#hacheyhitchensorwell
Shane Hachey on Facebook posted this excerpt from Christopher Hitchens's Why Orwell Matters and asked, "Does this sound familiar at all?".
Answer: Yes—It's why the OIF FAQ exists. George Orwell had only his own and his fellows' eyes. We have the advantage of the immutable, incontrovertible law and facts that define the Iraq issue.
#brandsfeaver3piecescounsel has been moved here.
#entreatmillercenter has been moved here.
#bushlied4bulletpoints has been moved here.
#ellemanunmovic has been moved here.
#schwarztheintercept has been moved here.
#halberstam
David Halberstam illustrates the lineage of the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq war stigmas in The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (Hachette Books, 2007) at the end of Part 7, Chapter 26: "Crossing the Parallel and Heading North":
So the men of the Dai Chi had doctored the intelligence in order to permit MacArthur's forces to go where they wanted to go militarily, to the banks of the Yalu. In the process they were setting the most dangerous of precedents for those who would follow them in office. In this first instance it was the military that had played with the intelligence, or more accurately, one rogue wing of the military deliberately manipulating the intelligence it sent to the senior military men and civilians back in Washington. The process was to be repeated twice more in the years to come, both subsequent times with the civilians manipulating the military, with the senior military men reacting poorly in their own defense and thereby placing the men under their command in unacceptable combat situations. (The title of a book by one talented young officer, H.R. McMaster, studying how the senior military had been snookered by the senior civilians' pressures during Vietnam, was Dereliction of Duty.) All of this reflected something George Kennan warned about, the degree to which domestic politics had now become a part of national security calculations, and it showed the extent to which the American government had begun to make fateful decisions based on the most limited of truths and the most deeply flawed intelligence in order to do what it wanted to do for political reasons, whether it would work or not. In 1965, the government of Lyndon Johnson manipulated the rationale for sending combat troops to Vietnam, exaggerating the threat posed to America by Hanoi, deliberately diminishing any serious intelligence warning of what the consequences of American intervention in Vietnam would be (and how readily and effectively the North Vietnamese might counter the American expeditionary force), and thereby committing the United States to a hopeless, unwinnable post-colonial war in Vietnam. Then in 2003, the administration of George W. Bush — improperly reading what the end of the Russian empire might mean in the Middle East; completely miscalculating the likely response of the indigenous people; and ignoring the warnings of the most able member of the George H.W. Bush national security team, Brent Scrowcroft; and badly wanting for its own reasons to take down the government of Saddam Hussein — manipulated the Congress, the media, the public, and most dangerously of all, itself, with seriously flawed and doctored intelligence, and sent troops into the heart of Iraqi cities with disastrous results.
#georgefwill
In Chapter 8, "Going Abroad", of The Conservative Sensibility (Hatchette Books, 2019), Washington Post columnist George F. Will relies on readily correctable, blatantly faulty premises about OIF's justification as the basis for his thesis. Excerpt:
Page 436:
Three weeks before the March 20, 2003, invasion of Iraq, President Bush said, "Human culture can be vastly different, yet the human heart desires the same good things everywhere on Earth ... freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and tactics of terror."81Page 437:
The "human heart theory" of foreign policy died in Iraq. On April 1, 2004, as the Iraq war entered its second year, Bush said, "I also have this belief, strong belief, that freedom is not this country's gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom."83 This was a justification for the invasion that was quite independent of the prudential justification — the theory that something specific, the "survival" of American liberty, depended on something particular, this invasion. In his January 20, 2005, second inaugural address, Bush said, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."84 Note the word "survival", which makes the spread of liberty a matter of existential urgency for the United States. Bush began with the idea that American liberty is made insecure by all deprivations of liberty elsewhere: "The defense of freedom requires the cavalry of freedom."85 Bush was a short step from Woodrow Wilson's insatiable hunger for world improvement. Wilson said: "I will not cry 'peace' so long as there's sin and wrong in the world."86 Bush could have learned a saving moderation from an unlikely source, Robespierre: "The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries."87* Pages 437-438 continued:
America invaded Iraq to disarm a rogue regime thought to be accumulating weapons of mass destruction. When no such weapons were found, the appropriate reaction would have been dismay and indignation about intelligence failures. Instead, Washington's reaction was Wilsonian. Never mind the weapons of mass destruction; justification for the war was Iraq's noncompliance with various UN resolutions. So a conservative American administration said that war was justified by the need — the opportunity — to strengthen the UN, aka the "international community", as the arbiter of international behavior.Page 438 continued:
It was then counted as realism in Washington to say that creating a new Iraqi regime might require perhaps two years. Washington did not remember that it took about 110, from 1865 to 1975, to bring about, in effect, regime change — a changes of Jim Crow institutions and mores — in the American South. Would a Middle Eastern nation prove more plastic to Washington's touch than Mississippi was? Would two years suffice for America to teach Iraq to elect good men?
It is perhaps unfair to say that America's nation-builders went about their work incompetently. That suggests that there is, somewhere, a reservoir of nation-building competence. But many misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere would have been more forgivable if they had not been driven by an ideology. They came from the Jeffersonian poetry of democratic universalism. If everyone yearns for freedom, and freedom is understood identically everywhere, how hard can building a democratic nation can be? Why would many US forces, or much time and treasure, be needed? If a natural — almost spontaneous — moral consensus, not power, is going to be the regulator of people and of relations among nations, then of course international politics will be undemanding.[Pages 439-441: Basically, contra Prime Minister Blair, the Middle East is unsuitable for democracy. Arabs do not have equivalent leadership to American founding fathers George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall.]
Page 441:
The question is: What should the United States do to encourage, in the words of President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, "the survival and sucess of liberty"?95 What can US foreign policy do to expand the recognition and enjoyment of the natural rights essential for human flourishing and therefore conducive to peace among nations? In moral reasoning, "ought" implies "can": There is no duty to do the impossible. The last fifty years have been a painful tutorial in the limits of the possible. This has been instruction in the relevance to foreign policy of Friedrich Hayek's idea of the fatal conceit, the dangerous belief that we can know, and can control, more than we actually can.Endnotes:
81: Bush, "Remarks at the American Enterprise Institute Dinner", 2003.
83: Bush, "The President's News Conference," 2004.
84: Bush, "Inaugural Address," 2005.
85: Bush, "Remarks on the War on Terror," 2005.
86: Wilson, The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 294.
87: Nelson, Thomas Paine, 215-216.
95: Kennedy, "Inaugural Address", 1961.
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