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Learning Why Jingoism Is Stupid The Hard Way

What I should have said is that Friedman holds a special place in my development.  I took a class from him at college on ‘globalization’, and read most of his books.  In 2002, he and Ken Pollack were the two people that I relied on for guidance with regards to Iraq.  I trusted him.  I […]

What I should have said is that Friedman holds a special place in my development.  I took a class from him at college on ‘globalization’, and read most of his books.  In 2002, he and Ken Pollack were the two people that I relied on for guidance with regards to Iraq.  I trusted him.  I believed in him.  And he got it one hundred percent wrong.  And while honest people tend to admit their mistakes, and when the mistake is particularly soaked in blood, do a lot of soul-searching and apologizing, he never has.  My mistake in looking at the Iraq war still pains me, and though I was a 24 year old kid with no experience in foreign policy or politics, my gullibility and the betrayal from my former guides still colors my thinking.  For someone like Friedman, who should know better and occupies the most valuable opinion space in the world, it’s stunningly immoral to pretend to having no responsibility in this quagmire.  All of us are responsible, and the first step is to admit error.  Maybe if I said this he finally would have understood where we come from, though I doubt it.  But I didn’t say it. ~Matt Stoller

Mr. Stoller may now understand that the short path to making errors in foreign policy judgements is to listen to foreign policy establishment wonks and newspaper columnists, but I should have thought that would be rather more obvious to someone on the left than to others.  But I suppose I can sympathise a little.  When I was 11 and 12, I saw how excited everyone was to go to war with Iraq the first time, I heard all of the rationales (the only convincing for me one was false: oil prices could go through the roof if we don’t act!) and I took my cues from the adults, most of whom seemed to be certain that getting in the middle of an Arab war was the smart and necessary thing to do.  Most of Congress agreed with the President, and the country was overwhelmingly in favour (as Americans have tended to be about post-Vietnam conflicts at the beginning).  Over the years, I discovered that all of the people I had come to respect and listen to since then, such as the editors at Chronicles, Russell Kirk and the like, had actually been opposed to the first Gulf War, since it in no significant way served American interests.  About this they were completely right, but, of course, this was a war that was not really being fought under the pretense of defending the interests of the United States.  (The Saudis had a fairly huge army of their own, some of the best military hardware oil money could buy, plus any number of Afghanistan-hardened mujahideen, so the idea that they “needed” American help in the event of an Iraqi invasion was, on reflection, ridiculous.)  In the event, I supported the Gulf War, albeit not in any public or recorded way (I was 12), and I have been sorry for that for a long time.  In subsequent years, as the illegal no-fly zones were set up, the sanctions kicked in, and “we” launched a few cruise missile strikes on Baghdad now and again, it began to dawn on me that getting into that conflict in the first place probably wasn’t very smart.  Remaining there indefinitely, trying to starve out the Iraqis for having the audacity to be oppressed, seemed unsustainable, immoral and stupid, and after thinking about it for about five minutes it occurred to me that invading Iraq would be even more foolish, so it seemed that the only sensible thing to do would have been to leave.  Of course, the government went ahead and did the more foolish thing.

Interventionists have sometimes latched on to the very Bin Laden statements that Ron Paul referred to in the debate as proof that the Iraq status quo was unsustainable.  According to these people, this was why we had to invade!  They were right that the status quo was unsustainable, but the answer wasn’t invasion. 

Despite the views of someone like Gen. Zinni, who believed that containment was “working,” containment “worked” only if Americans were willing to keep cutting Iraq off from the outside world and bombing it on occasion.  Given the alternative of invasion, containment would have been much better, but it was absolutely true that the presence we had and the policies we were enforcing in the region were contributing factors in motivating terrorist attacks against U.S. targets.  Iraq war hawks did not usually make these arguments publicly (it was so much more fun to deceive the public about other reasons to go to war), but this was Wolfowitz’s view and it is recorded in Ricks’ book Fiasco (something else about which Rudy Giuliani probably has never heard and knows nothing).  Besides, it wouldn’t do to basically say, “We’re starting this war so that we will be able to eliminate the causes of Al Qaeda’s complaints.”  Never mind that attacking and occupying a Muslim country ranks rather high on the old jihadi-aggravator scale.  Looked at this way, we can see that the administration not only “gave in” to Al Qaeda’s demands (at least inasmuch as leaving Saudi Arabia, ending the no-fly zones and stopping the sanctions were all concessions to Bin Laden’s laundry list of complaints), but then gave them something else to use as a rallying cry. 

Far from demonstrating resolve to show that terrorism “doesn’t work,” the administration practically gave up on the same policies that non-interventionists were calling for Washington to give up on before 9/11 and engaged in a new policy that was sure to magnify the very jihadi threat that the other “concessions” might have weakened.  To the extent that these “concessions” “showed weakness”–that perennial hegemonist fear–the administration clearly “showed weakness,” even desperation, in its haste to relocate the forces then in Saudi Arabia to Iraq.  The administration admitted in practice that the Ron Pauls of the world were right all along about the dangers of the policies we had been pursuing during the 1990s, and then proceeded to compound their past errors by embarking on our equivalent of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  If even the administration could acknowledge the dangerous and counterproductive nature of deployments and policies that contributed to 9/11, why was the solution one of actually invading–quite illegally–another Muslim country?

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