Since he doesn’t want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let’s make a bet. I predict that Iraq won’t have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I’ll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now).  This way neither of us can hide behind clever word play or CV reading. ~Jonah Goldberg‘s challenge to Juan Cole, c. 2005

Via Matt Yglesias

While no one doubts Goldberg’s preference, if not skill, for clever word play, I don’t suppose there would be much danger for him to engage in a lot of CV reading as a cover for his bad arguments.  There wouldn’t be much of a CV to read anyway.  In any case, he prefers the route of ad hominem and distortion. 

This bet exemplifies what has always been so painfully comic about debating neocons on anything related to the Near East: it has almost always been a contest between the relatively well-informed, the professional and the expert among us on one side and on the other people, like Goldberg, who strike bold moral poses about a region they do not begin to understand and believed they could remould like so much potter’s clay.  These were the people who included such luminaries as James Woolsey, who could write (presumably seriously) in The Wall Street Journal in the months before the war that Iraqi Shi’ites were primed and ready to be the Jeffersonians of Iraq–he specifically used the term Jeffersonian.  These were the people who would quote The Arab Mind as some sort of reliable guide to the region’s peoples, while laughing at the State Department’s Arabists because they were deemed to have an insufficiently morally “clear” perspective on Israel (i.e., at least some people at State believe that Arabs are human beings and should occasionally be treated as such).  When necessary, they would trot out the egregiously biased Bernard Lewis as one of their house professionals to bless their foolish invasion, even though everything about the history of the nation-states of the modern Near East screamed, “This will fail!”  These were the people who said, “The road to Jerusalem goes through Baghdad”–they just didn’t realise that they were referring to the road that leads to Jerusalem from Tehran.  Well, better luck next time, I suppose.    

Now that it is too late to avoid calamity, these profound thinkers discover that Iraq is a fissiparous and artificial state seething with rivalries and resentments that had just been waiting to burst out into the open.  Indeed, the new meme bouncing around is that Iraq was always such a godawful mess that nothing could have been done to prevent the nightmare now unfolding (except, of course, the option of not invading–but for them this is never considered a serious alternative, not even now).  This is said now not so much as an explanation as an exculpation, a way out for all of the villains and enablers who pushed a war of aggression and destroyed a country.  Exactly like the fragmented Yugoslavia that these same masters of the universe cheered on to its destruction (and whose destruction they did more than a little to hasten), Iraq has rapidly fallen to violent contestation of power among its constituent member groups (just as more than a few people who knew more than two things about Iraq said would probably happen in the absence of strong central rule).  This would be the natural result of the aftermath of the collapse of any regime, especially any regime trying to hold together at least three mutually antagonistic communities, as those with some respect for and knowledge of history outside of the hallowed 1938-1945 period would have known.  Yet somehow it has taken these far-seeing visionaries entirely by surprise. 

As late as last summer these sages quibbled over whether you could really call the savage sectarian killings in Iraq civil war.  You see, there weren’t rival armies in distinctive uniforms duking it out in the fields of Pennsylvania, so therefore it couldn’t be a real civil war (not that our “civil war” was actually a civil war, of course, but that would take us too far afield).  When they were pressed to admit the obvious some of their less scrupulous allies cooked up kooky analogies to the Spanish Civil War (in which America apparently was functioning in the role of the Soviet sponsor of the Second Republic…which in addition to being atrocious also happened to lose its war).  Naturally, they wished to avoid admitting the existence of civil war, because they know that Americans are funny about seeing their soldiers getting killed in somebody else’s bloody grudge match.  Americans don’t like this at all and assume that a foreign civil war is an intractable conflict that is not worthy of American sacrifice.  To acknowledge the existence of a civil war makes plans for counterinsurgency almost irrelevant, because it is an admission of deep political failure that precludes any possibility of successful counterinsurgency.  It is no surprise, then, that we should find the most die-hard supporters of the misguided surge among the same people who were the last to admit the reality of Iraqi civil war.  The surge supporters are, of course, among the last to keep pretending that there is an “Iraqi government” distinct from the Shi’ite militias and death squads–they have to maintain this fiction if they are going to be able to support the surge.  

In early 2005, civil war seemed likely, and the elections along sectarian and ethnic lines virtually confirmed that there would be one sooner or later.  The Samarra bombing roughly one year ago signaled to everyone paying attention that it had clearly started.  That Goldberg could predict in 2005, in all earnestness and snide condescension, that there would be no civil war in Iraq, even when essentially every relevant precedent and modern experience with post-Versailles multiethnic states in the wake of the Cold War told us otherwise, should have discredited him completely then as a commentator on all things Iraqi.