THE SPIN BEGINS
Cori - Ranting Profs
The conclusions of the Senate Intelligence report have to be digested, assessed, evaluated. This is a serious topic for serious thought.
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That isn't what's happening. What's happening is instant spin, the re-presentation of the report to mean that since the WMD intelligence was wrong there was no justificatiion for the war, and no gain for all the blood and treasure spent.<font size=3> Case in point, Bob Herbert's column today
nytimes.com
(although you know and I know that this framing is happening throughout the straight news coverage as well.)
He starts by bringing up the story of one particular Marine, and the deaths of several troops over the last few days. That's a rhetorical device. The smaller the number of people we're talking about, the more personal the costs appear. It is a perverse fact of human nature that it's easier to talk about several hundred deaths than it is to talk about a single death, but there it is, and it's a technique Herbert attempts to use.
But then he writes:
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For what?
Even as these brave troops were dying in the cruel and bloody environs of Iraq, the Senate Intelligence Committee in Washington was unfurling its damning unanimous report about the incredibly incompetent intelligence that the Bush administration used to justify this awful war.
The bipartisan committee, headed by Republican Senator Pat Roberts, declared that the key intelligence assessments trumpeted by President Bush as the main reasons for invading Iraq were unfounded.
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But that's an enormous bit of "hype," if I may be excused for using the word, in and of itself. Herbert leaps from the claim that the WMD argument has turned out to be inaccurate in part now to concluding that every single justification for war is wrong, and that we could have known that in time to make sound judgements -- or could have responsibly waited. But those conclusions are far from obvious, as is the argument that this "awful" war has accomplished nothing.
He proceeds:<font color=blue><font size=3>
Nearly 900 G.I.'s and more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians have already perished, and there is no end to the war in sight. The situation is both sorrowful and disorienting. The colossal intelligence failures and the willful madness of the administration, which presented war as the first and only policy option, can leave you with the terrible feeling that you're standing at the graveside of common sense and reasonable behavior.
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First, of course, is the offensiveness of both using the 10,000 figure while ignoring, as critics of the war inevitably do, the number of civilian lives that have without a doubt been saved by overthrowing one of the most wretched and genocidal dictatorships ever. I understand that there are arguments against going to war for humanitarian reasons, but lets not deny that this was in fact a genuine humanitarian interviention. Second, I also understand that there are people who believe that there actually remained hope in negotiations, in inspections, in, God help us all, the French, and believe the administration irresponsibly foreshortened all those options. I understand that argument although I disagree with it, but that argument concedes that the administration did, for a time, pursue other directions besides war.
It is willfully rewriting history to cliam that war was
presented as <font color=blue>"the first and only policy option."<font color=black>
He continues:<font color=blue><font size=3>
A government with even a nodding acquaintance with competence and good sense would have launched an all-out war against Al Qaeda, not Iraq, in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. After all, it was Al Qaeda, not Iraq, that carried out the sneak attack on American soil that destroyed the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon and killed 3,000 people. You might think that would have been enough to provoke an all-out response from the U.S. Instead we saved our best shot for the demented and already checkmated dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein.
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Bin Laden and Al Qaeda must have gotten a good laugh out of that. Now they're planning to come at us again. On Thursday, the same day Iraqi insurgents killed the five G.I.'s in Samarra, the Bush administration disclosed that bin Laden and his lieutenants, believed to be operating from hideouts along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, were directing an effort by Al Qaeda to unleash an encore attack against the United States.
Yeah. Because an <font color=blue>"all out"<font color=black> effort in Afghanistan (which, I assume means taking all the resources being used in Iraq and deploying them in Afghanistan, despite warnings at the time that a massive land invasion of Afghanistan would quickly bog down for a variety of reasons -- not the least of which was it would, you know, look like an occupation and turn the people against us) would surely have gotten at the trained al Queda operatives in the other 59 countries, and left them with no motive whatsoever to keep coming at us.
It just amazes me that anyone makes this argument. No one ever suggested that the overthrow of the Taliban, or the efforts to attack al Queda in Afghanistan no matter how successful, would be the end of the threat posed by al Queda. No one serious anyway, and certainly no one from the administration. They argued, on the contrary, that the threat was deep and long and wide and that the war would be hard and would take years and that Afghanistan was just the beginning. Yet everytime they bring up a threat it's used against them as evidence that they've failed by not having won already. It's as if every battle on the way to Berlin was used as sign evidence that the landings at Normandy were a failure.
Herbert then devotes a sentence or so to the actual argument: <font color=blue>that Iraq has been a distraction from the real action along the Afghan/Pakistan border.<font color=black> But that really isn't enough to develop a substantive argument. He also argues that the war in Iraq has sparked hatred of America all over the Muslim world.
Because after all, we were so loved before.
There might be arguments to make there. But he's spent so much space ranting on other issues, that he just asserts those two, where there might be some real argumentative traction.
Did the war with Iraq increase hatred of the US in the Muslim world?
Well, I'm guessing it didn't help much.
I havent seen much evidence it's led to increased terrorism over and above what would have happened otherwise (but I haven't read the IISS report yet.) There's plenty of evidence they're all happy to go to Iraq, which is a different story. But the question that isn't possible to answer is how many terrorists would have been created given alternative choices. Is there anything we could have done that wouldn't have resulted in a short term spike in terrorists? Is the spike that's being claimed anything but a short term spike we need to absorb in order to take effective action?
Not questions that can be addressed in the last paragraph of a piece like Herbert's. But then, he isn't interested in thinking through the tough questions to get to the truth. He's interested in repeating the truisms.
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