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We Are All On “The Lunatic Fringe” Now, Sort Of

But the lack of rationale for the war is glaring in hindsight. By 2006, it had just become too difficult for Bush and Congressional Republicans to justify to the voters why we were still there.  It wasn’t just America-hating anarchists anymore, but ordinary voters who couldn’t buy the White House talking points. ~David Freddoso During […]

But the lack of rationale for the war is glaring in hindsight. By 2006, it had just become too difficult for Bush and Congressional Republicans to justify to the voters why we were still there.  It wasn’t just America-hating anarchists anymore, but ordinary voters who couldn’t buy the White House talking points. ~David Freddoso

During the opening of the Afghan War, I also liked to derisively mock critics of that war effort as “peaceniks,” and I think opponents of the invasion of Afghanistan still have a much harder argument to make for how they justify their position than opponents of the Iraq war have, but after 2002-03 I got sick of this kind of “argumentation” really quickly.  It amounts to a pose rather than an argument: “I’m the real American and you’re unpatriotic, nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nya!”  For eight-year olds, this sort of argument is powerful.  But “we” do at least normally try to aspire to levels of understanding higher than that of the third grade, right? 

All questions of substance were really put to one side; it was one’s attitude, not one’s understanding or ability to frame an argument, that mattered in 2002-03.  The attitude and the pose could always save a jingoist’s argument when he had run out of evidence (which was pretty fast, considering that they had virtually no evidence in support of their case): “What are you, some kind of Saddam-lover?” When that failed, there was always the fake concern about racism: “You probably think that Arabs are incapable of democracy, don’t you?  Yeah, well, we know what that makes you!”  Intelligent?  Well-informed?  Not a mindless cretin?  Oh, right, racist–I keep forgetting that that’s always the right answer!  The cheapest, lamest ad hominem arguments (the kind in which liberals alone were supposed to excel, according to the magnificent El Rushbo) were trotted out to serve as placeholders for real argument.  Irrelevancies abounded: “He gassed his own people!”  Except, of course, that they weren’t “his own” people–they were Kurds and in open rebellion against his government, and when the Turkish government killed even more Kurds in its counterinsurgency against the PKK this was not counted as proof of Ankara’s intentions to destroy the world.  That doesn’t in any way justify the atrocities he committed, but it reminds us that these people would say just about anything to get their war and that their deep concern for the victims of Hussein’s regime, about whom most war supporters had not spared a thought in their entire lives, was awfully convenient.  No one was seriously objecting to his suppression of a rebellion against Baghdad’s authority, but they were simply using it as a way to stoke outrage against a government and a country that had done essentially nothing to us.    

And, no, “we” (K-L would interrupt here: “Say I, not we!”) conservatives did not “all” trust Mr. Bush implicitly on Iraq, and some of “us” bristled when ignorant conservatives unthinkingly parroted administration talking points like paid lackeys.  Some of “us” were embarrassed by the ranting of the ignorant leftists Mr. Freddoso mentions, but “we” conservatives who opposed the war from the beginning also saw merit in the arguments of leftists when there actually was some merit.  “We” antiwar conservatives did not reflexively assume that because they are leftists they must automatically be ignorant (this is a habit that many on the left apply to us, because they know that no rational and intelligent person could actually believe what “we” believe, and it is a habit that all would be well-advised to drop).  “We” found ourselves being forced to pay attention to commentary from The Independent and The Guardian, because they were among the only English-language newspapers that gave any indication of practicing something one might call journalism and exhibiting suspicion about official justifications for the invasion.  Center-right publications here and in Britain were mind-bogglingly supportive of every government claim, no matter how far-fetched or unfounded (to its credit, The Spectator always entertained serious antiwar voices from across the spectrum, though its official editorial line was as irrationally jingo as that of its partner, the Telegraph).  If anything should have put to rest the myth of reflexively hostile “liberal media,” the acquiescence of all major newspapers in the great Republican lie of our new century should have done it. 

How many “America-hating anarchists” (in America) were there opposed to the invasion of Iraq?  There were some who might possibly fit that description, I will grant you, but of the roughly 30% of the public who opposed the war in March 2003 does anyone think they made up a significant percentage?  Obviously, antiwar conservatives were neither America-hating nor anarchist, which didn’t stop some of “us” (i.e., conservatives in general) from trying to make antiwar conservatives out to be just that.  Long before 2006 roughly half the country had come to oppose the war.  It was only in 2006 that a clear majority finally came out against it.  That means that many “ordinary voters” had been against it for quite a while.  My family was full of such “ordinary voters.”  It apparently was only around 2006 that a number of Republicans and pro-war conservatives began to concede that there might have been good reasons to oppose the war and that people not on “the lunatic fringe” opposed it.  This was an interesting about-face.  2006 was the year of “if I knew then what I know now” confessions on the right, which was funny, since some of “us” knew then what these people only know now.  If they had asked, we would have let them in on the secret!

I really don’t mean to pick on Mr. Freddoso.  But then he says things like this:

No, al Qaeda was not totally absent from Iraq. But surely we did not invade and occupy an entire country simply in order to catch Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the one major al Qaeda player we knew Saddam was harboring before the war.

That’s great, except that “Saddam” wasn’t harbouring him.  Before the war, Zarqawi dwelled in the mountain fastnesses of northern Iraq wih Ansar al Islam, which, except for the claims of one misleading New Yorker piece, evidently had no connection, or at least no meaningful, operational connection, to Hussein’s government.  More than that, his base of operations in Kurdistan was well within the northern no-fly zone and could have been destroyed in coordination with Kurdish forces without ever having to touch the rest of Iraq.  In fact, as confirmed reports have since told us, there were opportunities to eliminate Zarqawi before the invasion that the administration called off–apparently because they would have damaged the case for invading!  It isn’t only that the government would never have invaded just to get Zarqawi, but that the government could have killed Zarqawi without invading at all.  The goal was always regime change for the sake of changing the regime.  The rest was, I’m sorry, window dressing and rationalisation.

Some will say that I should give Mr. Freddoso a break.  After all, he is ridiculing the war pretty thoroughly here.  So maybe I should go easy in my remarks.  But then he says things like this:

The deteriorating situation in Iraq led ordinary voters, not just the kooks, to question the occupation of Iraq and to reject Republican candidates, who mostly had no choice but to defend it.

In the judgement of Mr. Freddoso, 30-40% of the public are “the kooks,” whereas his own section, the section that was unbelievably wrong on Iraq, are those remarkable “ordinary voters” again!  Yes, sir, the “ordinary voters” sure are slow on the uptake and way too trusting of government, but they are very, very ordinary and not kooky, and that’s what matters.  Can you imagine how insufferable Mr. Freddoso would have been if the Republicans had won the election?

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