Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
by John Cole| 14 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs
I have never understood why Democrats always believe they have a monopoly on the interpretation of political speech, but here is another fantastic example. Matt Yglesias links approvingly to a Kieran Healy post (who I should read more often) that states the following:
Dan [Drezner] can be relied on to have made as well-argued and well-supported case for war as possible, but at this point I really don
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Thank You John Cole
This is cathartic. I’m breathing a little easier after reading it. And I’m glad to see somebody finally taking on Matt Yglesias. Many seem to think that because he’s a liberal and he reads The Corner, Andrew Sullivan, and the…
A Man With A Memory
John Cole has 5 good reasons why we went to war, and not a damn one of them involves whether Saddam tried purchasing uranium….
cs
The fact that Bush made other arguments in favor of the war has nothing at all to do with Matt’s point. In fact, he specifically says that he wants to discuss the implications of Bush’s dishonesty _apart from_ the issue of the justification of the war. Surely you don’t want to argue that it is OK to make a dishonest argument as long as one also makes an honest arguement for the same conclusion?
(Yes I know that you are not convinced that Bush was dishonest, but I am operating from that premise to point out that you are mistaking Matt’s argument.)
Andrew Lazarus
Do you think forcing Sinn Fein into a peace agreement will result in the disarming of Al Qaeda? No. me either.
I’m at a loss to understand your point 4. As best as I can tell, no expert in the field believes that Saddam had any sort of working relationship with Al Qaeda. Hence, I don’t see why the war with Iraq (as opposed to Afghanistan) will make us any safer from Al Qaeda or impinge on their terror capabilities in any way. Your belief, indeed, seems to me to be dangerous wishful thinking.
I concede that removing Saddam’s support from *Palestinian* terror groups might reduce the terrorist threat to *Israel*, although the suicide bombers also receive stipends from Saudi Arabia, and in any event seem willing to blow themselves up for free. Is this why we’ve created our own little Southern Lebanon (down to the Shiites who start by cheering our arrival and will end by chasing us out at gunpoint, objectives unmet).
I don’t understand why it’s a whine to point out that the fundamentalist training camps were in an area of Iraq off limits to Saddam’s security apparatus since the Gulf War. After all, you never gave Saddam credit for the GOOD things that happened in Kurdish Iraq (me neither). YOU are the one employing rhetoric over against reality here: yelling loudly that the camps are inside the nominal Iraq border, and ignoring the reality that Saddam had nothing to do with them, neither for nor against. That’s not whining. That’s debunking a very nasty bit of false propoganda.
PG
If the proven case for regime change was so excellent (and as a bleedingheart liberal, I’m willing to invade based on humanitarian considerations), why did Bush venture out to far more dubious allegations?
Had Bush’s entire case for war been about Saddam Hussein’s brutality, no one could have argued with it.
Unfortunately, Bush apparently thought that the American people would not support a war that was waged solely for humanitarian reasons. I would agree that the American people will not support essentially unilateral wars made on that basis; I think support for action in Kosovo was possible because it was a genuinely multilateral effort to end a genocide.
I’m sure Bush cares about suffering, but sometimes he has a funny way of showing it.
John Cole
Andrew-
THe northern kurdish Iraq and the part of the soutern no fly zone in Iraq have something in common- they are both IN IRAQ.
Unless, of course, you are proposing just invading part of Iraq and cordoning off the central region under Saddam’s control.
In other words, the only way to deal with them is precisely how we dealt with it- we invaded Iraq.
Dean
PG:
What genocide in Kosovo? Now that we’ve been there a few years, where is the evidence of a systematic effort at killing all the Kosovars?
You don’t mean that Clinton happened to LIE, now would you?
Fredrik Nyman
PG:
In order to get the UK to support us, we needed to take our case to the UN.
In the UN, the WMD allegations and the evidence that Iraq failed to comply with UNSC resolutions were the only arguments that mattered. The UN doesn’t care at all about human rights.
Dean
Fredrik,
How can you say that? Isn’t a paragon of democracy and human rights chairing that subcommittee right now? Who is it? Iran? Libya?
And the UN has does a stellar job preventing human rights crises in places from Zimbabwe to Liberia to Uzbekistan to Iraq to China. Why, the American Left has invited the UN to monitor our elections—you KNOW that they must stand for human rights when out Lefties do that!
PG
Dean, I can’t tell if you’re joking or not, but the relevant group being targeted was not Kosovars (which describes citizenship, not ethnicity) but ethnic Albanians being killed by Serbs. Kosovo’s genocide.
I realize that there is some dispute over whether genocide actually was occurring, but I think the evidence weighs toward labeling what was happening as genocide. I recommend the relevant chapter in Samantha Power’s book A Problem from Hell if you’re interested.
If the UK was convinced by the humanitarian case for war, why would they have demanded that we go to the UN? This is what continues to stymie me.
I thought the humanitarian case for war in Iraq was excellent; I thought the same about the case for intervention in Rwanda or the Congo, neither of which Bush would want to get involved with.
However, I realize that the price paid for intervention can be high, and that many Americans do not think that we should pay it unless our own interests are directly threatened. If the fact-based case for war was so good, why did Bush need to add anything to it?
DANEgerus
If the argument against the WMD evidence was to be made it should have been raised before the war… the Donks were privy to the same intelligence and used it to formulate the regime-change policy as well as implement the UN inspections both during the Clinton(D) administration.
The fact that Bush solved the problem is being ignored.
The fact that the arguments that Bush discussed were a continuation of Donk policy is suddenly a LIE?
In what universe?
Well if your saying Donks always lie… even about their own lies, then perhaps the lies that they told about their lies don’t justify their own ends that they couldn’t accomplish and so the Donks are lying to cover their lies in supporting their lies to reinforce their committment to lying now about the lies that supported the war.
Andrew Lazarus
John, by your logic [?] the Bosnian government is responsible for the anti-Bosniak training (and rape) camps perpetrated by Serbs within the technical borders of Bosnia.
Ever since the Gulf War, parts of Northern Iraq have operated *completely independently* of the Baghdad government. There are any number of mainstream press pieces PREDATING the current war on this, and if you insist, I’ll Google them up.
Most of the Kurdish groups were more-or-less pro-Western, but one that was not allowed an Al Qaeda affiliate to set up camps. Saddam didn’t give permission and, under the restrictions imposed in 1991, couldn’t stop it.
Trying to refute these plain facts with droning on about borders on a paper map (and not facts on the ground) suggests a real lack of faith in the quality of your arguments.
I’m somewhat confused by DANEgerous, who seems to believe that the Democrats in Congress run their own intelligence service, instead of having to swallow the false and half-true versions concocted by the Administration.
Ryan Waxx
Lazarus, if there had been a conspiracy to decieve the Democrats, who recieved regular reports from the intelligence services, it would have outed by now.
Take your tinfoil-hattery elsewhere.
Robert Crawford
“As best as I can tell, no expert in the field believes that Saddam had any sort of working relationship with Al Qaeda.”
You’re wrong. Absolutely wrong. At the very least, Saddam and al’Qaeda had a “truce”; it’s known that Saddam sent a bomb expert to train al’Qaeda when they were in Sudan, and that there were nearly a hundred instances of contact between Saddam and al’Qaeda.
Heck, there was an al’Jazeera staffer on Iraq’s payroll acting as a courier between Saddam and bin Laden.