Speak for yourself, Andrew Sullivan

[Recursion]

If you guys will pardon a long-pent-up rant for a second...

I've come to read Andrew Sullivan more in recent years once the cleavage between him and Republicans became more clear. I don't think he's so much moved to the left (he was always an outlier on social issues anyways) though he did repent of his support of the Iraq war; mostly it's just that the right has become the batshit insane right, and Sullivan has stayed more or less Sullivan: a Burkean conservative who instinctively trusts the market more than the forum. And, I have to admit, a damn good writer.

Those of us on the left too often have a weakness of needing an auto-da-fé from those who have disagreed with us; the fact that I recognize this flaw in myself doesn't make me less susceptible to it. His, from 3 years ago fit the bill. Since then I have enjoyed reading his ardent advocacy for marriage equality, his attempts at a reasonable conservative (in his sense of the word) stance on health care reform, and his self-indulgent posts about his beagles (actually one turns out not to be a beagle but a basset mix: he won't say which one, to spare their feelings).

But this post about the run-up to the Iraq invasion sticks in my craw:

And the crucial element was the flooding of our frontal cortexes with fear that made prudent close to impossible.

As my title says, speak for yourself. I and many of you were part of the largest anti-war protest in human history except possibly the original Lysistrata, and the media (of which you are a member, Andrew) couldn't choose between pretending we did not exist and calling us traitors. This wasn't even remotely hard.

I know many on this board are, but I am not a pacifist. I served in the military (in the Iraq war, even). I supported the invasion of Afghanistan (again, I know a lot of the board disagrees, and I respect that). Before this goes down the memory hole into "we all were duped" land, I want to just remind everybody of the non-pacifist arguments against the Iraq war, which were there to be found if anybody was listening (and I was far from the only person even in the military making them):

1. This was a war with no defined military objective
2. This was a war with only a vague political objective
3. There was no Phase IV planning
4. Worse, Wolfowitz actually said to Congress he found it "difficult to imagine" that an occupation would require more troops than an invasion.

1. through 3. are bad enough, and reason enough from a simple national interest perspective to have opposed the invasion (at least until more and better plans were made). But 4.... The hair on the back of my neck stood up when I heard Wolfowitz say that, along with most of the other people in my platoon. That's not "difficult to imagine", that's basic Military Theory 101. Holding always takes more troops than taking. Not "sometimes". Not "in some circumstances". Not "since the invention of gunpowder". Hell, not even "since the invention of the spear". This is an immutable and well-known basic fact of warfare. Ramesses knew it. Alexander knew it. Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld don't seem to have known it, but I can't think of a single military operation in human history that justifies that belief. Even liberated France in WWII required more troops to maintain simple order than were required to drive the Nazis out, let alone occupied Germany.

This was a war where a clear national interest was never defined (OK, they said there were WMDs... would they be more or less secure after an invasion? That was never discussed; it doesn't seem to have even been wargamed. And that in itself is inexcusable because it was after all possible he had them, meaning we went in blind to what various enemies might have done with them in the chaos after the invasion -- come to think of it there are still missing stockpiles of sarin.)

I just don't want to let this attempt to rewrite history pass unremarked upon: there were entirely national-interest-based, non-pacifist, security-only arguments against the invasion of Iraq long before we set foot in the country even if we accepted the idea that Saddam was pursuing WMDs, let alone if we acknowledged serious doubts about that. And the agents of that drumbeat to war don't get to say "we were all duped" when, in fact, it was really just them.

OK, that was my rant; carry on.

[Bluenorthwest]

1. Sullivan was a cheerleader for the Iraq war, for Cheney in

particular, whose presence he found 'comforting'. In his 'repentance' piece he claimed he would never stop apologizing for being so massively wrong, but in fact, he had a stiff shot and almost instantly started back into sermonizing. That would be mere self serving hypocrisy had Sullivan spoken his mind in favor of the war and of Bush and Cheney and let it go at that, but Andy as always had to deliver the sermonizing, and as he shook his pom poms for the war, he also launched into extreme derision and criticism of any and all who opposed the Iraq invasion. "I saw the opposition to the war as another example of a faulty Vietnam Syndrome, associated it entirely with the far left—or boomer nostalgia—and was revolted by the anti-war marches I saw in Washington."
"My misjudgment at the deepest moral level of what Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were capable of—a misjudgment that violated the moral core of the enterprise—was my worst mistake. What the war has done to what is left of Iraq—the lives lost, the families destroyed, the bodies tortured, the civilization trashed—was bad enough. But what was done to America—and the meaning of America—was unforgivable. And for that I will not and should not forgive myself." So he did the unforgivable, and makes much drama of that, but he still expects to be seen as a credible person, a man of ideas not of grave errors sold with slanders of those who were in fact correct.
He is the lowest of the low.

[devilgrrl]

2. Sullivan from September 2001

While Clinton diddled

The record doesn't lie. The former president had repeated warnings and wake-up calls, but he failed to protect the country against the growing danger of Islamic terrorism. Part 1 of a debate.

http://dir.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/01/09/clinton/

[JHB]

3. They knew, but it wouldn't have gotten them their war.

"Small, quick, and cheap" was the whole thrust, in concert with the "cakewalk" and "pay for itself" angles.

Realistic force levels would have entailed up front too many people and too much money to let them steamroller political opposition. once we were in we'd be committed, so they shoveled every peice of horseshit they could to smother opposition and put it in motion. (By "they" I mean Cheney, Rumsfeld, and pretty much the entire PNAC gallery that were put in senior positions.)

It's not just the matter of force levels: the entire "plan" rested on a string of assumptions that all would have had to work as envisioned back in Washington. If any part didn't work out right (which was most of them), there wasn't even a "plan B". That sort of thinking has a long legacy in military history...of spawning fiascos.

But the Bushies accomplished their actual goals (profiteering, expansion of executive powers, control of the oil fields), so what do they care for how much their half-assed neoconservative joyride cost everyone else?

</ end rant>