Conor Friedersdorf has a good round-up of various principled Burkean arguments in favor of the Iraq war.
Andrew Sullivan:
FABULOUSLY ANTI-WAR: No, I don’t mean Madonna. I mean a group called Glamericans. These are drag queens, performance artists, and sundry others who form “a non-partisan group of funky Americans committed to non-violence and its promotion through glamorous, media-savvy, cultural events. We believe in America’s potential to be a peaceful and powerful force in the world. We believe that war is bad for our country, bad for our environment and bad for our travel plans.” Dammit. Let Saddam test nerve gas on political prisoners strapped down in hospital beds. Let him gas the Kurds. Let him protect terrorist groups.
Jonah Goldberg:
“I want to rub it in the anti-war crowd’s face so badly. I want to hear the protesters explain why it’s a bad thing we released more than 100 children from an Iraqi gulag for underage political prisoners.”
Some idiot named Brendan O’Neill who opposed the war but hated the protesters more than the war:
Most of the new antiwar groups express an entirely personal opposition to war, one based more on moral revulsion than effective political opposition. Protesters voice a personal distaste for violent conflict, rather than organizing a collective stand against it. And when opposing war is about making pompous moral statements about me, myself, and I, you can count me out.
He left out my favorite, from Megan McArdle:
I can’t be mad at these little dweebs. I’m too busy laughing. And I think some in New York are going to laugh even harder when they try to unleash some civil disobedience, Lenin style, and some New Yorker who understands the horrors of war all too well picks up a two-by-four and teaches them how very effective violence can be when it’s applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner.
Atrios puts it well:
I know all the ‘liberal hawks’ perceive themselves as having engaged in some sort of high minded intellectual exercise back in the day, but what they were really doing most of the time was punching hippies.
The respectable position, then, was to support the war, never mind the details like how many soldiers to send in and how to deal with sectarian strife. Freedom isn’t free! Just as now the respectable position is austerity, never mind the real world affect it might have on the economy. End the debt!
I do wish that just once, someone who supported the war but who isn’t a total asshole would admit that they backed it because that’s just what serious people did at the time, that they had no idea, in practice, how the war might work out, that they’d never thought about it all.
Deffrey Jahmer
XTC! Feck yeah!
NobodySpecial
I don’t know anyone who supported the war who isn’t a total asshole.
Redshirt
Does it matter anymore? We live in “Post-Truth” times. Whatever was said ten years ago, ten weeks, ten days or even ten hours ago hardly matters. Just come up with a new spin for the moment and spin away – win the day!
khead
I guess a 2×4 is lighter and cheaper than the Thermomix.
Alex S.
Well, it seems that Sully merely thought that the protesters weren’t butch enough.
rikyrah
water carriers…eh
the thing that gets me is the mofos who lied us into this, see that it’s cost 1 TRILLION DOLLARS AND THOUSANDS OF LIVES and say…
I’d do it again.
THEM, I want to roast on a spigot.
FlipYrWhig
I never supported the war, but I think you’re underselling the influence of the “liberal hawk” position a la Kenneth Pollack, which was to think of a war in Iraq as continuous with wars like Bosnia and other so-called humanitarian interventions. For them “hippie punching” was more like “stupid hippies can’t tell good wars from bad wars, but I can, and this is one of the good ones.” Conservative hippie punching was a different beast. One of the dismaying things about the Iraq War was that the “liberal hawk” position on ending the suffering of innocents in a sovereign state merged with the “neocon” position that American power needs to be projected and reinforced so that we can prove ourselves to be both great and free.
FlipYrWhig
@khead: Didn’t McArdle eventually say that she didn’t know what a 2×4 was?
jrg
Boy, this McArdle person sounds pretty tough. Any chance we’ll see her in an MMA competition anytime soon?
srv
@NobodySpecial: That would be something around ~70 of the electorate.
Personally, I find the asshole percentage a little higher.
FlipYrWhig
@jrg: Worst Cooks in America, perhaps.
Paul in KY
Good luck on that, Doug.
Hungry Joe
@FlipYrWhig:
I think what she eventually said was that she didn’t know what 2 x 4 equals, exactly, but it doesn’t really matter because she’s sure it’s somewhere around 10 and that’s close enough.
Jim C
Now, I haven’t fully explored the five boroughs, and I certainly can’t claim it’s true around here, but is there a lot of loose lumber lying around in New York City?
Yutsano
@jrg:
The FSM does not love me enough for this to happen. But we could match her against the transgender MMA fighter and see what happens. For teh lulz.
jeff
I also dislike the groups who tried to co-opt the protest by salting the march with socialist slogans when all we wanted to do was very clearly say “no” to the war. However, to my credit, I sure as hell joined the marches, hippies or not. Plus, I didn’t hit anybody.
liberal
@FlipYrWhig:
That reminds me of a little diagram blogger “uggabugga” made, a graph showing who influenced/cooperated with who in supporting the decision to invade.
IIRC, Josh Marshall was a little island connected to Pollack, which I found humerous.
Cassidy
@Yutsano: Fallon Fox is 2-0 with 2 KO’s. Have you followed that story at all?
Roger Moore
You mean other than John G. Cole?
liberal
@jeff:
Exactly. I wasn’t very happy with the “ANSWER” bullshit, but given that I wasn’t involved enough to organize my own march, the moral thing to do (given the alternative, sit at home) was to go with the marches we had, not the ones we wish we had.
FlipYrWhig
@liberal: Maybe it was a small (decadent?) enclave. I remember it being a major presence on that New Republic / Atlantic Monthly axis, but I might be misremembering.
the Conster
Good for young Conor. Didn’t see that coming.
Chris
@srv:
Grumpy Cat? Is that you?
Sorry. I did LOL. And by the way, thanks for recommending Ronin in that thread a couple days ago (pretty sure it was you) – watched it, good film.
Tokyokie
@FlipYrWhig: Well, a 2×4 includes numbers, so she probably wouldn’t know what one is.
Yutsano
@Cassidy: ESPN is sort of covering it, although I get the feeling they wish she would just go away. Or lose.
Villago Delenda Est
These people are all so enthusiastic about war, particularly since they are safely far away from the IEDs and the lack of running water in the camp.
Scout211
I read that link earlier this morning and was actually quite pleased that for once, the ten-year anniversary story mentioned the millions of protester marchers worldwide.
It seems as though most of the ten year reflective stories have been current and former journalists and pundits naval gazing and pointing fingers at each other.
I wondered when someone would remember all of us who marched in protests around the world.
Young Conor highlights the huge amount of ridicule we then endured after we marched in protest.
I am proud to say that this DFH, her 23 year old (at the time) daughter and my husband (a Navy veteran who served 2 tours in Vietnam) were marching and protesting back then.
Cassidy
@Yutsano: It’s beena big topic on MMA sites. A lot of the usual “it’s icky and I don’t like it”. Some people have tried to make reasonable arguments regarding her development as a male for so many years and that gives her an unfair advantage. Impressively, one journalist has reached out to a couple of SRS Surgeons, an Endocrinologist, and other medical professionals in a series of interviews to try and get some diverse opinions.
A lot of the MMA demographic doesn’t understand what being trans is, but most of the ones wher I go are trying to be objective and learn about her. Of course, you can never get away from the dipshits who insist on calling her “he” and whatnot.
the Conster
Sully’s “explanation” about why he hated the left and fell in love with Bush, is because gay leftists were mean to him about being a conservative. So, Iraq had to be invaded because like everything else, it’s all about Sully.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@FlipYrWhig:
This.
This is one of the reasons why I’m against even the wars that end well (for us at least), if vital national interest aren’t at stake. The “good wars” are a gateway drug to the bad ones.
Ever since WW2 it seems we can’t even begin to debate the merits of staying out of new conflicts without Godwinning the topic before it even starts. We got such a moral superiority bong hit out of helping to take down Hilter, that ever time the chance arises we have to keep going back for another hit. WW2 is the Greatest Generation’s Greatest Weed Stash.
? Martin
@Roger Moore: Cole was a total asshole then.
Villago Delenda Est
@the Conster:
It’s always all about Sully, all the time, which is why he can’t be bothered to worry about anything that happens to the bitches.
Chris
@the Conster:
Probably 95% of the conservative resentment towards liberals is the notion that meanie liberals failed to show them the proper respect. It doesn’t even have to be something that’s actually happened. The simple suspicion that the latte-sipping Volvo-driving East Coaster is laughing at him behind his copy of the New York Times even if you can’t see his face is enough. And there are plenty of people in Fox and elsewhere who’re happy to pepper them with such suggestions every day.
(And I’m sorry, “big gay meanies being mean to me when they found out I was a conservative” gets as few sympathy brownie points from me as “black people were mean to me when they found out I was a racist.”)
Nemo_N
Oh if only hippies had been nicer to Iraq war supporters! They would have been taken seriously and, if not stopped the war, at least they would have been considered not-entirely-scum.
So protesters are to blame for the sociopaths’ acts too! Both sides do it!
Kay
I think it was more than that. I think it was a really romantic idea of war, that this was the War Of Their Generation, and in that sense it made them “serious” where before they had been pampered and sheltered because they hadn’t had a war. I saw the same thing with media people.
Honestly, it was uncomfortable for me, because it all seemed like people playing roles in a production called “war.”
Ultimately, it didn’t feel genuine.
Comrade Dread
Back in my a$$hole Republican days, I supported the war. I believed Colin Powell, even though that sounds absurd now. But my team was running things and I trusted my team.
And yeah, seeing hippies march against it made me more supportive because fuck hippies.
Then it quickly became obvious that Saddam had no WMDs. That Bush and company literally had zero idea of how to manage an occupation, had sent no where near enough troops to occupy the region, had zero understanding of Iraq, its politics, or its culture, and I realized we had just seriously fucked up on a scale that my Republican mind could not conceive of, so I ended up siding with the hippies, but I still didn’t care for them, because fuck hippies.
Then, right around the time that the free market Galtian geniuses would approve any mortgage application because they could package it up and sell it to investors on the promise that housing values would increase forever, and then bet several trillion dollars more than existed, it started to dawn on me that the hippies have been pretty consistently right since the 60’s.
Go, hippies.
I guess the lesson being, that for some of us, the ideology was so ingrained in us that it took reality hitting us with a 2×4 to realize who wrong the ideology we had been taught as kids was.
Scamp Dog
Matthew Yglesias discussed why he supported the war here, and (after the four nominal reasons) explicitly says that it was partly due to what the “serious people” at the time were saying. It’s one of the few fairly honest takes I’ve seen on the topic, without any added hippie punching or reflexive “they were right, but for the wrong reasons” nonsense.
Yglesias gets a fair amount of abuse here, some of it deserved, but he’s gotten this one right. Of course, the real test is how he’ll respond when similar issues come up, and the first few results for the search “Matthew Yglesias Iran” reveal posts discussing why a war with Iran is a bad idea.
I’m not sure I can think of anyone else who’s put out a similar mea culpa followed by signs that they’ve actually changed the way they think about things.
ETA: Roger Moore: You’d think I’d remember about that John Cole guy, given the amount of time I spend reading this blog. OK, can anybody come up with a third person?
Mr. Longform
These remembrances of 10 years ago make me feel guilty, not because I supported the war. I assumed Bush and Cheney were lying bastards. But I wasn’t very engaged, and I also assumed that all those media types would let me know if the war was a really stupid idea. It seemed like a stupid idea, but I just assumed a lot more policy types would be yelling if it really was a bad idea. I have, or course, learned a lot about policy types and media types since then. But, damn, I wish I’d done something at the time to add one more voice to the other side.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
Even now, the assholes who got it wrong are seen as ‘Serious People’ who are taken with the utmost credibility, while the folks who got it right are still dirty fucking hippies who were ‘Right for the Wrong Reasons’ and therefore should remain ostracized like little fucking dumbass naifs.
The Other Chuck
I was by no means an asshole republican then, but I did believe Colin Powell.
The majority of people still want to call it an “intelligence failure”, rather than what it was: a deliberate systematic campaign of LIES.
GregB
I’d like to see an actual study of the media and how much comparative time and coverage was given to the anti-Iraq war protesters verses the tea-bagger protests.
I am sure it would be vomit inducing.
Emma
The quality required to do that is called “rigorous intellectual honesty” and they don’t have any.
the Conster
@Chris:
We do laugh at them because they are stupid and wrong, and I hope Jonah Goldberg’s last sight and sound on this earth is a laughing DFH all up in his grill.
ranchandsyrup
Nice XTC reference Doug.
From Mcmeg’s twitter twatter feed:
elaine lapersonerie @winkprnyc 20 Mar @asymmetricinfo saw your story on IHA! Any interest in experimenting with a @SousVideSupreme? DM me if so!
Megan McArdle Megan McArdle @asymmetricinfo 20 Mar @winkprnyc I already own a sous vide supreme (demi) and love it!
Of course she does.
srv
@Chris: It’s even more scary considering I’m an optimist.
Ya, Ronin, an old rainy day favorite. There are so many great outliers on Netflix and Amazon.
Another fave, Exiled by Johnnie To:
http://instantwatcher.com/titles/175933
Check his other HK Bullet Ballets.
Cassidy
@srv: Check out Donnie Yen’s Flashpoint. Amazing fight choreography. Yen wanted to incorporate modern MMA and streetfighting.
Domino
Can not recommend Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Just a fantastic summary of the few successes but numerous fuck ups Bremmer and crew created.
Eric U.
@liberal: I always kinda wondered if ANSWER isn’t an outfit that exists to discredit liberal causes. They always had the parade permit for any protest of any size.
Scamp Dog
@Scamp Dog: Well, apparently I was too slow in my editing for my “ETA:” part to take. Here goes…
@Roger Moore: You’d think I’d remember about that John Cole guy, given the amount of time I spend reading this blog.
@Comrade Dread: OK, you’re person number three. :)
Can somebody come up with any other major commentators who eventually figured things out?
ETA: …and now that ETA part shows up in the original comment. FYWP!
FlipYrWhig
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: See, well, I think I come down in almost the reverse position. I still see the hope in the idea that American power ought to be used to protect the human rights of people being victimized, and I wouldn’t want to reduce the idea of vital interests to something like “because we get oil from there” or “because a country we like is nearby.” Human rights should be a vital interest. But obviously you can’t overthrow all bad governments, and you can’t deliver liberalism by gunpoint. There’s the rub.
(The Iraq war was so obviously based on false pretenses like WMD and convergence between “rogue states” and stateless terrorist groups — claims that looked fake at the time — that it’s hard to believe more people didn’t oppose it. As many people have said since then, a lot of people seem to have been supporting _a_ war in Iraq, not _Bush’s_ war in Iraq, while failing to notice that whatever anyone’s personal reasons were, we’d all be saddled with Bush’s no matter what.)
Liberty60
@NobodySpecial:
We don’t know each other, but I did support the war. Whether I am an asshole or not is your call.
At the time, I was a reformed Republican who hated Bush. But I did trust the Administrations pronouncements. I was cautious, and agreed with Colin Powell’s warnings about “you break it, you buy it.”
But the thought of Saddam with a nuke terrified me so I supported the war.
Yep, it was foolish and naive. If it is any sort of penance, I have nothing but a seething rage at GWB and the neocons now that I realize how massive the lies were.
Darkrose
@FlipYrWhig:
She got it confused with a 4×4 because her calculator had gastritis.
Chris
@srv:
I might check that one out too. You see, my problem with watching any movie in a language I don’t understand is that I’m usually doing other things as well when I’m on Netflix, which isn’t so bad if I can still hear what they’re saying, but movies like this, I have to actually sit through and watch everything.
(Recently had fun watching “The Good, The Bad and the Weird” – fun Western type movie set in 1930s Manchuria. But it damn near took me four hours to watch, what with all the times I had to pause it).
Cathie from Canada
Its too bad that so many people in the US didn’t take the United Nations seriously. Stopping a stupid war was exactly what it was designed to do.
Any proposed war that can’t generate enough support among the community of nations to get a positive vote by the Security Council (or from NATO in a pinch) shouldn’t be fought.
And while I can foresee a situation where only a minority of the Security Council would support a justifiable war, the Iraq War was so purposeless that it couldn’t even get a significant minority vote, in spite of the enormous pressure from the US and Britain on nations like Canada and Mexico and the other SC members back in 2003.
Out of the 15 SC members, only Britain, Spain, and Bulgaria supported the US — France, Russia, China, Germany, Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, Mexico, Pakistan and Syria all wanted inspections to continue, as did Canada.
The UN is not a perfect system, but when there are that many nations unconvinced or opposed to what you want to do, it should have given the nation pause.
geg6
Andy’s “apology” to the DFHs like me who marched against his and W’s excellent adventure that he posted today is really something. Liberal gays were mean to him and made him support W and invading Iraq. And all liberals were, apparently, the gays who were mean to him. So of course he hated liberals and had to call them traitors. Traitors to Andy, that is.
ansapphire
@Redshirt: I hear you. I never believed the bs about the war when it was put out there. I remember telling people that I didn’t support the war and my boyfriend trying to shut me up because God forbid someone might hear me and kick me out the country or something. But it was bs and I called it straight up bs.
Chris
@FlipYrWhig:
Yeah, this. It’s theoretically possible that Iraq could have been done better, but that would’ve required having an administration in charge that measured “doing a good job” in any terms, any terms at all, other than “how much money are my donors making off of this?” That sure as hell wasn’t the Bushies.
I’m one of these people. Well, was. My biggest reason for supporting the war was precisely the “liberal hawk” Kosovo-inspired notion (that was the first conflict I ever followed). Knew al-Qaeda claims were bullshit, didn’t know for the WMDs, but bought the “build democracy” horseshit hook line and sinker. I would say “in my defense, I was fifteen,” and in most cases that would be a defense, but I was also at an international school where most of the people my age already knew better and said so. I was just really really dumb.
Comrade Dread
@Cathie from Canada: Being anti-UN is par for the course for Republicans.
And it happens early: the UN is a waste of money, they’re anti-American, they’re the first step to a one world government that will undermine American sovereignty and steal all our golfs (as Charlie Pierce says); they don’t have the guts to stand up to evil like ‘Merica does.
Sterling
and some New Yorker who understands the horrors of war all too well picks up a two-by-four and teaches them how very effective violence can be when it’s applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner.
McArdle should drive over to the veterans hospital so she can pick up some artificial limbs. An amputee can teach her how war has a way of mangling people who aren’t typing away in an apartment in D.C.
TerryC
@ansapphire: Me2. Never for a moment saw any meaningful evidence supporting invasion, and all I had was magazines and the Internet; no connections. Not a hippy, Vietnam vet, but I was out there demonstrating against it and calling my politicians. I saw that it would be a disaster. I heard no serious political talk about after we kill Sadaam, then what? It was a disaster. I’m with those who want to see some top level criminal prosecutions.
Chris
@Comrade Dread:
I love how they manage to believe that the UN is impotent and useless while simultaneously believing that it’s a proto-One-World-Government that’s plotting to take over America and probably already has black helicopter squadrons up and running for strategic cattle mutilation in Montana and Idaho.
Sort of like how the Soviet Bloc was an alternately an inefficient bureaucratic mess whose factories couldn’t assemble a can opener without fucking it up, and a monstrous juggernaut capable of blitzkrieging us all into oblivion.
And the Muslim World is on the verge of uniting everything from Morocco to Indonesia into a Super Caliphate that will then march across Europe, Persian Horde style, but they’re also nothing but silly ragtag insurgents who suck at their job so much that the only possible way we could do badly in Iraq and Afghanistan is if the liberals stabbed us in the back…
… and so on, and so forth.
Suffern ACE
I was too busy starting a new job and moving to read much or watch tv during that time. I had lost my job due in part to the Enron recession and I had other things to do then than keep up with the emerging blogosphere. But i did read a little. But Jesus fucking h Christ. Reading this stuff today just pisses me off. I wish we could mark this anniversary by pissing on their graves.
smintheus
@Liberty60: I’m genuinely interested to know why you did not see through the Bush administration’s lies. Could it possibly have been clearer that at least a significant number of their public justifications for the war were false, and though discredited, kept being repeated and amplified? How do you see an administration lying to the public and still conclude that it can be trusted?
catclub
@Comrade Dread: “had zero understanding of Iraq, its politics, or its culture, and I realized we had just seriously fucked up on a scale that my Republican mind could not conceive of, so I ended up siding with the hippies, but I still didn’t care for them, because fuck hippies. ”
Admitting it was wrong means admitting that Ahmad Chalabi and the Iranians conned us into doing them a huge favor.
That cannot happen while Iran is still the enemy of the week.
David Koch
And yet Atrios supported warmonger Edwards like a love sick teen.
Redshirt
What I’ve learned over the past 30 or so years is: I’m pretty much always right.
So jump on board! If you’re in doubt about something, ask me.
catclub
@Chris: Well, once you have three examples of embracing cognitive dissonance. It is obviously the way that they ‘think’.
Barack Obama – manipulative dictatorgenius or incompetent simpleton over his head? Both!
Omnes Omnibus
@FlipYrWhig:
I came from the liberal interventionist school of thought myself; I was in the army in Europe when Yugoslavia came apart. I was ready to volunteer to transfer to a unit going to Bosnia if we had bothered to do so. I still believe that a timely intervention there would have saved thousands of lives. On the other hand, the Iraq war was nothing of the kind and this merger of liberal hawks with neo-cons was part of the problem. You could just see guys like Pollack, who I had respected, blinding themselves to facts in order to justify that war. The whole idea of humanitarian intervention is lost if you are basing the intervention on a lie. The liberal interventionist position really requires walking a tightrope, and a shitload of “serious” people fell off.
TerryC
@ansapphire: Me2. Never for a moment saw any meaningful evidence supporting invasion, and all I had was magazines and the Internet; no special connections. Not a hippy, Vietnam vet, but I was out there demonstrating against it and calling my politicians. I saw that it would be a disaster. I heard no serious political talk about after we kill Saddam, then what? It was a disaster. I’m with those who want to see some top level criminal prosecutions.
Chris
@catclub:
See, when it comes to our politics, it’s not like I’m even asking anyone to like hippies. Fuck, when you see the way people on this blog react to “the professional left,” I think it’s fair to say that plenty of people even pretty far to the left don’t like them either (depending of course on one’s definition of “hippie.”) I’ll settle for people having SOMETHING in their politics other than “hippie punching first last and always must be the guide to all our decisions. If they oppose it, it must be wrong.”
I don’t like Ron Paul either, but I don’t base my political opinions by consulting him every day to see what he doesn’t like and then supporting it just to spite him. Not that the idea doesn’t appeal to me, but Ron Paul and his supporters are so irrelevant in our politics that it would really be a ridiculous waste. The extent to which Gooper beliefs to this day are determined by their desire to stick it to people with no power in the system is similarly retarded.
ETA: sorry, meant to respond to Dread.
Redshirt
Hippies aren’t always right. But, they’re right far more often then your typical Republican.
Chris
@Redshirt:
Well THAT is for damn certain, though not exactly difficult. I’m not sure Cultural Revolution style Maoists don’t have a better grasp on reality than your typical Republican.
(I denounce Mao and broccoli, of course).
Redshirt
@Chris: I’m reading Nixonland right now and it seems tragic how the hippies (among others) brought down LBJ from the left. After he accomplished more big ticket liberal agenda items than anyone since FDR.
Sure, Vietnam. But hey! Maybe Nixon will make it all better.
Serious “Holier than thou” Firebagger flashbacks.
Mike in NC
@Comrade Dread: “Get the US out of the UN” was a rallying cry for the John Birch Society and the rest of the lunatic fringe back in the 50s and 60s. Now of course it’s mainstream Republican dogma and was probably a talking point that all of the GOP presidential hopefuls had to trot out during their primary debates.
Gin & Tonic
The orange blog has a story up referring to a Pollster/HuffPo survey of party identification. Without going over there, who can guess the percentage of people in this poll who self-identify as Republican? Think for a second before you guess.
srv
Hmmm.
Prince for $250 in a small venue.
What does BJ think?
Redshirt
@Gin & Tonic: 72%?
Gin & Tonic
@Redshirt: Are you dyslexic?
Cluttered Mind
@Hungry Joe: Gastritis. Can’t do The Maths.
Redshirt
@Gin & Tonic: I am for the LULZ. :)
Trentrunner
Sully’s mea culpa today is really infuriating, especially this part:
You history-revising cunt. You were outed as a HYPOCRITE for chastising others for having unsafe sex while you were having it. It had nothing to do with your being a “gay conservative” (other than the extent that your self-loathing fuels your hypocrisy).
Never forget: Andrew Sullivan solicited unsafe sex while HIV-positive, even as–at the same time–he was shaming and naming gay men for having unsafe sex in the time of AIDS. Feel free to Google “andrew sullivan milky loads” for all the details.
Omnes Omnibus
@srv: If you have the money, go. I have seen Prince several times and he is unbelievably good in a small venue.
Foregone Conclusion
@Jim C:
She was either consciously or unconsciously riffing off this, I suspect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Hat_Riot
srv
@Omnes Omnibus: Done, thx
Eric U.
@Trentrunner: I thought Sullivan was being called “bareback Andy” a long time before the war, but it’s hard to remember that far back. He’s a thoroughly reprehensible person, but I guess being able to string words together in a pleasing manner is more important than being a racist scumbag that is wrong about everything
Comrade Dread
@Chris: Although these days, you’re far more likely to hear that America is the greatest country ever and we’re exceptional, while simultaneously hearing how we’re one more liberal law away from becoming the Soviet Union West.
Whatever works to keep people afraid and looking to them to protect us.
Omnes Omnibus
@srv: Have fun. The crazy little dude puts on one hell of a show.
Turgidson
@Chris:
And Obama is simultaneously (1) such a skillfully devious manipulator that he put a plan in place to get illegitimately elected and destroy the country from within despite as an America-hating Kenyan Muslim before he was even born, and (2) also incredibly lazy (well that’s just racism…but still) and unable to speak coherently without a teleprompter.
pluege
the spectacle of Gulf War I on TV left an unsated taste in the mouths of all the little pro-war lusters from neo-cons to so-called liberal hawks, and they were busting for more, like a junkie needing a fix.
FlipYrWhig
@Trentrunner: I think I’d rather keep that out of my browser history, thanks.
kay
The weirdest part was their lack of confidence in their position and how they kept looking for validation from “red states”, how the war had to be popular.
Andrew Sullivan in particular kept pointing to the “wisdom of the common man” or whatever. The vast red sea between the coasts.
Funny how that doesn’t apply to the austerity obsession. In that case populism must be tempered with the firm hand of our betters advising sacrifice. Austerity isn’t popular at all.
It’s such a disgusting premise, that the soldier class in The Heartland understand violence and retribution, but they need Pete Peterson to lead on matters relating to finance.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I was just watching Tweety and a couple of guests rant about Cheney, Perle, Rumsfeld et al. The name that always gets left out is the great alpinist of failing up, Condi Rice, who comes to mind because, like Condi, McMeghan has only failed up from her days as “Jane Galt”. Though I gather now she’s at The Daily Beast, which I can’t see a step up from just about anything.
Bob2
@dougj
Do you think you could do a roundup of apologies including Megan’s mealy mouthed one a few years back? Dreher’s made me want to hit him.
Also we went to Iraq so Mcmegan could have a sous vide prime and a thermomix. Seriously her star rose because of her blog in relation to 9/11. Glenn Reynolds and Andy s. linked to her incessantly
Omnes Omnibus
@kay:
I think that a good number of them perceived that support for the war was, among other things, a chance to be a good “regular American” just like the people in The Heartland. They might drink wine instead of beer and eat canapes instea dof nachos, but, by God, they could be full-throated in support of war.
Needless to say, I think that perception was warped and stupid. But then, I drank wine and ate canapes and was against the war, so what the fuck did I know.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s not far from how I thought about it prior to 2003. I used to think that with care and due diligence we could thread the needle between the good wars and the bad wars, and had a moral obligation to try our best. But our domestic reaction to 911 and then the Iraq war changed my thinking on this subject, and I decided that collectively speaking the American public and news media are far too blunt an instrument for trying to pick and choose between good wars and bad wars.
Or to riff off of how Omnes Omnibus put it succinctly in comment#68:
My take is that this tightrope is just too narrow for us to walk with any reasonable degree of success except by accident, and because the US is such a large and powerful country with such an abundantly funded military, we do massive damage when we get it wrong, and thus we need to stop doing this stuff.
Vital national interests, and that’s it. Anything else is playing at being a surgeon, only with a sledgehammer and a chainsaw, and leaving a trail of bloody wreckage behind us.
FlipYrWhig
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
WIN.
Do people still say that? Hopefully.
FlipYrWhig
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: I feel like a lot more humanitarian inventions would be good in the abstract. But the downside potential and the What Comes Next uncertainty are just massive. Like the old sports saying goes, we had a good team on paper, but unfortunately they played the game on grass.
kc
Cole already did that, to his credit.
Roger Moore
@FlipYrWhig:
I understand the point, and I support it in principle. But as you point out, there are far more bad actors in the world than we can possibly take on. That means that even if we choose to accept humanitarian intervention as a reason for war, we will still need to answer the question of why we should make this specific intervention now. This is especially important because our resources are sufficiently limited that we shouldn’t count on being able to fight two wars at once, so intervening in something now may prevent us from intervening somewhere else more pressing.
I think the biggest thing that this approach would say is that the only really appropriate time for a humanitarian intervention is when there’s an acute crisis. It inherently answers the question of why we need to get involved here and now (there’s a problem right now that wasn’t there before) and hopefully keeps the time for the intervention short, since it can be turned over to someone more like UN peacekeepers after the worst of the crisis is over. Limiting interventions to acute crises should also help to limit the temptation to represent every attempt to overthrow a tinpot dictator who happens to control vital resources as a humanitarian mission.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@FlipYrWhig:
My larger point is that even if everything goes peachy (for us at least) this time, and we get out of the current conflict, whatever it is, with our hands as clean as we could reasonably have ever hoped for, that fortunate event just makes it so much easier for us to run eagerly into the hellish maw of the next conflict which turns out to be ohshitwhydidweeverthinkthiswasagoodideawhataclusterfuck.
When people perform an autopsy on our flawed decision making, and ask: Why did we ignore the all the signs of trouble? How could we be so blind and stupid? The nostalgic glow of the last “good war” is a big part of this problem. “Good wars” are the gateway drug for the bad wars.
Liberty60
@smintheus:
Why didn’t more of us see through the lies?
They weren’t all that obvious at the time. I really do think that I, and a lot of other people, couldn’t concieve of lying on so vast a scale. That it was all lies, all made up tissue of fabrications, which would eventually be exposed when the WMDs were not found?
Not that it is an excuse, but Saddam DID in fact make himself look pretty damn guilty; it doesn’t excuse the CIA and inteligence community for not seeing through it- but for the average tee vee watcher, he looked like a guy who was hiding nukes.
Hypnos
I am Italian. Three million people – 5% of Italy’s population – marched in Rome on February 15th, 2003, to say no to the war. Eight to thirty million more marched in tens of other countries.
I give the war hawks credit for getting one thing right.
Non-violence does not work.
We should have burned the place down and strung war supporters upside down in Piazza del Popolo.
Tokyokie
@srv: Usually can’t go wrong with Johnny To movies. Some are over the top, but he can put together an action scene better than just about anybody around, including all of Hollywood.
Chris
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
This.
World War Two both gave birth to and blessed the MIC and security state with an aura that’s still glowing and nowhere close to going away. Along with the Godwin narrative we’ve used to define every one of our enemies ever since.
Lurking Canadian
@FlipYrWhig: What I started to realize around the time of Kosovo was that “humanitarian intervention” can always be used to justify the use of force. Just about anybody any Western power ever wanted to fight can always be portrayed as a villain who is the next Hitler. I mean, the US’ll have a hard time depicting the invasion of Canada as humanitarian when you come north to take our water and oil, but once you get outside the NATO powers, plus France and Australia, but minus Turkey, there’s enough autocratic, violent shit going on everywhere on the planet that if you want to, you can justify anything.
Milosevic was a murdering bastard, and the world is better off without him. But if he had waited until 2004 to start shit in Kosovo, the party line would have been that the KLA was a terrorist group, probably aligned with al Qaeda, and Serbia had every right to use force against the internal enemy.
Neldob
Well, just to give credit to where it’s due, Robert Scheer of Truthdig.com was against the war, pointed out the fools who were pushing it were part of Vietnam and Central American horror stories, that there were no WMD found by the people on the ground in Iraq. Also the history of the area should have caused a bit more consideration. Scheer has an article up “Dumb Wars Now and Forever”.
Chris
@Lurking Canadian:
I still think Saddam made one spectacularly good Hitler-clone. The Western-totalitarian-style dictatorship, the racist government backed by violent ethnic cleansing, the crazy militarism that led him to keep starting wars he couldn’t win. It’s still easy for me to see why so many people saw him in those terms.
It’s just that his power didn’t in any way match old Adolf’s…
There is a revisionist narrative on the right that sees it exactly this way. The argument is that it was a mistake to do what we did because the Muslims were the real threat and we should’ve been helping Milosevic stamp them out, not giving him shit for it.
Haven’t heard it from a mainstream politician ever before, but it comes up in the blogosphere not uncommonly.
Tokyokie
@Chris:좋은 놈, 나쁜 놈, 이상한 놈 is the best action film of the last 10 years. The big shootout in the Ghost Market is simply brilliant, with fenzied action all across a huge and finely detailed outdoor set, and it’s all done with meticulous blocking, tightly choreographed tracking shots and a set designed to come apart a dozen different ways to accommodate those tracking shots, very little CGI. (There may not be a single broken axis line in the entire sequence, and if there is, it’s because director Kim Jae-woon chose to do so.) Hollywood action films may be louder, but they’re not nearly as good.
kuvasz
All of them ought to be lined up against a wall and shot as traitors, just as they wanted of us.
Yutsano
@Lurking Canadian:
This could be directly related to how long you keep that hoser Harper as PM. Jeebus I’ll never understand how y’all could have given him a clear majority. And fuck Ignatieff for being such a milquetoast.
(Not getting into the NDP thing. I think Layton knew he was sick and couldn’t be PM.)
Johnnybuck
@Liberty60:
Of course he did. he was surrounded on all sides by his enemies, what did you expect him to do? Show his hand?
People actually believed that uranium was being enriched in moving laboratories, Powell actually tried to sell that shit at the UN. Never mind that he sold out his credibility as soon as he signed on with the Bush administration. I mean seriously? If you bought the WMD story it was because you wanted to believe it. I’d rather hear the apologists just admit that they wanted to go fuck up an Arab country because it might make them feel better. That Iraq2 was just therapy to soothe the trauma of 911. America just needed a dog to kick, and there was the mangiest dog of all Saddam Hussein.
And it must be true since 70% of the country supported the invasion to repair our national wounded pride. It was all about a second term.
Lurking Canadian
@Yutsano: Actually, if that fucker stays in power long enough, you might be welcomed as liberators.
Tonal Crow
Aw c’mon. The primary reasons “important” people supported Bush’s Second War were:
1. They though it’d make them look “strong” and win more elections and campaign contributions (Republicans);
2. They feared being painted as “weak on terror” (too many Democrats);
3. They thought it’d make them money (members of the Military-Industrial Complex and Big Oil);
4. They wanted to try out all the nifty stuff that our overindulgence of the MIC had bought (some of the military brass);
5. They hated hippies, wanted to suck up to Republicans, and knew that opposing the war would lose them invites to the insiders’ Washington parties and might get their countertops inspected (the press).
It’s nearly that simple.
Roger Moore
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s what Incognito mode is for.
Tonal Crow
@Trentrunner: Republicans are the Party of Personal Irresponsibility: they hardly ever take full responsibility for their actions.
Mart
I would listen to the UN inspectors on NPR saying that due to lack of trace radioactive isotopes they were 99.99% sure no nuke program, and based on their weapon inspections they were over 95% sure no WMDs. Then I would hear the Bush Admin lie about Saddam kicking them out. I would try to explain this to co-workers and then they would all punch the hippie. Recently with another group of hippie punchers the start of war came up. When I asked why no WMD’s, no Casus belli, all eight of them said they were in Syria. It really is hopeless at times.
the Conster
@Mart:
The “tell” for me was the constant conflation of Iraq and al quaeda/9.11 by everyone in the administration. When no one in the MSM really pushed back, I knew we were fucked, and the fix was in. Ugh, it makes me die inside a little bit every day, even now.
Suffern ACE
@Tokyokie: yep. For an unheard of sum of $25 million, you got all that action and when the script called for a cavalry and camels, there were actual horses and camels.
Bill Arnold
@Mart:
This was pretty convincing to me too. I didn’t march but would launch anti-war rants at anybody who might listen. That it would cost in excess of $1 trillion, 10/20 thousand American soldiers’ lives, and devolve into ethnic/religion conflict, that it would be impossible to explain the case for war to grandchildren years from then. (Wrong on the high side for American casualties, low side on cost, right on the explaining a decade later part.)
The confusing part was that Saddam Hussein was acting so much like there was something being hidden. Confusing because the GWBush administration was so obviously hell-bent on war and surely Saddam must have realized GWBush/Cheney’s intentions. Somewhat naive in retrospect. I never understood the bit about weapons being moved to Syria. Really, if you want to hide stuff why not just fly helicopters on a cloudy day into a random place in the wilderness and bury stuff and record the coordinates from a GPS unit. Also, it seemed most likely that any trucks moving to Syria were filled with loot like cash or gold or other valuables, not chemical (or whatever) weapons.
Nancy
Hillary?
Chris Grrr
@Liberty60:
QFT.
Gracias.