Rod Dreher

Country Girl, Country Daddy

‘The Po-Mo Immorality Of It All’

By Rod Dreher • March 15, 2013, 8:30 AM

Evans-Manning Award to Noah172 for this comment:

I didn’t think about this in the early years of the Iraq War, but now I am shocked at the po-mo immorality of it all: This country, my country, launched war against a state that had not attacked us, a state that had indeed been a target of American aggression (justified or not, that’s not my point here) for a dozen years prior to our ground invasion; said war justified on combination of malevolent ideology, mass hysteria, and lies; with no sacrifice asked — heaven forbid demanded — of the broader public, the burden of fighting carried entirely by a tiny, insufficient (in numbers, not courage or skill) stratum of stressed volunteers and their loved ones, and the burden of payment laid entirely on generations unborn (debt is a part of any war, but Iraq, we should remember, was the first American war in which taxes were reduced, rather than raised, a feat celebrated by, among others, that embodiment of corruption and cynicism Tom Delay).

And now it is like it never happened — a bad nightmare, not a reality with which we still live as a nation.

Shameful. The shame is compounded by the looming threat of an even more immoral, potentially more catastrophic war with Iran — which, like Iraq, would be fought by too few volunteers and paid for entirely by debt (borrowed from foreigners) while regular Americans waddle through the mall and the elites count their lucre.

Posted in War. Tagged Iraq, Iraq War.

75 Responses to ‘The Po-Mo Immorality Of It All’

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Linda says:

March 15, 2013 at 5:54 pm

Rob in CT says:
“Of course, some of us were saying that at the time.”

Bush and Cheney ignored their church’s efforts to stop the Iraq war:

Church executive urges Bush not to attack Iraq, 9/3/2002

“With unprecedented disregard for democratic ideals and with an astonishing lack of evidence justifying such a pre-emptive attack, the president has all but given the order to fire,” he said. [United Methodist, Jim Winkler, General Secretary, General Board of Church & Society]

“A pre-emptive war represents a major and dangerous change in U.S. foreign policy,” he said. “It also sets a terrible precedent for other nations. For example, what would then stop India or Pakistan from carrying out such an attack on one another on the grounds they themselves might be attacked? Pre-emptive war cannot become a universalized principle, lest disaster and chaos result.”

This would not be “a just war,” Winkler stated. Proof of a real threat to the United States has not been offered, he said, noting that no evidence has shown that Iraq has a nuclear warhead aimed at the United States or even deliverable weapons of mass destruction. “No case can be made that a war against Iraq is justified for the self-defense of the United States. Further, Iraq’s neighbors are not calling for assistance from the United States.”

Winkler raised questions about the potential loss of life on all sides, the financial costs of a war and its aftermath, and the consequences for the future of Iraq.

“Congress must exercise its constitutional responsibilities and vote on the question of undertaking an invasion of Iraq,” he wrote. “The length of conflict, level of long-term involvement and final outcome are by no means assured.”

If we, as United Methodists, are to take seriously the words of Jesus to become peacemakers and seek justice and peace with one another (Matthew 5:1-12), we must speak out now – to the president, members of Congress, and our local media – that the path upon which the President seeks to embark is counter to the teachings of Jesus, inconsistent with the position of the United Methodist Church, and is one that threatens the rule of law as a fundamental principle of democracy. That the ends justify the means is the weakest of all possible arguments. Our nation deserves better, and the world expects better of us.

http://tinyurl.com/a4pczao

The Methodist Church, he says, is not pacifist, but ‘rejects war as a usual means of national policy’. Methodist scriptural doctrine, he added, specifies ‘war as a last resort, primarily a defensive thing.

http://tinyurl.com/3cqk8
Pat says:

March 15, 2013 at 7:15 pm

I understand postmodernism as holding that the world looks different from every person’s perspective, and that it is not possible to accurately translate the different descriptions of it that result into a single language, in order to compare them by one fixed set of criteria.

Being in the sciences, I obviously don’t believe this applies across the board. But I think it applies pretty well to American politics. I remember the run-up to the Iraq war very well, and the constant dribble of things not-being-the-way-they-had-said that followed. At every point I would ask my conservative friend why, since the leftists had been right about all these things, he didn’t pay more attention to the other things they were saying. He had no answer.

But the fact is, the things said by left and right are not compared for accuracy the way scientific data are compared. They are so bound up in lifestyles, ideals, aesthetics, emotions, etc. that what makes people believe in them cannot be expressed in one language, lined up, and evaluated. It’s that epistemic closure thing, only more subtly; even without isolating yourself in a conservative or liberal infobubble, you are isolated in a particular view of the world because that view is based on the things that matter most to you. This is the essence of postmodernism. And it got a lot of people killed in Iraq.
Joe Sansonese says:

March 15, 2013 at 7:24 pm

““The Director-General of the IAEA, Mr. ElBaradei, reported that, after three months of intrusive inspections, the Agency had found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq. There was also no indication that Iraq had attempted to import uranium since 1990 or that it had attempted to import aluminium tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment.”

The nuclear program was not the concern, except as a model of how UN inspectors in the 1980s were capable of missing an Iraqi nuclear-weapons program that employed 7000 and had a budget of $10 billion.

The bio-weapons that the Iraqis admitted having completed was a far greater concern, the product of which could have fit into a garage. That was also the program that the Iraqis were compelled into admitting after Israeli intelligence revealed to the UN in 1995, around the time that Saddam’s son-in-law defected and said the same thing. That was the stuff that the clueless Blix (who had headed the IAEA compliance team in the 1980s) was looking for. You’re dragging in a non-issue. I suspect to obscure the fact that the inspectors could not find an elephant without the US Army winning the war in 1991. But in 2003 George Bush was expected to believe a pompous ass when he said he needed just a few more months to find a gnat in a desert.

“You previously argued that the Security Council resolutions authorized unilateral US action.”

I never said any such thing. You’re just making stuff up now.

“Those of us who doubted the exitstence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003 could rely on a number of UN weapons inspectors reports.”

Uh huh. Reports that amounted to precisely this: having searched they so far had found nothing. Great! Not one of them claimed that Iraq had no WMDs—as I’ve already indicated, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Blix stated that it was still an open question.—or stated what had become of them. Your doubts really are your doubts, but I cannot see what they rest on anything more than your intuition. Stop patting yourself on the back. You personally got nothing right that mattered in 2003.

“The claims of WMDs in Iraq were “exaggerated” . . . . That was widely recognized, but concededly not universally, at the time.”

There’s the understatement of the year, I must say. Uh listen, McFaul, whether they were “exaggerated” or not is the substance of the dispute, isn’t it? You cannot simply assert it and expect to be taken seriously, when, for all I know, all it means is that you and your wife believed that. I advised you once before to look up “begging the question.” Please, please do so. Spittle-flecked claims that “‘everybody else’ was not as clairvoyant as I was” are not attractive.

As for the United Nations, the United nations authorization for the war was a piece of paper. The United Nations did not fight the war or stop Saddam. The United States did that. It was the US that was attacked on 9/11, not the UN which is in the same city and presents a mighty tempting target, wouldn’t you agree?

To illustrate how incoherent your argument is: You clearly state “When [the UN charter] is not [in our interests], we should withdraw from the Charter.” So now, if we had withdrawn from the UN before the invasion, there would be no war crime? Maybe just a war misdemeanor, huh? What the??? That’s all it took? Why didn’t you say so? I’m sorry, but failure to adhere to the political gyrations du jour in Turtle Bay do not amount to war crimes ipso facto, all that sanctimonious poppycock about Nuremberg notwithstanding. Nuremberg! Good grief! Hermann Goering and George Bush: two peas in a pod! Any old iron will do to bash phantoms when you’re foaming at the mouth, I s’pose.
cecelia says:

March 15, 2013 at 7:32 pm

What seems most apalling to me about Iraq – is that the dimwits running this country actually thought that the whole thing would be over in a matter of months – they actually based this country’s military and economic stability on the ramblings of a discredited batch of Iraqui ex pats who assured them that a nice neat Iraq pro western government would happily be put in place immediately and we could then leave. Bush et. al. ignored the military, the State Dept and the CIA in favor of the looney advice of these exiles and the 30 something Ph.D’s at the Heritage Foundtion. Horrifying.

As for Iran – anyone who thinks we can stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons is not listening to what the military (you know – the ones who will have to do the job) is saying – we can at best delay them – but in the end – short of permanently occupying the country – we cannot stop them. The more hawkish and threatening our rhetoric and actiolns are – the more we convince the Iranians they need nukes to protect themsleves from US.

So – for those who think the need to do somethng about Iran – are you ready for permanenet occupation and all its costs?
JonF says:

March 16, 2013 at 7:31 am

Cecilia, to be fair here, the military aspect of it was over pretty quickly. We didn’t lose the war, we lost its aftermath– mainly because the Bush administration had no more clue how to run a country than my cats do. We are lucky that they inherited a huge amount of inertia here in our own country or they would made every bit as big a botch of running America sat hey did in Iraq. As it was they sure didn’t leave the US in remotely as a good of shape as they got it.
JonF says:

March 16, 2013 at 7:41 am

Re: 9/11 was the work of ant-American Muslim zealots.

Yes, but what has that to do with the business? When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor should we have attacked Thailand because, hey, they too were slant-eyed Buddhists? And maybe we should have declared war on Switzerland in WWII because they too speak German. And yes, Saddam Hussein was a nasty SOB, now burning in hell if God is just, but one thing wasn’t is a Muslim zealot. Even by Islamic standards he is burning in hell.

Re: Iraq admitted to possessing WMDs, in particular to possessing 10,000 liters of bio-weaponry, which, in terrorist hands, could have made 9/11 seem a Central Park mugging by comparison

Bio-weapons have never– I repeat NEVER– been used to any effect in any war*. The few such attempts in history have been total busts. The only true WMD is a nuke. Chemical weapons are nasty, but no more deadly, pound for pound, than explosives. Bioweapons are wholly untested and likely not to work. The very word “WMD” ought be banished, and if discussing things that should properly give us nightmares, it’s nukes and nuke alone.

* It shouldn’t be necessary to say this, but I am excluding accidental outbreaks of disease– smallpox among the Aztecs, typhus in besieged Athens– which have had a major effect on historical events.
VikingLS says:

March 16, 2013 at 7:49 am

I have been prepping Iraqi Ph.D candidates for study in the US for the past year and a half. I asked a group of 8 of them individually (none of them knew the question was coming and were alone when they answered) what form of government was best for their country. 1 said restoration of the monarchy and the other 7 said a dictatorship was the only form of government that can work in Iraq.

Ali: We have to have a strict leader.
Me: Yes, but not as strict as Saddam.
Ali: No, as strict as Saddam.

For what it’s worth this was coming from Iraqi Shia and this conversation was taking place in an east coast university in the USA.

We see this over and over in the middle east. Some western educated Iraqi, Egyptian, Syrian, ect assures us that what the people want is democracy. Maybe he believes it, maybe he doesn’t. So we support the overthrow of dicatators and then again and again what emerges is not a flourishing democracy, but a period of chaos until a new dictatorship emerges.

Americans look at Saudi Arabia and think, those poor people must be miserable with such brutal laws. I have heard from Saudis many times that they like having such a heavy handed government because they believe they have no real crime in their countries. (Spare me the statistics, it’s what they think) One Saudi told me that he can go into a store and leave his car unlocked with the motor running and know that the car will still be there when he comes back. Another told me that if he wakes up in the morning and his car is gone he knows a friend has it.

The reality is that 4 thousand years of empires, monarchies, tribal cheiftains, and military dictatorships coupled with a particularly heavy-handed faith has not created a civilization where individual freedom is held in the same regard we hold it.

The neocons love to talk about removing Saddam as if it was tough-minded realism, but it was nothing of the sort. The response of tough minded realists post 9-11 would have been to work with the dictators in Baghdad and Tehran to wipe out the common enemy. (And buying off Saddam would have been way cheaper than removing him.)

A pity so many of the right-wing utopians are so much better at rhetoric than they are analysis and that they’ve been so deft at moving the conversation off of the realities of middle eastern cultures they neither understand nor can be bothered to learn about and on the counter-factuals about Germany and Japan.

[Note from Rod: Thanks for this, Viking. And you know, if you make this point in discussion with some people, they'll accuse you of racism, along the lines of, "You don't think Arabs deserve democracy?!" -- RD]
VikingLS says:

March 16, 2013 at 8:22 am

Rod one of those same Iraqis, the one who suggested that they restore the monarchy, told me that he thinks our system seems designed to elevate mediocre men into positions of power.
Joe Sansonese says:

March 16, 2013 at 9:11 am

Jon F, the two points of mine you quote separately and then analyze separately are meant to be considered together, as I clearly and repeatedly state. The significance of the one has to be understood in terms of the significance of the other. Obtusely, you insist on doing just the opposite and understanding them severally. They were written in response to the question:

“What did the Iraq War have to do with 9/11.”

The unspoken premise to this tendentiously silly question is that 9/11 and the Iraq War may only have a relationship if Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks. If that premise and only that premise were true, then, sure, the one had little to do with the other. But I went out of my way to say quite explicitly:

“. . . . there was no bait and switch. I mean I don’t know how simple this has to get before you see it: The connection of 9/11 to the War in Iraq does not have to mean that Saddam particpated in 9/11.” [emphasis supplied]

So there’s that. And here you are right back at it making the same silly assumption and waxing all high and mighty about it?

So one more time, with real short words:

1) 9/11. Islamic terrorist attack. Catastrophe.

2) Iraq. Had WMDs. Says “no more.” Foe of US. Lies a lot? Gives WMDs to Islamic terrorists. Far worse catastrophe.

Ok? More clear. Can you drop the pointless WWII—I don’t even know what to call them—fun facts, will do. they certainly aren’t analogies. And the statement that Saddam was not an Islamic zealot, makes the further wooden-headed assumption that that means that the two could never cooperate even though (a) bin Laden is on saying the opposite, (b) a captured Iraqi intelligence document from 1992 lists bin Laden as “an asset in Damascus,” (c) CIA report submitted into evidence before the war listed 19 contacts between the Iraqi Mukhabarat and Al Qaeda in the 1990s, and (d) the enemy of my enemy is my ally is a sentiment much understood and appreciated everywhere and at all times.

In that regard a useful, as opposed to bizarre, lesson from WWII, might be the Hitler–Stalin Pact of 1939. Was Hitler a Bolshevik? Was Stain a Nazi? Nope. Moreover they despised each other and were dedicated to each other’s destruction. Arm in arm though, they managed to kick off the war in spectacular fashion. So much for the relevance of Saddam’s piety.

Finally, your remarks about the efficacy of bio-weaponry in war are simply not responsive for a whole bunch of reasons: (a) a terrorist attack does not usually occur on a battlefield, so the comparison to a war is forced, (b) the anthrax attacks that followed immediately on 9/11, often called the Amerithrax attacks, were quite effective enough, thank you. Seven letters containing small amounts of anthrax infected 22, placed seven people in serious, life-threatening condition, and killed five within four days of exposure. Congress shut down. It required three months to clean the House Office Building. All parcel deliveries on the East Coast (not just postal) stopped overnight, resulting in $65 billion in losses. And no one—that definitely includes you—knows, or knew, what the likely result of introducing many thousands of times that amount into an air-conditioning system of all but hermetically sealed skyscrapers. So please, don’t waste time pretending you do. No one has any idea at all really, since nothing like it has ever happened before. But then again, nothing even vaguely like 9/11 had happened before.

What George Bush needed to know before he would run the risk that you, based on nothing persuasive in particular, seem to be insisting didn’t exist, was not simply the answer to the question: “Does Iraq have WMD?” Yes or No, was an answer he could have gotten, as so many here seemed to have, by flipping a coin or consulting a Ouija board, or just knowing in their gut, and the like. No. What George Bush needed to know was the answer to a question, actually 10,000 questions, along the lines of:

Re Container No. 12345, listed [by Iraq in 1995] as containing lethal toxin X: When, where, and how was it (a) disposed of, (b) rendered harmless, (c) other (circle one), and by whom, and what was his rank, and is he living or dead, and what is his address, and what his phone number?

Those were the questions that needed answering. And wouldn’t you know it? Iraq had answered questions just like those about its chemical weapons programs; so they are not unreasonable questions, nor would it be at all unreasonable to suspect that, in a nation as plagued with bureaucrats as was Baathist Iraq, anyone claiming, trust me, such information doesn’t exist, is a damnable liar.
Sands says:

March 16, 2013 at 6:44 pm

“2) Iraq. Had WMDs. Says “no more.” Foe of US. Lies a lot? Gives WMDs to Islamic terrorists. Far worse catastrophe.”

Aim your rocket back toward earth there rocket man. Planet La La ain’t working out for you.

You know who else Saddam was a foe of? Islamic terrorists, that’s who. There was never any threat of Saddam handing weapons over to Islamic terrorists who hated him and his secular regime.
Deggjr says:

March 16, 2013 at 8:35 pm

The military and intelligence teams assured me they were looking constantly. The examined hidden sites Saddam used during the Gulf War. They collected intelligence and responded to tips … They found nothing … We dug up the ground. Nothing materialized.

George Tenet recruited David Kay, the UN’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq in 1991, to lead the new inspection team.

… But there was one thing Kay did not find: the WMD stockpiles everyone expected …

I have concluded that we made two errors that account for many of the setbacks we faced … The other error was the intelligence failure on Iraq’s WMD. Almost a decade later, it is hard to describe how widespread an assumption it was that Saddam had WMD.
David J. White says:

March 17, 2013 at 12:29 pm

You know who else Saddam was a foe of? Islamic terrorists, that’s who. There was never any threat of Saddam handing weapons over to Islamic terrorists who hated him and his secular regime.

I think part of the problem is that to most Americans, all those olive-skinned foreigners with funny names are all the same and are lumped together in the same pot. I think of someone close to me, who, after 9/11, said, “We should just bomb all those swarthy people and be done with it.” I think the idea that one Arab hostile to us (Saddam) would not only not be in cahoots but actually be mortal enemies with other Arabs hostile to us (Islamic terrorists) is too subtle and too complicated for some Americans to get their minds around. Unfortunately, many of these Americans are running our government.
Joe Sansonese says:

March 17, 2013 at 1:13 pm

“You know who else Saddam was a foe of? Islamic terrorists, that’s who. There was never any threat of Saddam handing weapons over to Islamic terrorists who hated him and his secular regime.”

The blandest and most ho-hum of assertions, and it’s amazing that, with so much evidence around to the contrary, anyone could still believe it. Just for stsraters:

On January, 15, 1991, precisely because he was worried for his safety and wanted to curry favor with Islamists, Saddam changed the Iraqi flag to include a prominently centered banneret emblazoned with “Allahu Akbar.” Do you recall the, um, situation in Iraq on January 15, 1991? Desert Storm was about to commence; January 15th was in fact the UN deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. “Henceforth,” Saddam explained to his generals, the Iraqi flag would literally be “the banner of jihad and monotheism [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takbir].” At the time, Iraq was constitutionally “nonsectarian.”

A week earlier Saddam had convoked a “Popular Islamic Conference” in Baghdad, in opposition to the regularly scheduled one occurring simultaneously in Mecca, “in order to frighten Iraq’s adversaries with the prospect of Islamic terror” (Martin Kramer, “Islam in the New World Order,” in: Middle East Contemporary Survey, Tel Aviv, 1991, p. 173).

During the 1990s, Iraq hosted in Baghdad two more Islamic conferences, at least one of which was attended by Ayman al-Zawahiri, to give a sense of the seriousness with which attendees viewed such gatherings.

Additionally, apart from the Palestinians, the sole steadfast ally of Iraq through thick and thin has been Sudan, led by Omar al-Bashir, an aggressive Islamist, to say no more; that Sudan had a connection to the 1993 World trade Center bombing (which occurred on February 26th, the second anniversary of Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait) is certain. That until Saddam’s deposition, Sudan was (a) virulently Islamic and (b) his ally, should be enough to convince anyone in possession of elementary reasoning ability of how transcendently silly is the notion that Saddam was always and only “a foe of Islamic terrorists.”

Ahmed Yasin, a man described in the American media as “the only participant in the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 who was never caught” left Iraq in July, 1992, and arrived in New York in September where he assisted Ramzi Yousef, bomb maker and Islamic militant extraordinaire (ostensibly Khaled Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew!), in building the 1993 bomb. The week after the bombing, Yasmin returned to Iraq via Jordan, from where Saddam refused extradition. Around the time of the American invasion in 2003, Yasmin conveniently disappeared and has not been seen since.

Finally, it is at least mildly interesting to note that, Ramzi Yousef entered and left the US using a passport issued in Kuwait at the time (August, 1990) that the Iraq Secret Service was in control of the Kuwait passport office, having occupied the office immediately they entered Kuwait City earlier that month.

Wake up! When his interests were threatened, Saddam would work with anybody
Rob in CT says:

March 18, 2013 at 10:08 am

When his interests were threatened, Saddam would work with anybody

Of course. Finding himself in a corner with the combined might of most of the top militaries on Earth arrayed against him, Saddam tried anything he thought might work. I, for one, am shocked.

This means he was a threat to hand over chemical, bio or nuclear weapons to terrorists?

That’s the claim you must advance.

And, like the Bushies before you, you really don’t have a case. A for effort, though.
Joe Sansonese says:

March 18, 2013 at 10:53 am

“That’s the claim you must advance.”

That’s right, and I back it up with a host of fact-based reasoning, the eight paragraphs or so that precede the single sentence you quote, none of which you mount so much as a fly-swatter riposte to, nothing, zero, one great yawn of a nada, not a simulacrum, ghost, phantasm, or impersonation of a rebuttal, except, of course, to repeat what you said originally.

Do you have any idea of what an argument is beyond, that is, restating the point at issue again and again. Good grief, what a bore!
Franklin Evans says:

March 18, 2013 at 11:29 am

Gosh, Joe, you’ve been advancing the same arguable “evidence” ad nauseum for days, and I have yet to find you boring at all. Lighten up and find some entertainment value here.
VikingLS says:

March 18, 2013 at 2:22 pm

Joe why are you putting so much of your time and energy repeating the same argument that nobody here bought the first time?
Joe Sansonese says:

March 18, 2013 at 4:02 pm

Franklin and Viking: Just follow the comments. My last half dozen posts have been responses to something I posted. If someone addresses a comment to me as you did and as Rob did, I respond, as you and Franklin did today. What do you do?

Why do I repeat the same argument when “nobody bought it the first time”? It’s a stupid question really since (a) I have always added a facts to the mix, though I can’t do your reading for you (if you’re not reading my remarks any longer how would you know if I’m repeating myself); and (b) I’m not actually, you know, selling anything.

It’s more than a little interesting to observe how, as I continually add to set of facts that I feel support my argument, it’s the commenters who tend to repeat their opinions and only their opinions, not me.
VikingLS says:

March 18, 2013 at 5:03 pm

Joe

Well in that you’re responding to questions you’re being asked I suppose that’s fair enough.

The information you’re adding is of the same nature as the information you’ve contributed before. None of it implies that Hussein would actually hand WMDs off to Islamists.

Now if you were arguing that Hussein was giving shelter to terrorists or that his opposition to political Islam is overstated you’d have made a case. What you haven’t shown is that Hussein was likely to go to all the trouble to secretly develop WMDs and then let them out of his control.

You’d have to already believe that for your argument to be convincing. It’s like debating evolution with a young Earth creationist. An Ark is possible, but it’s not probable. A paranoiac dictator going to great lengths to develop WMDs secretly and then handing any of them off to uncontrolled non-state actors is possible but not probable.

What I don’t understand is why you’re putting so much energy into it when it should be obvious by now that you’re not convincing anybody.
Joe Sansonese says:

March 18, 2013 at 6:25 pm

“What I don’t understand is why you’re putting so much energy into it when it should be obvious by now that you’re not convincing anybody.”

Asked and answered!

My aim is not to convince anybody. In all but two of the posts on the current thread, I have been responding to comments directed specifically at me—like now for instance As I asked you a very short while ago, what do you do in that case?

Let’s review the bidding as they say in bridge. As far as this thread is concerned, I began by commenting on the blog topic, which is an excerpt from a statement by someone called Noah to the effect that, basically, there were absolutely no objective reasons for the Iraq War. That it was immoral, cooked up for insane reasons, immoral, completely reckless, the dream of so-called neocons, immoral, and very bad bad bad. Have I mentioned that Noah really believed that the war was immoral? I did? Good.

I decided that Noah was out of order and, not yet having commented on this thread, attacked the excerpt quite vigorously, using an argument that I had not used before. Well, I had used it, but then someone (I think it was, ahem, you) went crying to teacher that I’d pulled someone’s pigtails and was a big fat meanie besides, so teacher scolded me and tore up my drawing. Also, I simply have to add that I especially recall the touching moment afterwards, when you went up to teacher’s desk and, fighting tears, thanked him. I nearly cried myself. It reminded me so much of Auntie Em’ comforting Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz. I’m a sap for that sort of thing.

So if you’ve had to read it again, you can blame yourself.

Then somebody named Don Quijote, of whom I’d never heard before, piped up as to why I was wrong, which, as is usually the case here, amounted to not much more than the bland assertion that I was wrong. So I responded to that. Next, I think, Franklin chided me with a wholly original specification of the exact sort of immorality perpetrated by Pres. Bush, so there was that to be replied to. Then somebody named Paul, otherwise unknown to me, brought up the subject of the invasion of Iraq being a matter of “bait and switch,” advancing the by then wholly boring and unimaginative thesis that the Iraq War could have something to do with the 9/11 only if Iraq had actually carried out the attacks. So a post was prepared arguing that that thesis was just malarkey in light of what had actually been going on in Iraq for a decade before the war and so on, for which I introduced a whole new set of facts to ponder, all of which, amazingly enough, prompted Franklin to chime in with something along the lines of, wait for it, the Iraq War could have something to do with the 9/11 only if Iraq had actually carried out the attacks! So then, more rebuttal, but streamlined and with further new facts. Then some fellow named David refuted me with the truly revolutionary suggestion that Saddam Hussein would never ever never work with Islamic terrorists, cross Dave’s heart and hope to die. So that had to be dealt with. Then Rob jumped in with his two—strike that—with his penny’s worth of non-argument. And that led to where we are now. I mean it’s plain as paint that I am in all of this more sinned against than sinning.

As to putting in “so much energy,” why not a bit of it. And don’t you worry your pretty little head one more second in that regard. I’m a writer. I’ve been writing all my life. I’ve have had a book of nonfiction published, a screenplay or two turned into movies, and half-a-dozen plays staged. I even have an agent! I enjoy nothing better than tapping away while watching old Ronald Howard films on Netflix.

Now, you’re not going to ask the same question again, are you?
Sands says:

March 18, 2013 at 8:54 pm

Joe,

Your posts are really freaking me out. I mean it’s like it’s still 2002. I had to go look in the mirror to verify that I have fewer productive hair follicles than I had back then. I also asked my wife if I was just imaging this little boy running around calling me daddy because I know he wasn’t here in 2002. My truck was manufactured in 2004 and the calendar on my wall says 2013. I’m telling you, I was on the verge of a panic attack.

I finally calmed down when I realized that you really, really are rehashing talking points from back then. Is Dick Cheney even using those anymore?

Anyway, if you think the points you presented are strong evidence that it was in Saddam’s nature to supply WMD’s to people that he was at odds with, then I don’t know what to tell you. But after reading your posts, I do know that it would be pointless to write a 1000 word reply.

Don’t fret though, your side got its way a decade ago. You got the war you wanted. And despite the tens of thousand killed and an emboldened Iran, you will forever claim that you also got the results you wanted. Nothing any of us say will make any difference.
VikingLS says:

March 18, 2013 at 8:59 pm

Joe

I didn’t complain to Rod about your behavior, I don’t know how that’s even done, but he was right to reprimand you.

So people disagreed with you, you feel the obligation to respond, but you’re not attempting to convince anyone of your point of view? That’s completely illogical.

I’m very unimpressed with the sarcasm. If you can’t defend yourself without retreating to cheap parlor tricks, hang out someplace else.
Joe Sansonese says:

March 19, 2013 at 5:52 am

Sands: Your trip down memory lane is delightful. It has zero argumentative value, however, and only serves to underline how easily confused you are. I suspect that has been true a long time, at least 10 years.

Forget 1000 words. How about 100 actually confronting the facts I present, rather than simply repeating that Saddam would never ever work with terrorists, which is all you do, though you do couch the refrain in the form of a rhetorical question, he sum total of your ingenuity. Whether in your opinion Dick Cheney presented them first is, I don’t now how to break this to you, absolutely irrelevant. It really is distressing to see commenters such as yourself over and over again rushing to clasp corpses to their bosoms, dead Iraqis, dead soldiers—it really does give off a necrophiliac odor—morbid tendencies that, for some reason, permit you to wave the bloody shirt, as if their deaths are yours to exploit, as if no deaths followed on Saddam’s remaining in power.

If I have not been convinced, it’s because no one replying has even tried. What, do you seriously imagine that I am the only one repeating myself, that no one ever before puffed themselves up on the confetti typically offered here by way of argument? “What did Iraq have to do with 9/11?” or, right up your alley, “Saddam would never work with terrorists!” Boy oh boy, those “arguments” are about as fresh and stimulating as an open glass of Coke left on the kitchen counter for a week or two.

Have you proposed anything more? Of course not. It’s all beneath you, so you hide behind a coward’s contention, “Oh, it’s not worth arguing with you.” Face it, you long ago made up your mind on these matters, have been dwelling contentedly, how to describe it, in an echo chamber? under a bell glass?—you pick the metaphor that describes extreme mental desuetude brought on by too much back-patting and self-congratulations—and you don’t much like it that someone has a different opinion than you and the rest of the Borg. What a shocker!

Besides, you don’t even appreciate the substance of my disagreement, which, all along has never been that matters turned out very well in Iraq, only that George Bush decided on the policy that he did as a matter of managing risk, of acting in a situation with a host of unknowns and semi-knowns and facts that taken together, and as a rational and principled matter, could have been the portents of catastrophe, and especially after September 11, 2001. when, as President he understood that he—and no one else and certainly not the mob here and certainly not you—had the responsibility to act, rather than because the neocons had hypnotized him or because he was working out competitive feelings he had towards his old man or because he was a religious fanatic who believed God had placed a sword in his hand or because he came from Texas, where there’s oil in the ground and since Iraq had oil in the ground, then, well, the simple-simon argument writes itself, or because he and Cheney and the rest of his Administration were in actual fact bloodthirsty liars bent on imperialistic conquest or any number of other suppositories regularly sucked on in this vicinity.

I have never claimed that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11 or that he actually would work with terrorists. I did claim that in a situation fraught with unknowns it was not irrational to come to the conclusion that he—Saddam—might, and laid out the evidence, as I see it, so then that question prescinds quite logically to another: What are the consequences if he did? And another: Is it rational to run that risk? All along I’ve insisted that someone could make the choices that Bush made without being either mentally defective or Satan incarnate. Moreover, all the other contemporary flotsam and jetsam notwithstanding, that was Bush’s core principle: After 9/11, I will not take a chance on Saddam Hussein.

Yet that is precisely the rationale that, as a matter of sheer knee-jerkery, it often seems, is ruled completely out of bounds by commenters here and deemed not worth bothering with, half-baked conspiracies and worse being preferred, who then proceed to insist, quite comically, as if no one but themselves was alive and conscious at the time, that everything was clear as a bell in 2001–03. It wasn’t, unless you were Sibyl the Soothsayer.

So would you put away the tambourine, climb off the soap box, and at least recognize the argument being made. Ir’s not the straw man that, to your satisfaction, you have refuted quite inside your head.

Sorry about the hair.
Joe Sansonese says:

March 19, 2013 at 6:18 am

Viking: I have checked the relevant thread, and you are correct: It was JonF who complained in such a manner as to invite Mr. Dreher to censor me. So you are owed a correction and an apology. But you are being depressingly literal in understanding me to have meant that you or—as it turns out—someone else complained any other place but in the comments.

“So people disagreed with you, you feel the obligation to respond, but you’re not attempting to convince anyone of your point of view? That’s completely illogical.”

You need some remedial study in logic. The two propositions would only be illogical if the one was the contradictory of the other. The contradictory of “I do not want to convince anyone” is “I want to convince everyone,” not “I feel obliged to respond.” The sense of obligation I feel has little do with persuading and more with indicating that I am paying attention.

Conversely, the contradictory of “I feel obliged to respond” is “I am free to respond or not” and not “I want to convince anybody.” I could, as a logical matter, want to convince someone but not feel “obliged” to do anything. You dragged logic into this, so at a minimum you should have a much better sense of what is logical and what illogical.
Joe Sansonese says:

March 19, 2013 at 6:50 am

Let me summarize and let it be an end to it as far as I’m concerned:

Did George Bush do the right thing in invading Iraq in 2003? Considering all that was known for certain at that time, meaning from 9/11/01 to 3/21/03 and doing my utmost to ignore what I have learned afterwards, I say yes.

Similarly, and as I felt at that time, meaning from 9/11/01 to 3/21/03, it was not unreasonable for another observer to say no, a distinction I made much, much earlier in reply to Mr. McFaul, I believe, on another recent thread devoted to the topic of the Iraq War, not that anyone seems to have noticed or, having noticed, cared.

And yes, I consider myself to be a conservative Republican agreeing with everyone else here in the majority of the controversies of the day.

So have at it. I’m done.