Maybe it’s just human nature – when things are going badly and you feel like a fool, because you actually do look like a fool, you react by striking out. Someone just proved you wrong and the facts are clear – you were wrong – so you smash that someone in the mouth, hard, repeatedly. It doesn’t make you right, but it makes you feel better. Contrition is more mature, but it’s difficult, and in the world of politics, almost unknown. No – scratch “almost.” It’s unknown. Admitting you were wrong ends your political life, or does these days. You just cannot do that. Denial is a possibility – you just weren’t wrong at all and those facts are not facts at all. Denial is, then, sometimes an option, but you can end up looking rather stupid – facts won’t just evaporate because you want them to evaporate. There’s a reason they call that magical thinking. The damned facts just sit there – no magic, no “poof” they’re gone. There is always “reframing” – as in shrugging and asking the question that isn’t a question at all – “Twenty years from now what difference will it make?” That makes those who called you out look sadly short-sighted. They get upset too easily, over what’s really nothing. The opposite reframing of the issues at hand is the one the current president is using now – “Historians will prove me right a hundred years from now.” There is no arguing with that. Anything is possible, and we’ll all be dead anyway. And saying that makes those who called you out seem lacking in broad historical vision, unlike you. Just don’t try it with the cop who pulls you over for speeding. There here and now does matter, after all – that’s where we live, and die.
But most often, when things are going badly and you feel like a fool, because you actually do look like a fool, you try to wriggle out of it. Oh, there are minor variations – the non-apology where you say you’re sorry that what you said offended almost everyone, but you don’t say you’re sorry you said whatever it was, or take back your words. You’re just sad that folks are so sensitive. That sometimes works.
What happens when things go really bad? Monday, October 8, we seemed to be there –
Britain will halve its remaining troop contingent in Iraq next spring, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Monday. A British official later said they could not guarantee that any troops would remain in Iraq by the end of 2008.
That’s it. It’s all ours now, save for a thousand or so from Australia, the twenty-three hundred from South Korea, and a handful from here and some from there – the one Icelandic advisor went home. We’re standing alone in the desert, holding the bag. Of course we can feel all noble and heroic, like the Three Hundred of Sparta at the Battle of Thermopylae – and perhaps history will show how noble and heroic we were. Heck, maybe someone will make a cool movie about us too. But that’s cold comfort. We are where we are.
Maybe the Brits know something we don’t know (besides the arcane rules of cricket). Joshua Partlow reports in the Washington Post something that’s not getting much play. It seems that the Iraqi leaders have given up on even the possibility of political reconciliation –
Iraqi leaders argue that sectarian animosity is entrenched in the structure of their government. Instead of reconciliation, they now stress alternative and perhaps more attainable goals: streamlining the government bureaucracy, placing experienced technocrats in positions of authority and improving the dismal record of providing basic services.
“I don’t think there is something called reconciliation, and there will be no reconciliation as such,” said Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, a Kurd. “To me, it is a very inaccurate term. This is a struggle about power.”
Humam Hamoudi, a prominent Shiite cleric and parliament member, said any future reconciliation would emerge naturally from an efficient, fair government, not through short-term political engineering among Sunnis and Shiites.
Okay, think about that. The point of the 2007 escalation, the surge, was to create the conditions for these folks to begin to work things out. We created the conditions, pretty much. Now these guys shrug and say that was kind of beside the point – what we want to happen was never going to happen. So the broad goal was a chimera. This seems to be a situation where we can rightly feel like fools, because we actually look like fools – these were the folks we freed from Saddam Hussein and set up in a unified, national government. Oops.
Kevin Drum puts it nicely –
If reconciliation depends on the emergence of efficient, fair government in Iraq, that’s pretty much all she wrote. It’s time to pack up and go home.
We won’t. One does not admit mistakes.
Others do - Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi intellectual and professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Brandeis does. In his profile of Makiya, who is depressed, Dexter Filkins also talks to Ayad Allawi, the fellow who was the interim Prime Minister of Iraq – he became Iraq’s first head of government since Saddam Hussein when the Iraq Interim Governing Council dissolved on June 1, 2004 and named him Prime Minister of the Iraqi Interim Government. He lives in Jordan now, hiding –
Allawi tried as hard as any Iraqi to make a go of the new Iraq, and he is thoroughly disillusioned. He says he is resigned to the likelihood that Iraq will end up a sort of protectorate of the United States for the next several decades, not unlike the Philippines was for much of the 20th century - dependent, violent, crippled.
Accept the inevitable (without the Imelda woman and her shoes). See Andrew Sullivan who works out where we are –
Our decision to stay indefinitely in Iraq - made last month - makes this scenario the likeliest, no? If we do not enlarge the war to Iran, that is. My concern is that a permanent occupation of the place has even more unintended consequences - the constant danger of enraging the Muslim world that even a perfectly-run occupation would risk; the moral corruption from policing what is in many pockets a barbaric place packed with barbaric actors; the enormous costs required to keep the ungrateful volcano from constant eruption; and the near-impossibility of any sectarian reconciliation to the point of a viable nation-state for the foreseeable future.
Other than that, no problem – history will prove us right, or as Sullivan also suggests, maybe it won’t –
Even if we manage to contain violence and genocide to less grotesque levels than last winter, our measurement of what is acceptable keeps being defined downwards. To do all of this primarily to ensure stability in an energy resource that we need to wean ourselves from makes the entire project close to farcical. Maybe it was doomed from the start, as Makiya now suspects. But it is good to see exactly where we are: on the eve of decades of neo-colonial management. It’s a classic case of late imperial decline.
Morally, the cost-benefit ratio has shifted as well. Would Saddam have murdered as many innocents as have perished under American occupation? It is becoming a more even match, isn’t it? And would the United States have lost its moral leadership without the torture tactics adopted across the war theater in Iraq? The answer is yes: torture was authorized before the Iraq invasion. But using it in Iraq, against Muslims and in Saddam’s own prisons, deepened the stain. With every day we stay on, the day we leave recedes from view. We will, I think, never leave.
What should we do? Someone just proved you wrong and the facts are clear – you were wrong – so you smash that someone in the mouth, hard, repeatedly. And Dexter Filkins at the New York Times isn’t the one to beat to a pulp. It’s obviously time to go to war with Iran. Or it would be, but for the man who stands between US and new war – and the Telegraph (UK) notes he’s not who you would expect –
Those familiar with internal battles in the Bush administration say Mr Gates has eclipsed Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, as the chief opponent of air strikes and is the main reason President George W. Bush has yet to resort to military action.
Pentagon sources say Mr Gates is waging a subtle campaign to undermine the Cheney camp by encouraging the army’s senior officers to speak frankly about the overstretch of forces, and the difficulty of fighting another war.
Bruce Reidel, a former CIA Middle East officer, said: “Cheney’s people know they can beat Condi. They have been doing it for six years. Bob Gates is a different kettle of fish. He doesn’t owe the President anything. He is urging his officers to be completely honest, knowing what that means.”
That’s interesting. It seems from the start that State is where you dump the token black folk – Powell then Rice. They don’t matter. Having a State Department is kind of beside the point to these people. But it seems officials say Gates’ strategy is working out – he got William Fallon, the head of US Central Command, who is, after all, charged with devising any war plans for Iran, to say last month that the “constant drumbeat of war” was not helpful. And then General George Casey, the army’s new chief of staff, requested an audience with the House Armed Services Committee to warn that his branch of the military had been stretched so thin by the Iraq war that it was not prepared for any another conflict. And Gates seems to be lining up Mike McConnell, the National Director of Intelligence, and Michael Hayden, the head of the CIA – to counter Cheney.
It’s a matter of who gets what to the boy-king –
Insiders say Mr Gates has ensured that Mr Bush has seen more extensive studies of the probable negative effects of an attack on Iran than he was privy to before the war in Iraq.
One CIA insider said: “Bush understands that any increase in real military hostilities in Iran right now could have a negative effect. Bob Gates is the only one opposed to it. He’s the single person in the US government who has any standing with the White House fighting it.”
That’s scary. But then David Ignatius wrote a Sunday column to get everyone to calm down. Yes, after General Petraeus formally identified the Iranian ambassador to Iraq as a terrorist, you may think Cheney has his general saying the right thing – but Petraeus reports to William Fallon, the head of US Central Command, who is, after all, charged with devising any war plans for Iran. And Fallon famously called David Petraeus a little, sniveling sycophant – if you believe the gossip. And yes there are the constantly rising number of incidents where US forces have engaged Quds elements in Iraq, and there is the resolution Hillary Clinton backed, the one declaring Quds a terrorist force – but we are told that the United States has no intention of actually going to war – we’re just “increasing pressure” on Iran for a peaceful solution. So Ignatius says we really shouldn’t worry –
One knowledgeable official argues that any “surgical strikes” against the al-Quds Force, as discussed by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, would come only in response to a high-casualty attack - say, on U.S. forces in Iraq - that could be traced to Iran.
Andrew Sullivan says this is just wishful thinking from the now marginalized State Department –
The problem with these reassurances is the trust factor - or lack of it. After Iraq, this administration cannot say that it wants a diplomatic solution, while rhetorically prepping for war, and be believed. And no one in the administration, apart from Bush and Cheney, can really be trusted as a reliable source on a matter such as this. There’s only one Decider. The danger is that the weakness of the US, demonstrated by the fact that we have run out of troops in a war we have already lost in Iraq, prompts the Bushies to up the rhetorical ante to counteract the reality on the ground. When both sides are upping the ante, mistakes can happen.
So, if there’s no point to any of this now, when things are going badly and you feel like a fool, because you actually do look like a fool, you react by striking out. Or you say you will. And mistakes can happen.
Ignatius: “What’s worrying is that this is still a game of chicken - two cars coming at each other on a narrow, poorly lit road.”
Sullivan: “Worrying? Given this administration’s record for delicate positioning and strategy, a more fitting word would be terrifying.”
And to keep you on your toes consider what the chief public neoconservative, William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, thinks we ought to do to help fix the awful situation in Burma –
What about limited military actions, overt or covert, against the regime’s infrastructure - its military headquarters, its intelligence apparatus, its rulers’ lavish palaces? Couldn’t such actions have a deterrent effect, or might not they help open up fissures in the regime? Have we really done all we can to avert the disaster that is unfolding?
Kevin Drum is amazed –
Tell me again why anyone takes Kristol seriously? Why is it that a guy who thinks U.S. military action is always the answer is any more credible than the peacenik who thinks it never is?
Paul Krugman at the New York Times knows, as he, like many, cites Fred Barnes (Fox News, author of Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency George W. Bush) who has a real problem with Barack Obama –
You know, I’ve thought for a long time that Obama’s not in quite as strong a position on the war in Iraq as he really thinks he is. Remember, when he famously came out against the war, it was back in a time when the entire world believed that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that he would probably be willing to use them himself at some time or pass them along to terrorists who would use them. And yet, Barack Obama was against going to the war at that point. I don’t think that shows that he is very strong on national security, which he needs to be.
So you see, having been right on Iraq is a sign of weakness. Well, Obama said this –
Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.
Krugman says Fred Barnes deserves all the ridicule he’s getting, but his position is typical of what we have now –
Look at a typical lineup on the Sunday talk shows, discussing the war: you very rarely see an “expert” on the issue who wasn’t pro-war. Look at a recent panel at Brookings, advertised as representing a “uniquely broad” range of views on Iraq - from liberal hawks all the way to conservative hawks.
The fact is that in our national discourse, at least in DC, you’re still considered “not serious” if you were right about Iraq. And you’re also considered extreme and shrill if you were right about Bush.
It’s just human nature. Being wrong hurts too much.
Or you could think of it this way –
With metronomic regularity, the United States, for one, always seems to be losing its innocence - the Kennedy assassination, the urban disturbances of the sixties, Vietnam, the Church committee’s CIA revelations, Three Mile Island, the smoking cancer scandals, the John Lennon assassination, Iran Contra, the priest pedophile imbroglio, September 11, Abu Ghraib (to detail just one recent trill) - and yet Americans never seem to learn anything, repeatedly emerging as resolutely innocent (which is to say, unknowing) as they were before the latest brief seizure of lucidity.
Or is that the right way of thinking about things?
No, that’s about it.
