What Went Wrong? |
2007-02-27 |
This is not an essay about Bernard Lewis, or his ideas. I bring him up because the same question keeps spinning around in my head these days, only now with a different subtitle: "What Went Wrong? Islamist Impact And Western Response". When I look around me at the world we got, the world we created after 2001, that's the question I keep coming back to: What went wrong? The question nags me all the more because I was part of it, swept along with all the currents that took us from the ruins of the World Trace center through the shameful years that followed. Iraq, the war on terror, the new European culture war.
This mirror of "What Went Wrong" wouldn't be a story on the same scale, but it has the main theme in common. It would be about Westerners who had their reality bubble pricked by people from an alien culture, and spent the next couple of years stumbling about like idiots, unable to deal rationally with this new reality that had forced itself on them. Egging each other on, they predicted, interpreted, and labelled - and legislated and invaded. They saw clearly, through beautiful ideas. And they were wrong.
Who were these people? They were us. "Us"? This seemed a lot clearer at the time. Us were the people who acknowledged the threat of Islamist terrorism, who had the common sense to see through the multicultural fog of words, and the moral courage to want to change the world by force. It included politicians like George W. Bush and Tony Blair, it included the new European right, it included brave and honest pundits, straight-talking intellectuals in the enlightenment tradition.
And then there were people like me, who labelled ourselves "warbloggers", and called our friends "anti-idiotarians". Phew, all those labels! Now, anyone who knows me knows that I've been drifting away from where I started for years. They're going to laugh if I pretend that I've ever been an Islamophobe, or that I was among the most eager of the Bush supporters, and use that to claim special insights into these people. Some of the ideas I criticize I believed for a long time, some for a short time, and some I never liked at all.
And by "us" I don't mean that everyone thought alike, I mean that there was an identity based on an unspoken agreement about who were "ok" and who weren't. And - God help me - I was ok. I haven't been for a while now, but it's only recently I've realized just how little there's left of what I believed five years ago. Our worldview had three major focus points - Iraq, terrorism and Islam - and we were wrong about all of them.
Iraq
There aren't many people left who believe that it was a good idea for the US, Britain and their coalition to invade Iraq in 2003. At least fifty thousand Iraqis dead, (or a hundred, or several hundred), maybe two million refugees, and who knows how many more when the Americans finally give up and leave. Supporters of the war have dropped off one by one, for different reasons. Some neo-conservative intellectuals believe that the plan was good, but that George W. Bush screwed it up. There might be something to this. With smarter people in charge, the odds might have been better. But this assumes that a smarter administration would have embraced their plan to invade Iraq in the first place. I don't think it would, and I think the blame belongs with the thinkers who pushed for war, as much as the officials who carried it out.
Every war must have a war party, a group that actively tries to sell war to the government and to the public. For Iraq, that war party was us - neo-conservative intellectuals, and pundits and bloggers who were sympathetic to them. Without all these people arguing for war, legitimizing it, begging for it, an invasion would have been difficult.
Anyone who argues for war plays with dangerous forces, so they must do it responsibly or not at all. Foolish wars have led countries to disaster. They have caused the deaths of millions. History and psychology tells us that war parties tend to be over-confident, paranoid and emotional. So the minimum you should expect from a responsible war supporter is that they are aware of this bias, and do their best to counterbalance it.
It's not enough to believe that you are right. You have to be actively open-minded, you have to listen to your critics, and encourage devil's advocates. You have to set up a robust information structure that makes it as difficult as possible for you to ignore reality. This is the only good way to prevent self-deception. It works. And we did not do it.
What we did was the opposite. At every level, from the lowliest blogger to the highest official, war supporters set up filters that protected them from facts they did not want to hear. We saw what we wanted to see, and if anyone saw differently, we called them left-wing moonbats who were rooting for the other side. We defined the entire mainstream media establishment as irrelevant, leaving more biased, less experienced "new" media as our primary source of facts. We ignored reasonable critics, and focused on the crazy ones, so that we could tell ourselves how incredibly smart we were.
Among the bloggers there was a sense that there were all these brilliant people, who knew so much about history, war and society, who had previously been without the tools to express themselves. Thanks to the wonders of amateur media, we could now finally exploit this huge reservoir of expert knowledge. And when you contrasted the lazy neutrality of the old media with the energy of the new, it certainly could seem that way. Here were people who regularly would write thousands of words about the historical context of Islamist terrorism, who could write brilliantly about freedom and democracy, who commented boldly on the long trends of history. How could such people be wrong?
But what we saw was not expert knowledge, but the well-written, arrogantly presented ideas of half-educated amateurs. This, too, went all the way from the bottom to the top. It often struck us how well the writing of the best of the bloggers measured up to that of pro-war pundits and intellectuals. We thought this showed how professional the amateurs were, when what it really told us was how amateurish the professionals were.
And so we came to believe that we could invade Iraq and plant the seeds of a new, democratic Middle East. Yes yes there were also the nukes, but we saw beyond that, towards a spring of freedom that would delegitimize terrorism and fanaticism all over the region. Some people will tell you that they never pretended this would be easy, that they always knew it might not work. There are no certain outcomes, and if you have a good chance of success, that chance is worth taking, even if it doesn't end well. Also many argued - and I think I may have been one of them - that instability would be a good thing for the Middle East. The stability of these authoritarian and extremist regimes was precisely the problem. A little chaos would only do the region good.
When I think of this chaos argument today I am struck with horror at the stupidity of it. There's no secret about what happens when a state collapses. It might go well, but when it doesn't, there is no upper limit to how badly it can go. Millions of people may die. Fanatics and sadists fight their way to the top, trampling the weak down beneath them. In our vision of a liberated Baghdad, we saw the beginning of a new Eastern Europe. Now, I have nightmares of Congo, Rwanda, Angola, Uganda, Algeria, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Lebanon, Afghanistan.
As for the chance of success, what gave us the idea that we could estimate this? There are some now who say that even if the war supporters got a lot of things wrong, so did the opponents, so there you go, that's uncertainty for you. Everyone was wrong, but at least we were on the side of freedom, and they were on Saddam's. But that's just not true. The opponents were right. They said this was extremely risky, they said it might result in countless deaths and instability. They got a lot of details wrong, but that's just the point. For the Iraq invasion to go right, war supporters had to get many predictions right. Opponents knew that if any of those predictions were wrong, the whole thing could fail. So the smart choice was to be cautious.
War opponents said a lot of things that were stupid, cynical and deluded. Some war supporters find comfort in this, I don't. The opponents were, on the whole, right. We were wrong, and people in Iraq will pay for this mistake for a long time.
Terrorism
The war on terrorism has not been a disaster, but there too we went wrong. And not just Iraq war supporters. This mistake crossed party lines and infected mainstream thought through most of Europe and North America. We got the threat wrong, and we got the response to it wrong.
Right after September 11, civil liberties activists warned us not to overreact. Attacks like these, they said, were a classic threat to individual freedom. We had to make sure that we didn't fall into xenophobic hysteria and authoritarian solutions. We listened to this, we nodded, and then we all went ahead and ignored it.
There were of course no anti-Muslim riots, no massacres, no overt authoritarian measures. But everyone agreed that terrorism was such a large threat that we had to give the state new powers to fight it. The most extreme examples were the cases of torture by proxy and imprisonment without trial by the US, but all over the West there has been a new wind of authority. Some argued that freedom of speech should be restricted for Muslim extremists, others that the police needed more powers of surveillance.
The British CCTV system, built partly in response to IRA attacks, shows how eagerly people may trade freedom for security. All it takes is a permanent climate of fear, and the calm, soothing voice of authority telling you it knows how to make you safe. I'm not saying that we've become unfree, or are about to. But I think the path towards it is open. The only response to terrorism we can imagine is to give more power to the state, and once given, that power will be hard to take back.
I'm pessimistic about this, because the underlying mechanism of trading freedom for security so strong. The security is often illusory, giving us little more than a temporary reduction of anxiety. The anxiety soon returns, and more freedom must be traded away. Just as a war frenzy can spin out of control, so can a panic for law and order in the face of terrorism. Especially so since the alternative is so depressing and counterintuitive.
As I wrote earlier (Living With Terrorism), the right way to fight terrorism is to be stronger than our fear of it. There are many things we can and should do to prevent terrorist attacks, but we have to treat fear as the single most damaging weapon terrorists have. Compared to a panicked public, a bomb is relatively harmless. With weapons, terrorists can only do as much damage as a weapon can do. Through fear, they have the full powers of state and society to play with.
When terrorists attack, we should resist the immediate impulse to "do something". We should not be "swept off [our] feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, 'Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you.'" I don't believe this is realistic. I believe that our civil rights are in the hands of terrorists. The more bombs, the less patience people will have with personal freedom. We'll hear all the old arguments, presented as new, about suicidal liberalism, the chaos of freedom, and the importance of moral unity. We already are. And that's why I'm a pessimist. We were wrong about terrorism, we still are, and I suspect we always will be. At best we can hope for long periods of calm where personal freedom is allowed to reassert itself.
Islam and the culture war
The last major mistake we made was about Islam, and especially the role it got to play in what we might call a European culture war. The European culture war is a war in defense of secular, but Christian-based, enlightenment values against Muslim extremists, multiculturalists and naive leftists. It is a war for the "soul" of Europe, as Pat Buchanan said about the American counterpart.
Europe's culture warriors often come from the right, like me, but many also from the left. What they have in common is frustration with what they see as a deadening centre-left consensus among the elites - politicians, academics, journalists. There's a sense that there is this great fog of dishonesty that we must chase away with reasoned and courageous thinking. The elites believe in little, they tolerate anything as long as it is foreign, and despise everything that is solid and proud in European culture. That's why they aimed so much hatred against Christian pseudo-fanatics, while letting genuine Muslim extremists in through the back door. They told us that Europe's worst enemy was itself, when of course the real threats come from the outside.
The culture warriors want to restore Europe's sense of purpose, and restore some of its old values - including our Christian heritage. Not necessarily Christianity itself, but they admire its moral firmness. The elites believe nothing, and that makes us vulnerable to Muslim extremists, who are blessed with a complete lack of uncertainty and a total committment to their religion.
Islam is the key to the European culture war. There is a sense that we have been infiltrated and betrayed, that Europe is slowly falling apart from the inside, and it is all because of Muslim immigration. Millions of unintegrated muslims, most of whom are at odds with basic European values, and many of whom actually despise our culture and want to make it more Islamic - and a few of whom are willing to kill us to accomplish this. Most culture warriors don't believe that Islam is inherently evil, they believe it can be secularized - Westernized, but they all believe it is the key to everything that is happening, not least for what it reveals about our own elites.
Here's why I'm frustrated: I'm not sure where all this went wrong. I can look back at what I believed some five years ago, and what motivated me to hope for exactly the kind of thing we now have - a grassroots reaction to the centre-left multicultural consensus, edging steadily in on the mainstream - and I'm not so sure that I was wrong. This idea that it should be ok to discuss Muslim extremism, and make demands of immigrants, and not meet cruel traditions with a tolerant smile, I certainly still believe that. And this rebellious reaction I had to the media consensus, there was nothing wrong with that. And we really do need to revive some liberal and rational strands of thought that somewhat inaccurately go by the name of enlightenment values.
But there must have been something wrong with that starting point, nevertheless, because why else would so many people who adopted it gradually turn it into something distasteful and frigthening? Or maybe it was like that from the beginning, and it just took me a while to notice. However it was, their lack of doubt bothers me now, their self-righteousness and anger, their clear labelling of people as either corrupt enemies or enlightened friends.
I'm bothered by their humorless sarcasm and gotcha-approach to cultural criticism. I worry that their defense of European culture has become rationalized chauvinism. I'm dumbstruck by their choices of intellectual heroes. And I fear that their constant indignation and certainty will inspire a popular revival of xenophobia.
I realize that it is precisely in reaction to such behavior that the "multicultural" worldview makes sense. We do need to doubt ourselves. We do need to worry at least as much about our own potential for evil as that of the foreigners. We do need to meet other cultures with some humility and respect. We do need to have mixed feelings about our own culture, admiration tempered by wariness, as with a wild animal. We do need to listen to people who believe differently, instead of just lecturing them. Not because there is no right or wrong, true or false, and not because every culture is equal, but because the alternative is so dangerous. The road of the righteous champion of the Army of Light.
So it appears that I believe all of these things, both the essential ideas of the culture warriors and those of their multicultural enemies. This might be a contradiction - I'm not sure. It would seem that I'm both anti-elitist and elitist, that I understand both those who want to confront and those who want to talk. And maybe that's not such a bad place to be.
I know how the culture warriors feel about such doubt, they see it as weakness, a fear of moral clarity. But I see something cold and inhuman in their clarity. Give me conflicting ideas, isolated incidents, and individuals. Keep your angry visions, I'll do just fine with doubt and curiosity.
And now..?
Now I try not to do it all over again. I think I'll begin by writing down, in big letters, somewhere I can't help but notice it: "Warning! Objects in blogs are smaller than they appear."
Glad to see you posting again.
If the Western reaction to these three focus points was wrong, what should we have done instead? After 9/11 we could either aggressively defend our nations and culture (the neo-conservative choice), or put on a hair shirt, apologize, apologize, apologize, and be passive.
Is the question moot since we have already chosen a path and now must deal with the consequences?
I would say we do need "skepticism" instead of doubt and curiosity.
If you have ever played Diplomacy, you know that indecision and inaction, especially at the center of the board, is a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately it is often true that in times of crisis, any action, even if it leads to bad things, is better than no action.
I actually don't like aggressively defending myself, but sometimes it is the best and most effective action. We have to walk a delicate balance (we surely have made mistakes), and be wary of potential tyrrany, but if I had to do it over again, I would make the same choices.
In response to the Iraq section, it's my understanding that Iraq became the battleground for the "War On Terror" because of Saudi Arabia. The "War On Terror" is an intelligence war and the Saudi's had good inteligence. However, they couldn't be seen supplying the US with intelligence while US bases were on Saudi soil. As a result, the US had to get out of Saudi Arabia if they wanted Saudi cooperation on intelligence. As for the Jihad in general, 9/11 was perhaps "premature" on the part of the Jihadists because they would have been able to build a much stronger position in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, if there were no "War On Terror".
There's a lot of fluff here with very little substance. Could you explain to me all of these freedoms that I've supposedly lost. I've been reading people say that since 9/11 and I can't think of one time where I have lost any of the freedoms I had before hand.
Andrew: "I can't think" is all you needed to say. You can't.
"Unfortunately it is often true that in times of crisis, any action, even if it leads to bad things, is better than no action."
No, it isn't.
>> we should resist the immediate impulse to "do something". And that is the only moral of this sad story. Every thing else in this essay is a feeble attempt to feel proud of claiming "mea culpa". The "west" should refrain from trying to continue its historical duties of proselytization, which is not only Christian in its roots but decidedly Protestant. There are people and then, there are people. There is nothing inherently wrong about an Islamic Caliphate from Iberia to Karachi. Just that, it is not us. Which raises the question, who does "us" inlclude and more importantly who gets to define "us". Another point to be admitted by a whole lot of "us" is that injustice sometimes happens. And sometimes the best thing to do would be to wring one's hands in despair.
Andrew, freedoms are like insurance - you pay for them throughout your lifetime and hope you never need to use them.
You say the culture war went wrong, but you don't know where. Allow me to suggest a possibility:
"The elites believe in little, they tolerate anything as long as it is foreign, and despise everything that is solid and proud in European culture."
The stereotyping, the arrogance in deciding that you know better than the "elites" how they feel and what they think -- this is where it went wrong.
I personally come from the left, and proudly so, but I want to see a strong, vigorous right wing. Partly because sometimes they are correct, and in any case, they represent a significant point of view which should be part of the debate. But the debate has to be conducted with respect. Too many today believe that according respect to someone you disagree with is a sign of weakness. And that, too, is where it went wrong.
On Christian moral firmness: I am an American today because my ancestors were persecuted, murdered and driven out of Europe by Christian moral firmness. The right wing of its day: sounds good in theory but it all went wrong in practice.
andrew: if you are an American, you have lost the right of habeas corpus, the right to an attorney and to attorney-client privilege, and the right to a speedy and public trial. If Jose Padilla doesn't have those rights, then neither do any of us. If you as a citizen enjoy these things anyway, it is because the government has granted them to you as a privilege, perhaps because you are not Moslem-looking enough, or they haven't made a mistake with you that they need to cover up. It's not a matter of right unless it applies to everyone.
"The culture warriors want to restore Europe's sense of purpose, and restore some of its old values - including our Christian heritage. Not necessarily Christianity itself, but they admire its moral firmness." What is there to admire? Blind faith and religious dogma is devastating to a civilized society. The God delusion must be cured. Now. We do not need values based on religion. We need values based on rational thought. "Most culture warriors don't believe that Islam is inherently evil" Islam, like Christianity is inherently evil. We have laws against hate speech, and yet these religions contain buckedloads of it. And we accept it. Why?!
Wow. Terrific post, Mr. Staerk, particularly the remarks about self-imposed information filtering among war advocates. I saw lots of that during the run-up to our glorious Mesopotamian adventure, so much that I never expected to see anyone in the pro-war camp exhibit the kind of introspection and honest reconsideration that runs throughout the essay. Up to now all I've seen from repentant hawks is blame-shifting, special pleading and ass-covering. This article is a very welcome and commendable exception. It reads like something written by an intelligent adult -- if only there were just a few of the breed among what passes for the American "leadership" caste!
Lee Cockrell writes:
"After 9/11 we could either aggressively defend our nations and culture (the neo-conservative choice), or put on a hair shirt, apologize, apologize, apologize, and be passive."
False dichotomy, excluded middle. Apologies do not exclude action--far from it: they point us in the right direction. You can't find the right road until you admit you took the wrong one.
Rather than just posing false binaries to justify a continued spiral of violence, how about actively and responsibly addressing the systemic injustice that helped create the kind of movements that perpetrate atrocities like 9/11? Even a cursory reading of the history of the Middle East will leave one somewhat surprised at how long it took for the backlash against the colonial powers to build to a point where it could inflict even a fraction of the damage those powers have done in that part of the world.
Such a realization does not entail condoning 9/11, nor prevent working in rational and effective ways against its perpetrators. But we cannot "win" this conflict by becoming the mirror image of what we oppose.
Generally thoughtful piece. My one criticism regards your remarks about the mainstream media in the runup to the war in Iraq. I think you are referring to the European media, which was more critical and did more reporting of some of the potential problems and questions. In the US, the mainstream left media, e.g. New York Times and Washington Post, were fully in the pro-war camp both editorially and in their reporting. Judith Miller wrote for the New York Times, where she funneled all kinds of total disinformation about WMDs and so forth, and similar kinds of stuff was going on in other papers. Among the regular columnists at WaPo, most of the so-called liberals, people like Richard Cohen, were strongly in the pro-war camp. In the US, one did not need to go to the blogosphere to find the pro-war arguments, one neeeded to go there to get the anti-war arguments.
A very good post, sir. I have been waiting with disappointment and disenchantment for Thomas Friedman (New York Times), a chief liberal member of the war party, to admit his grave mistake. Evidently he is a smaller man than you.
The best way to fight evil, is to do good. I wrote this after 9-11. but before the Iraq War -- and, of course, before the Bush administration banned the guy for bogus reasons:
The Theology’s the Thing Why we’re at war.
By Paul Donnelly, writes about immigration and citizenship. February 20, 2002 8:15 a.m.
n Samuel B. Griffith's Cold War translation of the Art of War in 1960, he approvingly quotes Xundze that the first fundamental factor in war is "moral influence." To win the Cold War, the United States led the free world not only by opposing Communism as an ideology but also by constantly promoting an alternative way for those beyond the Iron Curtain to live, as free Russians and Poles, etc .
But we don't talk thus to Muslims. Blandly mumbling of a "religion of peace," the Bush administration shows no clue that we face a theological struggle as much as a military one, that what we mean by "Islam" will be as decisive as what we meant by Communism. (Just this yesterday, in fact, Attorney General John Ashcroft said in a speech: "We're not fighting a religious war. We're fighting a freedom war.") Defense Department think tanks are actually prohibited from studying the national-security implications of religion, which "takes off the table just the topic that militant Islam finds most compelling," says Jack Miles, who won the Pulitzer Prize for God: A Biography. "One can no more discuss (Islam and terrorism) without discussing theology than one can discuss communism without discussing ideology."
Thus, the flaw in the speechwriter's phrase, "axis of evil." The only ideology Iraq, Iran, and North Korea have in common is that they wish us harm — but Hamas and Hezbollah, al Qaeda and the ayatollahs share much theology.
Is radical Islam's theology definitely Islam at the root? Attorney General Ashcroft thinks so: "Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him," he said to columnist Cal Thomas last fall, as one Christian to another. "Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you."
This theological dimension of the Bush administration's war on terrorism shows we are in deeper trouble than even the Saudi alliance suggests. Ashcroft is an example of a "Muslim fundamentalist without being a Muslim," in the phrase of UCLA law professor Khaled Abou al-Fadl. For America's leadership to agree with bin Laden and Hamas on the meaning of Islam, is as if Truman, Eisenhower, and Reagan had accepted the class struggle theory of history. But where is the alternative to the suicidal theology that is the only Islam our attorney general sees?
Switzerland.
Tariq Ramadan teaches Islam at two prestigious European universities, in Geneva and Friboug. Forty years old, his many books focus on the growing Muslim communities in the West, particularly Europe. To Be a European Muslim, his first in English, boldly asks what the Bush administration won't: "Early in Islamic history …(jurists ruled that) it was not possible for Muslims to live (outside of Muslim-ruled states) except under some mitigating circumstances. What bearing does this have on those Muslims who came to work and are now living in the West with their families? What about their children and their nationality? Can they… be true, genuine, and complete citizens, giving allegiance — through the national constitution — to a non-Islamic country?"
Ramadan is important for many reasons — including that his grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, founded the Muslim Brotherhood. But the Swiss Islamicist is sharply critical of reactionary Islam, especially Wahhabi influence from Saudi Arabia — a "catastrophe." He might be the Muslim Martin Luther — but he is not medieval.
Ramadan draws graphs: This thoroughly modern thinker illustrates the dynamics of faith in a matrix with one axis "to be a Muslim," and the other "how to act" like one. Without a clergy (particularly for Sunnis, the vast majority), Muslims individually choose what is, and is not Islamic.
Ramadan's matrix has depth and nuance, which many Islamicists lack: What is most Muslim is simply what is least Western. (One scholar refused to eat with a fork, another to try watermelon, since there is no evidence the Prophet did either.) Islamic experts acknowledge Ramadan is a wholly orthodox thinker with innovative, even revolutionary conclusions. (He uses forks.)
Perhaps the most important of Ramadan's innovations (reviving a neglected tradition) is his attack on the concept of Dar al-Islam, the House of Submission that has come to replace Islam itself, perpetually confronted by Dar al-Harb, the House of War, the unbelievers: us. "The concept of Dar al-Islam is a hindrance today," he explains, supposedly the Islamic world "where the rules of Islam are implemented, which is not the reality for the majority of the people who are speaking about Dar al-Islam."
Ramadan courageously answers the fundamentally theological question how it is possible to be a Muslim and remain a citizen of any nation.
Citizenship is an American invention. In 1776 all nations had subjects, most with a religious character. If the attorney general's concept of religion does not allow Muslims to be citizens, he ought to say so. But if he recognizes that Muslims can be patriotic U.S. citizens, he apparently unconsciously, and certainly inarticulately believes in the Dar al-Islam that Ramadan is proclaiming publicly. "Dar al-Islam is the space where we are at peace, where we are safe," says Ramadan. "Am I not in a safer place, in the West, than in the majority of the so-called Islamic countries experiencing dictatorship?"
Thus politically transcending the us vs. them ideology-crippling Islam, Ramadan proposes replacing Dar al-Islam with a "House of Witness," for Muslims everywhere. He cites the Koran requiring Muslims "to compete with the unbelievers in doing good works," bearing witness to Islam's moral force that Ashcroft finds so alien.
If that moral force is not with us, as the president said, it will be against us, as Ashcroft believes. The Art of War urges reminding Muslims that Allah is on our side, and Ramadan shows us how.
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I'm not exactly where you are but I've sure changed my thinking about a variety of things. Judging by the comments your getting, I would say from experience that you better get used to it. For the true believers (and there are still many)you have been cast into the outer darkness.
But don't worry - you've got company...
Thank you Mr Staerk, it takes a big man to admit he was wrong. It's a shame that the majority of the other warbloggers continue with the same smear tactics. Nate, despite how the New York Times markets him Thomas Friedman is not and never has been a liberal.
Nicely written; it's a relief to hear someone who supported the war re-assessing their beliefs on the basis of what actually happened. It's very striking there isn't more of this. Before the invasion of Iraq, I was scared of what the outcome would be. I believed that the claims of wmd were completely overblown if not dishonest, and that we would be mired for years to come, where either staying or leaving could be disastrous, and that our reputation in the world would take a huge hit. I also worried about how this would distract us from rebuilding Kuwait and responding to North Korea. Now if I had been as wrong as the war bloggers have been wrong, if we now had a stable democratic government in Iraq friendly to the United States and could bring our soldiers home, right now I would be seriously reconsidering my beliefs. I would have to admit that my world view must have been horifically distorted, and I would have a lot less confidence in my opinions regarding the world. But now that it is the warbloggers who've been discredited, now that everything they said about what would happen has turned out to be wrong, now that the claims of wmd have been completely discredited, now that the invasion has led not to a stable democrazy in Iraq, a beacon of change to the mideast, but rather a hell and a haven for terroists, with the real danger of bringing its neighbors into the conflict, with extemely few honorable exceptions, the warbloggers are just as arrogant as ever, just as willing to impugn those who disagree with them of cowardice or treason. I'm beginning to think if anything that happens could even slightly humble them. Thank you very much for your article. --Rick Taylor
One other thing that your article made me think about is the lack of respect for expertise, for educated opinion. By and large the people who drove the discussion of war had no special background in Mideastern studies, they did not for example speak arabic. In the United States in particular, there's a disrespect for expertise. There's the sense that in a democracy, everybody's opinion is as good as everybody else's. But this isn't true. The opinion of a physicist who writes peer reviewed articles for a journal on the merits of string theory is certainly to be taken more seriously than mine, for example. The trouble is that academics who really did have knowledge about the mideast with few exceptions aren't the loudest voices; they don't pontificate arrogantly on blogs (again, with a few exceptions). I remember reading that people who actually knew something about Iraq were usually terribly concerned about the conflicts between the various ethnic groups and the potential for chaos if things weren't handled extremely delicately. But they didn't have much effect on the debate. This is a really huge problem, and not limited to the debate on Iraq. In particular, the same thing is happening regarding global climate change, where you have a strong consensus opinion among people who actually do research in related areas that this is a big issue and we need to respond to it right away, but it overall opinion is very divided, and conservatives feel free to arrogantly make fun of such people, just as they made fun of people who warned that invading Iraq was a really bad idea. --Rick Taylor
What went wrong?? Since the advent of domesticated meat and grains and the decline of hunting and gathering, we humans have fallen head over heels for this one concept that I am suggesting is the true Pandora's Box for humankind: Specialization. Hunter/gatherers by nature are egalitarian, if you survive, don't starve and procreate, then you are a member of the Human race, no better, nor worse than the others. Specialization allows for, well, specialists. With domestication, not all of us have to expend energy scrounging for food. Hierarchies develop meaning that we evolve into leaders and followers, rich elite and peasants, Commanders in chief and cannon fodder, Popes and the faithful, white folk and black folk, long ears and short ears, Hutu and Tutsi, etc. With Domestication and specialization, city-states develop, material and idealogical wealth is created and gathered. Ultimately it has to be guarded from theft. Here in America, you join the military, you take the oath..to "defend the Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic". You don't think about that at the time. what you think about is killing and dying. What went wrong is what has always gone wrong. Those individuals who are in power, misuses that power, thoughtlessly destroying the lives of those beneath them on the hierarchical ladder for self serving purposes and they think they have the right to because, well, their special! What went wrong is the lesson that never is learned. We just keep allowing these greedy, selfish bastards to take charge and take us to war. A population with poor educational facilities (that's us)producing stupid but obedient citizens is a nation that's going to fall for it every time. And the nation now is a war nation. We specialize in it. A trillion taxpayer dollars disappeared into the greedy maw of the military/industrial/ congressional complex and it's unabated greed is accelerating. Those of you who fell into line as pro war, were and are suckers, stupid suckers.
"When I think of this chaos argument today I am struck with horror at the stupidity of it."
I appreciate the insightful essay. It can be difficult (though restorative) for us to acknowledge where we've gone wrong. Having said that, I wonder whether the "chaos" argument was not just wrong and stupid but, additionally, immoral. I do not think I've ever heard a more debased reason to INFLICT WAR ON AN ENTIRE REGION OF THE GLOBE. The effects of chaos are, definitionally, unpredictable.
This is not to say that war is, necessarily, immoral. It is to say that this specific argument for war is immoral because the outcome of such action would not be clear or even predictable, despite knowing human misery would likely be caused. Misery and pain and loss of life are concepts considered in war-planning. If one is going to impose them on a populace, ONE BETTER DAMN WELL KNOW WITH SOME PREDICTABILITY WHAT KIND OF FORCES WOULD BE UNLEASHED BY SUCH A MOVE. In the situation described in the essay, no one could know for sure what chaos would bring. As such, the advocacy of such an argument slides quickly away from stupidity and down the slope to immorality.
Stærkt, Bjørn. Vel talt.
I came over from Political Animal. Very impressive self examination. This is what I saw in the U.S.:
"What we did was the opposite. At every level, from the lowliest blogger to the highest official, war supporters set up filters that protected them from facts they did not want to hear. We saw what we wanted to see, and if anyone saw differently, we called them left-wing moonbats who were rooting for the other side."
I am not a reader of history and can't write thousands of words on the history of Islam. So I went to the people supporting the war and I said "explain this to me. Why won't this be another Vietnam, another Palestine for Israel, another Afghanistan for Russia. Why won't this turn into a three-way civil war between Kurds, Shia, and Sunni? How will this work?"
And the only answer I got, the *only* answer, was an attack. I was unpatriotic. I had Bush Derangement Syndrome. I was a Saddam lover.
What I still don't see is how to prevent this same dynamic in the future. The next time a group of people want to invade and occupy another country, is there any guarantee that they will consider and engage?
andrew: There's a lot of fluff here with very little substance. Could you explain to me all of these freedoms that I've supposedly lost.
I guess that depends on who you are and where you live. The majority of Europeans and Americans have only been inconvenienced by the war on terror - such as not being allowed to carry liquids on plane trips. Muslims have more to fear. Some have been arrested and prosecuted based on pretty flimsy evidence. Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was sent to Syria to be interrogated with torture, and he's not alone. We have no idea how many of the people in Guantanamo Bay are guilty of anything, because they haven't had proper trials.
So no, you personally probably haven't lost much freedom at all. Congratulations and enjoy.
Amos Newcombe: Too many today believe that according respect to someone you disagree with is a sign of weakness. And that, too, is where it went wrong.
Absolutely. All that arrogance and indignation is at the heart of the problem. Words like "elites" and "leftists" are pretty much without meaning, they're more like mantras than clearly defined words. Once you brush them away it becomes easier to see your opponents as people like yourself, who probably think they're doing the right thing, and might even have thought of some things you haven't. Then you can have a proper debate. What we usually get isn't debate, it's just shouting and posturing.
Barkley Rosser: My one criticism regards your remarks about the mainstream media in the runup to the war in Iraq. I think you are referring to the European media, which was more critical and did more reporting of some of the potential problems and questions. In the US, the mainstream left media, e.g. New York Times and Washington Post, were fully in the pro-war camp both editorially and in their reporting.
Yeah, but the perception was - and still is, among many - that the New York Times and Washington Post were anti-Bush and anti-American propaganda machines, always eager to undermine their own government and society. The reality was that on the one hand they had some pretty lousy journalists who unthinkingly repeated the spin of their anonymous sources, and on the other hand a centrist-liberal orientation and something of an old media stuffiness about them. So everyone out on the wings saw them as an ideological enemy, when they were probably just lazy and incompetent.
You're right though that this description fitted the European press much better. And actually much of that criticism was justified. There are a lot of prejudices about American politics and society in Europe, we tend to project our own dark side across the Atlantic, and this was put on full display after 9/11. The European press often wasn't any less lazy than the American one, it just had a different bias.
Rich Moran: For the true believers (and there are still many)you have been cast into the outer darkness.
I know, and I've had time to get used to it. This isn't a sudden conversion on my part, I've been writing about this for a while. Probably the angriest reactions I got was to Living with terrorism, which was held up in the islamophobic blogosphere as final proof that Europe is full of self-hating dhimmified cowards.
But of course, writing these things make me correspondingly more popular among the kind of blogs that have linked to this post - Crooked Timber etc. That's a bit dangerous too. Praise puts me on edge, but unfortunately not as much as it ought to.
Rick Taylor: There's the sense that in a democracy, everybody's opinion is as good as everybody else's. But this isn't true. The opinion of a physicist who writes peer reviewed articles for a journal on the merits of string theory is certainly to be taken more seriously than mine, for example.
Yes - and that's easy to forget when you have all these brilliant and exciting lay writers in newspapers and blogs, while the real experts are hidden away in specialist publications. They don't write very well, and their opinions are not very entertaining. At best they can hope for a sensationalist misquote on a tabloid frontpage. It's a real tragedy. "Those who know don't speak, those who speak don't know."
"I appreciate the insightful essay. It can be difficult (though restorative) for us to acknowledge where we've gone wrong. Having said that, I wonder whether the "chaos" argument was not just wrong and stupid but, additionally, immoral. I do not think I've ever heard a more debased reason to INFLICT WAR ON AN ENTIRE REGION OF THE GLOBE. The effects of chaos are, definitionally, unpredictable."
Tell that to self-proclaimed visionary and "grand strategist" Thomas Barnett. His oh-so-whimsical euphemism for inflicting chaos and anarchy is "the Big Bang", and I've yet to see any inkling of doubt on his part about the wisdom -- let alone the ethics -- of the formulation. I guess that as long as the speaking fees roll in, those other issues are secondary.
Probably the angriest reactions I got was to Living with terrorism, which was held up in the islamophobic blogosphere as final proof that Europe is full of self-hating dhimmified cowards.
If BS is thinking about this, then he is (as usual, when he throws around with this diagnosis) wrong in categorizing it as the Islamophobic blogosphere - there is nothing Islamophobic about that site and sites similar to that one.
[i]If you have ever played Diplomacy, you know that indecision and inaction, especially at the center of the board, is a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately it is often true that in times of crisis, any action, even if it leads to bad things, is better than no action.[/i]
Life is not a board game.
This assertion is ungrounded in reality. It was true of Chinese culture for a long time and Japanese, but Islam in the Middle East was from its inception involved with the West. The first conquerors out of Arabia defeated the Roman legions, later fought and ultimately defeated Crusaders, conquered Spain, and laterly been involved with the West by becoming colonies post WWI. Since the 40's the Middle East has been subjugated by Western countries who have installed anti-Democratic West-friendly totalitarian regimes and by the invasion and occupation of Palestine. Bernard Lewis and his ideas are completely in error. That is a complete crock. WMD WMD was the great rallying cry for war. Not anything else and anyone doubting the existence or effectiveness of WMD was smeared and smeared again by the McCarthyites of the right. You didn't give a damn about democracy; Chalibi was your man, until Sistani insisted on a vote. I can only assume that the rest of your commentary is a misguided and erroneous as these two claims, so that's enough for me.
To our host: you still haven't actually answered the real question, I don't think.
We ARE in Iraq -- so what do we do now?
My god you are so wrong on every particular. A more telling example of over-wrought moralism and emotionalism based on Elitist rejection of America's interests in favor of moralizing could not be found. It's like an echo of the medieval priesthood's hatred of the nation in favor of the Church.
1. Iraq. Saddam had passed his one set of usefulness, which was a counterbalance to Iran. More and more he was collaborating with the Iranians and spending too much effort in hostile alliances with Al Qaeda and other terrorist actors.
More to the point, and example HAD TO BE MADE. 9/11 happened because Pakistan and Iran and Saudi and Iraq were not afraid of the consequences of their assistance to the plot which was considerable. This had been the case since 1972 when Arafat ordered the murder of US diplomats in the Sudan and the US State Dept and President after President covered that act up to preserve "a partner for peace."
The ME is a dangerous place and "love" gets you contempt. 9/11 acts can only be deterred by FEAR. The biggest one being removed from office and pulled out of a spider-hole, hung in disgrace after your sons bullet riddled bodies are displayed on TV. Raw and naked use of force to induce fear is the only rational means to make non-state Actors lose the crucial but often "deniable" support of states. Increase the pain level and make examples like Saddam and you deter future support for Al Qaeda.
2. Terrorism. Here you exhibit the same rhetoric as Larry Johnson did in July 2001 "The Declining Terrorist Threat." Modern technology including nuclear weapons (more than 60 years old) along with jet travel allow a man to be in Kabul one day, Islamabad the next, and NYC the day after. What started as relatively bloodless airline takeovers soon escalated in mass killings in the hundreds (such as the Lod Massacre) or high-visibility Munich style murders of Leftist approved targets (Jews, Americans, US military personnel). Escalating still further to 9/11 where only good "luck" prevented a death toll as high as 20,000.
Terrorism is NOT a few 19th Century Anarchists throwing bombs and assassinating the odd Archduke Ferdinand (recall how that one turned out).
It is a WAR OF THE PEOPLES. Muslims object to the existence and intrusion of the modern world, viewing it as an existential threat. As Lewis points out, a Cairene can get up in the morning and go to bed at night and the only thing produced in the House of Peace (Islam) is the prayers. Even the Water company and coffee will be Western. The internet, satellite TV, and jet travel only make this worse. Rising prosperity actually increases contact with the modern world (really poor places like Mauritania provide relatively few jihadis) so you have your Attas (Engineering students), bin Ladens (billionaires) and Zawaharis (Medical Doctors). Every Muslim terrorist would if he could nuke a US city or three.
Given that Pakistan is falling into Al Qaeda / Taliban control slow-motion, Iran will soon have nukes if it doesn't already, and Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the UAE have all announced nuclear programs this threat is not idle. Sam Nunn and others believe a Western city will be nuked within ten years by terrorists.
No one should be shocked by this. Islam cannot co-exist with the modern world: it has produced no world-class medical center, scientific research facility, technology or technology company, or even arms manufacturer. "There is No God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet" cannot co-exist with the modern world's insistent whisper that God does not exist.
Europeans know this, and have for decades before 9/11 instituted: warrantless wiretaps, preventive detention without charges, waterboarding, noise, and sleep deprivation, summary deportation, and other measures. Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish Judge who indicted Pinochet, has held Madrid 3/11 bombing suspects in investigative detention for three years without bringing charges.
Meanwhile Muslim terrorists behead the teachers of girls in Afghanistan, or Catholic Schoolgirls in Indonesia.
You object to the reality that a war of the peoples is ugly, dirty, disgusting, and requires ugly dirty and disgusting work for one people to survive over another. Welcome to reality. Calculate the loss of NYC or DC or Chicago to a potential "loss of civil liberties" ... and note the alternative is simply to seal the borders and toss out all Muslims. No Muslims in the US, no Muslim terrorism. No need for police action either.
Culture: you can't have Muslims in your nation in significant numbers and not have Sharia. That's it. Choose your poison. Either climb into a burka, accept honor killing, female genital mutiliation, forced cousin marriages, killing of gays, second class citizenship for non-Muslims, anti-Semitism, and all the other dark ages savagery of Islam, or fight back and expel non-Citizen Muslims and make clear that Muslims must (essentially abandon Islam) and live according to Western values. Otherwise they are free to return to Islamic nations such as Saudi where they can behead each other to their hearts content.
The Thais have tried everything, selective military brutality to concession after concession, even making a Muslim their military head, and still get nothing but more violence including their capital Bangkok bombed.
What you call the Culture War is merely the desire for Rich Euro and American elites to replace a middle class that wants it's own say with a compliant servant class of subservient Third Worlders, about whom rich and unpatriotic priesthoods can feel morally good about "uplifting" and tut-tutting when half of Paris goes up in flames in a Sharia-demanding Car-b-que.
Your main objections: the world is filled with ugly brutality and hard men with guns. Make it STOP! Let me go back to my pretty dreamland. "Welcome to the party, pal."
It takes a lot of courage to look at the world one believed in wholeheartedly and see it's wrong. It takes more courage to admit that knowledge. It takes even more courage to say so publicly, knowing what the response will be from one's former comrades. Yes, we of the left posting here do admire you for that. I personally admire the fact that you have come to see the difference between a real "Conservative"
- which you are - and a right winger, which most of your former fellows are. 70 years ago, a lot of other European conservatives missed it when a certain somebody proclaimed himself and his movement "conservative" when the truth was they were radical revolutionaries, and when the conservatives finally realized their mistake it was too late to prevent a cataclysm. Hopefully you and the other real conservatives will admit the truth that your beliefs have been hijacked by people who will destroy everything you believe in, and will do so in time to "cancel their ticket" before they cancel everyone else's. Please keep it up. And "Living With Terrorism" is also great thinking and courageous writing.
As I see it, one part of what went wrong with our reaction to 9/11 is summed up in the first post, above:
"If the Western reaction to these three focus points was wrong, what should we have done instead? After 9/11 we could either aggressively defend our nations and culture (the neo-conservative choice), or put on a hair shirt, apologize, apologize, apologize, and be passive."
Americans, especially, tend to think we need to do something. Afghanistan was necessary. And what else?
Mostly, nothing. The correct response was to sit tight, put resources into intelligence work, and accept two propositions: 1) we're not actually in much danger from terrorists, who on average kill a couple of hundred people a year (I'm not including Iraq in that, because I see it as a civil war). 2) We will never be completely secure. We should protect vulnerable points, such as chemical plants, but accept that we will have losses no matter what we do and not judge a policy on its prospects for completely eliminating terrorism.
A subsidiary point is that we should quit wasting resources on what Bruce Schneier calls "Security Theater." For instance, almost everything about airport security falls into this category. Schneier is a wonderful source of information and analysis about security; some of his writing is here:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/
He also makes the point that terrorists win when we fear; so, we should stop making policy based on fear. In my view fear is also the source of false hopes, such as believing that we could spread democracy in the Middle East.
I would also like to make an observation about who is listened to. To become someone who is heard above the noise a pundit needs to make simple, startling statements. Anything simple and startling can almost be guarenteed to be wrong, but that rarely comes back to haunt anyone. Alas, those who need to be heard are (as noted above) almost certain to be inaudible.
It is also depressing how little expert knowledge helps to forecast the outcome of something like the Iraq invasion.
The points in the last two paragraphs were taken from Philip Tetlock's book "Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know." He has data from a prospective study of political judgement that's been going on for a couple of decades now. I commend it to the attention of those who wish to understand what went wrong with our judgements.
Well, I applaud you're willingness to look with clear eyes upon your own mistakes. It saddens me that anybody ever thought it was acceptable to invade another country and kill their people for some vision of democracy. That was never right, or moral. We were only ever justified to invade where we faced an imminent threat that demanded a response like invasion and conquest, and we never faced such a threat from Iraq, even if one believed everything that the Bush administration tried to tell us. The invasion was never justified. Certainly not to make "an example", as Jim above believes it is appropriate to do. A war between two countries is not a fight between a school-yard bully and the target of his aggression, and Jim Rockford's statement only betrays that he has the same failure of understanding that you rightly reject. Amongst those who can still manage to support this war, naivete is applauded as being clear-sighted, and repudiation of common knowledge and understanding is some form of "new" wisdom. What people like Jim cannot argue with is that we are losing, and we are less safe because of this war. Jim may continue to vigorously deny reality and conflate the war in Iraq with some over-broad clash of civilizations, but our nation has no such luxury.
Mike from Santa Monica:
Jeez, chill out. Bjorn here has rendered a compelling mea culpa and all you can do is try to continue to flay him, not only without mercy, but without sense?
Do you really think you know better than Bjorn what HE believed at the time? Sure, Bush, Cheney, et. al. made their case around WMD, but "101st Fighting Keyboarders" were making exactly the case Bjorn describes here. I heard them on more than one occasion. They really DID think this was a holy crusade to "democratize" the region. Of course, their definition of democracy was laughable. Of course, they were tragically misguided, but people like this did serve as enablers for Bush and Cheney, as Bjorn now admits, and you don't need to come down like a ton of bricks on the one who has the guts to admit he was wrong. Save your venom for those who still spew this crap.
Best wishes to you. I admire your courage to admit you were wrong, but much greater I admire your intellectual curiousity that allowed you to open your mind to the possibility that you were wrong. However some comments clearly indicate that many still don't get it. And ridiculous polarisations were part of the whole psychological weaponry. "Either you fight with us in Iraq or you're a cheese eating surrender monkey." I wait in vain for the ridiculous right wing journalists of my country to publicly admit their error, and the fact that the vast majority of issues raised by the middle left have come to be the disasters foreseen. I still can't believe that a nation that was so deeply affected by the vietnam war would trudge of to another indefensible and stupid within a generation. But I'm not feeling too smug, our Prime Minister followed lack the loyal lapdog he is.
In response to Lee J. Cockrell (first comment) I would say, as one who has in the past been involved in design of wargames and strategy games, that it is a grave mistake to think that Diplomacy is a transferable model of the real world.
This is one of the most moving and memorable posts I've read in a long time. Major congratulations to Bjoern for having the strength and the courage and the fortitude to do it with such eloquence and power.
Björn du har min respekt för den moraliska integritet du visade här. Kudos! Sedan kan jag som vänster tycka att ditt problem med var det gick fel beror på att du utgick från högeråsikter men det är bara jag... :)
Its not often fun feeling uncertain about almost everything. But when you realise that politics, culture and society are not like the laws of physics, where answers can be known to three decimal places, you also realise that its irrational to be certain about anything.
This a piece of writing I don't think I will forget for a very long time. I hope that when I am faced with a similar challenge to something I believe in I can face it as well as you have.
Good points up to the end where it got into the culture wars with Islam.
What 90% of people have yet to grasp is that Islam as a religion is intensely 'anti-Islamic Culture'
What we actually have are people trying to force Arab and middle eastern cultural traditions through in the name of Islam in same way 'Christianity' was associated with British and French Imperialism.
Jim Rockford:
1. Turkey is an overwhelmingly Muslim country. 2. There is no Sharia in Turkey. At least, I can remember being in Konya (the most conservative Muslim city in a very Muslim country) and drinking beer. My head still rests atop my head.
"In response to Lee J. Cockrell (first comment) I would say, as one who has in the past been involved in design of wargames and strategy games, that it is a grave mistake to think that Diplomacy is a transferable model of the real world."
I would've agreed with this seven or eight years ago, but now I think it needs a slight modification. It seems plausible that many of the strategic geniuses who inhabit the Cheney administration learned everything they know about foreign policy from boyhood sessions of Risk and Diplomacy. So maybe those games have more predictive value than any sane adult would want to believe.
Jim Rockford, USA, 2007-03-02 "My god you are so wrong on every particular. A more telling example of over-wrought moralism and emotionalism based on Elitist rejection of America's interests in favor of moralizing could not be found. It's like an echo of the medieval priesthood's hatred of the nation in favor of the Church. 1. Iraq. Saddam had passed his one set of usefulness, which was a counterbalance to Iran. More and more he was collaborating with the Iranians and spending too much effort in hostile alliances with Al Qaeda and other terrorist actors. More to the point, and example HAD TO BE MADE. 9/11 happened because Pakistan and Iran and Saudi and Iraq were not afraid of the consequences of their assistance to the plot which was considerable. This had been the case since 1972 when Arafat ordered the murder of US diplomats in the Sudan and the US State Dept and President after President covered that act up to preserve "a partner for peace." " I'll hit the first two points only; the full post has enough BS to devote a career to. Point 1 - Only people like Cheney are continuing to allege Saddam-Al Qaida ties anymore; please get with the current propaganda. 'collaborating with the Iranians'? Jeez, I never heard that, even from the most devoted pro-war propagandists. Point 2 - making an example. If Joe hits me, and I go beat up on Larry, because he's weaker and I can beat him, I've certainly set an example - that Joe can hit me with impunity, but Larry can't. We've shown that world that killing 3,000 Americans isn't something which will necessarily get you in trouble, but that being vulnerable to the US (and possessing something that that the US wants) will definitely get you in trouble. No matter what the court said, Saddam Hussein was hung by the neck for two crimes: insubordination to US interests (see Kuwait, invasion of - but no Iran, invasion of) and failure to possess vast stockpiles of WMD's.
Get out of Iraq...a couple terror attacks in USA and it will be interesting to see the reactions... To know what was right or wrong depends what we think Saddam would do without control and with all Iraq state resources and what Al-qaeda would do without spending resources in Iraq. If Bjorn thinks that casualities are high he just should wait for Islamics taking control over Arab dictatorships...Because that is the strategic shift that is happening: The failure of socialist ideas to mobilise Arabs and other peoples of Middle East anymore .They'll go full Islamic if there is not anyone to stop it. Wars against colonialism was also a strategic shift and just go to the list of deaths...
Get out of Iraq...a couple terror attacks in USA and it will be interesting to see the reactions... To know what was right or wrong depends what we think Saddam would do without control and with all Iraq state resources and what Al-qaeda would ahieve without spending resources in Iraq and spending them elsewhere. If Bjorn thinks that casualities are high he just should wait for Islamics taking control over Arab dictatorships...Because that is the strategic shift that is happening: The failure of socialist ideas to mobilise Arabs and other peoples of Middle East anymore .They'll go full Islamic if there is not anyone to stop it. Wars against colonialism was also a strategic shift and just go to the list of deaths...strangely everyone agrees more or less with them dispite what happened to Africa. What strikes me has most strange is that Bjorn seems to not know what is War in first place. For me i was expecting 10000 US casualities just for invasion combat...
You may want to contact John Cole http://www.balloon-juice.com/ since he has suffered through similar recognitions, made similar confessions, and suffered similar penalties. I hope that more people learn from you.
There's an old adage: "Never tear down a fence without knowing why it was built in the first place."
In this case, Saddam and his regime were the fence. No one thought him a good man, but there were some of us who thought that maybe that "fence" was there for a reason. He was an evil, but the consequences of removing him might be worse. If you're gonna try to fix a bad situation, recall the physician's credo: First Do No Harm.
When I tried to voice these opinions before the invasion, I was ridiculed, called "anti-American," told to leave the country, derided, and generally demonized. Because of this experience, I am no longer proud to be an American, as I once was. Or rather, let me put it another way: I don't wish to be associated with the Americans who were complicit in all this.
Hundreds of thousands of poor, powerless lives destroyed or lost because of some grand idealism (or greed?) of the powerful. If there is a greater tragedy in my lifetime that I am remotely or directly associated with, I don't want to know what it is.
At least I recognize bullshit when I see it, now.
And here I thought everyone on the right was a dolt. Thank you for correcting my misguided assumption. Very insightful post, something we can all learn from it.
Thanks for a thoughtful analysis. I do take issue with one point, which is your characterization of the blogs versus the major media, which I think gets close to "doing it all over again". Were warbloggers amateurish and prone to bias and simplistic analysis? Sure. But that doesn't mean the mainstream media was right all along, or that they are now. The particular criticisms of "old media" (not the 'leftist' smear, but the lazy practices, failure to do basic research or fact-checking, and often-blatant bias and denial of same) do hold up under the microscope. New media could not have made the gains it did absent the poor quality of old media.
Interesting essay. I read your "warblog" frequently in the months after 9/11 and generally was in full agreement with your thinking at the time. But I jumped off the bandwagon when it turned and headed for Baghdad, while you apparently rode on. What has always amazed me about the way the Bush administration ran the Afghanistan and Iraq wars was that they seemed to have learned the lesson of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and therefore limited the presence of US ground troops, made pragmatic deals with local warlords, and successfully put a moderate muslim face out front. If they had just stopped there, and used their 2002 success as the first step in a PR War (not a shooting war) against radical Islam worldwide, we may really have Islamic terrorism on the run today. But they didn't seem capable of considering the non-violent means to obtain their ends. And just as bad, they apparently thought the Soviet experience with a radical Islamic insurgency in Afghanistan had to do with the topogrophy of that country, rather than from the presence of an army of perceived infidels occuppying an Islamic nation.
Kudos to you Mr Staerk, as others have observed it takes a big man to admit error, particularly major error such as we see here.
As one who was against the Iraq invasion from the first moment I heard of the idea I must say that it gives me little pleasure to say "I told you so". The consequences of this ill fated adventure will reverberate through the mists of time for a long time and will probably bring evil fortune to many.
I was posting on an astronomy blog at the time of the runup to the Iraq invasion and I was utterly amazed at the level of vituperation and scorn which I received from otherwise calm, thoughtful and well educated fellow Americans when I dared to express my opposition to invading Iraq. Astronomers I had thought would be the ones most likely to take the long view and try to assess the evidence from a position of a disinterested observer. Boy, was I ever wrong. It was an eye opening experience for me and I learned a valuable lesson that I will never forget.
We in the West have experienced the ravages of two virulently evil political philosophies, fascism and communism. What virtually all of us are completely unaware of is that for much of the rest of the world there have been three virulently evil political philosophies, fascism, communism and colonialism. Colonialism has caused at least as much suffering and grief as has either of the two other philosophies of which I speak, it's just that from our own perspective we cannot see the truth of the matter since colonialism was either invisible or even a positive from our point of view.
As far as the causes of the pro war blindness, I have been reading an excellent online book by Dr Bob Altemeyer called "The Authoritarians" which documents his multi decade career of research into what he calls "authoritarian followers" or "right wing authoritarians". According to Dr Altemeyer there is about twenty five percent of the human race that are particularly vulnerable to blindly following a leader who tells them what they want to hear. We all have this tendency to a greater or lesser extent but for authoritarian followers the tendency is extremely strong and indeed usually overpowers most of their rational thought processes. In the USA, authoritarian followers are almost entirely on the political right, often on the far right. In the former Soviet Union the authoritarian followers were communist party members or strong supporters of the communist party. Authoritarian followers wish to be told what to think and will listen with very little critical engagement to anyone who reinforces their already strong prejudices.
I would strongly urge anyone who has any interest in the reasons why the war bloggers and other war supporters so strongly excluded the viewpoints of anyone who disagreed with them to read Dr Altemeyer's book. The book is remarkably accessible and an easy read for an academic tome. Dr. Altemeyer is available on the web to answer any questions you might have and to further elaborate on his research. "The Authoritarians" is freely available to read online in PDF format at the URL below:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
There is a Google discussion group on the concepts laid forth in the book online at:
http://groups.google.com/group/theauthoritarians
Anyone is free to join the discussion on the Google group and I would urge anyone interested to come and at least take a look.
Good night and good luck,
Jonathan
Fantastic and clear-eyed reassessment. Except in part regarding Muslims. Over time the xenophobic reaction to Muslims in Europe will be seen for what it is: another dehumanising and essentialising dynamic that strips all of us of our ability to treat a human being as a human being. I hope we in the West see this before we plunge into another witchhunt.
I think I'm going to hurl at this sickening display. I'm not referring to Bjorn's epiphany but the backslappers who are congratulating him for it.
This is how I look at it.
An analogy: Bjorn got stinking drunk, climbed into his car and ran down some pedestrians. And now everyone is slapping him on the back for doing nothing more than sobering up.
F**k that shit. I don't give a damn about Bjorn's awakening or that of any other warmonger.
The only thing I want to hear from him is how he plans to atone for his complicity in helping bring about the destruction that has been done around the world.
This essay is exceptionally inciteful. We are not yet at the point of a post mortem on the war, but what you have begun is a step in the right direction and I thank you. If no other lesson has been clear it is that constructive criticisms and sincere reservations are not to be confused with treason and/or cowardice. Incidentally, I have never liked or used the term "warblogger," and also regard neologisms like Islamofascist as the New Antisemitism. Part of the challenge is that our vocabulary is rife with spin. We learn a lot about the universe of reference that a person uses simply by the language being used. This is helpful when avoiding ignorant people, but counterproductive when trying to resolve a disagreement.
Bjørn, I don't know if you're going to have the patience to keep reading this far into the comments. We've e-mailed each other a few times over the years. Maybe not enough for you to remember me... (I taught you how to translate "smørøje" into Danish.) I agree that those of us who supported the war were too gung ho in the beginning. That has led me to a certain modesty in making foreign policy statements in general. But I still think it's too early to say that Iraq will have been a success or a failure. Five or ten years from now, you may find yourself having to say that you were wrong to say that you were wrong. (And I may have to say that I was wrong to write this post.) Anyway, even if most of the pro-war people who respond to this post turn out to be angry loudmouths, I wanted you to get at least one message from a pro-war individual who tries to be civil. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your blog over the years, even the posts I disagree with. Keep posting when the spirit moves you. If I'm ever in Norway, I hope you won't mind if I try to look you up. --James
Good mea culpa all around but wrong! Certainly those who supported the war early on (like myself) have to ask themselves whether this support was warranted. But an important question you do not ask is "what was the alternative and was the status quo desirable?" In my opinion, there were 2 assumptions made about invading Iraq which were fundamentaly flawed (and which explain the current situation). [By the way, these do not include the WMD connendrum..I believe that the WMDs existed and that they currently are in Syria and Lebanon). The first incorrect assumption is that Iraq would welcome democracy. Wrong. Like many Muslim counties, the fundamental political structure is tribal and as a result, the very concept of democracy is unpallatable. So we are effectively trying to build a structure which most Iraqis fundamentally reject. The second assumption is that the "moderates" among Islam would prevail over the extremists. Wrong again. The extremists are now so ingrained in the very fabric of so many Muslim communities that the moderates have been permanently silenced into implied acceptance through utter fear of death. This realization is also what explains why in the US and other Western countries, people ask "why are the moderate Muslims not speaking out agaisnt extremism?" I believe that many of these Muslim communities have passed the point of no return and that the extremists among Muslim have wrestled control of these communities. With Saudi money flowing into most mosques in order to ensure that only fundamentalist Imams have staying power, it will take less than a generation to turn most mainstream Islam away from "moderation". It is time we wake up to the fact that Islam, which has never been reformed the way Christianity has been, is an evangelical religion whose only purpose is the submission of all of Mankind by any mean, including death. Neither Christianity nor Judaism have anything akin to this very principle as their guiding principle. Ignoring this fact is why the war on terror is not making the progress that it should. We are burying our head in the sand pretenting that we are fighting a few bands of terrorists around the world. Wrong. We are fighting the vangard of militant Islam, which for the very first time has the money to purchase the weapons it needs to take on Western Civilization. We have made mistkes, unquestionably. But the mistakes we made were not the ones you identify. We have consistently underestimated the depth of penetration of extremism into mainstream Islam. And we have always refused to admit that we are at the begining of a clash of civilization which can only end with one civilization defeating the other. This very concept is just so foreign to the multicutural pabulum we have been fed over the last 50 years that we have simply refused to see what is now staring us in the eyes.
James Haney: We've e-mailed each other a few times over the years. Maybe not enough for you to remember me...
Yeah, I think do.
But I still think it's too early to say that Iraq will have been a success or a failure. Five or ten years from now, you may find yourself having to say that you were wrong to say that you were wrong.
That's not how it works. In the long run, I think we can hope that the Middle East will become stable and democratic, and when it does, perhaps someone will conclude that the American invasion was the starting point of that development. People grow used to their history, and eventually even the bad events seem so formative that we don't like to imagine history without them. For instance, today Europe is peaceful and stable in a way it has never been before - and this is in large part because of the world wars. But does that mean that these wars were "good" or "right" at the time that they happened? To put it another way, how long do we wait? In the long run everything happens. In the long run we're all dead. You can't act now on the belief that things will eventually turn out okay. You have to think about the here and now.
The situation here and now is that the US has taken a huge gamble with the lives of everyone in Iraq, maybe the entire region, based on some rather amateurish theories about the nature of democracy. That's not just foolish, it's wrong. The gamble seems to have failed, but even if it doesn't, even if somehow Iraq finds a way out of this within the next year or two, it's still wrong to take that kind of gamble with people's lives.
If I'm ever in Norway, I hope you won't mind if I try to look you up.
Not at all.
Andre: But an important question you do not ask is "what was the alternative and was the status quo desirable?" In my opinion, there were 2 assumptions made about invading Iraq which were fundamentaly flawed (and which explain the current situation). [By the way, these do not include the WMD connendrum..I believe that the WMDs existed and that they currently are in Syria and Lebanon).
And this is precisely the kind of armchair speculation that, while it might be fun, and with luck correct, is not something we should risk the lives of millions of people on. The default mode in foreign policy should be caution and humility. There are always things you don't know, and your instincts, especially aggressive and conflict-oriented ones, can't be trusted. Peaceful instincts can't really be trusted either, but at least fewer people get hurt when you err in that direction. I know, I know, the whole world hangs in the balance, and if we don't do something drastic right this minute it will all fall apart. But what if you're wrong? You're not the first to think this, these sort of theories are common everywhere, and they're very rarely true.
Thoughtful and well-written mea culpa. I still think you should have won that Gullblogg award.
Bjørn Stærk:Praise puts me on edge
Oops, sorry. Seriously, though, your call for humility is both timeless and well-timed. This is particularly true for foreign interventionism, since the stakes are so high both ways. As a general principle, inaction is less dangerous than action, but I'm not sure this is always the case. However, the Iraq war was ill-conceived from the start. Shunning "Old Europe" when getting them aboard would have just taken a little bit of tact and leadership seemed and seems like pure arrogance.
I long for the old "good cop, bad cop" dynamism of the U.S. and EU - I almost cheered for Bush when he threatened Iraq with invasion unless they started making meaningful concessions, because he acted like he was crazy enough to actually go through with it, and Iraq seemed to be cowed into cooperating with the weapons inspectors. Of course, that may just be my pinko optimism. Could Saddam have been threatened into improving the civil rights of his people without actually going to war? Probably not. But the cost of trying it is just some presidential pride.