The Reading Experience

Ulterior Motives

George Packer's recent piece of Iraq War reportage has, predictably enough, been met with the kind of oohs and aahs that has greeted most of his writing on our Iraq misadventure. Although it is sometimes noted that Packer was a supporter of the war--albeit based on grand moral and humanitarian motives that we are assured have nothing to do with the neocons' crasser geopolitical delusions--and has never exactly backed away from that support, for whatever reason even many people who opposed the war from the beginning find essays like this one from Packer to be "insightful" and "hard-hitting" in its criticism of the Bush war policy. Myself, I find it deeply disgusting.

Packer writes of those Iraqis who have been "betrayed" by the Bush administration. They were set up by its incompetence to take the fall they are now experiencing, led to believe their cooperation would redound to their credit and help bring democracy to Iraq. Etc. It's the same line Packer has been peddling since the war began to go wrong: the goal was noble, the execution inept. The bad people in the White House ruined his philanthropic war. As Michael Hirsch puts it more charitably in his review of Packer's Assassin's Gate, "With all of his visceral experience, Packer cannot free himself, finally, of the romance of this 'war of choice' for democracy."

According to Packer

Whenever I asked Iraqis what kind of government they had wanted to replace Saddam’s regime, I got the same answer: they had never given it any thought. They just assumed that the Americans would bring the right people, and the country would blossom with freedom, prosperity, consumer goods, travel opportunities. In this, they mirrored the wishful thinking of American officials and neoconservative intellectuals who failed to plan for trouble. Almost no Iraqi claimed to have anticipated videos of beheadings, or Moqtada al-Sadr, or the terrifying question “Are you Sunni or Shia?” Least of all did they imagine that America would make so many mistakes, and persist in those mistakes to the point that even fair-minded Iraqis wondered about ulterior motives. . . .

It's mind-boggling to me that Packer could report that most Iraqis had given no thought to what might replace Saddam, had "assumed that the Americans would bring the right people" and not acknowledge how utterly irresponsible and morally unhinged this makes his own initial support for the war--couched in all kinds of slippery vacillations about the possible dangers that might ensue--seem to be. Surely Packer, who assured us that anti-Saddam Iraqis were idealistic dreamers just like himself, had to know that most Iraqis were simply counting on the Americans to make the desert bloom, and that the Bush administration was singularly unprepared to undertake such a mission, yet he apparently based his support on the assumption that the very sort of Iraqis who now seem so naive would indeed step forward and help usher in democracy. What made him think that an invasion of a sovereign country--led by the likes of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, no less--that had no prior experience with democracy, and that was apparently going to rely on Ahmed Chalabi to bring it forth, could result in anything other than the catastrophe still ongoing? To me, his tacit support of this invasion amounts to moral dereliction of the rankest kind. At least Bush has his own stupidity as a partial excuse. What excuse does Packer have?

Did George Packer anticipate the "terrifying question 'Are you Sunni or Shia'"? Did he really believe the Bush administration incapable of "so many mistakes"? If he did anticipate the "terrifying question" but he didn't envision the Bush government's incompetence, perhaps he is only guilty of his own kind of stupidity. (Although it would be nice if he would confess to it.) But Packer has always distanced himself from the administration's tactics, as if this would shield him from blame when it all came a cropper. I believe he did anticipate the ethnic/religious turmoil that followed the invasion, yet he gave his assent to the war nevertheless, since his high ideals couldn't be mistaken. And he still won't admit that his allegiance to this brand of liberal idealism turned out to be no more admirable than neocon cynicism.

Packer's essay presents a doomsday scenario in which the United States is forced to flee Iraq in ignominy. Packer thinks this will leave those Iraqis who tried to assist the Americans in bringing stability to the country to their horrifying fate. That this is a wretched thought indeed, and that the Bush administration's actions in Iraq have been morally contemptible, cannot be denied, yet Packer won't acknowledge his own part in validating these actions. I find this just as contemptible, and the mind boggles even more loudly when Packer implicity endorses the notion that we must "give the new [surge] strategy a try." "The alternative, as Iraqis constantly point out, is a much greater catastrophe." With all the loathsome evidence of betrayal all around him, Packer continues to think we might just pull it all off after all, if we just stay around longer and inflict more pain.

In Assassin's Gate, Packer writes:

The Iraq War was about something other than human rights and democracy, but it could bring similar benefits. I wanted Iraqis to be let out of prison; I wanted to see a homicidal dictator removed from power before he committed mass murder again; I wanted to see if an open society stood a chance of taking root in the heart of the Arab world."

Well, I want to see peace on earth and good will toward men myself, but I don't think that waging war is a good way of achieving it. I don't think that imposing my ideas of benevolence on people I know nothing about is a good way of eliciting their gratitude. None of his interviewing and profiling, his pretence at providing an "objective" view of what's happened in this demented war, will ever convince me that George Packer (and Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens) is doing anything other than willfully denying his own complicity in bringing civil strife and mortal danger to the people of Iraq.

Ideological Failures

As much contempt as I feel for BushCheney, Inc. and its insane mission to Mesopotamia, I can only feel even more for the so-called "liberal hawks" such as Paul Berman and George Packer, who did as much as anyone to validate the invasion of Iraq, especially among other liberals in the political press, and who are now engaged in the most breathtaking evasions of responsibility for the ongoing catastrophe they helped to commence. Here's Packer in a 2006 interview attempting to explain What Went Wrong:

It's not just an engineering problem. There were ideological failures. A lot of the ideas were wrong. The ideas about what Iraq was and what we were going to get into and the ideas about our role, the U.S.'s role, not just in Iraq but in the world-they were wrong. People like me who were sympathetic to the possibility of getting rid of this dreadful tyranny were really in a bad position, because there was only one administration that was going to do it, and this administration had already shown some of its colors. Now, I don't think it had shown its incompetence in 2003. At that time, people may have thought this administration was ruthless, that it was monolithic in its aims and methods, but not that it was incompetent. That understanding is because of the Iraq War (and of course Hurricane Katrina was the final nail in that particular coffin). But that was not the wrap on them in 2003, and there's a bit of rewriting of history when people say, "You had to know that they were going to screw this up because of who they are." Well, that's a bit too convenient for me. What people said in 2003 in opposition to this war was not that they're going to screw this up, but rather that they're doing this for malicious reasons and it's going to create an explosion in the Arab world while simultaneously antagonizing our allies. Let's take those one at a time. Doing it for malicious reasons: I've never bought the idea that this was a war for oil. It doesn't make sense on the face of it, and that argument is in my book without being explicit. Explosion in the Arab world: not an explosion but a pretty strong wave of anti-American revulsion, and among a tiny minority-yes, they've come to Iraq to fight us, and that's something we should have anticipated. Antagonizing our allies: I've been worried about that from the start. In so many ways, this war was being undertaken at the wrong time and in the wrong way. But that's sort of the bad hand you're dealt by history.

Later in the interview, Packer elaborates some on the "ideological failures" he now concedes:

Our power is not inherently good. The neoconservatives thought it was. Therefore, they argued, we don't need Europe. Who cares if Egypt objects? Our power is good! Well, that's theology, and I was deeply worried about it from the start. Those are some of the bad ideas, and they led to other ideas, like the idea that somehow the Iraqi Shia would accept us, that they would somehow be philosophically sympathetic to us. That was a neoconservative idea in a rarefied world of a few thinkers, disciples of Bernard Lewis, and that was wrong. Totally wrong. They got a lot wrong.

"They" were wrong. Packer was "worried" about the theology of American goodness "from the start." The notion that "the Iraqi Shia would accept us" was "totally wrong." Yet he was, as he himself admits, "intellectually. . .open to hearing what [the neocons] had to say." The neocon analysis of "a deep political pathology" in the Middle East "all seems true to me today, still. Nothing in the Iraq War of the past three years has belied it." If the Shia now don't seem to appreciate our presence, nevertheless "there were many towns and cities where we were cheered" and "most of" the Iraqis were "grateful for their liberation."

In other words, the Iraq War failed because the neocons were naive, too enveloped in American innocence, not because the whole notion of invading Iraq in response to the events of 9/11/01 was inherently deranged. If Packer was "sympathetic to the possibility" the invasion might succeed, he could not really have been that worried about neocon theology, and by his very own logic, had the Bush administration shown more competence in prosecuting the war, all of these second thoughts about "ideological failures" would have been moot. There seem to be lots of things about the war that Packer, at least in retrospect, claims caused him disquiet, but not enough to make him take a step back from the precipice and warn his neocon friends their assumptions might be "wrong." The most he will accept is that he was "in a bad position," that he was dealt a "bad hand. . .by history."

The liberal hawks are very eager to blame the failure of their misbegotten adventure on the tactical mistakes of BushCheney. Not only was it "monolithic" and "ruthless," but, lo and behold, it was also incompetent! In this post at Crooks and Liars, Barbara O'Brien describes how rerunning "old tapes" of previous wars affects each generation's perception of war-fighting. According to O'Brien, much of the calamity of the Iraq war derives from the viewing of such tapes from Vietnam: Iraq was, in part, "about erasing the shame of Vietnam with a glorious victory." She worries that we will find ourselves "replaying old Iraq tapes someday." If we do, they will likely be the tapes we can see Packer recording even now. There were good reasons to invade Iraq--"getting rid of this dreadful tyranny"--but the Bush administration fouled it up. If only we'd fought the war George Packer wanted to fight (inviting our allies along in a "war of liberation" rather than a self-defensive war against WMD), things would have turned out all right. That these potential allies would have been even less willing to fight Packer's War than they were Bush's War doesn't occur to him.

Packer reveals the extent of his self-delusion (and, in my opinion, that of most of those who still won't face up to the consequences of the war they supported) when he lashes out at his critics:

. . .The left wants "I was wrong;" the right wants the media's line; and they resemble each other in the shallowness of their thinking. But this is about the war; and it's too big, too serious, too deep for it to be about whether I or anyone in my position was right or wrong. It just annoys the hell out of me, and honestly-the people who want that kind of thing are people for whom the war isn't real. It's just an argument they want to win.

How convenient. The war's "too big, too serious" to require any accountability on the part of those who truly got it "wrong." Those who got it right are so annoying when they seek such accountability! Better to be wrong than to be so "shallow" as to think that getting it so thoroughly and disastrously wrong means you ought to change your thinking on the subject.

It's pretty shameless to assert that those who want to stop the carnage think "the war isn't real." If George Packer couldn't have foreseen that BushCheney's war on Iraq would turn out the way it has, he's the one living in a fantasy world. And it wouldn't be worth arguing about it all, if his fantasy hadn't also required the deaths of 3,000 soldiers to fulfill his illusions.

NOTE Just to keep this post up-to-date, here's another bit of liberal-hawk evasion, from Jacob Weisberg at Slate:

There is, of course, no way to know what might have happened if we hadn't made these mistakes, and others. An American defeat still would have been possible with better planning, sufficient troops, realistic goals, and sound strategy. But even in this mistakenly chosen war, our failure wasn't inevitable. It is the product of blunders made along the way by President Bush and his people—and the blunders they are making still.

Always with the "they."

Cogent Arguments

Paul Berman does have a lot of nerve. After providing the Bush administration with plenty of political and intellectual cover through his stupid book Terror and Liberalism, he now tells us that jihadists "will be defeated only when their ideologies begin to seem exhausted, which means that any struggle against them has to be, above all, a battle of ideas — a campaign to persuade entire mass movements around the world to abandon their present doctrines in favor of more liberal ones." I don't recall Berman advocating "a battle of ideas" during what passed for debate about the wisdom of invading Iraq. I recall him justifying the impending war without equivocation. I'm sure the families of dead American soldiers will now appreciate that he would have preferred a "battle of ideas" rather than the actual and deadly kind.

In discussing Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads, Berman concedes that the "liberal interventionist position" (which Berman--falsely--claims is the argument he was making three years ago--false because there's nothing "liberal" about this position) looks something like the argument Fukuyama now makes:

. . .A genuinely cogent argument, as Fukuyama sees it, would have drawn attention to the problems that arose from America's prewar standoff with Hussein. The American-led sanctions against Iraq were the only factor that kept him from building his weapons. The sanctions were crumbling, though. Meanwhile, they were arousing anti-American furies across the Middle East on the grounds (entirely correct, I might add) that America was helping to inflict horrible damage on the Iraqi people. American troops took up positions in the region to help contain Hussein — and the presence of those troops succeeded in infuriating Osama bin Laden. In short, the prewar standoff with Hussein was untenable morally and even politically. But there was no way to end the standoff apart from ending Hussein's dictatorship.

A nice little euphemism, that "ending Hussein's dictatorship." Is Berman now saying that the effort to "end" Saddam's reign should also have been conducted via "ideas"? Or is he just afraid to say that he still thinks waging unprovoked offensive war on Iraq was (in theory, at least) a good idea? And what a tangle of putrid logic! We waged war against Iraq in 1991 (which of course in retrospect set this whole ongoing catastrophe into motion in the first place), but then the sanctions we imposed, although they "were the only factor that kept [Saddam] from building his weapons" then began to "crumble" and were, besides, "arousing anti-American furies" and inflicting "horrible damage on the Iraqi people." Containing Saddam only "succeeded in infuriating Osama bin Laden" (poor guy), thus the only way to end the "standoff"--created by American policy in the first place--was to terminate Saddam's dictatorship. Huh?

Berman concludes by advising us that "Fukuyama is always worth reading, and his new book contains ideas that I hope the non-neoconservatives of America will adopt. But neither his old arguments nor his new ones offer much insight into this, the most important problem of all — the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them." So the ideas that he hopes "non-neoconservatives of America will adopt" include the idea that invading Iraq was a mistake? Is this an idea that Berman himself has adopted, or will adopt now that he's read Fukuyama's book? Or is he not a "non-neoconservative"? Does his caveat that Fukuyama hasn't solved "the problem of murderous ideologies and how to combat them" mean that Berman won't adopt them after all, that the solution he supported--war--was the only plausible one available? Still is? This after reminding us that "what dominated the 20th century, what drowned the century in oceans of blood, was precisely the free play of ideas and ideologies," the struggle of which he's previously endorsed (I think) as the way to "persuade entire mass movements around the world to abandon their present doctrines in favor of more liberal ones"?

What a weasel.