From The New Republic (a center-left journal in the US), How I got the Iraq war wrong, by Peter Beinart. Beinart supported the war. In this piece he explains why he did, and why he was wrong to do so.
For myself, perhaps the most honest reply is this: because Kanan Makiya did.When I first saw Makiya--the Iraqi exile who has devoted his life to chronicling Saddam Hussein's crimes--I recognized the type: gentle, disheveled, distracted, obsessed. ...
If the United States were a different country, and not merely motivated by oil, it could be trusted to expel Saddam from Kuwait. If the United States were a different country, one really concerned about human rights, it could be trusted to bomb Slobodan Miloševíc out of Bosnia and Kosovo. At some point during the 1990s, I began to see it as a trap. There were no other, purer methods and no other, purer country. At least, that was how the Kuwaitis and Bosnians and Kosovars and Afghans seemed to feel. ...
Makiya knew better; he knew that the United States had intervened more frequently in the Third World to quash democracy than to spread it. He knew that the Bush administration had other, darker motives. And yet, made desperate by Saddam's horrors and his resilience, he was willing to gamble.
I was willing to gamble, too--partly, I suppose, because, in the era of the all-volunteer military, I wasn't gambling with my own life. And partly because I didn't think I was gambling many of my countrymen's. I had come of age in that surreal period between Panama and Afghanistan, when the United States won wars easily and those wars benefited the people on whose soil they were fought. ...
"All the Iraqi democratic voices that still exist, all the leaders and potential leaders who still survive," wrote Salman Rushdie in November 2002, "are asking, even pleading for the proposed regime change. Will the American and European left make the mistake of being so eager to oppose Bush that they end up seeming to back Saddam Hussein?" [See this piece from The Guardian, in February of '03, for an expansion of that thought.]
I couldn't answer that then. It seemed irrefutable. But there was an answer... It begins with a painful realization about the United States: We can't be the country those Iraqis wanted us to be. We lack the wisdom and the virtue to remake the world through preventive war.
Pity I didn't see this yesterday, would have been a useful addition to the diary I wrote. From The Atlantic, Am I Being Too Rational? by James Fallows.
Starting late in 2004, I have been writing that the United States could not rationally contemplate attacking Iran ...Through that time I have been arguing with friends, adversaries, and people I do not know, all of whom keep saying: rational or not, it’s coming!...But there is a deeper strangeness that I worry about at 2 a.m. Am I guilty of projecting my own assumptions about rationality onto the Administration?
Based on everything I have learned through reporting, or simply read and thought, an attack on Iran would be unique in modern American history — perhaps in the entirety of American history. American leaders have made a lot of mistakes in 200-plus years. (Plus made a lot of inspired, far-seeing decisions.) But they have rarely done things that were simply insane. ...
Launching a discretionary war against Iran would be insane. Every one of the elements of long-term American strength and self-interest would be jeopardized: Economic, grand-strategic, diplomatic, military, moral. There would be damage in the short run—stepped-up attacks in Iraq, chaos in the oil market—and worse damage for decades to come. ...
I have not quite believed that even an administration as guilty of misjudgments as this one would actually go ahead and start such a suicidal war. ... That is, I have thought that George Bush and Dick Cheney were as decent as Richard Nixon.
Also from The Atlantic, in Andrew Sullivan's blog
The small British withdrawal from Basra is not a watershed. Its minimal nature and indeterminate timing make it the least that Blair can still do to appease the overwhelming sense of public opinion in Britain, while not rupturing the alliance, or leaving irresponsibly. ...What's more telling is how unpopular the war is in Britain, and how an entire generation of Brits have now grown up thinking of the United States as a bullying, torturing force for instability in the world. ... it is the image of America that Bush and Cheney have built ... In Italy, the government has fallen because there is no longer support for even a minimal presence in Afghanistan, let alone Iraq. ...
Once, for all the residual anti-Americanism out there, [soft power] was a significant plus for the U.S. Bush has somehow managed to give the U.S. a soft-power deficit - in a war against some of the most barbaric, evil enemies we have ever faced. That really is an achievement.
Some old comments of mine from K5, back in 2003, laying out my views on the war: Let the middle-east deal with its problems. ... Why go to war and remove [Saddam] with conventional weapons, when we have the nuclear deterrent to keep him from attacking us? See also this and this.
You don't hear much from the left these days about running third party candidates. You don't hear them saying "There are no differences between the Republicans and Democrats" either. I guess they finally accepted the fact that if Nader hadn't been running in 2000 then Al Gore would
I remember hearing someone on NPR, a couple years back, saying that if any of the Republican or Democratic candidates in 2000, other than Bush, had won the election, then the Iraq War wouldn't have happened.
The attacks of 9/11 certainly changed the world. Remember when people in Europe wanted the US to be more involved, and complained because Dubya was semi-isolationist? Be careful what you wish for...
Indifference will certainly be the downfall of mankind, but who cares? Bob Abooey.
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