Attacking Iraq is a pointless, cowardly act of bullying, a more or less willful distraction from any of the things that might in fact give our nation pause (from Al Qaeda to the economy to North Korea to Israeli-Palestine relations to the rest of the list), which comes at the end of a disgraceful season of diplomatic incompetence, that not even dirty tricks (bugging the UN?), bribery (what, 26 million for Turkey?), backstabbing (ask the Kurds), threats and insults and raw plain stupidity (all those idiots, right up to the house of representatives, renaming French Fries and french toast) could save from complete failure, leaving us alone, with one lame duck ally willing to do anything besides line up for the photo ops and payoffs...It has been an odd week - I have been going back and forth with someone on Facebook about the war. This person is trying to justify the support for the war - how everyone thought Saddam had WMDs, both parties, how he didn't remember any arguments against the war, how all this talk about how bad it was comes from hindsight - I don't know. It wasn't hindsight - Stephen Walt points to this ad - signed by 33 international security academics - that lays out the case against the war, succinctly and absolutely accurately. Alex Pareene notes how The Washington Post and NY Times, even while pushing the war on the front pages and editorial pages, were publishing other stories - reported, in ways that didn't fall apart the way Judy Miller's did. Bill Moyers offers a collection of Iraq stories. There was enough info, in 2003, to doubt the government's case for the war. An awful lot of the information was speculation, probably on both sides - but when you found things that were based in solid reporting, they tended to point against the war. Things like the stories about Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda - those were debunked long before the war started, but were being repeated right up to the end. It made you wonder.
I mentioned how weak the arguments for the war seemed at the time - how they were built on metaphors and analogies, hand-waving, moving the goalposts around, and so on. They were narratives - stories - and that air of inevitability, the image of unanimity, was part of the narrative. As were the Serious people on TV, the Serious Liberals, too, forced to support the war - while the anti-war side wasn't suppressed exactly, but all too often was represented by hippies in the street - by movie stars and Noam Chomsky or something like that, at least as straw men. It was all so well orchestrated....
Enough. Though the fact is that it remains a haunting question - the means by which the country was taken to war, and especially the ways fairly widespread doubts about the war were submerged - not suppressed exactly - but somehow forgotten... It's a lesson of some kind. But one that even now seems to be submerged - brooding about the war seems even now to be something for lefty bloggers and repentant liberal hawks - the public and the politicians still seem quite unwilling to admit any of it happened. We shall see.
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