why are the Iraqis too dumb to notice all the happy fun good times? They weren't fleeing the country in droves before we invaded. They could freely go to Syria, Jordan... Lots of options.

I mean, Iraq before we broke it had a ton of problems, and our sanctions weren't helping the matter any, but in what universe is it better off today than it was then? I totally can't get my head around that. How much of the country has fled? What percentage has died? What the hell?

If it makes anyone happy, I'll be happy to acknowledge things have gone from terribly bad rotten and awful there before the surge to bad rotten and awful now. Happy, Brooks? Now if the magic surge could get around to, oh, accomplishing any of it's metrics for success, that would really be spiffy.

Posted by BethanyAnne | June 25, 2008 2:25 AM

Which, actually, is a good time to quote Klein's own comments about Brooks' column ( http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/06/surge_protection.html ):

"Another bit of 'luck' was the ethnic cleansing that took place in Baghdad in 2005-2006 that lessened the potential for internecine violence in many of the neighborhoods. That plus the constant troop presence in the neighborhoods gave residents the confidence to tell the troops where the bad guys -- as often as not criminal gangs who were taking advantage of the anarchy -- were hiding.

"It was always clear that the militias, especially the Sadrists, would go to ground and wait out our presence rather than confront our superior military force. And that remains one of the biggest questions: What happens when we go? I would guess there are two possibilities, neither of which involves a very robust democracy. The first is a return to sectarian chaos, with our 'Sunni Awakening pals' turning on the government, the Shi'ites fighting amongst themselves and the Kurds bidding the Arab Iraqis adieu. The second is the gradual transformation of Nouri al-Maliki, or some other Shi'ite, into a fairly classic Middle Eastern strongman. Maliki's popularity has skyrocketed because he has been able to use the Iraqi Security Forces intelligently in recent months. We've seen this movie before.

"But go we must, in an orderly fashion, the sooner the better -- this war is simply too expensive and too exhausting for our military. And it is currently drawing crucial resources from the more important war in Afghanistan. And that is why the right-wing triumphalists shouldn't get too triumphal: this war has been a terrible mistake from the start. It has diverted crucial resources from the stated purpose of Bush's policy after 9/11 -- the war against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

"The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked -- still smacks -- of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives -- people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at 'Commentary' -- plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel. And then there is the question -- made manifest by the no-bid contracts offered U.S. oil companies by the Iraqis -- of two oil executives, Bush and Cheney, securing a new source of business for their Texas buddies.

"The surge has reduced violence. We should all be thrilled about that -- and honored by the brilliance of those who have served in Iraq. But what we're talking about here is whipped cream on a pile of fertilizer -- a regional policy unprecedented in its stupidity and squalor."

Goodness. When Klein isn't sounding like me in this column, he sounds strikingly like those awful radicals (such as Matt) who dare to perceive ulterior motives in a lot of the war's supporters. Surely this couldn't be true.

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | June 25, 2008 2:28 AM

So... why are the Iraqis too dumb to notice all the happy fun good times? They weren't fleeing the country in droves before we invaded.

They're not fleeing the country in droves now. And before the invasion, they were dying in huge numbers from disease and malnutrition, thanks to the "containment" policy, while their country was disintegrating around them, and the dictator who had been murdering and torturing them for two decades was still in power. Perhaps you think that was a better situation than the one that exists now. I don't.

I mean, Iraq before we broke it had a ton of problems, and our sanctions weren't helping the matter any, but in what universe is it better off today than it was then?

In any universe? If you think the sanctions were bad policy, and you think the invasion was bad policy, what clearly superior policy do you suggest we should have followed instead?

Posted by Mixner | June 25, 2008 2:40 AM

They're not fleeing the country in droves now.

Neighboring countries won't let them in. Either you know this and you're lying, or you don't and you're stupid. Or both.

If you think the sanctions were bad policy, and you think the invasion was bad policy, what clearly superior policy do you suggest we should have followed instead?

Try isolate and ignore. The Iraqis would have taken care of him sooner or later themselves. He didn't have tens of thousands in his bodyguard for nothing. And after being whopped in Kuwait, he wasn't in any shape to invade any of his neighbors.

You've taken a bad situation and made it much, much worse. Nice play, Shakespeare! I'm sure the parents and friends of the four thousand American military dead appreciate your devotion to solving other people's problems with your countrymen's blood.

Posted by sunsin | June 25, 2008 3:55 AM

sunsin,

Neighboring countries won't let them in. Either you know this and you're lying, or you don't and you're stupid. Or both.

They don't have to go to neighboring countries. Either you know this and you're lying, or you don't and you're stupid. Or both.

Try isolate and ignore.

"Isolate" how? "Ignoring" Saddam is what created the mess in the first place. How many more countries would he need to have invaded and attacked, how many more wars would he need to have started, how many more hundreds of thousands of people would he need to have murdered, before you'd be willing to take action?

The Iraqis would have taken care of him sooner or later themselves.

There is no evidence of any serious threat to Saddam's control of Iraq. He could have remained in power for decades, and he was grooming his murderous sons to eventually take over from him.

You've taken a bad situation and made it much, much worse.

No, we've taken a bad situation and made it better. Your allegedly superior alternative policy is that we should have "ignored" that bad situation, allowed the bodies to continue to pile up indefinitely into the future, and allowed Saddam to continue his long-standing record of military aggression in one of the most unstable parts of the world.

Posted by Mixner | June 25, 2008 4:13 AM

No, we've taken a bad situation and made it better.

Great. Stupid and evil. Love it.

Posted by DMonteith | June 25, 2008 4:34 AM

Mixner and Justin JJ make solid points that aren't effectively refuted by name-calling and other forms of frothing by the True Believers. It's pretty clear to me that their reasoning is much more reflective of mainstream voters than the radical isolationism expressed by the majority on this blog, which (to the extent they were old enough to be engaged) lost the argument on Iraq in 1990, 1998, and 2002. They have been diligently manufacturing propaganda all along in an attempt to win the argument without actually proposing rational alternatives. Attempting to make Iraq simply go away by pulling out is clearly not a rational alternative.

The public is sick and tired of the floundering stupidity that turned our intervention in Iraq from a victory to a quagmire on at least two separate occasions, but that doesn't mean they have forgotten the history of our engagement there which started with ample justification and full legal bells and whistles in 1991, and has carried on more-or-less continuously ever since. Nor does it mean that they want to end our involvement with a self-inflicted defeat in the world's most geo-strategically important place.

The "surge" is working not because we have an extra 30,000 soldiers--we had a lot more boots on the ground in 2003. Within reason, it's less important how many troops than what they are tasked with doing. If we'd been doing in 2003 what we're doing now, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

The idea that our current strategy isn't working because the Iraqi government hasn't checked all the boxes on a list of "benchmarks" that have more to do with politics in Washington than Baghdad is a red herring. The government is clearly demonstrating more strength and popular support, and it certainly can't be faulted on its independence. Iraqis insisted on elections rather than our "occupation"; rejected a number of leaders we favored and elected quite a few we don't like; have insisted on defining their own relationship with Iran; and will clearly move on the "benchmarks" at a pace and in a way they find suitable rather than one that helps one American faction or another.

At the end of the day, which will be sometime in the next fifty years or so when we're not totally dependent on Persian Gulf crude to have a world economy, our having acted to turn a committed enemy state in the form of an aggressive, genocidal totalitarianism in a crucial location into a reasonably stable, reasonably democratic ally, will be seen a lot differently than it is now.

Posted by robert powell | June 25, 2008 5:04 AM

No, we've taken a bad situation and made it better.

More than half a million excess deaths in 5 years, two decades worth of GDP in damage to Iraqi civil infrastructure, 2 million refugees outside the country and 1.8 million internally displaced.

This is not "better". This is an atrocity, very similar in kind to the atrocities for which Saddam was rightly hanged, and for which, if there is any justice in this world, Bush and Cheney should be hanged for also.

Posted by BP | June 25, 2008 5:13 AM

our having acted to turn a committed enemy state in the form of an aggressive, genocidal totalitarianism in a crucial location into a reasonably stable, reasonably democratic ally, will be seen a lot differently than it is now.

Most likely, through the lens of a genocidal, generation-decimating civil war we "failed" to prevent. Not that we could have in the first place, but if our boots are still on the ground, we will be blamed.

But hey, if it's sunny in 2008, don't let me ruin your picnic by talking about the 10-day forecast.

[And yes, what BP said.]

Posted by scythia | June 25, 2008 5:37 AM

Even with the inflated stats cited here, Saddam's reign of terror killed exponentially more, and more innocent, Iraqis, Iranians, Kuwaitis, and others. And of course, most of the Iraqis killed since 2003 weren't killed by us, except for those enemies of civilization we were trying to kill. The death and destruction caused by the sanctions alone is a bigger number. For what it's worth, civilian deaths attributed to US military action is between 40- and 50,000. We killed about 60,000 French civilians in 1944.

Moreover, all the death and destruction between 1991 and 2003 left Iraq still tightly in the grip of the murderous tyranny that was sure to continue running up the score. Now Iraq has a legitimate shot at a decent future. "Experts" here who pronounce with such certainty what Iraqis want and how they see their situation, based apparently on nothing more substantial than some drive-by Western polling, are unconvincing. Life for the vast majority of Iraqis is today clearly and objectively vastly superior to 2002--better nutrition, more money, more freedom, and far less state-sponsored violence. It's possible to find some Sunni's who say they had it better under Saddam, and it seems the media has found them all. But for most Iraqis the question, "was it better under Saddam?" is seen as an insulting joke by ignorant foreigners.

Posted by robert powell | June 25, 2008 5:57 AM

Even with the inflated stats cited here, Saddam's reign of terror killed exponentially more, and more innocent, Iraqis, Iranians, Kuwaitis, and others.

The relevant stat ain't total deaths, it's deaths/year.

For what it's worth, civilian deaths attributed to US military action is between 40- and 50,000.

Can we get an official source on that?

But for most Iraqis the question, "was it better under Saddam?" is seen as an insulting joke by ignorant foreigners.

Fuck it, I'm tired:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=life+better+under+saddam&btnG=Google+Search

Some people prefer stable dictatorship to Hobbesian anarchy. I don't fancy myself one of them, but I can understand the sentiment.

Posted by scythia | June 25, 2008 6:07 AM

Powell is one of the great stupid, lying cocksuckers of the world.

Nothing whatsoever that comes out of his PC is worth a toss.

The stupid fuck doesn't realize that sooner or later - and voting for sooner would be a good bet - he's going to look even more incredibly stupid and dishonest than he does now - if that's possible.

The provincial elections and parliamentary elections are coming up. He assumes he can just keep babbling and everybody will forget his bullshit once it's proven to be just that.

Unfortunately, there's me. I'll be around to remind everyone of his bullshit when the US is driven out of Iraq by the Iraqi nationalists who will probably take power next year.

The more Maliki screws around, the more violence will be generated. The less he screws around, the quicker he's going to be going into exile to avoid a bullet in the head when the nationalists take power again. And the sooner the nationalists are in power again, the quicker the US will be forced out of Iraq.

And in any event, sooner or later even Ayatollah Sistani will lose what little patience he has left - and order a fatwa against the US occupation. Most of his personal militia have been imploring him to do so this year. But he's still concerned that the Shia might fall from power.

As William Lind pointed out yesterday, the smartest thing Maliki could do right now would be to order the US out of Iraq. That would give him a hell of a lot more of that critical requirement - "legitimacy". "Street cred". Which right now Sadr has a lot more of. Only by obtaining a little of that - and swinging to the side of the nationalists - will he keep his head.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | June 25, 2008 6:13 AM

Actually, Robert, in the interest of furthering understanding over meaningless back-and-forths, let me highlight two of your statements I concur with, and try to use them to explain the left wing's POV.

Saddam's reign of terror killed...Iraqis, Iranians, Kuwaitis, and others.

The death and destruction caused by the sanctions alone is a bigger number...all the death and destruction between 1991 and 2003 left Iraq still tightly in the grip of the murderous tyranny

See, here's the thing. The U.S. Gov't encouraged Iraq to go to war with Iran. We sold them weapons in order to do it more effdectively--including WMDs. Saddam turned around and used those weapons--including those we now classify as WMDs--on his dissident civilian populations, but the U.S. Gov't turned a blind eye on these atrocities, because he was our man in an economically- and strategically-important region.

Saddam invaded Kuwait because he thought he had our tacit approval. After we beat him back (as his invasion had discomfited our stronger allies in an economically- and strategically-important region, we then imposed 12 years of merciless sanctions, which, as you mention, crippled his population while entrenching him further in power.

Then, we decided to depose Saddam, and have introduced five years of chaos and intercine warfare into a country we've already helped ravage.

See, we're not saying the surge isn't working, or that the invasion was a mistake. We're saying that the last 25 years of U.S. policy re: Iraq has been a COMPLETE AND UNMITIGATED HUMANITARIAN DISASTER, and no, a temporary lull in sectarian violence does not indicate that the trend has been reversed and things are now on the mend.

Posted by scythia | June 25, 2008 6:21 AM

http://www.theirc.org/special-report/iraqi-refugee-crisis.html

In case anyone seriously believes that there is no Iraqi displaced persons issue.

Posted by jonathan | June 25, 2008 8:06 AM

What was your standard mocking line? Something about finding a pony, I believe. Your point was that surge could not possibly succeed. You were not only wrong, you were sneeringly wrong. While the surge cannot yet be said to have succeeded, it might.

I really enjoy your blog, but do hope this episode has taught you some humility.

Posted by ostap | June 25, 2008 8:28 AM

The "surge" is working not because we have an extra 30,000 soldiers--we had a lot more boots on the ground in 2003. Within reason, it's less important how many troops than what they are tasked with doing. If we'd been doing in 2003 what we're doing now, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

The first part is true--the surge is not working because of more boots on the ground.

The second part less so--the facts on the ground that enable the current strategy to work just weren't in place in '03. Sunnis turning on al Qaeda. Successful ethnic cleansing. Sadr's truce. The post-Samarra bombing wave of Iraqi violence just turned into a negative-feedback loop, itself putting into place the factors that caused the violence to ebb.

It's really scary when you stop to think that the both the rise and fall of violence were the result of purely endogenous causes in Iraq, not our strategy. Things could suddenly spiral out of control again--only even worse, since all sides have been arming themselves through the current lull in fighting. Or maybe violence will just keep dropping. It's impossible to predict.

Posted by Consumatopia | June 25, 2008 8:32 AM

Thanks, scythia. As you demonstrate, and as I have seen for some time, "the left wing's pov" is based largely on lies and propaganda. For example:

--There is no, zero, evidence that "the US encouraged Iraq to go to war with Iran" in spite of the fact that a virtual state of war had existed between us and the Iranian regime since the Embassy takeover. Our official policy as expressed by George Schultz was "it's too bad they can't both lose".

--Between the late '70's and 1990, the US supplied less than one-half of one percent of Iraq's imported military hardware per the Stockholm Institute for Peace. Iraq was a Soviet client state, with tens of billions of dollars worth of military hardware supplied by Warsaw Pact members, plus China, France, and a few others ranging from small arms and artillery to rockets, radar, and the latest jet aircraft. At one point when it looked like Iran was going to win, we supplied Iraq with some spare parts, conventional ammunition, satellite imagery of Iranian positions, and a photo of Saddam shaking hands with Rummy. Most in Iraq's position would prefer the tens of billions worth of Soviet gear. Iraq was supported by us militarily about as much as East Germany for most of the decades in question.

--It is ridiculous to assert that we supplied any sort of wmd's to Iraq. The Reagan Administration actually went to court to stop the sale of some potentially dual-use items like trucks. The famous "evidence" for this lie resides in the fact that the National Institute of Health sent some lab samples of some diseases, as we routinely do to most any country, for public health work. What we didn't send was any info or technology on weaponizing or mass-producing such stuff, or anything else related to wmd production. In all the domestic record and all the captured data from Iraq there is not a shred of evidence to support this dastardly lie. Actual prosecutions have gone forward against Dutch and German firms which supplied wmd precursors, so one may well inquire why we got off the hook if this was a serious accusation. It isn't.

--Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait because he was an aggressive dictator with incredibly bad judgment. The idea that April Glaspie gave him a "green light" is preposterous nonsense, as the quick and near-total rejection of the invasion by the international community lead by Britain and the US should make unmistakably clear.

I'm sympathetic with the pov that we've made a hash of things in Iraq, but the idea that it would have been better to leave Saddam Hussein in the drivers' seat is a bad one to begin with, and it's not bolstered by citing blatant propagandistic lies. Over 80% of Iraq's population is Kurds and Shi'ia. Anyone who thinks they were better off under Saddam might also believe that Stalin created a Workers' Paradise.

Posted by robert powell | June 25, 2008 8:40 AM

And of course, most of the Iraqis killed since 2003 weren't killed by us, except for those enemies of civilization we were trying to kill.

Most of the Iraqis killed before 2003 were killed by the Iranians, not Saddam. That excuse was not enough to save him from the gallows: it was his war of aggression, the resulting carnage on his conscience - whatever little he had -, and he paid the price. The cowardly and immoral attempt by the current administration to avoid all responsibility for the carnage unleashed by their war of aggression in Iraq should not - again, in a just world - save Bush from the noose either.

Posted by BP | June 25, 2008 8:54 AM

Mixner, just say "imperialism" -- the new love that dare not speak its name. You've talked about our "vital interest" in the region. Just come on out and say it: imperialism.

****

The excess deaths cited in both epidemiological studies of mortality in Iraq are greater than the number of deaths attributed to Saddam. Millions in exile. The country carved up, physically walled off, and segregated. All so US oil companies can get access to Iraqi oil.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 25, 2008 9:04 AM

The violence is down in Iraq. But it's still way too high.

"The surge has worked" is a rhetorical device that allows war-lovers to avoid squaring with the fact that the US presence is the main driver of the violence there, and with 100s of 1000s already dead, the continued US presence continues to rack up Iraqi deaths for which the US is responsible.

Posted by Ohmy | June 25, 2008 9:37 AM

Mixner, robert powell, and the rest of the warmonger crowd keep pretending that the only deaths attributable to George Bush's unprovoked assault on the people of Iraq are the ones with American bullets in their brains.

This is stupid.

Every child that dies because the chaos granted the Iraqis by Mixner left her without healthcare is directly attributable to Mixner and his policies.

Every Sunni with a Shiite bullet in his back is the direct result of robert powell's desire to steal the oil from Iraq.

It is the responsibility of the imperial aggressor to ensure stability in a conquered nation. Whining doesn't eliminate that responsibility. Sophistry about how it's those unappreciative natives doesn't change anything.

The suggestion that we ever ignored Iraq or that our policy of mass slaughter and then malign neglect of our imperial responsibilities has made Iraq "better" is a cruel joke.

The reason we mock you idiots and call you names is because you are impervious to reason - made all the more obvious by this mind-bogglingly stupid comment from robert powell "Life for the vast majority of Iraqis is today clearly and objectively vastly superior to 2002." You will note that this ignorant fuckhead leaves out any reference to medical care or electricity. He also blithely ignores the 20% of the population that is currently displaced (powell like response: "see that's their newfound right of free travel"). He also prattles on about "state sponsored violence" as if "random acts of violence" are somehow a better way to die. Finally, this thick-witted, morally obtuse, cheerleader for death whines about "inflated" numbers while using numbers generated with the same methodology to condemn those who think aggressive assault on innocents is a bad idea as "isolationists."

If you learn nothing else today robert powell, you half-witted monkey's ass, the opposite of assaults on innocent people isn't isolationism. You merely pulled this big sounding word out because you think it scores you points. It only demonstrates you are an ill-informed jackass.

Posted by Not as stupid as Will Allen | June 25, 2008 9:50 AM

"It's pretty clear to me that their reasoning is much more reflective of mainstream voters than the radical isolationism"

I continue to be fascinated by the mainstream meme that not going into someone else's home and killing them is somehow "radical isolationism". Nobody to my knowledge has ever suggested anything close to Sakoku, so why this idiocy keeps getting perpetuated is beyond me.

Posted by Ryan | June 25, 2008 10:32 AM

Sanctimonious moralizing by people who argue for Saddam Hussein's regime is its own refutation.

Our commitment to Iraq is based on objective national interests and idealistic hopes for a world order that can reliably respond in an appropriate way to incidences of national sovereignty abuse of the sort that results in genocide, aggressive wars of conquest, wmd proliferation and use, state-sponsored terrorism, and perhaps even the sort of abuses we see now in Zimbabwe, Darfur, Tibet, and Burma.

Isolationists don't get it.

Posted by robert powell | June 25, 2008 1:13 PM

"isolationists" are gaining power in the conservative spectrum--Ron Paul and Bob Barr, anyone? Every day, more and more Americans are looking at the forest (how pointless and economically wasteful the occupation is) instead of the trees (whether the casualty stats are up or down, this week), and it won't be long before America is back to its "start a war only if it's an extreme emergency" foreign policy.

Posted by Nobody Important | June 25, 2008 2:21 PM

robert powell you haven't managed to refute anything. All you've done is assert incredibly stupid things and claim that this somehow demonstrates your superior wisdom.

No one is "argu[ing] for Saddam Hussein's regime."

What is happening is that people are pointing out that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was less dangerous to your average Iraqi than George W. Bush's Iraq. A proposition so obvious that even a total moron like yourself should be able to see it.

What's Iraq's total violent death rate now compared to 2001? No artificial separation of government sponsored vs. private. Total. Guess what nitwit, it's up. Not a good metric to support your half-witted invasion is it?

How about dislocation? How does the number of displaced Iraqis compare between 2001 and 2008? Oops, another metric that shows that George W. Bush had made Iraq worse than its previous dictator.

Okay, let's go with something easier, electricity production. Wait, no, you guys can't get that right either.

Wait, I know, Bush is an "oil man." Surely at least the oil production must have increased since 2001. Nope. So the nation has even less money than it did under sanctions.

What's self-refuting is the notion that chaos is better than stability. This is just so stupid as to be holy writ for morons like you.

Posted by Not As Stupid As robert powell | June 25, 2008 2:39 PM

oh, and mr. powell? The antonym of "imperialist warmongering fuckhead" isn't "isolationist."

These arguments would be much shorter if you would simply stop lying. They would be shorter because any such restriction would eliminate your ability to post.

Posted by Not As Stupid As robert powell | June 25, 2008 2:52 PM

It's the outright denial by the Bush Administration and its surrogates that anything was going badly.

I can't speak for the other anti-antiwar commenters on this thread, but I am not a member of the Bush Administration, nor even the Republican Party. The case for the war, as well as the case for the surge exists independently of Bush/Cheney, or the particulars of how they ran the policy. So to counter our arguments with citations of Bush's various misdeeds in carrying out or communicating about the war is an invasive non sequiter. See, I don't care how Bush is seen by history. I care about how things turn out in Iraq, a country of massive, disproportionate strategic importance not just to the US but to the entire world.

As someone else said above, our relationship with Hussein was an amoral one, at least before 1991. We were willing to tolerate his cruelty to his own people, and certainly his aggression toward Iran, but not his invasion of Kuwait. 9/11 changed the dynamic such that we could no longer take such an apathetic stance toward Hussein, unless he altered his policies. The good faith we were looking for from Hussein was minimal: Compliance with UN resolutions with regard to WMDs. He refused. So, we had a hard decision to make. Let him continue to thumb his nose at the world, let him continue whatever it was he was up to with respect to WMDs, or depose him.

Those who favored invasion in 2003 weren't warmongers. We simply saw that invasion was inevitable, and the longer we postponed it, the worse it would be. Of course, I bitterly resent many of the Rumsfeld decisions that allowed Iraq to descend into bloody chaos after the invasion. But that was a contingent outcome that does not retroactively contaminate the case for war.

That's what I don't understand about the Andrew Sullivans of the world, politicians like Hillary Clinton, or Matt. Having supported invasion, it's fine to then attack Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld for incompetent management of it (and then to praise Bush/Gates/Petraeus for finally shifting strategies in 2007). But the only reason to "reconsider" what really can't be taken back anyway is either politics, i.e. following the polls, or sheer narcissism. The multifaceted case for war, based on what was known in 2002-03, hasn't really been discredited. It's easy to say now there were no WMDs, thus a weak argument for the war. But no one who was arguing against the war in 2002-03 was basing their argument on saying Hussein had no WMDs.

Posted by Vail Beach | June 25, 2008 6:19 PM

Sorry, to suggest that there was a valid case against Saddam Hussein is to boldly lie. The only reason the unprovoked assault on Iraq was inevitable was that Bush and the warmongers who supported him wanted to kill people. The PNAC document signed by many of the liars who promoted this "short victorious war" makes this clear.

That you are forced to pretend that there was any evidence of WMDs demonstrates just how important this lie was to the selling of the war. The American people were not going to war to enforce UN directives. And Bush wasn't trying to enforce them - if he were he could have asked for the approval he said he was going to get. He knew that once it was denied the selling of the war would be much more difficult - so he went back on his word.

The case for the war was only "multi-faceted" if you consider the stream of bullshit rationalizations, each flimsier than the one that preceded it, to be facets. They were not. There were no WMDs, there was no threat to the United States from Iraq, there are many nations (some of which are staunch US allies) in contravention of UN resolutions, and Saddam Hussein was no threat to his neighbors by virtue of the fact that he didn’t even fully control his own nation. I have dismissed the self-serving and nonsensical claim of humanitarian aims.

It doesn’t matter whether the opposition said “Saddam Hussein has no WMDs." Why not? Because even with the popularly believed lie that he did have them it was a bad idea to assault the people of Iraq. That this was a lie provides more than enough justification for reconsideration. The only reason to maintain that this brutal assault was necessary or inevitable, in the face of the mountain of evidence that it was both unjust and counterproductive, is either politics (standing by your tribe, no matter the facts) or sheer love of misery and death.

Posted by Not As Stupid As robert powell | June 25, 2008 7:07 PM

I'd like to point out one other fallacy to our friend Vail Beach. This poster claims that there weren't many opponents of the brutalization of the Iraqi people claiming there were no WMDs. This is simply false. At the very least there were plenty of opponents of the slaughter of Iraqis asking that the inspectors be allowed to complete their work.

Now, were some of them just looking for a delay, any delay? Perhaps. But Bush's insistence that the war start before the inspectors gave an all clear was one of the tells that this was a con game. Any doubt that Bush knew there were no WMDs was erased by his rush to war.

Posted by Not As Stupid As robert powell | June 25, 2008 7:47 PM

When you hear a writer accusing someone of "avoiding the bigger debate," get ready for a complete issue dodge....

Yglesias does a great job eliding Brooks's main point: That Bush's forecast was accurate. Maybe Bush got lucky, maybe not--the sample size is too small to tell with certainty.

But what little evidence we have points to the conclusion that more war created more peace---just the kind of paradoxical result that we economists tend to love!

A side note: I am puzzled that the anti-Iraq-invasion types have gone from saying sanctions were killing innocent babies to arguing that they were no big (humanitarian) deal. Maybe it's different people arguing the point---it's been half a decade, and people move one--but both sides were certainly published in the same magazines....

Speaking of which, I'm sure glad I stopped reading The Nation in grad school.....What a waste of time that was.....Wrong on fighting Communism, wrong on fighting the Great Society, wrong on fighting Islamism.....

Posted by Garett Jones | June 26, 2008 2:34 AM

Garett Jones, what the hell are you talking about? No one is saying "they were no big (humanitarian) deal." You don't get to make shit up. Also, there is no evidence that Bush has done anything right here or that there is any paradoxical "more peace."

Please try to keep up. The sanctions were brutal and a humanitarian nightmare. The war has provided the Iraqi people with all of the effects of the sanctions plus hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of displaced people. In the real world that suggests that the sanctions aren't as bad as the chaos inflicted on the Iraqi people by George W. Bush. Only someone with severe mental defects could confuse that with "no big (humanitarian) deal."

All the evidence we have so far points to George W. Bush making Iraq a worse place for Iraqis than did Saddam Hussein. Major Fail.

Posted by Not as stupid as robert powell | June 26, 2008 2:49 AM

Thanks to Vail Beach and Garett Jones. It's encouraging to get the occasional comment on this topic based on something besides sanctimonious hysteria and propaganda. Speaking of which:

Apologists for Saddam usually vastly overstate casualties since 2003 and understate those before. It's also fairly typical to attempt standing reality on its head in the sense of arguing that it was up to the world community to prove the negative on wmd's in a police state the size of France that was engaged in actively frustrating the investigation. In fact it was the clear responsibility of Iraq under the Resolutions to disarm "transparently and pro-actively", which Blix made unambiguously clear in his last report that they had willfully failed to do.

The obvious fact of the matter is that by going the UN route in 2002 Bush gave Saddam the power to pull the plug on the invasion almost up to the last minute. Post-invasion review of the data seems to indicate that he was encouraged to avoid doing so by the support he received from collaborators like Chirac to imagine he could still avoid "serious consequences".

We went to war in Iraq in 1991 with ample justification, full legal bells and whistles, and this war carried on almost continuously through the fall of Baghdad. Those ignorant of what was going on in and around Iraq between 1991 and 2002 make fools of themselves with their cartoon "analysis", and should stick to the comics.

Currently we are engaged in supporting the freely elected government of Iraq, the most representative and legitimate in the Arab world, at its express request. Over 80% of Iraq's population is Kurdish and Shi'ia, and anyone who thinks they aren't better off now simply doesn't know the facts. Boorish adolescents running around wetting their pants in frustration with what they ignorantly see as a conflict created entirely by a clique of deviants in the post-2000 White House tend now, as they have in the past, to undermine the arguments they seek to advance.

Posted by robert powell | June 26, 2008 3:07 AM

Mr. powell, your every comment is nothing more than "sanctimonious hysteria and propaganda," and the commenters you praise are simply repeating the kind of lies you have been promulgating.

Idiots like you wildly downplay the amount of violence and destruction in Iraq as a result of Bush's illegal, unprovoked, and immoral assault on the Iraqi people. Whining that your opponents aren't nice doesn't change the fact that Iraq is an incredibly violent place as a result of warmongering fools like yourself.

The obvious fact of the matter is that nothing Saddam Hussein could have done would have prevented the warmongering Bush administration from terrorizing the people of Iraq. As has been repeatedly pointed out to you and the rest of your supporting cast of nitwits, dullards, liars, and fuckheads, the inspectors never found the slightest bit of positive evidence; no matter how many times Bush's cabal claimed that "we know where the WMDs are," they never provided any intelligence to find them.

Of course the reason they had to cut the inspections short was that there weren't any. Another one of those things dimwitted apologists for the slaughter of Iraqi people like robert powell ignore.

Oh, and mr. powell? Going to war can't be done based on forcing someone to prove they don't have something you have no evidence they have. Doing so is the definition of unprovoked assault.

The government in Iraq lives and dies on American firepower. It is a de facto dictatorship under George W. Bush.

Finally, asshats like you robert powell imagine you are scoring points by calling those who recognize the carnage of the Bush/powell plan for Iraqi subjugation "apologists for Saddam." That's because you are a fucking moron (a phrase I use a lot because frankly anyone who loves death so much as to support this clusterfuck is, at best, a fucking moron). It is the robert powell's of the world who supported Saddam Hussein. Those not nearly as stupid as you are never did. Not even when your hero and Reagan's delivery boy was giving him gifts.

Posted by Not as stupid as robert powell | June 26, 2008 9:58 AM

More victims of robert powell's love of death and misery.

Posted by Not as stupid as robert powell | June 26, 2008 10:06 AM

It's funny for dishonest thugs like robert powell to decry hysteria with regards to Iraq (okay, given the number of bloody deaths idiots like him have cause, funny isn't the right word). There were three hysterical excuses for taking out Saddam Hussein:

1) He was a danger to the National Security of the United States (the "mushroom cloud" of Bush/Rice).

This was clearly bullshit. There has never been any positive evidence demonstrating Iraq having nuclear capabilities. This is why the yellowcake lie was so important to put in the SOTU. It is, by the way, the only reason Americans were willing to sacrifice their blood and treasure.

2) He was a danger to the region.

This too, was bullshit. He didn't even control his own nation. This also relies on the argument that he had powerful chemical and biological weapons - which was also bullshit. The idiots promoting this had to get the weapons inspectors out of Iraq before a clean bill of health was given. Otherwise their glorious adventure in murdering brown people would have come to naught.

3) The sanctions were killing Iraqis (the "humanitarian" argument).

Here we have some truly odious and smelly bullshit. It is, of course, designed to appeal to those who recognized the brutality of the sanctions regime. But, contra the merry maruading morons like powell, there weren't merely two options: war or sanctions. Those not wedded to the joy of killing knew that the rationale for the sanctions was really rooted more in post WWI policy towards Germany than in rational thought. Those not committed to mass murder recognized that 2001 Iraq was a far different place than 1991 Iraq.

With all of the excuses used by the cretinous powell and company eliminated there really is no mechanism for calling the brutal and unprovoked assault on the Iraqi people anything but what it was and is: a war crime.

Posted by Not As Stupid As robert powell | June 26, 2008 12:11 PM