Were we therefore wrong to support the war, those of us who did? In terms of what we hoped and what we thought likely, we obviously were – given how things have actually turned out. But on the basis of what could have been reliably foreseen, I think it’s harder to say that. Only if the disaster was always foreseeable as the most likely outcome would I be convinced of it. ~Norm Geras

But disaster of some sort was always foreseeable as the most likely outcome.  Some people said so from the very beginning and kept saying it.  Besides the injustice of a war of aggression and the misguided nature of interventionist enterprises in principle, no one who knew the first thing about Iraq could seriously believe that overthrowing Hussein’s regime was going to usher in anything other than violent resistance and chaos.  No one who knew anything about Iraq believed that the Shi’ites were primed for Jeffersonian democracy; naturally, those who claimed such things knew next to nothing of the country beyond what Bernard Lewis had told them in his extremely tendentious pro-war arguments. 

The war has actually not ushered in as much regional chaos as some of us feared, which hardly vindicates the supporters of the war.  Instead of an immediate refugee crisis all at once, the refugees have been pouring out at a considerable, steady rate; instead of immediate civil war, we have a civil war that seems to be picking up a head of steam; instead of Kurdish independence, we have general Iraqi fragmentation and death squads.  So it could be worse–that is hardly going to be a slogan with which to inspire the true believers in the war.  We opponents often offered worst-case scenarios, and so far there have only been bad scenarios, but on every point–how Iraqis would respond to occupation, how they would adapt to political reform, how Islam would mix with democratic politics, how sectarian and ethnic hatreds would overwhelm the country, and on down the line–opponents of the war have been proven largely and substantially right.  Their predictions are a matter of record.  The ludicrous certainties of the war supporters are as well.    

I don’t dwell on this point much anymore, since there is nothing satisfying in being proven right about the incompetence of government and the foolishness of ideologues when their mistakes and crimes bring death to tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people, but people who opposed the war in Iraq from the start were very simply right about just about everything.  We were not simply right about the pragmatic questions of success or feasbility (that is, we assumed some form of significant political failure in the aftermath of the war, regarded the democratisation talk as insane Wilsonian fantasy, etc.) but we were also on the side of morality and justice because the goals set by the administration, whether in terms of improving the Iraqis’ lot or transforming the country into a successful democracy, were never realistic and never going to be realised.  This is the case also because the war was, in the final analysis, always a war of aggression, no matter how many elaborate excuses and justifications were cooked up to evade this basic truth.  Aggression cannot be just, no matter what it is you may believe you will achieve by it.  You cannot will evil that good may come of it.  Obviously.  But it was not obvious to supporters of the war for reasons that will never be clear to me.   

I appreciate that Mr. Geras has recognised the folly of persisting in Iraq, but it seems to me a fairly half-hearted conversion if he still believes that it was really very likely that the war was ever going to do anything other than fail, unless success were defined in a very narrow way as the deposition of Saddam Hussein.  If that were the definition of victory, the war should have ended almost three years ago.  That would not have prevented Iraq from collapsing into the carnage we see today (I am skeptical that anything, short of another heavy-handed ruler, would have prevented this), but had we left the Iraqis to their own devices at that point America might at least not be so directly implicated in the disintegration of that country.