I don't have Jeffrey Goldberg's years of reporting experience in the field, but rather than Michael Gerson getting booed for criticizing Saddam Hussein doesn't it seem much more likely that Gerson was booed for being an apologist for a bloody and costly fiasco? The evil of Saddam Hussein can't just be waved about to distract attention from the giant errors of the American hawk camp.
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A Question of Interpretation
03 Jul 2008 12:42 pm
Comments (45)
"The evil of Saddam Hussein can't just be waved about to distract attention from the giant errors of the American hawk camp."
True, but one can certainly try.
They may have been booing him for his ridiculous comparison of Saddam Hussein to Pol Pot. There were certain differences of scale in their malefactions, among other things. Also, I don't think Pol Pot ever got U.S. support.
It's also an unnecessarily hacky move. We've spent the better part of two decades discussing the heinous crimes of Saddam Hussein - questionable historical comparisons won't do much to put his sins into perspective.
Matt, you missed the big news of the day.
Schmidt has given the McCain campaign a new slogan:
"Perfection is our goal. It will never be obtained, but excellence is our standard and it will be reached every day.”
which, I think, combines:
"Committment to Excellence" - Oakland Raiders
and
"Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence" - Montgomery Burns
Democrats, beware!
First, every time they bring up Saddam being involved in genocide, they are talking about a more than decade old event with the Kurds (which, BTW, we allowed to happend rather than backing up the Kurds). It's not like we rushed in and prevented further genocide. So to anybody making that point, stuff it up "your phrates".
I imagine the reason for the boos are that Gerson was using Saddam to justify the war. Right now, the vast majority of the country does not feel the war was worth it. So you can talk all you want about what a bad man Saddam was, and not doubt he sucked, as long as you don't use it as justification for going to war.
Put another way, if a man beats and rapes a woman and then runs into the bar, and I run into the bar with a machine gun, blasting wildly, and kill the man, along with 7 other men while wounding another 20 and destroying the bar, some might say what I did wasn't worth it. Does that mean they support assault and rape? GONG!
Seth:
Some people don't understand the difference between an authoritarian, thuggish, strong man (Saddam Hussein, Pinochet, Assad) and an unstable revolutionary strongman (Pol Pot, Hitler, Mao). The former are qualitatively different than the latter. But Gerson does like his morality talk, which makes it fun to confuse the two.
It's worse than that, LFC: Saddam almost certainly used poison gas on civilians during the Iran-Iraq war, at which time the US was supporting Iraq. And the US knew about it: there was a Senate resolution, long about 1986, to condemn/sanction Iraq for using chemical weapons, but Reagan's minions were able to block it. (faintly recalled from Peter Galbraith's book, which is passionately pro-Kurd more than it is conventionally liberal or conservative).
Some people like to minimize Saddam's crimes because they don't like Bush or Republicans.
They don't have a clue what Saddam's Iraq was like. You can be anti-war but at least base your assertions on reality.
I think it's you who is tendentious in this post, not Goldberg. Assuming Goldberg reported this accurately, my own first thought on reading what he wrote was that Gerson's comparison of Hussein to Pol Pot was more risible than his using Hussein's ugly record to defend the war. The latter is a common argument, pretty much the only one with any merit. The former is gross exageration where an exageration wasn't needed.
To put it another way, I find the comparison of Hussein to Pol Pot offensive for the same reasons I'd find a comparison of Hussein to Hitler offensive, especially in the context of justifying a war that has killed more civilian Iraqis than Hussein ever did.
That's not to minimize just how bad was Hussein's gassing of the Kurds or his murder of large numbers of people by his secret police. But Pol Pot's victims number in the millions, a dishonor that places him among rarefied heights of mass murderers. Hussein is not only a garden variety murderous dictator by comparison, he's a garden variety murderous dictator absolutely.
Goldberg perhaps ought to be reminded that we were on Hussein's fucking side of the war in which he killed those Kurds—the war in which Rumsfeld infamously met with Hussein and shook his hand.
So, you know, spare me these neocon crocodile tears over the poor Kurds and their false outrage against Hussein's murders. Worse is their invocation of the Cambodian skulls they are playing political football with. I would have squirmed and booed, and not merely because someone was defending a war I oppose. If I were Gerson, I'd say he was being as morally repugnant as Hussein. But I'm not, so I won't; but his moral repugnance nevertheless turns my stomach a bit.
Hey, y'all hired Goldberg. Don't look to your incredulous readership to bail you out.
Look, you can come right out and say what we all already know: Goldberg is a lying shitbag who distorts events in order to support his own insulting, careerist narratives.
Whoever is offended that someone compared Saddam Hussein to Pol Pot is seriously screwed up.
Why do people like to defend Saddam Hussein so much?
"Also, I don't think Pol Pot ever got U.S. support."
Not true. Ford, Carter, and Reagan all supported the Khmer Rouge as a counter weight to a unified Viet Nam once Hanoi conquered South Viet Nam in 1975. Carter and Reagan both recognized Pol Pot's CPK (Communist Party of Kampuchea) as Cambodia's legitimate government after Viet Nam invaded and drove it from power in 1978, following at least a year or heavy CPK provocation.
Can I call Poe's Law on P.K.?
I read the first sentence as Jonah, not Jeffrey, Goldberg, which made it much, much funnier.
I'm pretty sure they were saying "Boo-urns"
Goldberg allows no comments. The lame motherfucker.
"Whoever is offended that someone compared Saddam Hussein to Pol Pot is seriously screwed up.
Why do people like to defend Saddam Hussein so much?"—Peter K.
Look, it's possible you're just ignorant and really do believe that the scale and quality of the atrocities of Hussein's and Pol Pot's regimes are truly comparable. If so, then Google is your friend; it'll help you avoid looking so foolish in the future.
In the more likely case that you aren't ignorant, then of course comparing Hussein to Pol Pot is offensive, just like (as I said, why am I having to repeat this to you?) so many comparisons of the atrocity-of-the-week to the Holocaust is offensive. There are a few organized, state-sponsored atrocities that do compare to the Holocaust, and what the Khmer Rouge did is among them. Hussein's gassing of the Kurds or his brutal oppression of Iraq is not. Making this point isn't "defending Hussein", it's defending truly mind-boggling evil and its millions of victims from being devalued by those attempting to make cheap political arguments.
As I already wrote, Hussein's atrocities were pretty much the only valid argument available for this war. I was approximately neutral about this war during its run-up, willing to give a chance to the claim that it would have a quick and agreeable outcome, given the ease with which the previous version was concluded. I was happy to see Hussein go. I was happy to see him die.
But I'm not happy to see him compared to Pol Pot, of all things, as an excuse to justify this war. Especially when our prosecution of it has both killed a large number of Iraqi civilians and when it turns out that we like to indulge in torture, ourselves. After Abu Ghraib, any American invoking the outrage of Hussein's secret police ought to choke to death on their hypocrisy.
Matt, you could spend all damn day correcting your mistaken co-bloggers. Maybe you should find a new home.
Facts and Goldberg are diametically opposed.
Goldberg is a lying shitbag who distorts events in order to support his own insulting, careerist narratives.
Second. Also, throw in Peter K.
I don't usually feel bad for Christopher Hitchens, but it must be excruciatingly embarrassing for him to have acolytes as stupid as Peter K.
TT - you're right. U.S. did support the Khmer Rouge, at least before they took power. I wasn't thinking in that context. And the aid was more than merely verbal. I wonder whether George Washington had these kinds of "foreign entanglements" in mind when he cautioned us to avoid them?
It cracks me up that Jeffrey Goldberg is too intellectually insecure to open up his blog to comments. I mean, it's understandable, given the drivel that oozes forth from his keyboard, but still.
As I already wrote, Hussein's atrocities were pretty much the only valid argument available for this war.
Right. His twenty-year record of invading other countries, threatening to invade other countries, attacking other countries, threatening to attack other countries, starting major wars, jeopardizing the vital national interests of the U.S. and Europe, etc., wasn't any kind of valid argument at all.
Right. His twenty-year record of invading other countries, threatening to invade other countries, attacking other countries, threatening to attack other countries, starting major wars, jeopardizing the vital national interests of the U.S. and Europe, etc., wasn't any kind of valid argument at all.
Yeah, Bush must be pissed that he'll only have an 8-year record of the same activities. Damn you, 22nd Amendment!
1. Please pass along to Jeff that it is very hard to make the argument that we removed Saddam Hussein because of his tyrannical, murderous, ways with his own people. He was just as murderous in the 1980s when we provided him assistance against Iran (this is when he gassed the Kurds). I hesitate to say he was our ally because we were also assisting the Iranians (Iran/Contra) and the Kurds; so we combined cynicism and hypocrisy equisitely. I agree with the comment that people are not booing Gerson for saying how bad Saddam was, but for using a weak humanitarian argument to defend a humanitarian catastrophe that we is our direct responsiblility: from the decision to make war, to the decision to unleash our firepower on the people of Iraq in response to an urban guerillia war, to the decision to subject detainees to conditions violating the Geneva conventions, and for the decision not to even try to meet the obligations of a occupying power to maintain order and protect the civilian population after a conquest. That is all our fault. Further, Gerson's purpose in his talk, as anyone reading his columns in the WP can surmise, is to vindicate George W. Bush, justify a permanent occupation of Iraq as a monument to Bush's war policy, and to undermine Obama's chances for election by implying that either he is irresponsible if he does not flip flop and support an indefinite occupation of Iraq, and then if he does flip-flop, state that since his policy is now just McCain/Bush lite, the people should elect the real thing and not a weak, unprincipled, flip-flopper. In other words, he is a hack, and a hack should be booed. A real conservative who should have been invited to this confab is Andrew Bacevich, not the hack Gerson.
2. Our motives for invading Iraq were Oil and a lust for revenge for 9/11, not the welfare of the Iraqi people, since, according to then Deputy Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Larry Di Rita, "we owe them nothing" (a statement since denied by him, but testified to by Jay Garner and several other members of Garner's team). I surmise were the above cited reasons predominated for going after Saddam, along with the 1% chance he had WMD and would pass those along to terrorists, but that last rationale always had the ring of an after the fact rationale for a decision already made.
3. Matt, I would pose to Jeffrey, a veteran of the IDF, a query about whether Likud (and their friends in America) thought the removal of Saddam was suppose to be the panacea that would cause the Palestinians to collapse in despair and accept an Israeli diktat. Instead, Israel saw Hamas victorious in in an election and then egged into disastrous war with Hezbollah in The Lebannon by the Bush administration. Neither Israel or us have been willing to conduct wars of extermination (or at least threaten extermination as the British did to the Boers in 1899 to 1903) that appears necessary to win people's wars such as this (at least for a generation as Britain conduct several such wars against Irish from 1550 to 1850 and yet within a generation a new bunch of troubles would begin again).
4. We should withdraw as safely as we can from Iraq because WE HAVE NO MORAL RIGHT TO REMAIN IN THAT COUNTRY against the will of the people. The one exception I would have is a base in Kurdistan if the Kurds agree to remain in Iraq on a Federal basis. That would hopefully reassure the Turks, the Kurds, and the Iraqis for a generation where perhaps they call all learn not to cut their throats, while at the same time.
"Right. His twenty-year record of invading other countries, threatening to invade other countries, attacking other countries, threatening to attack other countries, starting major wars, jeopardizing the vital national interests of the U.S. and Europe, etc., wasn't any kind of valid argument at all."
Right. It wasn't. Because having a long history of invading other countries and starting wars isn't a valid justification for invading someone. If it were, you'd be cheering on the invasion of the US. As you're not, I'll assume you concede the point.
A proximal invasion is a good excuse to attack someone. We did that the first time around and we were right to.
In 2003, Hussein wasn't a military threat to anyone. I realize you and your ilk would like to rewrite history and claim that this is not so, but fortunately this particular history is well documented. Hussein was contained, we had destroyed his capacity to do do anything like fight another war with Iran or invade Kuwait. We were actively destroying his capacity to wage war, with sanctions and bombings and similar. Iraq wasn't a threat, you moron.
On the other hand, he was still a threat to his own people. He still caused regional trouble on a much reduced scale. And the US arguably still had UN authority to finish the invasion we had started years before and had handily managed. From that you could make a credible argument that an invasion with a goal of removing Hussein from power was a warranted and realistic alternative.
Occupying the country? Not so much. Attempting to build a new democratic nation-state during that years long occupation? Not so much. Removing WMD's that everyone knew he almost certainly didn't have? Not so much. Removing the support for Al Qaeda that everyone knew Iraq didn't provide or in revenge for Iraq's involvement in 9/11 which everyone knew didn't exist? Not so much. Because Hussein was behind a failed assassination attempt at Bush 41 years before? Not so much.
Conservatives often like to claim that liberals are wrong because they are prone to wishful thinking. That may or may not be true. It's certainly true of the neocons. And although it's not wishful thinking you and other conservatives are guilty of when you dredge up rationales for this failed and ugly war, it's something else also hostile to truth and is much less motivated by good intentions.
Maybe they were just booing Gerson for being a tendentious hack.
Keith Ellis,
Because having a long history of invading other countries and starting wars isn't a valid justification for invading someone.
On the contrary, it's a very good justification for invading "someone."
In 2003, Hussein wasn't a military threat to anyone.
The sanctions against Iraq had already killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and were breaking down. If we had maintained the sanctions, Iraq would have continued to descend into death and disintegration indefinitely into the future. If we had lifted the sanctions or they had been circumvented, Saddam would have resumed his long record of aggression and attacks. Either way, he would have continued murdering and torturing his own people as long as he remained in power.
Occupying the country? Not so much. Attempting to build a new democratic nation-state during that years long occupation?
So your position is that we should have withdrawn immediately after capturing Saddam, consequences for Iraq be damned? Is that it?
Conservatives often like to claim that liberals are wrong because they are prone to wishful thinking.
You're demonstrating the truth of that claim right here.
You're demonstrating the truth of that claim right here.
Hilarious!
As I like to say, Mixner & friends are like people who deliver endless snide lecture about personal cleanliness while never noticing they themselves are covered in shit.
Indeed, even as they yammer on, they reach for another bucket to pour on themselves.
Mixner: "If we had maintained the sanctions, Iraq would have continued to descend into death and disintegration indefinitely into the future. If we had lifted the sanctions or they had been circumvented, Saddam would have resumed his long record of aggression and attacks."
Mixner regurgitates Powell's talking points.
First, the US enforced the sanctions. Stop enforcing them and we'd have stopped killing Iraqi kids.
Not to mention that the US military has directly killed an estimated three hundred thousand Iraqi civilians - more than Saddam has been proven to have killed in his entire reign (not counting the Iran-Iraq war - and if you do count it, well, then count the ONE MILLION Iraqis who have been killed in the US war - equally a war of aggression.)
Second, lifting the sanctions would have done nothing to enable Saddam to attack anybody. His military was weak, and once the UN inspectors cleared him of having any WMD, a monitoring program would have been put in place preventing him from ever having nukes.
Mixner - and Powell and the rest of the right wing nuts - are full of it.
"So your position is that we should have withdrawn immediately after capturing Saddam, consequences for Iraq be damned? Is that it?"
No - the proper position is that Iraq should not have been invaded at all. If you wanted Hussein gone, pay some of his people to kill him. That would have cost, oh, some three trillion dollars and over a million lives less than what actually happened.
Moron.
Maybe they were just booing Gerson because he writes at a 4th-grade level.
Maybe they were just booing Gerson because he writes at a 4th-grade level.
Keith Ellis writes,
Hussein was contained, we had destroyed his capacity to do do anything like fight another war with Iran or invade Kuwait. We were actively destroying his capacity to wage war, with sanctions and bombings and similar.
RSH writes,
Second, lifting the sanctions would have done nothing to enable Saddam to attack anybody. His military was weak, and once the UN inspectors cleared him of having any WMD, a monitoring program would have been put in place preventing him from ever having nukes.
You guys need to get your story straight. Were the sanctions necessary to "destroying [Saddam's] capacity to wage war" or were they an unnecessary source of death and misery to the Iraqi people that could have been removed without doing anything "to enable Saddam to attack anybody?"
The contradictions and incoherence of the arguments deployed by anti-war fanatics is perhaps the clearest indication of the utter irrationality of their position.
OPEN ON:
MIXNER, standing on street corner. He is clearly covered in shit. Flies buzz around him, often landing on his face.
MIXNER [screaming at passersby]: You morons are so stupid! If you were a genius like me, you wouldn't be covered in shit!
MIXNER pauses for breath, then reaches down to pick up one of several buckets of shit surrounding him. Lifting the bucket over his head, he pours the shit over himself.
MIXNER: Look at you! You idiots are covered in shit!
CUT TO:
MONTAGE of Mixner in different locations all over the world (can we get the Dancing Matt people?), screaming at passersby, then emptying more buckets of shit on himself.
"You guys need to get your story straight. Were the sanctions necessary to 'destroying [Saddam's] capacity to wage war' or were they an unnecessary source of death and misery to the Iraqi people that could have been removed without doing anything 'to enable Saddam to attack anybody?'
The contradictions and incoherence of the arguments deployed by anti-war fanatics is perhaps the clearest indication of the utter irrationality of their position."
Do you really want to stick with this argument you're obviously so proud of? I could wait for an answer and just set you up for ridicule, but I'll be kind.
First, just for the sake of actual rigorous thought, I'll point out that two separate people made two separate arguments. I didn't say that the sanctions could have harmlessly been removed and he didn't say that the sanctions neutralized Hussein. Assuming those two statements are actually contradictory, the fact that they were never connected by anyone to make an argument necessarily means, as a matter of pure reason, that no one actually committed such an unreasonable argument, which you assert. You're wrong.
Second, I'll go ahead and say that I agree with Richard about this. Sadly for you, it doesn't open me up to the criticism recounted in the previous paragraph.
Allow me to use an analogy. You have an appendicitis. I cut you open to remove it. That causes bleeding and other damage in the course of correcting the larger problem. Then, once I've removed the appendix, I stitch close the cuts and suture them. I leave the room.
Somehow, miraculously, my cutting you open both solved your underlying problem and caused some problems of its own. Yet I was able to stop cutting you open and leave without causing the appendicitis to recur! Utterly amazing!
For those scoring at home, that's zero irrationality, incoherence, or contradictions, and at least two-of-three in the arguments of the person who accused me and Richard of those faults.
If this is the quality of arguments wherein you and people like you accuse people like me of being irrational, you're in deep shit.
Keith Ellis,
First, just for the sake of actual rigorous thought, I'll point out that two separate people made two separate arguments. I didn't say that the sanctions could have harmlessly been removed and he didn't say that the sanctions neutralized Hussein.
The point is that the two of you use contradictory premises to support the same conclusion.
Assuming those two statements are actually contradictory,
You said the sanctions are what prevented Saddam from being able to wage war. RSH said the sanctions just caused the Iraqi civilians to die and could have been removed without "enabling Saddam to attack anybody." If you seriously think these two premises are compatible, you have a serious reading comprehension problem.
On this point, you're right, and RSH is talking nonsense. The sanctions clearly did effectively destroy Saddam's ability to engage in large-scale military aggression. But they also caused immense suffering and death to the Iraqi people. Given these facts, there was a "credible argument" for invasion, as you yourself just conceded.
Where you go wrong is in your apparent belief that we should have just deposed Saddam and withdrawn, leaving Iraq in a state of chaos. Such a policy would almost certainly have led to civil war and massive bloodshed, probably followed by the rise of a new dictator no less evil than Saddam.
Such a policy would almost certainly have led to civil war and massive bloodshed
CUT TO:
Mixner on the streets of New York, completely covered in shit.
MIXNER: Such a policy as you suggest would almost certainly have led to being covering in shit! Thank god we're following MY policy!
MIXNER takes another large bucket of shit and empties it over himself.
Maybe Goldberg should blog at The Corner since he's a pussy who won't allow comments.
What he said was that sanctions AND BOMBINGS were what caused Saddam's power to be weak. Which is exactly what I said - the 1991 war is what destroyed Saddam's ability to cause any more trouble.
The sanction were utterly unnecessary and criminal in themselves.
But then, anybody with experience of Mixner's "arguments" on this blog knows that he is merely a troll who parses words and mixes up arguments just to continue dumping his shit on everybody.
The really stupid part of his - and Powell's - argument is that having killed half a million Iraqis, it was then a matter of "saving" more Iraqis by going in and killing three hundred thousand more - directly with bombing and murderous fucktard US troops - while "indirectly" causing the deaths of a million more by causing sectarian cleansing and the displacement of four million more by destroying the economy.
Fucking assholes deserve a bullet in the head merely for arguing this stupid shit.
There's a long history of this kind of thing. Lot's of people very similar to those now attempting to distort the historical record in favor of Saddam Hussein reported of Stalin's Soviet Union that it was "the future, and it works!" They fudge the numbers, ignore the facts, and make new ones up like how we "supported" Saddam without a shred of evidence to back up such hilarity.
There is no serious question that the number of people killed by the Ba'athist regime was in the millions--domestic repression, invasion and eight-year bloodbath in Iran, invasion, rape, and annexation of Kuwait, support for terrorist atrocities, etc, etc. The manipulation of the sanctions alone probably killed a million of the most vulnerable Iraqis. But the main thing people tend to overlook in this kind of exercise is the reason we actually went to war in Iraq--because Saddam Hussein started the war.
There's no statute of limitations on genocide, and when you launch an aggressive war, lose, and then comprehensively violate the ceasefire agreement, even anti-American ideologues can't make a convincing case that there aren't going to be consequences.
You guys need to get your story straight. Were the sanctions necessary to "destroying [Saddam's] capacity to wage war" or were they an unnecessary source of death and misery to the Iraqi people that could have been removed without doing anything "to enable Saddam to attack anybody?"
Mixner, you need to get your story straight - was the penicillin effective at curing your strp throat, or is it unnecessary and wasteful to keep taking it six months after you were cured?
No one is denying that the sanctions were effective at destroying Saddam's ability to make war (although if we had not insisted that the sanctions stayed on as long as Saddam was in power, we could have found less destructive means. People tend to forget that we did not make lifting the sanctions dependent on Saddam's WMD program being verifiably ended, but dependent on Saddam relinquishing power).
The point is that by 2003 they were no longer necessary. In fact, they could have been lifted much, much earlier.
They fudge the numbers, ignore the facts, and make new ones up like how we "supported" Saddam without a shred of evidence to back up such hilarity.
It's too bad that when Saddam was wistfully telling his interrogators about how he'd always wished he could have the same kind of relationship again with the US that he'd had under the Reagan administration, Robert Powell wasn't there to tell him there wasn't "a shred of evidence" that this relationship had ever existed.
Comments closed July 17, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Answer: No.
If you're against the bloody and costly fiasco, you're objectively pro-Saddam Hussein.
Have you learned -nothing-?
Posted by gussie | July 3, 2008 12:57 PM