Despairing a bit as I read the Iraq commentary on Twitter.
Like Covid, something people can’t learn from because they would rather have recriminations.
Like Covid, something people can’t learn from because they would rather have recriminations.
Multiple things had to break down for the vast majority of Americans, the leaders of both parties, the nation’s leading (and most fiercely independent!) public intellectuals, and the most experienced foreign policy team since the founders to rush headlong into this catastrophe.
to wave that all away either as the result of obvious idiocy or simple deceit is to surrender our responsibility to understand what went wrong so that *we don’t fall into the same traps again.*
It wasn’t obviously idiotic—“obvious” means self evident, and the idiocy of the venture was by no means self evident to the vast majority of both the wonks, soldiers, or citizens of the country. Explaining *why* it wasn’t self evident is one of the major tasks here.
People have also memory holed the incoherence of many of the most prominent anti war voices & the adolescent spirit of the anti war protest movements, which was often aimed at meeting the emotional needs of a lonely leftist minority, not changing minds or leveraging opposition.
That might have to be my next essay—because no one seems to remember this or is willing to talk about it.Too many just want to take credit for being right on the big question without probing too hard into why their tactics and arguments failed to convince the rest of the country.
And then the issue of the lies: open lies they were not few and far between, insufficient on their own to tilt the American leviathan towards invasion.
Again, blaming it all on deception saves ourselves from investigating why the “liars” themselves came to believe things that were not true. Which they did! They sincerely believed them!
An angel could have visited every single important decision maker in Nov 2001 with the message “it is supremely important that in the next two years you do not rely on lies or do anything obviously stupid” and they all would have acted the same way.
“Do not lie” and “do not do stupid things” are not real lessons. If that is all we have learned, we have not learned anything.
Anyways if you want to read my attempts to chip away at various levels of the problem:
scholars-stage.org
scholars-stage.org
nationalreview.com
scholars-stage.org
scholars-stage.org
scholars-stage.org
scholars-stage.org
nationalreview.com
scholars-stage.org
scholars-stage.org
Update: my heavens folks, I do not think the activist left bears primary responsibility for this war, there is a 40 footnote essay about Donald Rumsfeld and his staff specifically linked above, another essay specifically on conservative intellectuals in 2002, and so forth.
And yes, I *do* think David Brooks should not be allowed into respectable society.
But I am young enough to look forward to a future where David Brooks, like Don Rumsfeld, is dead. And in that future it would be good if we learned something useful from our mistakes.
But I am young enough to look forward to a future where David Brooks, like Don Rumsfeld, is dead. And in that future it would be good if we learned something useful from our mistakes.
Further update: people are forgetting what the most common anti war arguments were. They were not usually about potential for insurgency, the thing we realize today we “got wrong” most today.
Some people argued that. But it was not front and center. Front and center were questions on whether war waged without UN approval was just. Or whether preemptive war was ever just. America’s role in the world, not situation on ground in Iraq, was the locus of debate.
This is forgotten partially because in 2004-2005 the national debate turned to whether there was an “insurgency” in Iraq or not, as the administration pretended there was not and the chorus of critics insisting there was grew louder.
But much like the argument that we were in Iraq for the sake of democracy promotion, a theory that only really took off post invasion, people are conflating the main debates of 2004-2006 with the discussion in 2002.
Also this
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