Too Much To Dream

Lileks writes:

If you believe this, you see two visions of the future: in one, Saddam is defeated, his weapons destroyed, his people freed. In the other, you see the UN reduced to irrelevance.

Those are the only two possible outcomes, are they? Either the USAF goes in, drops a few daisycutters, blows up a few palaces, then waves the Magic Wand of Reconstruction (ordered from the Fairy Godmothers 'R' Us, no doubt) and all is right with the world, or else Evil Saddam gets away with living like Silvio Berlusconi and Frank Sinatra. (Or something like that. I admit, I didn't quite follow what the hell that whole "New York, New York" ramble had to do with anything.)

And hawks accuse us sceptics of being simplistic and naive.

Honestly. The same U.S. Government that can't be trusted to run a national medical system, is going to not fuck up trying to rebuild a nation of foreigners who share neither our language, nor our culture, nor our religion, nor any common history. Scratch that -- it's not even a nation. It's a group of peoples lumped arbitrarily together after the retreat of the last imperial power to venture into the area, where every social or political structure not founded on the fear of Hussein has been systematically pulverized; where the economy has been fucked by a decade of sanctions, and where the remaining physical infrastructure is about to be smashed by war.

Trying to fix that will be the most thankless task on Earth. Whoever takes charge after Hussein will get maybe a year's grace, if they're lucky, and then everything that's still wrong with the place will become their fault. And you want to volunteer for that? For god's sake, why?

Because we need to go in to save the Iraqi people? That's nothing but bleeding-heart wishful thinking.

Because they're working on nukes? Um, where? Are they doing better than North Korea?

Because they're working with al Qaeda? Please. It'd be about time for some actual evidence of that, thank-you very much.

So it's better to leave the Iraqi people under the rule of a murderous despot?

Only in Iraq is "Staff Rapist" an actual profession, thanks to Saddamn.

No other argument for his removal needs to be made, and no argument against his removal stands up to that fact.

Well, how about the people of North Korea? Burma? Syria? Libya? Congo? Tibet? Haiti? Zimbabwe? Cuba? Angola? Liberia? The Central African Republic? Saudi Arabia? Gabon? Sudan? Togo? Turkmenistan?

"Only in Iraq", sorry, that's crap.

If this war is really about what's best for the Iraqi people, I'd like to see a bit more serious debate of the Hippocratic principle: above all, do no harm. The odds look to me rather better than fifty-fifty that destroying the existing government is going to leave nothing by an Somali-style anarchy in its wake; will invite Turkey and Iran in to mess with the Kurds; and God knows what else. Maybe that's better than Saddam; maybe not; but the difference is that America will now be directly responsible for it.

Colin,

If the Iraq operation turns out even moderately well, will you admit you were wrong? If so, that alone makes you more intellectually honest than most of the so-called "antiwar" crowd, by whose logic we'd still be fighting a bloody and losing quagmire in Afghanistan.

I'm prepared to admit when I'm wrong, though there isn't much way I can prove it to you. I do want to be clear on one thing here: I fully expect that the US can roll over Iraq, and that for the first six months to a year afterward things will look fine, as they did in Afghanistan. The real question is whether the kind of rosy reconstruction the neocons blithely promise is possible, and the jury will be out on that for at least five years. That's just the way the world works -- I mean, the blowback from the CIA's adventures in Afghanistan in 1980 is still bouncing around.

I also have to note that things are maybe not so cheery in Afghanistan as you assume. For example:

(11/14/2002) But an increasingly troubled international community disagreed and urged Karzai to exert control over renegade provinces. Examples of human-rights abuses abound across the country. As recently as Nov. 5, Human Rights Watch issued a report describing torture, arbitrary arrests, and political intimidation in the western province of Herat, where the local warlord Ismail Khan has "created a virtual mini-state."
....
But many wonder if the president will be able to enforce his edict. Only two of the 28 dismissed officials have agreed to go.

Just one of the kinds of problems you can look forward to in occupied Iraq.

Anyone who wants some idea of what military government in Iraq implies should read this article: "The Fifty-first State?", by James Fallows in the Atlantic Monthly. This is serious, non-polemical analysis. You're welcome to still believe invasion is necessary or worthwhile after you read it, but you should have fewer illusions about what you're attempting.

Hey Colin: I think I get your attitude. SInce we cannot predict the future with 100% accuracy, and since things have gone badly elsewhere in the past, it's better to do nothing at all, and let everyone suffer in their current state of misery, us and the Iraqis. How do people like you get out of bed each day? And what's more, how can you face yourself in the mirror? All you are saying is "let future generations take care of it, I don't want to deal with it." Here is my reply to that:

"And it is not our part here to take thought only for a season, or for a few lives of Men, or for a passing age of the world. We should seek a final end of this menace, even if we do not hope to make one." - Fellowship of the Ring

Andrea writes:

All you are saying is "let future generations take care of it, I don't want to deal with it."

I'm not saying anything of the kind. What I'm saying is that I do not believe launching war against Iraq is the solution to any of the problems we have before us. Any threat Iraq poses to the United States is currently unproven, to say the least. Any hope of democratizing Iraq by force seems wild-eyed, to me, and in any case if the goal is truly the worldwide expansion of democracy, I don't think it would be hard to come up with better uses for $100 billion. We're talking about starting a war here, and the case that's been presented to me so far just doesn't work.

Well, so far all you've done is rehash complaints and negatives that I have already seen elsewhere. What is your solution? Or do you have one? If you don't, then all you are doing is using my comments to post what really should be entries on your own blog. And yes, if your solution is to do nothing, which is the only one I can extrapolate from all your comments (summary: "in my opinion, what the administration is planning to do won't work"), then yes, you are fobbing these problems off to future generations.

Fobbing what problems off on future generations? The world changes every generation anyway, and dictators are as mortal as the rest of us. The Chilean dictatorship solved itself, as did the Spanish, and the Taiwanese, and the Greek -- not to mention the ex-Soviet Union. The only problem I see that can't be put off is the suppression of nuclear weapons development, and I have seen no evidence that, after ten years of sanctions, Iraq actually has an active programme. The administration keeps insisting, but saying doesn't make it so.

Further -- the US and Britain have been bombing Iraq pretty much daily since the last war. We never stopped. If there's a nuclear lab in there somewhere that we know about, just bomb the damned thing. Where, exactly, does the need to invade come in?

You might say that sounds cynical and heartless. Well, perhaps. But (a) you can't help everyone, and there are people worse off than the Iraqis that no one's even suggesting helping; (b) the best way to spread freedom seems to be to maintain stability and pull countries into the world economy; and c) I don't see how going to war with someone in order to help them can ever pass the "above all, do no harm" test.

But if my comments are unwelcome here, my apologies -- I will be happy to go away. (I wrote this reply only in answer to your direct question.)

Your comments are not unwelcome here, but I am not sure what you are trying to accomplish with them. You will not change my mind. You have your own blog on which you can state your opinions at length. I have read your argument in other forms, written by other people, and I find it unpersuasive -- it's basically a version of "close your eyes and pretend that nothing is wrong." And your statement that all these dictatorships "solved themselves" is beyond ridiculous; I am not even going to bother refuting it. I see that you are one of these people who believes that the Cold War was an entirely wasted effort, and I am not going to get into an argument with that particular... belief either.

Oh: and since when was "Above all, do no harm" supposed to apply to politics? I believe that that is part of the Hippocratic oath, which applies to the medical profession. If someone attacks my country and kills my fellow citizens, I do not want the people responsible to be hospitalized and medically treated, I want want them killed.

You are very free with your assumptions about what I believe. But, as you say, if it is not possible that you could change your mind, then I'm just wasting everyone's time here. My apologies.

What else am I to conclude from your statement saying that the Soviet Union was one of those "dictatorships" that "solved itself"? I have only your statements to go by. If you don't believe that the Cold War was useless, then what do you think all that activity was for? To provide plots for spy novels? I assumed that you believed this particular thing based on the fact that, from what you typed above, you seem to think that the Soviet Union's collapse happened in a vacuum, all by itself, without any American action whatsoever. So therefore it logically follows that you believe that the Cold War, which name we call those series of activities that were aimed at preventing the spread and success of the Communist bloc countries, was a useless enterprise that wasted money and lives. So, tell me what I got wrong?

You are very free with your assumptions about what I believe.

This from the very same chap that said this:

Either the USAF goes in, drops a few daisycutters, blows up a few palaces, then waves the Magic Wand of Reconstruction (ordered from the Fairy Godmothers 'R' Us, no doubt) and all is right with the world, or else Evil Saddam gets away with living like Silvio Berlusconi and Frank Sinatra.

Irony is hell, isn't it?