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A Familiar Pattern

This is the familiar arc of a poorly conceived war. At first, it looks like necessary defense. The public rallies around in the adrenaline rush of solving an intolerable problem by force. The critics are few, or foreign, and easily dismissed. As time passes, it becomes more difficult to name what has been gained amid […]

This is the familiar arc of a poorly conceived war. At first, it looks like necessary defense. The public rallies around in the adrenaline rush of solving an intolerable problem by force. The critics are few, or foreign, and easily dismissed. As time passes, it becomes more difficult to name what has been gained amid the horror. The moral price reveals itself. Criticism becomes mainstream and respectable and is entirely too late. ~Gershom Gorenberg

Gorenberg is referring to the Gaza conflict, but he could just as easily have been writing about the 2006 war in Lebanon or the Iraq war or the Georgian escalation in South Ossetia. What is striking about all of these episodes is how the experience of any or all of them seems to have no effect whatever on how most political and foreign policy elites respond to the next crisis or judge the next conflict. When the next crisis occurs, we hear the same justifications and arguments for the use of force, the pious intonations about the right to self-defense and the importance of national sovereignty (mind you, it is always our sovereignty and rights and those of our allies that count, and not those of the states or populations under assault) and the inevitable blaming of the victims of the campaign and whitewashing the excesses of the aggressor.

At the same time, there is always a great deal of commentary about how much has supposedly been learned from past mistakes without any acknowledgment that it was the decision to launch a major military campaign in the first place that was the key error. Because the elites have claimed that they learned their lesson, the different publics seem willing to put their trust in many of the same political and foreign policy elites who failed them in the past. However, time and again the elites do not address the fundamental flaws in their assumptions about policy or the decisions leading up to the crisis, and they are concerned mainly with managing the next crisis less clumsily and more “competently.” The mistaken consensus that preceded a disastrous or counterproductive campaign shields the elites and keeps them from being completely discredited, as they can always hide behind the vast majority of the government and population that wrongly sided with their poor decisions.

Those politicians who acknowledge their error and make some attempt to rectify it are mocked as opportunists or worse, while the ones that brazenly refuse to admit their failure somehow retain a reputation for conviction and steadfastness, as if great devotion to an utterly wrong-headed view of the world were exculpatory or admirable. This makes the political calculus the next time around very simple. Any national politician with ambitions of higher office will go along with the consensus and back whatever military campaign comes along, and even if he becomes a critic of how the campaign has been managed he will always frame his criticism as an expression of his desire to manage the campaign more effectively. For that matter, even in the rare event that an antiwar candidate rises to the highest level, he will have done so by making clear that his opposition to that particular war is the exception to his otherwise more or less reflexive support for the use of force in all other cases, and he will highlight his opposition to that particular war only when it has become overwhelmingly unpopular. In this way the political class keeps producing timid, consensus-following members who have no incentives to reject military campaigns outright from the beginning, which is why the leadership of all major parties is predictably and routinely in favor of almost all of these campaigns almost regardless of the circumstances.

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