Carl,
I'm not sure if you're following the Slate discussion of (mostly) liberal hawks, but I am reprinting some of it below. Zakaria's piece is one of the better (perhaps the best) justification for the war that I have read. Kaplan's response to it would be a part of my response (the other part is that the situation there is so ethnically and historically complex and conflicted that attempting to install a democracy there in the way we are doing has almost zero chance of success--and, as you have repeatedly said, the fundamental fact is that we are more hated than liked in the Arab world, complicating matters even more).
From: Fareed Zakaria
To: Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, and Jacob Weisberg
Subject: Changing the Middle East
Posted Thursday, Jan. 15, 2004, at 7:48 AM PT
Since this is my first post I want to address Jacob's central question, that Fred and George have pressed so effectively. Given the costs, was the war worth it? I think it was. Many of the costs (ruptured alliances, the postwar mess) can be alleviated (through better planning, diplomacy, etc.). I don't minimize these and have been vocal in pointing them out. But they do not invalidate the entire enterprise.
I've often been associated with the "democratization spillover" argument, so let me point out that the elimination of Saddam Hussein has been a big plus for American national security. The most anti-American and expansionist regime in the Middle East has disappeared. An actual and potential threat to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kuwait has been eliminated. A violent, rejectionist state has faced consequences. This has had a sobering effect on the region: See Syria and Libya's recent behavior. Given our interest in a stable Middle East, this is good.
Given our growing interest in a more decent Middle East it is even better. For the last few decades we have defined deviancy down in that region. Behavior that would be utterly unacceptable from other countries gets a pass because it's the Middle East. If we learned tomorrow that, say, the Brazilian government was supporting various terror groups, trafficking in chemical and biological agents, and allowing its media to glorify anti-American violence, we would be appalled. When it's Syria we shrug our shoulders and say, "It's the Middle East."
This is the real connection to 9/11. After 9/11 we came to realize that we couldn't let the Middle East keep festering in its dysfunction and hatreds. It was breeding anti-Americanism and terror. With Iraq in particular, business as usual was becoming increasingly difficult. Throughout this discussion we have assumed that there was a simple, viable alternative to war with Iraq, the continuation of the status-quo, i.e., sanctions plus the almost weekly bombing of the no-fly zones. In fact, that isn't really true. America's Iraq policy was broken. You have to contrast the dangers of acting in Iraq with the dangers of not acting and ask what would things have looked like had we simply kicked this can down the road.
I had been comfortable with the "Saddam-is-in-a-box" argument during the 1990s. But by the latter part of the decade the policy was collapsing. In 1996 Saddam invaded the Kurdish safe haven of northern Iraq, re-establishing his power in the area. In the next few years he repeatedly defied U.N. inspectors and busted sanctions. His neighbors—Jordan, Turkey, Syria—began illicitly trading with him. The French and Russians were openly working to get the sanctions lifted. Saddam adopted an increasingly bold negotiating strategy, refusing or reneging on various compromises that were offered him. In 1998 he stooped cooperating with the inspectors. In November 1999 he stopped exporting oil (under the oil for food program) so that he could send oil prices to their highest levels in a decade. On coming into office, Colin Powell, realizing how ineffective sanctions had become, tried to create a "smart sanctions" program that would target the regime and not the Iraqi people. The French and Russians scuttled it.
So, what we had by 2001 was a policy that was leaving Saddam strong but killing thousands of Iraqi civilians—by one UNICEF estimate over 30,000 a year, of which the majority were children under 5. This was not the containment of the Soviet Union. Iraq had turned into a gangsterland, on its way to becoming a Middle Eastern Chechnya. Its humanitarian crisis was broadcast every day across the Arab world and had enormous popular appeal. That is why, having no love for Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden listed it as one of his three grievances against America in his famous declaration of jihad.
Was a continuation of these trends—collapsing sanctions, total impoverishment, no inspectors, Saddam emboldened, and Iraq as the humanitarian cause of the Arab world—good for American interest and ideals? Particularly after 9/11?
George raises a very important question as to whether war is the best agent for democratization. No, it isn't. But there are certain places where change is unlikely to come from within—anytime soon. In particular in oil-rich countries, there is always enough money to pay the army, the secret police, and the torturers. That's why, over the last three decades, while dictatorships all over the world have tottered and tumbled, not one has fallen in the Arab world. Democracy doesn't always come at the point of a gun, but it often does take outside pressure to topple a bad regime—Germany, Japan, Eastern Europe, South Africa. And while external help can be suspect, sometimes outside pressure can help as it did in East Asia and Latin America.
The eggs are broken. Now we need to make a decent omelet. Of course George is right when he says that to succeed in Iraq we need greater popular legitimacy—and we could have gotten it in various ways. And he's right that democracy-building is long, slow, hard work—I've written much about that myself. I've read his intelligent accounts of all the problems in Iraq today. But would it really be easier to make progress toward a decent society had there been no war? And while I'm as sensitive as anyone to public opinion, please don't take too seriously the howls of Arab intellectuals, people who only a year ago hailed Saddam Hussein as their hero. They are reflections of a broken culture. If the goal is to make them happy, we will never achieve any progress in the Middle East.
The war against Iraq was a tough call. For me there was no single reason that was dispositive. But I believe that political and economic change in the Middle East is vital to tackling the war on terror. That, coupled with the humanitarian crisis, coupled with the security problem that Saddam posed, made me sign on to the war.
Yes, we could have tried to promote reform without a war—and we are. We could have better funded legal exchange programs in Egypt, helped women's education in Jordan, provided economic advice to Qatar—but would it have been an adequate and urgent strategy to address the virus that has infected the Middle East? In Iraq we have the possibility of helping a society break through the barriers of the past and set an example for the future. Of course it may not succeed, and things may not change in that region. Many of the Bush administration postwar mistakes make that outcome more likely. But one thing's for certain: If we hadn't tried, we can be sure that it would not succeed and nothing would change.
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From: Fred Kaplan
To: Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, and Fareed Zakaria
Subject: The Glass Is Three-Quarters Empty
Posted Thursday, Jan. 15, 2004, at 1:15 PM PT
Fareed Zakaria makes the most eloquent and persuasive case for war. If we all get together again in five years and his scenario has come to pass, I will arrive at the reunion with mea culpa in hand. I turned against the war last March not out of pacifism, faith in the United Nations, or solidarity with France, but rather out of sheer skepticism—not only about the Bush administration's dubious motives and mendacious ploys but also (and primarily) about its ability to pull the thing off, particularly in the "postwar" phase (which our officials, in fact, so thoroughly botched that it has devolved into a second, deadlier phase of the war itself). In their diplomacy leading up to the war, Bush & Co. proved themselves so maladroit at dealing with long-familiar allies and entities, I figured they'd be hopeless at untangling the internal ethnic tensions that would boil to the surface after Saddam's lid was blown off.
Fareed lays out an enticing plotline in which the emergence of a stable state and a civil society in Iraq inspires progress and moderation throughout the Middle East. He points to steps that have already been taken in this direction by Libya and Syria—and I agree that these steps are, in large measure, a direct result of the war. However, I would argue that we are still at a very early stage of this story. Iraq could evolve into a viable, Western-leaning nation; it could devolve into a bastion of Islamic fundamentalism, à la Khomeini or worse; it could deteriorate into fragmented anarchy, even civil war. I don't see any one of these possibilities as more or less likely than the others. If one of the latter two scenarios comes to pass, the impact on Iraq, the region, and the rest of the world—and the United States' standing in it—will be devastating, the exact opposite of the noblest intentions.
I'm not dogmatic about this point. Fareed, you may be proved right. I hope you are. I guess the difference between us, for now, is that you see the glass as one-quarter full; I see it as three-quarters empty.
The Bush officials have changed their tune somewhat in the past few months. They seem now to realize, to some degree, the need for a more multilateral approach. Baker's trip to Europe (which I think was about more than debt-forgiveness) is an intriguing sign in this regard. What they are doing, diplomatically, in the Middle East is less clear. The Libyan gambit is promising, but it would be nice to see some pressure on other powers, not least Israel, too.
The Bush people also appear more responsive to the desires and demands of Iraqi leaders. (You don't hear Wolfowitz waxing on de Tocqueville much anymore; when it comes to what we all see as an acceptable political outcome, the bar has been considerably lowered, to accommodate a shift from fantasy to realism.) And the military leadership—thanks, mainly, to the new Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, who rose through the ranks as a special ops commander and therefore knows the nature of "low-intensity conflict"—is adapting as well, attempting to strike a more effective balance between banging down doors and capturing hearts-and-minds.
Maybe it will work out. Maybe it won't. If it doesn't, the war will have unleashed forces far more damaging than might have been brought on by a continuation of containment, smart sanctions, and other, subtler pressures. Certainly I agree with you (and Tom Friedman, who has been making this point repeatedly in the Times as well as here) that the next few months are decisive and that the administration has got to start playing this game much more shrewdly than it has until now.
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From: Jacob Weisberg
To: Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Fred Kaplan, Christopher Hitchens, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, and Fareed Zakaria
Subject: Cost-Benefit Analysis
Posted Thursday, Jan. 15, 2004, at 2:04 PM PT
I'd like to bring the conversation back to the subject of the war's costs and benefits and the issue of whether the latter justify the former. Christopher Hitchens, in his post, asserts that such considerations are irrelevant. "One cannot know the price of anything in advance, but one can be determined to pay it no matter what, as in a struggle for one's own life or for the life of loved ones," he writes.
That seems to me an appropriate sentiment for a battle of national and moral survival, such as the fight against Nazism. But if anything is clear in retrospect, it's that the Iraq war was not a fight for our survival. The best arguments advanced for the invasion in this dialogue have been either bank-shot strategic or non-strategic humanitarian. Absent evidence of weapons of mass destruction or Iraqi sponsorship of al-Qaida, explicit self-defense doesn't come into it. And because choosing this war when we chose it was optional, a weighing of the costs and benefits is not merely appropriate, but the very heart of the decision.
Dare I make a comparison to Vietnam? I'm not sure where Christopher stands on that war today, but I would argue that there was a price worth paying to prevent Vietnam from falling into Communist hands. Unfortunately, the acceptable price—in American lives, Vietnamese lives, public funds, distraction from other problems, social division, and so on—was far less than what we paid short of achieving victory. If we could remake that decision with the benefit of hindsight, I hope we'd all agree Vietnam was a mistake—not on grounds of absolute principle, but because the costs were insupportable.
Of course, one does not simply stop fighting a war, even an elective one, because the profit-and-loss tally shifts from arguably favorable to marginally unfavorable—an implication of Christopher's I accept. Indeed, cost-benefit analysis can say we shouldn't have invaded in the first place, but that now that we're there, we should stick. We have already incurred most of the costs of going to war in Iraq and reversing course now would only serve to increase them—a point Mickey Kaus made the other day in his blog, in response to something Fareed wrote in Newsweek.
But that still leaves the question of whether our initial decision to support the war was wrong based on what we knew, or ought to have known, back in March. Most of you seem to believe we did not make a mistake. This afternoon, I'm leaning toward Fred's view that we did.
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From: Christopher Hitchens
To: Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, and Fareed Zakaria
Subject: The Price of Victory
Posted Friday, Jan. 16, 2004, at 8:06 AM PT
A short answer to Fred Kaplan's question of Wednesday: If the James Risen story in the New York Times is correct, which I have no reason to doubt, it is still written upside down, or at least would read just as well if printed that way. In other words, one might as well make a "disclosure" out of the fact that Saddam was in close touch with his own thugs concerning the movements of jihadist ones: movements of which he was very well aware.
On its own, that would now surprise nobody. Nor does it contradict anything we know already. My own analogy for the Baathist/al-Qaida collusion has always been that of a Hitler-Stalin pact: a cynical agreement on common interests and common enemies by ostensible and actual rivals. The analogy would break down a bit in point of relative scale: Saddam used to have a state machine, and the jihadists (at least after the fall of Kabul) did not. But that doesn't affect the argument very much. At all times—the case of Ansar al-Islam in Kurdistan might be another example, or the less Islamist Abu Nidal network—Saddam wanted to be the one using, not the one used. And he wanted control. He was an absolutist dictator, before we forget.
The statements made by al-Qaida spokesmen come out the same way: They don't support Baathism, but they did strongly support Saddam against the coalition and they did and do want to make Iraq into a site for holy war.
The leaked document on this relationship from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which contains a great deal of information that has not been contradicted, shows the same pattern. Deniable Iraqi envoys were sent to seek accommodation and understanding, at arm's length, with the newest and most serious anti-American force in the region. How could it have been otherwise? It was the Mukhabarat's job to do such things. (And sometimes to undo them, as when they murdered Abu Nidal in the run-up to the invasion.) It's only a few weeks since the New York Times breathlessly informed us, in another upside-down disclosure, that Iraqi middlemen seeking to avert an invasion made an offer, among other things, to surrender a certain Mr. Yasin—wanted for the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and ever since that date a resident of Baghdad. The main effect of that report was to tell the paper's readers, for the first time, of the existence of this very fascinating connection.
One still reads ignorant stuff about how "secular" the Baath Party once was. This ignores at least a decade's worth of ostentatiously jihadist propaganda, the building of mosques with militaristic names, and the writing of a special Quran allegedly in Saddam's own blood. To say nothing of open and boastful military and financial support for the jihadist suicide-murderers in Palestine, i.e., for the enemies of the more secular PLO. I dare say someone could now write an exclusive story for the New York Times saying that private letters showed that Saddam Hussein was never really sincere about his personal conversion to Islam. And I would believe that report, too.
Very occasionally, I feel sympathy for the anti-intervention forces. They can quite pardonably claim that they don't know quite which protean Bush/Cheney/Powell/Rumsfeld case they are debating, or which is today's prowar headline or justification. But the same applies in reverse. For example, once I finish arguing with someone who says that a thousand Osamas will spring up to replace the killed Osama, I turn to confront someone who angrily says that Bush hasn't killed Osama yet (which the first contestant can presumably not desire, unless he desires a thousand Osamas). And one can become dizzy, as between those who feel that there are too many American forces in Afghanistan or Iraq, and those who denounce Washington for sending too few.
I myself thought it was plain enough, when I spoke to Jacob's point about "cost," that I was alluding not merely to Iraq but to the whole front between ourselves and the jihad and its state allies. But perhaps I should have taken more care to bodyguard my remarks. (And I certainly didn't say that such a matter was "irrelevant.") I believe nonetheless that such a cost-accounting is impossible. At what point could it have been determined in advance that the fall of Saddam Hussein was worth X or Y? At what stage would cost have dictated discretion? Would halfway to Baghdad have been cheap at half the price? How was the "cost" of allowing continuing Baathist rule to be calculated? Have we really overspent in Afghanistan? Who would decide how the investment necessary for the demolition of the Taliban had hit diminishing returns? And when? And how would the money have been better spent "at home"? There is such a thing as knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. (Fred Kaplan comes closer to genuine bargain-basement reasoning by declaring boldly that he will endorse any policy that can be guaranteed as a painless victory in advance. Or that he might have done so until recently.)
Of some interest are the predictions made, by both Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, on precisely this point. In well-reported speeches and sermons, and in one instance in a tape-recorded exchange with a U.S. ambassador, both men predicted with boastful certainty that Americans would soon weary of the cost of combat and retire from the field, either because of "body bag" considerations or because of the general decadence produced by Judeo-capitalism, hedonism, corruption, impiety, etc. It seems to me to be of the very first importance, for reasons of morale and of strategy (as well as the imposed necessity of rehearsing and improving our tactics and soldiery by means of practice) that these predictions go into the dustbin of history as among the stupidest and vainest things anyone has ever said. I don't know how to quantify such a necessary attainment, but I do know that the contrary example would come in at a very high price indeed, and be very dearly bought for no comparative advantage.
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From: George Packer
To: Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, Kenneth M. Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, and Fareed Zakaria
Subject: What We Got Wrong and Why
Posted Friday, Jan. 16, 2004, at 8:25 AM PT
Among the many thoughtful posts in this week's conversation—including Fareed's on Thursday—one of the best came from a reader. His or her point was that for Tom and Fareed especially, but to a lesser degree for others among us, the war's justification was practical and experimental: It might have certain good effects in the region and in the larger war on terrorism, or it might not—but avoiding action altogether was less tolerable than taking the risk of war. And, this reader went on, once the justification was put that way, on a practical and experimental basis, the ultimate verdict on whether or not the war was the right thing depends on how things go in Iraq and the region. In short, as Chou En-Lai said when asked what he thought of the French Revolution, it's too early to tell. But just because the outcome is still to be determined, and the job will require enormous imagination, flexibility, local knowledge, and staying power on our part, success or failure will depend in large part on whether Americans manage to summon these mental qualities. As Christopher wrote in his book on Orwell, what you think matters less than how you think—and how this administration thinks isn't reassuring. For example, it's very difficult for me to imagine a symposium called "What Did We Get Wrong and Why?" being held at the American Enterprise Institute, where so much of the Bush foreign policy has been incubated, let alone at the White House. On the other hand, I'm encouraged by this conversation in Slate and by how the participants thought. I hope it continues in other guises. Thanks for the chance to join in.
George Packer
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From: Fred Kaplan
To: Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, and Fareed Zakaria
Subject: Bad Dictator Analogies
Posted Friday, Jan. 16, 2004, at 12:28 PM PT
Christopher Hitchens' historical analogy—Saddam is to Osama as Stalin is to Hitler (or should it be "as Hitler is to Stalin"?)—is more than a bit strained. But if the comparison is valid, then it follows that invading Iraq in response to 9/11 was like invading the Soviet Union in response to Nazi Germany's aggression against Czechoslovakia. Christopher also knows better than to accuse me of endorsing, as he puts it, "any policy that can be guaranteed as a painless victory in advance." As he well knows from our conversations at the time, I was (and remain) an avid supporter of the war in Afghanistan, which—given the Soviet and British experiences in that country over the years—was by no means foreseen (by me, him, or anybody else) as a sure thing.
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From: Paul Berman
To: Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, and Fareed Zakaria
Subject: Hitler, Stalin, Hussein
Posted Friday, Jan. 16, 2004, at 1:21 PM PT
A final footnote on the arcane topic of Hitler and Stalin. I do think we have reason to keep these historical figures in mind. Saddam's Baath was founded in 1943 under a Nazi influence. (This ought to give the Germans a reason to ensure Baathism's final defeat in Iraq, even if Bush has treated Germany with arrogance.) Later on, Saddam added an influence of Stalin to the Baathist idea. Fred Halliday has pointed out that Saddam's birthplace in Tikrit is a mere 450 miles from Stalin's birthplace. (This might give the Russians a reason to help out, too.) Saddam has the unusual quality of being able to claim descent from Hitler and Stalin both. He is himself the Hitler-Stalin pact.
This arcane fact goes to the heart of our modern predicament—the reality that large political forces exist that have demonized entire countries and populations and have worked up a cult of mass killing. The war against these political forces has been bungled by the strategists in Washington. But, as George and other journalists have shown, many heroic people are doing everything they can do to undo those blunders on the ground in Iraq. What should liberals and Democrats do at home in the United States? Everything we can to help those people. Their success and our safety are one and the same.
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From: Jacob Weisberg
To: Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Fred Kaplan, Christopher Hitchens, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, and Fareed Zakaria
Subject: Final Words
Posted Friday, Jan. 16, 2004, at 2:11 PM PT
Thanks to all seven of you all for contributing to what has been, at last for me, an illuminating and at times agonizing conversation. All week, I've found myself persuaded back and forth by your various arguments. And I very much second George Packer's commendation. The spirit of rigorous self-criticism is alive and well here, if nowhere else among supporters of the war.
For my part, I have indeed changed my mind this week. I no longer think I was correct to support Bush's invasion of Iraq last March. That's hard for me to say, since as I noted at the outset, I've itched to depose Saddam Hussein by violent means, since 1991. But Bush was the wrong president to do it, and last year was the wrong moment—based on problems I didn't perceive clearly enough because of my impatience to see our unfinished business in Iraq finally completed.
The first factor impelling me to change my mind is the emerging picture of the dishonesty involved in getting the public to support the war. Members of the Bush administration truly thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, as did the vast majority of its critics. But the administration contributed to the general misapprehension by suborning intelligence, exaggerating evidence, and amplifying unreliable data in ways that, as Ken Pollack has depicted, amount to deception. They did this because, absent a powerful fear of Saddam's WMD, the American people would not have supported the invasion. A democracy must not be led to war on the basis of deceit, even if the unarticulated reasons for going war remain persuasive to many of us.
I don't fault myself much for being wrong about the weapons. Perhaps I should have been more suspicious, but if Ken and other experts couldn't see through the flaws in the Bush administration's evidence, I don't see how I could have. It was a very strong argument for war that turns out to have to be almost completely wrong.
The other reason I have changed my mind is that, as I indicated yesterday, I don't think it stands up well to cost-benefit analysis available at the outset. I think that the benefits could have outweighed the costs if the Bush administration had proceeded multilaterally and on the basis of prudent contingency planning. But it should have been possible to see a year ago that Bush was going to proceed in precisely the self-undermining way he did. Unilateralism was the president's policy. The liberation fantasy that caused so much additional damage to the already wrecked society of Iraq was the obvious underpinning of the Pentagon's postwar plan.
Here I do fault myself, for not better recognizing the evident character of this administration. Another president might have taken us to war in a basically prudent and honest way. This one was not competent to do so. Facing a continuing tragedy in Iraq, but no emergency, we should have waited for a leader capable of reasoning about our security priorities and working more effectively with countries we need as allies in the fight against Islamic terrorism.
Mistake or no, we must all live with the consequences of our decision. One point we all seem to agree on is that America must stay and finish what it started. A functional, democratic state in Iraq that exerted a positive influence on the region would go a long way toward vindicating the liberal hawks. I'm less optimistic about this outcome than Tom Friedman. But if such a nation emerges, no one will be more pleased about it than I.
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