No forgiveness for liberal Iraq hawks

No Forgiveness for Bush’s 'Useful Idiots,' the Liberal Hawks Who Led Us into War

By Michael Ratner

March 19, 2013 | AlterNet

Ten years ago, between January and April 2003, it is estimated that an unprecedented 36 million people around the world took to the streets in protest against the Iraq War. They believed the war unjust, the evidence of a threat flimsy, and the costs, in terms of lives and otherwise, potentially astronomical. Worldwide protests, from Rome to Manhattan, brought together hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions to collectively voice opposition.

In any just government, these astounding numbers would give pause to the war-wagers in power. In a truly democratic America, these sentiments should have been represented in Washington. And surely this moment should have been the cue for our “liberal media” to echo the cautionary cries of our protesters to deafening levels. Instead, our reliably bellicose Republican congressmen were joined in support by an overwhelming majority of our so-called liberal representatives, and war went ahead as planned.

Even more alarmingly, in the months preceding the start of the war, the pages of the  New York Times would greet us with more banging of the drums: a demand by Thomas Friedman that France be kicked out of the Security Council for its refusal to join up, or a startling piece of war propaganda by then soon-to-be executive editor Bill Keller, fantasizing about the impact of a one-kiloton nuke detonated in Manhattan – 20,000 incinerated, many more dying a “gruesome death from radiation sickness.” But make no mistake: although the New York Times has a shameless history of supporting war after war, other prominent mainstream journalists and intellectuals were eager to ride the bandwagon. These names include George Packer of the  New Yorker, Newsday’s Jeffery Goldberg, the Atlantic’s Peter Beinart, Fareed Zakaria, Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Hitchens, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Paul Berman to name a few.

The late Tony Judt sized up this whole lot most aptly with the label “Bush’s Useful Idiots.” The “useful idiots,” he said, were those from within the liberal establishment who, either through a misguided attempt to project strength, willfully played along with preposterous WMD claims, or simply allowed themselves to get carried away with the imperialistic fervor surrounding a new call to war, abdicating the responsibilities upon which liberal ideology is based. Instead, they aligned their positions with the neo-conservative architects of the Iraq War.

Since then, of course, we have seen one devastating report after another about the impact of the war: the allegedly misguided estimations of scope, length, Iraqi public opinion, and cost. We have also seen reports of a monumental death toll of Iraqis as a result of the war: 600,000 Iraqis have suffered violent deaths from the war, according to estimates by the Lancet. The number, as predicted, is staggering.

As the reports worsened, each of the “useful idiots” began issuing a mea culpa, asking passively for forgiveness. To this, we have to call out the stunning insincerity of these apologies, and reply with a “hell no” that embodies the ignored cries of the millions on the streets in 2003. We cannot be asked to believe that the elite of our liberal establishment could not see what millions of us screamed until our voices were hoarse.

To whom are these leaders really apologizing, and for what exactly? Not one of these apologies has been delivered to any of the millions of families in Iraq which have been destroyed forever. Not one of the apologies is for supporting the idea of a war that senselessly puts Iraqi lives on the line. Nor is there an apology for promoting a war founded on torture: when Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi finally gave Bush administration officials the claims they were looking for, an obviously manufactured link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, we did not hear the outcry against his torture that we hear in torture debates today. Nor were there serious inquiries into the reliability of the information even though it was clear, and as al-Libi himself later admitted, that he would have said anything to end the torture.

No: the apologies we hear are for the war’s lack of success; for the impact on their own brands and political capital.

What’s even more frightening is that nothing has happened to the political capital of these leaders. Hillary Clinton has issued her cursory apologies, and now finds herself as the front-runner candidate for the 2016 elections. Her apology is for making the wrong calculation in 2003, which likely cost her the presidency in 2008. 

But here is the real problem: the liberal establishment still has not learned its lessons. Those who opposed the Iraq War 10 years ago are exposed today, not as having some kind of stronger moral fortitude, but simply having made the right political calculation.  President Barack Obama will take his credit for ending the unpopular Iraq War, which he opposed as a senator. He will do so while dropping bombs in residential neighborhoods in Libya, and expanding the drone program, which kills scores of civilians, in Pakistan and now extending it into Yemen, Somalia, and soon, possibly, into Syria.

And just as 10 years ago, the media fails us today in carrying a real debate. Not one of the prominent thinkers and actors in our liberal establishment has reflected on the true costs of war, or made any changes to their decision-making priorities.

So today, as we look back on a criminal war, and a human rights catastrophe, we may as well be looking forward as well, because it looks exactly the same. Unless we truly hold those who betrayed their oath of office to account for the devastation they’ve caused, the useful idiots of our next war will be us.

Hitchens: Beck's paranoia worse than Birchers'

Tea'd Off

Forfeiting a both-houses Republican victory, rational conservatives ignored or excused the most hateful kind of populist claptrap (e.g., the fetid weirdness of Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project). The poison they've helped disseminate will still be in the American bloodstream when the country needs it least.

By Christopher Hitchens
January 2011 issue | Vanity Fair

It is often in the excuses and in the apologies that one finds the real offense. Looking back on the domestic political "surge" which the populist right has been celebrating since last month, I found myself most dispirited by the manner in which the more sophisticated conservatives attempted to conjure the nasty bits away.

Here, for example, was Ross Douthat, the voice of moderate conservatism on the New York Times op-ed page. He was replying to a number of critics who had pointed out that Glenn Beck, in his rallies and broadcasts, had been channeling the forgotten voice of the John Birch Society, megaphone of Strangelovian paranoia from the 1950s and 1960s. His soothing message:

"These parallels are real. But there's a crucial difference. The Birchers only had a crackpot message; they never had a mainstream one. The Tea Party marries fringe concerns (repeal the 17th Amendment!) to a timely, responsible-seeming message about spending and deficits."

The more one looks at this, the more wrong it becomes (as does that giveaway phrase "responsible-seeming"). The John Birch Society possessed such a mainstream message—the existence of a Communist world system with tentacles in the United States—that it had a potent influence over whole sections of the Republican Party. It managed this even after its leader and founder, Robert Welch, had denounced President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a "dedicated, conscious agent" of that same Communist apparatus. Right up to the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and despite the efforts of such conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr. to dislodge them, the Birchers were a feature of conservative politics well beyond the crackpot fringe.

Now, here is the difference. Glenn Beck has not even been encouraging his audiences to reread Robert Welch. No, he has been inciting them to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him. It's from Skousen's demented screed The Five Thousand Year Leap (to a new edition of which Beck wrote a foreword, and which he shoved to the position of No. 1 on Amazon) that he takes all his fantasies about a divinely written Constitution, a conspiratorial secret government, and a future apocalypse. To give you a further idea of the man: Skousen's posthumously published book on the "end times" and the coming day of rapture was charmingly called The Cleansing of America. A book of his with a less repulsive title, The Making of America, turned out to justify slavery and to refer to slave children as "pickaninnies." And, writing at a time when the Mormon Church was under attack for denying full membership to black people, Skousen defended it from what he described as this "Communist" assault.

So, Beck's "9/12 Project" is canalizing old racist and clerical toxic-waste material that a healthy society had mostly flushed out of its system more than a generation ago, and injecting it right back in again. Things that had hidden under stones are being dug up and re-released. And why? So as to teach us anew about the dangers of "spending and deficits"? It's enough to make a cat laugh. No, a whole new audience has been created, including many impressionable young people, for ideas that are viciously anti-democratic and ahistorical. The full effect of this will be felt farther down the road, where we will need it even less.

I remember encountering this same mentality a few years ago, when it was more laughable than dangerous. I didn't like Bill Clinton: thought he had sold access to the Lincoln Bedroom and lied under oath about sexual harassment and possibly even bombed Sudan on a "wag the dog" basis. But when I sometimes agreed to go on the radio stations of the paranoid right, it was only to be told that this was all irrelevant. Didn't I understand that Clinton and his wife had murdered Vince Foster and were, even as I spoke, preparing to take advantage of the Y2K millennium crisis—remember that?—in order to seize power for life and become the Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu of our day? These people were not interested in the president's actual transgressions. They were looking to populate their fantasy world with new and more lurid characters.

There is an old Republican saying that "a government strong enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take away everything you have." This statement contains an essential truth that liberals have no right to overlook. But it is negated, not amplified, if it comes festooned with racism and superstition. In the recent past, government-sponsored policies of social engineering have led to surprising success in reducing the welfare rolls and the crime figures.

This came partly from the adoption by many Democrats of policies that had once been called Republican. But not a word about that from Beck and his followers, because it isn't exciting and doesn't present any opportunity for rabble-rousing. Far sexier to say that health care—actually another product of bipartisanship—is a step toward Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ten percent unemployment, on the other hand, is rather a disgrace to a midterm Democratic administration. But does anybody believe that unemployment would have gone down if the hated bailout had not occurred and GM had been permitted to go bankrupt? Why not avoid the question altogether and mutter about a secret plan to proclaim a socialist (or Nazi, or Jew-controlled: take your pick) dictatorship?

Again, there is a real debate about the pace and rhythm of global warming, and about the degree to which it has been caused (or can be slowed) by human activity. But at the first Tea Party rally I attended, at the Washington Monument earlier this year, the crowd—bristling with placards about the Second Amendment's being the correction—was treated to an arm-waving speech by a caricature English peer named Lord Monckton, who led them in the edifying call-and-response: "All together. Global warming is?" "Bullshit." "Obama cannot hear you. Global warming is?" "bullshit." "That's bettah." I don't remember ever seeing grown-ups behave less seriously, at least in an election season.

Most epochs are defined by one or another anxiety. More important, though, is the form which that anxiety takes. Millions of Americans are currently worried about two things that are, in their minds, emotionally related. The first of these is the prospect that white people will no longer be the majority in this country, and the second is that the United States will be just one among many world powers. This is by no means purely a "racial" matter. (In my experience, black Americans are quite concerned that "Hispanic" immigration will relegate them, too.) Having an honest and open discussion about all this is not just a high priority. It's more like a matter of social and political survival. But the Beck-Skousen faction want to make such a debate impossible. They need and want to sublimate the anxiety into hysteria and paranoia. The president is a Kenyan. The president is a secret Muslim. The president (why not?—after all, every little bit helps) is the unacknowledged love child of Malcolm X. And this is their response to the election of an extremely moderate half-African American candidate, who speaks better English than most and who has a model family. Revolted by this development, huge numbers of white people choose to demonstrate their independence and superiority by putting themselves eagerly at the disposal of a tear-stained semi-literate shock jock, and by repeating his list of lies and defamations. But, of course, there's nothing racial in their attitude …

As I started by saying, the people who really curl my lip are the ones who willingly accept such supporters for the sake of a Republican victory, and then try to write them off as not all that important, or not all that extreme, or not all that insane in wanting to repeal several amendments to a Constitution that they also think is unalterable because it's divine! It may be true that the Tea Party's role in November's vote was less than some people feared, and it's certainly true that several of the movement's elected representatives will very soon learn the arts of compromise and the pork barrel. But then what happens at the next downturn? A large, volatile constituency has been created that believes darkly in betrayal and conspiracy. A mass "literature" has been disseminated, to push the mad ideas of exploded crackpots and bigots. It would be no surprise if those who now adore Beck and his acolytes were to call them sellouts and traitors a few years from now. But, alas, they would not be the only victims of the poisonous propaganda that's been uncorked. Some of the gun brandishing next time might be for real. There was no need for this offense to come, but woe all the same to those by whom it came, and woe above all to those who whitewashed and rationalized it.

Blithe calculus of Iraq's welfare

Yes, I'm glad Saddam is gone and his evil reign is finished, but since then Iraq has not been Candy Land.  The human cost of ousting Saddam includes some 800,000 to 1.3 million dead Iraqis, millions of Iraqi refugees (including the best and brightest professionals and academics from the moderate middle class), rampant mental illness, unemployment, child starvation, privation, lack of education and basic services, more than 50,000 Iraqis imprisoned without charge, and on and on.  (These facts don't get much media "air time" either.)  

By comparison, it is estimated that in his 24 years in power, Saddam executed some 290,000 to 600,000 Iraqis, and sent another 500,000 Iraqis to die in the needless war with Iran.  So which way do the scales tip?  Far be it from me to say.  Nor should you think that you can so blithely perform the moral and physical calculus required to declare that Iraqis are indeed better off thanks to G.W. Bush's invasion and occupation.  To the Iraqis who were killed or forced to flee, Iraq is certainly not better off.

"Tell me, if you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon amputated your entire leg, what would you think if someone then asked you: Are you glad that you no longer have a knee problem? The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem."

In any case, it so callous and unfair to ask or answer the question as posed by Christopher Hitchens and his ilk to justify the illegal Iraq invasion: "Yes or no, is the world better off without Saddam in power?"  To start asking questions like that, and then, based on whatever answer you receive, attempt to justify whatever it is you did or intend to do, implies that the asker believes he is above the law.

Moreover, it implies that "the world's" needs trumped the sovereignty of Iraq.  (Aren't U.S. conservatives principally opposed to the UN or any kind of "world government" that would limit America's sovereignty?  And yet they would disregard other countries' sovereignty whenever they choose, just because they can, since might makes right.)  And anyway, a majority of the world has always opposed the Iraq invasion and occupation; so it is the height of arrogance and deception for the U.S. and its allies to decree they know not only what is best for Iraq, but also what is best for the world. 

For additional perspective, suppose if some foreigner had managed to assassinate G.W. Bush in office and then tried to justify his crime by asking me, an American, "Yes or no, is the world better off without Dubya?" my answer and the question itself would have been completely beside the point from any moral or legal standpoint, despite my strong political antipathy toward Bush.  In other words, a colossal wrong can't make a right.  

Disturbingly, in the ethically murky days since 9/11, more and more often America's leaders have asked us to accept that wrongs -- like illegal invasion, illegal torture, illegal domestic wiretapping, illegal rendition, detention and denial of habeus corpus, etc. -- do make rights.  It implies that we Americans think our laws and moral values aren't cut out for the "real world," as some put it; that our beliefs are quaint niceties made for a more gentle and civilized world; and therefore, paradoxically, that to survive in this world we must disregard our most basic beliefs in order to preserve them. 

This trend of thought at home worries me more than any cruel dictators or bearded loonies abroad.

And to start -- but not end -- another discussion, or just to give food for thought, consider this: We robbed Iraqis of the chance to free themselves.  Surely the consequences of this can be seen in the ensuing political chaos and the breakdown in national pride, increase in sectarianism, and loss of what it means to be Iraqi.  

By contrast, 200+ years ago Americans took the huge risk to free themselves [with a little help from the French] and it paid off; and those brave, heroic days have provided the unifying ideological and mythological foundations of our country to the present.  Iraq will never have the same chance again, because we took it from them.  We did the hard work for them.  Indeed, isn't it a conservative belief that one can never truly appreciate what one hasn't earned with one's own hard work, sweat, blood, and tears?  From now on, we should leave the hard work of national liberation to those nations who would be liberated.  We are not gods on Earth to decide what's best for everybody.

Hitchens: America's identity crisis with Obama

Identity Crisis
There's something pathetic and embarrassing about our obsession with Barack Obama's race.

By Christopher Hitchens
January 7, 2008 | Slate.com

To put it squarely and bluntly, is it because he is or is it because he isn't? To phrase it another way, is it because of what he says or what he doesn't say? Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois is the current beneficiary of a tsunami of drool. He sometimes claims credit on behalf of all Americans regardless of race, color, creed, blah blah blah, though his recent speeches appear also to claim a victory for blackness while his supporters—most especially the white ones—sob happily that at last we can have an African-American chief executive. Off to the side, snarling with barely concealed rage, are the Clinton machine-minders, who, having failed to ignite the same kind of identity excitement with an aging and resentful female, are perhaps wishing that they had made more of her errant husband having already been "our first black president."

Or perhaps not. Isn't there something pathetic and embarrassing about this emphasis on shade? And why is a man with a white mother considered to be "black," anyway? Is it for this that we fought so hard to get over Plessy v. Ferguson? Would we accept, if Obama's mother had also been Jewish, that he would therefore be the first Jewish president? The more that people claim Obama's mere identity to be a "breakthrough," the more they demonstrate that they have failed to emancipate themselves from the original categories of identity that acted as a fetter upon clear thought.

[Hitchens, who is a smart guy, sounds deliberately naïve here. Americans consider Obama black because he can't "pass" for anything else. It's really that simple. Unfortunately, black people (with the exception of Michael Jackson) don't get to choose their appearance the way they select their race on an application form. Nor do most "multiracial" black Americans enjoy the kind of friendly publicity of Tiger Woods , who uses the media spotlight to explain his racial makeup in exhaustive detail. Colin Powell put the issue succinctly, "In America, which I love from the depths of my heart and soul, when you look like me, you're black." Blacks and whites alike look with suspicion on anyone who goes to great lengths to assert his "unapparent" racial makeup. "Methinks he doth protest too much," I say of Tiger Woods and those like him. – J]

One can't exactly say that Sen. Obama himself panders to questions of skin color. One of the best chapters of his charming autobiography describes the moment when his black Republican opponent in the Illinois Senate race—Alan Keyes—accused him of possessing insufficient negritude because he wasn't the descendant of slaves! Obama's decision to be light-hearted—and perhaps light-skinned—about this was a milestone in itself. But are we not in danger of emulating Keyes' insane mistake every time we bang on about the senator's pigmentation? If you wanted a "black" president or vice president so much, you could long ago have turned out en masse for Angela Davis—also the first woman to be on a national ticket—or for Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. So, why didn't you? Could it have been the politics?

[People like Obama's politics, and his personality. I'm the only one saying we should vote for Obama just because he's black ;-) In fact, for most Americans Obama's race is just gravy, the chance to make history. Voters really like his youth, optimism, and his tendency to stay above the political fray. – J]

Last week happened to be the week that the nation of Kenya—birthplace of Obama's father—was convulsed by a political war that contained ghastly overtones of violent and sadistic tribalism. It would sound as absurd to a Kenyan to hear praise for a black candidate as it would sound to most of my European readers to hear a recommendation of a "great white hope." A white visitor to Kenya might not be able to tell a Kikuyu from a Luo at a glance, but a Kenyan would have no such difficulty. The time is pretty much past, in our country, when a Polish-American would not vote for a candidate with a German name or when Sharks and Jets were at daggers drawn, but this is all because (to borrow from Ernest Renan's definition of a nation) people agreed to forget a lot of things as well as to remember a number of things. So, which are we doing presently?

Sen. Obama is a congregant of a church in Chicago called Trinity United Church of Christ. I recommend that you take a brisk tour of its Web site. Run by the sort of character that the press often guardedly describes as "flamboyant"—a man calling himself the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.—this bizarre outfit describes itself as "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian" and speaks of "a chosen people" whose nature we are allowed to assume is "Afrocentric." Trinity United sells creationist books and its home page includes a graphic link to a thing called Goodsearch—the name is surmounted with a halo in its logo—which announces cheerily that "Every time you search or shop online! Our Church earns money." Much or most of what Trinity United says is harmless and boring, rather like Gov. Mike Huckabee's idiotic belief that his own success in Iowa is comparable to the "miracle" of the loaves and fishes, and the site offers a volume called Bad Girls of the Bible: Exploring Women of Questionable Virtue, which I have added to my cart, but nobody who wants to be taken seriously can possibly be associated with such a substandard and shade-oriented place.

All this easy talk about being a "uniter" and not a "divider" is piffle if people are talking out of both sides of their mouths. I have been droning on for months about how Mitt Romney needs to answer questions about the flat-out racist background of his own church, and about how Huckabee has shown in public that he does not even understand the first thing about a theory—the crucial theory of evolution by natural selection—in which he claims not to believe. Many Democrats are with me on this, but they go completely quiet when Sen. Obama chooses to give his allegiance to a crackpot church with a decidedly ethnic character.

The unspoken agreement to concede the black community to the sway of the pulpit is itself a form of racist condescension. The sickly canonization of Martin Luther King Jr. has led to a crude rewriting of history that obliterates the great black and white secularists—Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, Walter Reuther—who actually organized the March on Washington. It has also allowed a free pass to any demagogue who can manage to get the word reverend in front of his name. The white voters who subconsciously make the allowance that black folks sure love to hear their preachers are not only patronizing their black brothers and sisters but also helping to empower white ministers or deacons who make the same pitch, from Jimmy Carter to Mike Huckabee. The Iowa caucuses of 2008 were not the end of our long national nightmare about race, but another stage in our protracted national nightmare of piety, "uplift," and deceptive optimistic windbaggery.

['Sickly canonization'? That's harsh. MLK was imprisoned and later assassinated because of his struggle for racial equality. Here Hitchens' provocative iconoclasm (which includes going after Mother Teresa) reaches too far. – J]

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Hitchens' 'phased withdrawal' from stupidity underway

In-the-wise readers of Hitchens' columns will recognize in this installment the beginnings of a "phased withdrawal" from his previously unwavering position, which could only be characterized as "Invasion – Yeah!" and "Occupation – Indefinitely!" This is significant, because Hitchens has been the most formidable apologist for America's invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Briefly, I think the idea of Democratic Sen. Peter Galbraith, which Hitchens mentions, is interesting, and might be an improvement over the status quo; but Hitchens doesn't consider any possible downsides. (It is also, strictly speaking, "strategic redeployment," which only one year ago was called "cut and run" by war supporters.) One major downside: Putting all our military eggs in the northern Kurdish basket would make us pretty beholden to them, and would surely encourage Kurds' ambitions for their own state, encompassing parts of Turkey. This in turn would seriously anger our staunchest secular Muslim ally in the region. Talk about loyal gratitude!

Also, I would like to know exactly what would constitute an "al-Qaeda challenge" in Iraq, assuming American forces withdrew. This is the bogeyman we keep being threatened with by Bush, Cheney, et al if we withdraw, but they never explain what they mean by it.

Does Hitchens honestly think that al Qaeda would have any success raising an army and challenging anybody? They're acting at the fringes of the Iraq conflict now. That the Shi'ites (with or without Iran's help) wouldn't stamp them out if al Qaeda dared to form a regular army is beyond belief. Or would an "al-Qaeda challenge" be dozens or even hundreds of terrorists hiding around Iraq, plotting attacks? Well, that's the status quo, and none of our efforts have succeeded in stamping out the terrorists. We're too few, too clumsy, too disliked by the locals, and always a day late and a dollar short.

Finally, regarding Hitchen's warning to Democrats about "abandoning" the Kurdish provinces if America withdraws from Iraq completely… If the Kurds are really so united and self-sufficient (with their own army, government), then why do they need America? If the Kurdish provinces are the model of what we want all of Iraq to be, so that we can withdraw un-precipitously and in our own good time, then why would we want to keep our forces there? Do we really want to teach Iraqis the lesson: If you choose peace & stability, we will reward you with permanent U.S. bases on your territory?

Mesopotamia Split?

By Christopher Hitchens
March 26, 2007 | Slate

Wised-up opinion in Washington holds that the Republicans are being unsmart in opposing the Democratic attempt to impose a timeline on American withdrawal from Iraq. By resisting this demand, it is argued, the GOP insists on assuming the whole responsibility for the war, when it could have said to the opposition: All right, have it your own way; we will adopt your timetable and be ready to blame you if it goes wrong. But by opposing the proposal, the president's supporters are apparently shouldering the entire burden.

This analysis only works if you think of politics as a process of maneuvering, whereby each party hopes to reap the benefit of the other party's mistake in having either "lost" Iraq or in having "acquired" it in the first place. It also only works if you make the assumption that there is no middle policy between "surging" or "scuttling." As it happens, though, the Democrats know perfectly well that this is untrue, and it's time that they were called on the point.

The most senior Democrat to have called, the earliest and the longest, for the removal of Saddam Hussein is Peter Galbraith. For many years a senior staffer on the Senate foreign relations committee and during the Balkan wars a highly visible ambassador in Zagreb who urged the defeat of Slobodan Milosevic, he was exposing American complicity with Saddam's genocide at a time when Republican administrations considered Baghdad a strategic ally. His work on pushing for the passage of the Prevention of Genocide Act and in drawing attention to what was happening during the Anfal campaign in northern Iraq was exemplary.

His latest book, The End of Iraq, is notable for two things. First, it gives one of the most acute and intimate portraits of the Bush administration's catastrophic mismanagement of the intervention. Second, it proposes a serious program for a radical change in policy. What are our irreducible objectives in Iraq? To prevent the country and its enormous resources from falling into the hands of the enemies of civilization—most notably al-Qaida—and to protect what remains of the secular and democratic alliance that we once hoped might emerge to govern the situation. We made—both parties, not just the Bush administration—some serious promises to Iraqi democrats down the years. It would be morally impossible, as well as politically suicidal, to walk away from them.

Given the apparently irreversible fracturing of Iraq into at least three confessional and ethnic parts, an outcome that may have been innate in the Iraqi state, we cannot hope—so runs his argument—to police or manage the sectarian horror show that has been launched by the parties of god. And we run the grave risk of being drawn into it. However, there is a possible way of saving some of our credit. If we reconfigure our military presence to the north, in the three Kurdish provinces, we can reduce the size of ourselves as a target, remain just "over the horizon" in the case of an al-Qaida challenge, be available "case by case" in the event of any appeal from the Iraqi government for help, and protect the most outstanding of our achievements in the country, which is the emergence of a relatively peaceful, democratic, and prosperous region under coalition auspices.

By definition, this would mean a much smaller and leaner force, in an area where so far no American soldier has been killed by hostile action. (See, if you like, my report from Kurdistan in the current Vanity Fair.)

It would associate us with the secular and democratic Iraqis and Kurds, many of whom continue to witness for such values in the face of a terrifying campaign of torture and murder by the rival theocrats. And it would remove the suspicion that we are being "spun," or manipulated, by Iraqi factions who hope to use U.S. soldiers to crush their own private enemies. It would, finally, be congruent with values that are shared across American politics—such as the defense of self-determination and the protection of minorities from massacre and persecution, which was part of Operation Provide Comfort with which the world reacted to Saddam's barbarism in 1991.

I have my reservations about Galbraith's proposal, because I think that partition is always and everywhere a defeat and often leads to more wars and more partitions. But I strongly recommend a reading of his powerful book, which makes the case that partition is no longer avoidable and that we must broker "an amicable divorce" between the factions. And I know that he has been invited to address meetings of the newly elected Democratic intake on the Hill, many of whom have expressed varying degrees of interest and enthusiasm in his plan. The stakes here are not low. Does the Democratic leadership seriously suggest the abandonment of the whole of Iraq, including the abandonment of a region where the inhabitants have done everything that has been asked of them, from providing for their own defense with their own army to settling their own factional divisions? Is it to be forgotten that senior Democratic senators from Al Gore to Claiborne Pell spent much time in the 1980s and '90s defending the Kurdish cause against the degraded realpolitik of men like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Henry Kissinger?

At present, it seems that some Democrats are interpreting public disillusionment with Iraq as a mandate for isolationism and for treating a country that occupies a keystone position between Iran and Saudi Arabia as if it were negligible or irritating or an obstacle to plans for universal health care or the arrest of global warming. That this is a huge historical mistake is the least offensive way of putting it.

[In America, since when is the opposite of isolationism occupation? Democrats and war critics are not preaching isolation; in fact, they're demanding heavier engagement with Iran, Syria, North Korea, Israel, and Palestine. Engagement overseas does not necessarily, or even normally, entail guns a-blazin'. – J]

Hitchens: So, Was I Wrong About Iraq?

Here's a brief rebuttal to show why Hitchens is, was, and will always be wrong about Iraq:

> If flouting UN resolutions is a reason to go to war, let's attack Israel and Turkey, who have been flouting more them for more years. The key question regarding Iraq always was: Did it pose an imminent threat to the U.S. or to other countries in the region? After Iraq War I, with daily flyovers by U.S. forces in the North and South of Iraq, and U.S. forces stationed in the Gulf, the answer was clearly: No.

> Again, even if Saddam did have some chemical or biological weapons remaining from the 1980s and early 1990s, could they have been weaponized and used on the U.S., or our allies? Western intelligence could and did answer that question in 2002: No. Thus, Iraq did not present a clear and present danger to America.

> As for inspection, ask the inspectors themselves if they thought their efforts were working (Yes), and if Saddam had large amounts of WMD stashed away (No).

> Yes, Colin Powell's performance at the UN was a disgrace, but it's too convenient to lay all the blame on him – or on George Tenet, whom Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom after no WMD turned up in Iraq. Iraq has always been Bush's show. By all accounts, Powell didn't want to go before the UN, but in the end he decided to "Tom" it up, with his artist's renderings of Iraqi mobile weapons labs and aerial drones and all. Pathetic.

> Yes, even Hitchens admits that Bush exaggerated the al Qaeda-Iraq connection. To this day, Bush hardly misses and opportunity to say "al Qaeda" "9/11" and "Saddam Hussein" in the same breath. Is it really any surprise, then, that somehow, in September 2003, 70% of Americans believed – incorrectly – that Saddam was involved in 9/11; and in September 2006, a shocking 45% of Americans still believed Saddam was "personally involved" in the 9/11, even after Bush publicly denied it in September 2003!? Are Americans just plain stupid? Did they concoct this bogus idea all by themselves? Did the "liberal media" for its own inscrutable, diabolical reasons, plant this thought (which would only serve to help Bush!) in the Americans' brains? Or were Americans perhaps listening too closely and trustingly to what their President was saying "between the lines"?

> I've already chopped up Hitchen's argument that a civil war in Iraq was inevitable, even if Saddam had remained in power. It's pure speculation, totally unproveable or unrefuteable. It's a throwaway line of argument.

> Strikingly, what Hitchens ignores in all of this is what IRAQIS think. He doesn't care at all. Hitchens doesn't care that Iraqis want us to leave. He doesn't care that they hate being occupied by a foreign nation. And of course he doesn't care that Iraqis are living with fewer basic services like electricity, water, hospitals, and schools. Or that they have less security, or a chance to find a job. Or that nearly 2 million Iraqis (8% of the pre-war population) have fled the country. Or that at least 24,000 Iraqis , and perhaps as many as 100,000, have been violently killed since the U.S. invasion.

To Hitchens – and to Bush and his cronies – Iraq is just another chessboard for Western power plays. Its people are disposable pawns. What matters are OUR wishes, and OUR security. For Hitchens and his ilk, it is a given that America retains the absolute right to attack whomever it wants, on the slimmest of pretexts, in order to prevent another terrorist attack, and damn the consequences for the rest of the world's poor innocents.

And naturally, all of our "honest" mistakes are excusable, because our intentions are pure, and good, and noble, unlike all those other countries.

What a bunch of craven, arrogant $&#@*s !

So, Mr. Hitchens, Weren't You Wrong About Iraq?

Hard questions, four years later.
By Christopher Hitchens
March 19, 2007 | Slate

Four years after the first coalition soldiers crossed the Iraqi border, one can attract pitying looks (at best) if one does not take the view that the whole engagement could have been and should have been avoided. Those who were opposed to the operation from the beginning now claim vindication, and many of those who supported it say that if they had known then what they know now, they would have spoken or voted differently.

What exactly does it mean to take the latter position? At what point, in other words, ought the putative supporter to have stepped off the train? The question isn't as easy to answer as some people would have you believe. Suppose we run through the actual timeline:

Was the president right or wrong to go to the United Nations in September 2002 and to say that body could no longer tolerate Saddam Hussein's open flouting of its every significant resolution, from weaponry to human rights to terrorism?

A majority of the member states thought he was right and had to admit that the credibility of the United Nations was at stake. It was scandalous that such a regime could for more than a decade have violated the spirit and the letter of the resolutions that had allowed a cease-fire after the liberation of Kuwait. The Security Council, including Syria, voted by nine votes to zero that Iraq must come into full compliance or face serious consequences.

Was it then correct to send military forces to the Gulf, in case Saddam continued his long policy of defiance, concealment, and expulsion or obstruction of U.N. inspectors?

If you understand the history of the inspection process at all, you must concede that Saddam would never have agreed to readmit the inspectors if coalition forces had not made their appearance on his borders and in the waters of the Gulf. It was never a choice between inspection and intervention: It was only the believable threat of an intervention that enabled even limited inspections to resume.

Should it not have been known by Western intelligence that Iraq had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction?

The entire record of UNSCOM until that date had shown a determination on the part of the Iraqi dictatorship to build dummy facilities to deceive inspectors, to refuse to allow scientists to be interviewed without coercion, to conceal chemical and biological deposits, and to search the black market for materiel that would breach the sanctions. The defection of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law, the Kamel brothers, had shown that this policy was even more systematic than had even been suspected. Moreover, Iraq did not account for—has in fact never accounted for—a number of the items that it admitted under pressure to possessing after the Kamel defection. We still do not know what happened to this weaponry. This is partly why all Western intelligence agencies, including French and German ones quite uninfluenced by Ahmad Chalabi, believed that Iraq had actual or latent programs for the production of WMD. Would it have been preferable to accept Saddam Hussein's word for it and to allow him the chance to re-equip once more once the sanctions had further decayed?

Could Iraq have been believably "inspected" while the Baath Party remained in power?

No. The word inspector is misleading here. The small number of U.N. personnel were not supposed to comb the countryside. They were supposed to monitor the handover of the items on Iraq's list, to check them, and then to supervise their destruction. (If Iraq disposed of the items in any other way—by burying or destroying or neutralizing them, as now seems possible—that would have been an additional grave breach of the resolutions.) To call for serious and unimpeachable inspections was to call, in effect, for a change of regime in Iraq. Thus, we can now say that Iraq is in compliance with the Nonproliferation Treaty. Moreover, the subsequent hasty compliance of Col. Muammar Qaddafi's Libya and the examination of his WMD stockpile (which proved to be much larger and more sophisticated than had been thought) allowed us to trace the origin of much materiel to Pakistan and thus belatedly to shut down the A.Q. Khan secret black market.

Wasn't Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations a bit of a disgrace?

Yes, it was, as was the supporting role played by George Tenet and the CIA (which has been reliably wrong on Iraq since 1963). Some good legal experts—Ruth Wedgwood most notably—have argued that the previous resolutions were self-enforcing and that there was no need for a second resolution or for Powell's dog-and-pony show. Some say that the whole thing was done in order to save Tony Blair's political skin. A few points of interest did emerge from Powell's presentation: The Iraqi authorities were caught on air trying to mislead U.N inspectors (nothing new there), and the presence in Iraq of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a very dangerous al-Qaida refugee from newly liberated Afghanistan, was established. The full significance of this was only to become evident later on.

Was the terror connection not exaggerated?

Not by much. The Bush administration never claimed that Iraq had any hand in the events of Sept. 11, 2001. But it did point out, at different times, that Saddam had acted as a host and patron to every other terrorist gang in the region, most recently including the most militant Islamist ones. And this has never been contested by anybody. The action was undertaken not to punish the last attack—that had been done in Afghanistan—but to forestall the next one.

Was a civil war not predictable?

Only to the extent that there was pre-existing unease and mistrust between the different population groups in Iraq. Since it was the policy of Saddam Hussein to govern by divide-and-rule and precisely to exacerbate these differences, it is unlikely that civil peace would have been the result of prolonging his regime. Indeed, so ghastly was his system in this respect that one-fifth of Iraq's inhabitants—the Kurds—had already left Iraq and were living under Western protection.

So, you seriously mean to say that we would not be living in a better or safer world if the coalition forces had turned around and sailed or flown home in the spring of 2003?

That's exactly what I mean to say.

Hitchens: Don't blame us, history did it!

Hitchens is considered one of the more compelling and eloquent apologists of the Iraq invasion. So I take special care to rebut his desperately childish arguments.

Appointment in Mesopotamia

Iraq's problems existed long before 2003.

By Christopher Hitchens

February 5, 2007 | Slate

Replying to Fareed Zakaria's observation in Newsweek, about Iraq and the Iraqis—that "We did not give them a republic. We gave them a civil war."—Charles Krauthammer, in our common sister paper the Washington Post, expressed a fine contempt:

Did Britain "give" India the Hindu-Muslim war of 1947-48 that killed a million souls and ethnically cleansed 12 million more? The Jewish-Arab wars in Palestine?

Alas, the answer to the above sarcastic questions is "yes." (In the first instance by staying several decades too long and then compounding the mistake by leaving much too fast—even unilaterally advancing the date of independence so as to speed up the scuttle—and by capitulating to Muslim League demands for partition; and in the second instance by promising Palestine at different times to both the Zionist and Arab nationalist movements.) However, this unpleasant historical fact—which has its own implications for Iraq—does not acquit Zakaria's remark of the charge of being morally idle. In many other people's minds, too, there is the unspoken assumption that what the United States does in Iraq is a fully determined action, whereas what other people do is simply a consequence of that action, with no independent or autonomous "agency" of its own.

[The real assumptions of the anti-war crowd are indeed serious and "adult:": (1) every person, nation, or "agency" must be held responsible for its own actions; (2) before acting, every person/nation/agency must consider, first and foremost, the likely consequences of its actions – including others' likely reactions; and (3) every person/nation/agency should act with the intention of doing more good than harm – and preferably no harm at all. We must admit that, in our daily lives, this is basically how we make decisions.

So why do Hitchens and his ilk insist that America's preventive invasion of Iraq be exempt somehow from these basic rules of decision-making?

Because it suits them, that's why. It suits Hitchens because he doesn't care about doing more good than harm, only the selective good of having relieved the West – and particularly America – of Saddam Hussein.

The truth is, we still don't know how bad Iraq will get. We don't know how or when this violence and chaos will end. And we don't know whether a U.S. presence, no matter at what level of strength, will have any positive effect, much less bring about an end to it all.

If Hitchens can't or won't satisfactorily address these "known unknowns" – which boil down to: Is America ready and capable of ensuring a good outcome in Iraq? – then he must admit that America's Iraq policy is not very serious or grown-up. Policies whose successes depend on half-hopes and unlikely outcomes are fundamentally irresponsible and dangerous. A nation ought to enter such conflicts only when the situation is desperate, and the stakes immense. Saddam's Iraq, pre-invasion, was ugly, belligerent, and brutal to its own people, but it fit neither of these two criteria from the West's perspective. There was no urgency for outside nations to intervene, and no "adult" level of certainty that intervention would lead to something better. – J]

This mentality was perfectly expressed, under the byline of Marc Santora, in the New York Times of Jan. 31. Santora explained the background of the murderous attacks on the Shiite festival of Ashura: "At Ashura, Shiites commemorate what is for them the most formative event of their faith, a celebration that had been banned under Saddam Hussein. In recent years, Sunni militants, caught up in a renewed sectarian split, have attacked worshippers on the holiday." (My italics.)

I suppose that might be one way of putting it. But a factually neutral way of phrasing the same point would be to say that three years ago, the leader of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia wrote to his guru Osama Bin Laden, saying that there was a real danger of the electoral process succeeding in Iraq and of "suffocating" the true Islamist cause. The only way of preventing this triumph of the democratic heresy, wrote Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was to make life so unbearable for the heretical Shiites that they would respond in kind. The ensuing conflict would ruin all the plans of the Crusader-Zionist alliance. I can still remember the chill that went through me when I read this document and realized that it combined extreme radical evil with a high degree of intelligence. Santora's reportage is not alone in slightly declining the responsibility for facing this central truth.

If there is a sectarian war in Iraq today, or perhaps several sectarian wars, we have to understand that this was latent in the country, and in the state, and in the society all along. It was not the only possible outcome, because it had to be willed and organized, but it was certainly high on the list of probabilities. (The Saddam Hussein regime, which thrived on the worst form of "divide and rule," certainly represented a standing invitation to run this risk.)

In other words, those who now deplore and decry the "civil war" (or the "civil wars") must, in order to be serious, admit that they would have deplored such an outcome just as much if it had not happened on America's watch or had (like Rwanda) been something that we could have pretended to watch as disinterested or—even worse—uninterested spectators.

[To repeat: If civil war was always a likely possibility, then it was absurdly irresponsible and dangerous of the U.S. to invade and "liberate" Iraq in the first place, unleashing a sectarian battle for control.

Anyhow, Hitchen's hypothetical argument about "how we would have felt" under different circumstances is absurd and irrelevant, because it ignores actual circumstances, i.e. recent history. We "know" why we invaded Iraq – or at least we've been given several reasons why. And none of those reasons included preventing a possible civil war that could eventually happen someday in Iraq's future. – J]

The habit of viewing Iraq as a crisis that only began in 2003—a lazy habit that is conditioned by the needs of the impending 2008 election—is an obstacle to understanding. Everybody has their own favorite alternative scenario of how things might have evolved differently or better. In some weak moments, I can picture taking the alternative advice from the European Union and the United Nations in 2003—let's just see how Iraq develops if left alone as a private fiefdom of the Saddam Hussein dynasty—and only then deciding that things have deteriorated to the point where an international intervention is necessitated. That would have been much less upsetting and demanding than the direct assumption of responsibility, and could have been triggered by the more familiar images of unbearable suffering and carnage, and could have summoned the Darfur-like emotions of guilt and shame, but it would perforce have been begun very much later—and perhaps too late altogether.

Iraq was in our future. The specter, not just of a failed state, but of a failed society, was already before us in what we saw from the consequences of sanctions and the consequences of aggressive Sunni fascism at the center of the state. Nobody has ever even tried to make a case for doing nothing about Iraq: Even those who foresaw sectarian strife were going by a road map that was already valid and had been traveled before. Thus it seems to me quite futile to be arguing about whether to blame the Iraqis—or indeed whether to blame the coalition. Until recently, no Iraqi was allowed to have any opinion about the future of his or her country. How long did we imagine that such a status quo would have remained "stable"? Charles Krauthammer might be wrong about his specific historical comparisons, but he is quite right to lay stress on the point that—absent a complete evacuation of Iraq and the region—there was a rendezvous in Mesopotamia that could not have been averted. A general refusal to confront this fact is actively revealed by the use of the passive voice.

[Yes, indeed it is absurd to argue about whether to blame Iraqis or ourselves. We should blame ourselves, because that's what adults do: Act as wisely as possible, and then take responsibility for what they've done. Adults know they can't control what others do, only what they themselves do. But adults also live in the real world; they take into account others' possible reactions, which are often predictable. So, when an adult acts in a way that produces a predictably negative reaction from another, a real adult must place some of the blame for that negative reaction on himself.

It's another argument for another day, but it suffices to say that we could not have been certain in 2003 that Iraqis would not someday overthrow Saddam's tyranny (or his sons'), and make something at least marginally better out of Iraq, with less sectarian strife, bloodshed, and potential for regional spillover than there is now.

Hitchens, a war cheerleader from the start, only makes excuses for the Iraq disaster, and takes no responsibility. In fact, in his view it's silly to lay blame on anyone, what with all these "latent" conflicts and unavoidable "rendezvous" with destiny in that inexorable honeypot of Mesopotamia.

He may write prettily, but at heart he's an irresponsible child who won't 'fess up to a mistake. Hitchens' argument is, "Don't blame me; history did it." We adults in the room shouldn't let him get away with it. – J]