War Lies

10. It takes 2.6m wds from a titled milquetoast in Elizabethan cosplay to lend legitimacy to the decade-long opinions of millions. #Chilcot

— Shocko (@shockproofbeats) July 6, 2016

Too late we get the establishment acknowledgment of what we knew already. There was a reason that two million marched in London against the war, millions more worldwide to try and stop it. We knew it was pointless and would only lead to more misery, that the reasons for it were lies, that it couldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop terrorism and –surprise surprise– it didn’t.

When we marched we were told we were fools at best, naive idiots, complicit in Saddam’s crimes. The low end estimate of the excess deaths caused by the War on Iraq is in the neighbourhood of 1-1.5 million; considering what happened after the war and occupation ended, that is probably far too low. How much better would Iraq and the world be off right now had the sensible people not listened to and enabled the warmongering duo of Bush and Blair?

Matt Yglesias was one of the earliest liberal blogging “superstars”, still a student at Yale when he first started blogging, bright, wonkish and always comfortable inside the Beltway, looking to be a Washington insider himself before too long. A centrist by nature, he gets along well with both Democrats and sensible Republicans, not afraid to go against established opinion on his own side. Analytical rather than passionate, he’s not very ideological and approaches politicals rationally. In short, Matt was the perfect candidate to be suckered by the Bush administration into supporting the War on Iraq. Unlike some however, he’s been big enough to admit his mistakes, so I feel a little bit bad picking on him still, but then his recent post explaining why he made that mistake was such a perfect example of how very stupid an intelligent guy can be:

1. Erroneous views of foreign policy in general: At the time, I adhered to the school of thought (popular at the time) which held that one major problem in the world was that the US government was unduly constrained in the use of force abroad by domestic politics. […]

2. Elite signaling: When Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, Joe Biden, John Edwards, etc. told me they thought invading Iraq was a good idea I took them very seriously.[…]

3. Misreading the politics: […] I figured Bush wouldn’t be doing this unless he said some reasonable plan for extricating our forces and stabilizing the situation.

4. Kenneth Pollack: The formal case for war that I found compelling was Kenneth Pollack’s “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.” […]

He also adds that “being for the war was a way to simultaneously be a free-thinking dissident in the context of a college campus and also be on the side of the country’s power elite” which is an obnoxious motivation but honest of him to admit that. What’s clear from Matt’s explenations is that he just didn’t think things through at the time, letting others (Pollack, elite Democratic politicians like Clinton or Daschle) do his thinking for him, relying on their honesty, assuming the reasons the administration and its supporters gave for the war where the real reasons and there were no ulterior motives. This lack of critical thinking is shown even more in reason one, in which he reveals how uncritically he swallowed the myth of American reluctances to get involved in foreign adventures.

The common factor in all these errors is I think a lack of ideology, of being able to look beyond a given issue to the greater framework in which it takes place. He would’ve done better had he reflexively rejected the cause for war rather than to try and judge it on its merits, as he wasn’t smart enough or suspicious enough to reach the right conclusion. His supposedly rational approach to politics and the war blinded him to the real interests of those promoting it. It’s a trap any of us can fall into if we think we’re more clever than we are: rationality has its limits and you can’t reach the right conclusion if you don’t have all the facts.

Because there was of course an ideology driving the war, just one that was never stated explicitely. If you buy into the idea that America has the right to invade other countries if it decides they have trangressed the international order, then the only question is whether or not the reasons for invading Iraq are serious enough, with the more fundamental question of whether it’s right to do so not on the table. And sinces the cause for war was built on lies, it became impossible for those who like Matt took those lies seriously to reach the right conclusion. Matt’s arrogance, combined with his naivity ensured that these lies were swallowed.

The fifty thousand who remain are just tourists… So tired of this shit, especially since the Duthc news brouhgt a little retrospective of the war in which it described the reason for the attack the plan to bring democracy to the Middle East by toppling Saddam Hussein. The weapons of mass destruction have now been officially written out of history. Certainly the anonymous soldier cheering as the trucks rolled over the border about having brought democracy to Iraq neither remembered nor cared about Saddam’s smoking nuclear gun. Of course democracy is getting quite threadbare as an excuse as well, as Jamie’s find of a wannabe Saddam II shows.

Somewhat fitting to “end” the war with the same sort of lies as it started with.

I wasn’t one of the people, the very few people even on the left, who from the start insisted on the immorality of the sanctions imposed on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. I’m ashamed to say I never thought much about it until much later, when Bush’s the younger’s war on the country became imminent. It just never appeared on my radar as an issue, nor made much of an impact in the newspapers here. Only when the sanctions were argued as an alternative to war back in 2003 I formed an opinion about them and for a moment I bought into the idea that it might be a good compromise alternative to the war, before coming to my senses. Now Andrew Cockburn’s review of Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions by Joy Gordon makes it clear I should have been much more skeptical much earlier:

Most of the time, those overseeing the blockade were able to go about their task without public reproach. Every so often a press report from Baghdad would highlight the immense slow-motion disaster in Iraq, but for the most part the conscience of the world, and especially that of the American public, remained untroubled. Administration officials reassured themselves that any hardship was entirely the fault of Saddam, and that in any case reports of civilian suffering were deliberately exaggerated by the Iraqi regime. As one US official with a key role in the Unscom weapons inspections said to me in all sincerity at the time: ‘Those people who report all those dying babies are very carefully steered to certain hospitals by the government.’ In spite of reams of child mortality statistics collected by various reputable outside parties, such as the World Health Organisation, it was impossible to convince him otherwise.

Very occasionally, a ray of truth would shine through. In 1996, the 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewed Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the UN. Albright maintained that sanctions had proved their value because Saddam had made some admissions about his weapons programmes and had recognised the independence of Kuwait (he did this in 1991, right after the war). Asked whether this was worth the death of half a million children, Albright replied: ‘We think the price is worth it.’ Years later, as Gordon observes, Albright was still ‘trying to explain her way out of her failure to respond more effectively to what she described as “our public relations problem”’. Her attempts to justify the policy were echoed by other sanctioneers, such as the State Department official quoted by Gordon who maintained that ‘the US is conducting a public good which it has done a poor job of selling to other countries.’

[…]

Gordon puts all this in context. ‘Under the Oil for Food programme, the Iraqi government skimmed about 10 per cent from import contracts and for a brief time received illicit payments from oil sales. The two combined amounted to about $2 billion … By contrast, in 14 months of occupation, the US-led occupation authority depleted $18 billion in funds’ – money earned from the sale of oil, most of which disappeared with little or no accounting and no discernible return to the Iraqi people. Saddam may have lavished millions on marble palaces (largely jerry-built, as their subsequent US military occupants discovered) but his greed paled in comparison to that of his successors.

The economic strangulation of Iraq was justified on the basis of Saddam’s supposed possession of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Year after year, UN inspectors combed Iraq in search of evidence that these WMD existed. But after 1991, the first year of inspections, when the infrastructure of Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme was detected and destroyed, along with missiles and an extensive arsenal of chemical weapons, nothing more was ever found. Given Saddam’s record of denying the existence of his nuclear project (his chemical arsenal was well known; he had used it extensively in the Iran-Iraq war, with US approval) the inspectors had strong grounds for suspicion, at least until August 1995. That was when Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and the former overseer of his weapons programmes, suddenly defected to Jordan, where he was debriefed by the CIA, MI6 and Unscom. In those interviews he made it perfectly clear that the entire stock of WMD had been destroyed in 1991, a confession that his interlocutors, including the UN inspectors, took great pains to conceal from the outside world.

On a more theoretical note, the fact that sanctions could continue for so long under three presidents without real reason other than the fact that they existed is a good example of how real world “conspiracies” work. Most, if not all the facts about the futility of the sanctions were known almost from the start, as was the fact that the stated reasons why they should continue were never the real reasons. Yet criticism and awareness of these issues throughout their existence has been confined to the socalled loony left, with the official storyline being swallowed uncritically by everybody else. Including by me.