If one believes, as I do, that the invasion of Iraq was a terrible mistake, what implications does that have for current policy? Does it follow that one should advocate immediate withdrawal of coalition forces? Should we ‘bail out’? Is the security of the United States the one and only legitimate goal of U.S. foreign policy, now that the invasion has already taken place?
From the perspective of adults who understand that what we say has serious consequences, including death for the wrong answers, the answers are ‘no,’ ‘no,’ and ‘no.’ First, immediate withdrawal would simply be a rout, and more coalition soldiers would be killed in a rout than would be killed even in a prolonged occupation. Second, unconditionally withdrawing forces would mean nothing more than an encouragement to further attacks on the U.S. and U.S. allies. There is simply no concession that would stop the fanatics among our enemies from attacking us, and there is plenty of evidence that capitulation would embolden them. (Unlike, say, terrorists such as the ETA in Spain or the IRA in the United Kingdom, withdrawal would not satisfy them; what they seek is the extermination of the unbelievers.) Further, the resulting chaos would provide perfect conditions for the reestablishment of al-Qaeda recruitment and training camps. Third, there are ancillary goals and constraints that accompany even the most security-focused policies. If one could achieve some small increase in U.S. security by killing a million non-combatants, it would nonetheless be morally and legally unacceptable to do so. Even a moment’s thought should tell us that increasing national security is not the only guideline of U.S. foreign policy. In the current case, it is clear that every Iraqi who has assisted the U.S. would be killed and their heads mounted on spikes by the savage Ba’athist fascists and jihadist fanatics. And not only those thousands and thousands of people, but also the hundreds of thousands who would be slaughtered in a war of factions for control of the country. Our government made that mess, and now we have an obligation to bring about something that is, at the very least, compatible with our interests and an authentic improvement over what the Iraqis suffered before (i.e., Saddam and his cruel regime of mass murder and human meat-grinders).
Saying that coalition forces should ‘bail out’ is the response of those who prefer to say ‘I told you so’ to finding adult solutions to life-and-death problems.
Withdrawal is surely a proper goal. But only after something acceptable has been put in place of occupation. For citizens of coalition states, that means not reacting hysterically to every daily headline and not focusing only on the bad news. It means remembering our moral obligations. The goal is to withdraw from Iraq without conceding to terrorists, without encouraging terrorist attacks, and without abandoning those who have stood by the U.S. and other coalition members.
The above considerations do not mean that there are no lessons from this set of problems. The biggest lesson is that we should not intervene when there is no clear danger to the United States. Let’s learn that lesson. But let’s also not throw away the lives of those who have stood by the United States. There are moral limits on the pursuit of national security. That’s an important lesson, too.
Tom, I appreciate the point you’re making. The issues you raise should be considered.
On the other hand, I have to wonder: can the US government do anything to effect a better outcome, or is it just delaying the inevitable, while adding to the costs?
If the US government had stayed the course in Vietnam, do you think a better outcome could have been achieved? If so, would it have been worth the price?
Russell,
Both good and proper questions.
I do think that the U.S. government can do something to bring about a better outcome. At least, it’s too early to give up entirely when there are profound moral obligations at state, not to mention the credibility of future requests for assistance when actual national security may be at stake.
As to the Vietnam comparison, I don’t think that it is very helpful to understanding the present situation. After the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong were almost completely wiped out. The North Vietnamese Army wasn’t, and it was the NVA that carried out the conquest of South Vietnam. There is no obvious candidate for that role in the Iraqi situation. Even in the case of Vietnam, however, the U.S. government could have done a better job of getting its allies out of the country to safety.
Part of my concern is that focus on day-to-day headlines, which almost exclusively focus on bad news (bad news sells, in contrast to good news), may obscure the bigger picture. I’m hardly “hawkish” on this issue and I’m not a gung-ho triumphalist, but I do think that talk of bailing out would lead to much worse consequences than acting on the basis of resolve, willingness to take casualties in the short term (and remember that all of the U.S. soldiers there are volunteers, which does matter), and a strategic plan for turning the governance of Iraq over to an acceptable government. In short, I don’t think that the Vietnam analogy is sufficiently close to be helpful.
You mentioned “Saddam and his cruel regime of mass murder and human meat-grinders”
Have you seen this (or others like it)? I think it might interest you.
Best Regards,
KFG
http://www.guardian.co.uk/analysis/story/0,3604,1155399,00.html
The missing people-shredder
The horror of one of Saddam’s execution methods made a powerful
pro-war rallying cry – but the evidence suggests it never existed
Brendan O’Neill
Wednesday February 25, 2004
The Guardian
Forget the no-show of Saddam Hussein’s WMD. Ask instead what happened
to Saddam’s “people shredder”, into which his son Qusay reportedly fed
opponents of the Ba’athist regime.
Ann Clwyd, the Labour MP who chairs Indict, a group that has been
campaigning since 1996 for an international criminal tribunal to try
the Ba’athists, wrote of the shredder in the Times on March 18 last
year – the day of the Iraq debate in the House of Commons and three
days before the start of the war. Clwyd described an Iraqi’s claims
that male prisoners were dropped into a machine “designed for shredding
plastic”, before their minced remains were “placed in plastic bags” so
they could later be used as “fish food”.
Not surprisingly, the story made a huge impact. When the Australian
prime minister John Howard addressed his nation to explain why he was
sending troops to support the coalition, he talked of the
“human-shredding machine”. Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence
secretary, expressed admiration for Clwyd’s work in an email and
invited her to meet him.
Others, too, made good use of the story. Andrew Sullivan, who writes
from Washington for the Sunday Times, said Clwyd’s report showed that
“leading theologians and moralists and politicians” ought to back the
war. The Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips wrote of the shredder in
which “bodies got chewed up from foot to head”, and said: “This is the
evil that the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican
bishops refuse to fight.” In his recent book, William Shawcross wrote
of a regime that “fed people into huge shredders, feet first to prolong
the agony”. And earlier this month, Trevor Kavanagh, the Sun’s
political editor, claimed that “Public opinion swung behind Tony Blair
as voters learned how Saddam fed dissidents feet first into industrial
shredders”.
Nobody doubts that Saddam was a cruel and ruthless tyrant who murdered
many thousands of his own people and that most Iraqis are glad he’s
gone. But did his regime have a machine that made mincemeat of men? The
evidence is far from compelling.
The shredding machine was first mentioned in public by James Mahon,
then head of research at Indict, at a meeting in the House of Commons
on March 12. Mahon had just returned from northern Iraq, where Indict
researchers, along with Clwyd, interviewed Iraqis who had suffered
under Saddam. One of them said Iraqis had been fed into a shredder.
“Sometimes they were put in feet first and died screaming. It was
horrible. I saw 30 die like this …” In subsequent interviews and
articles, Clwyd said this shredding machine was in Abu Ghraib prison,
Saddam’s most notorious jail. Indict refuses to tell me the names of
the researchers who were in Iraq with Mahon and Clwyd; and, I am told,
Mahon, who no longer works at Indict, “does not want to speak to
journalists about his work with us”. But Clwyd tells me: “We heard it
from a victim; we heard it and we believed it.”
This is all that Indict had to go on – uncorroborated and quite
amazing claims made by a single person from northern Iraq. When I
suggest that this does not constitute proof of the existence of a human
shredder, Clwyd responds: “Who are you to say that chap is a liar?” Yet
to call for witness statements to be corroborated before being turned
into the subject of national newspaper articles is to follow good
practice in the collection of evidence, particularly evidence with
which Indict hopes to “seek indictments by national prosecutors”
against former Ba’athists.
An Iraqi who worked as a doctor in the hospital attached to Abu Ghraib
prison tells me there was no shredding machine in the prison. The
Iraqi, who wishes to remain anonymous, describes the prison as
“horrific”. Part of his job was to attend to those who had been
executed. Did he ever attend to, or hear of, prisoners who had been
shredded? “No.” Did any of the other doctors at Abu Ghraib speak of a
shredding machine used to execute prisoners? “No, never. As far as I
know [hanging] was the only form of execution used there.”
Clwyd insists that corroboration of the shredder story came when she
was shown a dossier by a reporter from Fox TV. On June 18, Clwyd wrote
a second article for the Times, citing a “record book” from Abu Ghraib,
which described one of the methods of execution as “mincing”. Can she
say who compiled this book? “No, I can’t.” Where is it now? “I don’t
know.” What was the name of the Fox reporter who showed it to her? “I
have no idea.” Did Clwyd read the entire thing? “No, it was in Arabic!
I only saw it briefly.” Curiously, there is no mention of the book or
of “mincing” as a method of execution on the Fox News website, nor does
its foreign editor recall it.
Other groups have no recorded accounts of a human shredder. An Amnesty
International spokesman tells me that his inquiries into the shredder
“drew a blank”. Widney Brown, the deputy programme director of Human
Rights Watch, says: “We have not heard of that particular form of
execution or torture.”
It remains to be seen whether this uncorroborated story turns out to
be nothing more than war propaganda – like the stories on the eve of
the first Gulf war of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait taking babies from
incubators and leaving them to die on hospital floors. What can be
said, however, is that the alleged shredder provided those in favour of
the war with a useful propaganda tool. The headline on Clwyd’s story of
March 18 in the Times was: “See men shredded, then say you don’t back
war”.
– Brendan O’Neill is the assistant editor of spiked. A longer version
of this article appears in this week’s Spectator
It seems like that story may have been a myth and I shan’t repeat it again, absent confirmation. (If I was snookered, I was in good company.) Does that change my evaluation of the regime? No. Did they execute hundreds of thousands of innocent victims? Yes; we have the mass graves to prove it, including graves filled with the bodies of children. Did they strap explosives to innocent young men and then laugh as they were blown up? Yes; we have the videotapes of top regime officers laughing and clapping as they tormented and murdered their victims. Did they hang people from meat hooks while torturing them? Yes; we have the meat hooks and the piles of bloody and soiled clothing from the victims. Did they torture people with electrically wired chairs? Yes; we have the chairs themselves. In the pitch black offices of Saddam’s secret police inside the Tomb of the Unknown Martry that I toured with a flashlight I saw the floors covered with hundreds and hundreds of files that contained the identity papers of boys and men. What do you think happened to those boys and men?
I don’t think that the above justified the decisions by the coalition to attack Saddam’s regime. I think that it was a tremendous error. But we are obliged to live with history (as a great writer once put it). We have an obligation to leave them something better than the murder machine our troops deposed. That doesn’t mean that it has to be Switzerland or Oregon, but it can’t be a regime that videotapes the explosion of young men for the amusement of its leaders.
I certainly didn’t mean to imply that the absence of a human shredder in Saddam’s arsenal would abrogate his manifest guilt in any way. The distinct horror of the regime cannot be ignored by anyone who has seen the footage of the mid-70s Baath Party meeting where Saddam consolidated his power by having assorted Zionist agents and conspirators hauled off to an end more horrible for its being left to our imagination. The fat men in the great hall sweat through their Italian suits and applaud maniacly while another of their number is identified and condemned. Saddam, piously unaffected, smokes an enormous cigar through it all.
On another note, I’ve noticed an unwillingness on the part of American “public intellectuals” to even consider allowing Iran to play a prominent stabilizing role in the future Iraq. I’d like to take this opportunity to ask you for a few thoughts on the likely benefits of an official Iranian sphere of influence in the Shia regions of Iraq. As a stable civilization, even moderately democratic, it seems to me that the Iranians could prove a unique asset in the next decade of our experiment with empire. As opposed to Turkey, for whom we seem always prepared to offer up the Kurds, the Iranians have a natural kinship with a huge population of Iraqis, and therefore less necessity for arms and terror.
I’d appreciate an airing of your opinion.
Enjoying Your Blog,
KFG
>>Our government made that mess, and now we have an obligation to bring about something that is, at the very least, compatible with our interests and an authentic improvement over what the Iraqis suffered before (i.e., Saddam and his cruel regime of mass murder and human meat-grinders). <<
BZZZT. I didn’t have anything to do with making this mess — I have no obligation to continue to pay to make it worse, except to the extent the Feds can continue to rob me at gunpoint.
Well, “T.J,” if someday the U.S. government (or that of Virginia or California or Miami or whatever) were to put you in some terrible situation that required an effort to rescue you from certain and terrible death, I’ll remember your remarks. “I” didn’t put you in that situation, and “I” would have no obligation to get that government to extricate you from the awful situation into which you’d been unjustly placed.
That’s right, you wouldn’t. Furthermore, you would be under a positive obligation not to rob from your neighbors in order to get the resources necessary to free me. You would also be under a positive obligation not to kill unrelated civilians while trying to rescue me.
This would be especially true if the means at your disposal to save me were as incompetent and corrupt as the current USG.
Attempting to save me from the USG would likely be very unwise, and would probably just get you killed too. Once the government targets you, you’re pretty much SOL. Mobility and invisibility are pretty much the only ways to stay safe.
Ah, I get it. You’re a kook. You just stay mobile and invisible, “TJ.” You’ll be safe then. Good approach. And don’t forget to take along your invisible friends, too.
Tom, thanks for a fine Adult policy. I was unsure about invasion until Feb, when Blix said Saddam was not fully cooperating. I am convinced that, without invasion, some or all of Iran/ Libya/ Iraq would have developed nukes; and used them on Tel Aviv — or else Israel would have preemptively stopped it.
Your honorable counter position is matched by adult realization of what’s possible, now.
Bush’s (the CPA’s? Bremer’s?) biggest reconstruction mistake is the lack of local elections. Cities should be electing city councils, using ration cards for now, and the city councils choosing temporary mayors (1 or 2 year; or until a new Iraq constitution; or city council vote of no-confidence). These mayors should have most of the reconstruction responsibility — controlling the money.
They could also raise money, like municipal bonds; which the US gov’t could totally subscribe to, but it’s pretty close to normal market. The point is to make Iraqis choose the priorities for spending. When Iraqis decide on the money, then they have the power, then it’s their country/ city. And there would be a new class of ‘elected Iraqi mayors/ city council members’ for the media to talk to, with, and about.
(I have more similar on my blogpost: http://tomgrey.motime.com/1082535232#261787)
Thanks for the input. And my apologies to Kevin Galvin if my post sounded like I was suggesting that he was in any way sympathetic to Saddam Hussein’s regime. That certainly wasn’t my intention.
Regarding Kevin’s question above, I’m not well enough informed to have a really interesting opinion on any possible positive role of Iran in the Shia regions of Iraq. That said, and based on my limited understanding of Iranian politics, I’d be skeptical. I understand that the Iranian state is fractured among different factions with very different agendas, so the question would be, “which faction would be likely to have the influence there?” I suspect that it would be the radical mullahs who’d like to sustain their own power at home by exporting a similar model abroad. But again, that’s based on admittedly superficial knowledge of Iranian politics.
I have two comments. First, the headline, “A Foreign Policy for Adults,” seems hyperbolic. Does Tom wish to imply that anyone who disagrees with the analysis in the post is therefore a child?
Second, Tom writes: “Withdrawal is surely a proper goal. But only after something acceptable has been put in place of occupation.” This is a reasonable statement. In general, a policy of nonintervention is probably wise, but it is hard to argue that it is a moral imperative. Some cases may warrant intervention — for instance, a very strong case could be made that the world was made better off by U.S. intervention in World War II — while others may not. Nor should we be too influenced by seemingly isolated events in Iraq — unless, of course, those events are not, in fact, isolated and instead represent a pattern of broad-based Iraqi resistance to U.S. intervention. This is arguably the case now. In short, while the case against intervention in Iraq is not clear-cut, as some libertarians would instinctively argue, the evidence is mounting, and people who support further occupation need to present stronger arguments than those offered here to justify our continued military presence in that country.
Here, by the way, is an excerpt from an op-ed by Tom’s colleague, Ted Galen Carpenter, which makes some measured, sensible points about the questions at hand.
…
Admittedly, a rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is not without its drawbacks. America’s credibility will take a hit, and radical Islamist forces will interpret the result as a victory for their side. Post-occupation Iraq could be a very ugly place, with a full-blown civil war a possibility. Those are all factors that advocates of the Iraq war should have considered before embarking on that mission. Opponents of the war warned that a U.S. intervention would create more instability, not less, in Iraq and throughout the region. Unfortunately, those warnings went unheeded, and we now face a choice of decidedly less than perfect options.
Advocates of staying the course blithely argue that we cannot “cut and run.” But a principle from the world of investing applies to wise and prudent foreign policy. Smart investors know that it is better to cut losses early rather than stubbornly hold on to an investment that has gone sour — much less pour more resources into such an investment. Those who defy that logic end up like the Enron and Worldcom investors who rode those stocks all the way to the bottom.
The U.S. mission in Iraq is an investment that has gone sour. We should cut our losses now, while they are relatively modest. If we don’t, we will likely be compelled to terminate the mission later under even less favorable circumstances. Moreover, by then we will have wasted tens of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives in a futile venture. A smart superpower should not make such a blunder.
http://www.cato.org/dailys/04-27-04.html
Thanks for Eli’s comments. The first point is well taken, but, upon further reflection, I’d stand by my headline. My point was that it’s an adult attitude to recognize moral obligations. Our government has put the lives of many thousands of people in jeopardy. We (or at least our government) have an obligation to them. It was immoral to promise protection to the people of Srbrenica and then to abandon them. It was immoral to promise support to the Marsh Arabs of Iraq and then to abandon them. And it is immoral to promise support to Iraqi policemen, human rights activists, and others and then to abandon them. To talk about “bailing out” without any recognition of the moral dimension of the problem isn’t even childish; it’s unthinkable and it’s certainly not the attitude of morally responsible people, for which the term “adults” is shorthand. Talk about “smart investors” is helpful, but it fails to mention the moral issues. That by itself raises issues of morality.