Anne-Marie Slaughter vs. Jim Henley on the War in Iraq: "War is a big deal. It isn't normal. It's not something to take up casually"
I score this debate for Henley, 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000-0.
Anne-Marie Slaughter:
Stop Gotcha Politics on Iraq: [Tom] Hayden's post and many other commentaries surrounding the fifth anniversary of the invasion are a microcosm of the problem with our Iraq policy as a whole. The debate is still far too much about who was right and who was wrong on the initial invasion and far too little about how, in Obama's formulation, to be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. That does not mean that those of us who were wrong about Iraq -- with whatever nuances, explanations, and justifications we might care to offer -- do not have a great deal to answer for. We do. But it does mean that until we can fix the mess we are in, everyone who cares about what happens both to our troops and to the Iraqi people should force themselves to face up to the hard issues on the ground rather than indulging in the easy game of gotcha.
I'll start by offering a metric for how to assess any candidate -- and any expert's -- plan for Iraq. The test for the best policy should be the one that is most likely to bring the most troops home in the shortest time (to stop American casualties, begin repairing our military, and be able to redeploy badly needed military assets to Afghanistan), while also achieving the most progress on the goals that the administration stated publicly as a justification for invading in the first place: 1) ensuring that the Iraqi government could not develop nuclear or biological weapons of mass destruction (done); 2) weaken terrorist groups seeking to attack us (this goal was based on false premises then, but is highly relevant now); 3) improve the human rights of the Iraqi people; and 4) establish a government in Iraq that could help stabilize and liberalize the Middle East. No policy can possibly achieve all of those goals. But the policy that offers the best chance on all five measures is the policy we should follow, in my view. And applying those measures to concrete policy proposals is the debate we should be having.
Jim Henley:
How I Got It Right: Looking Back at a Time of Justified Opposition to a Mad, Violent Enterprise: So many publications have expressed such overwhelming interest in the perspectives of those of us who opposed the Iraq War... that I have had to permit mutliple publication of this article in most of the nation's elite media venues - collecting, I am almost embarrassed to admit, a separate fee from each. Everyone recognizes that the opinions of those of us who were right about Iraq then are crucial to formulating sane, just policy now. It's a lot of pressure, so please forgive anything glib or short you read herein: between articles, interviews, think-tank panels and presentations before government agencies and policy organs I'm not permitted to mention, I'm a little frazzled.
On the bright side, and I can confirm that my experience has been similar to those of my fellow prophets, being the object of so much attention, being repeatedly quizzed by eager interlocutors on the same basic points, encourages one to distill one's thinking to its essence... the essential question: "What the f--- was so special about me, anyway?" Why did I have the sense to oppose the US conquest of Iraq when so many of our great and good supported it? Sometimes I think the other question is almost more interesting: What the fuck were those other people thinking? Alas, answers to that one are hard to come by, since understandable shame has closed many mouths. So my own side of the story will have to suffice. Why was I right and you, if you were a powerful politician or respected pundit in 2002-2003, wrong? Some guesses follow.
I'm really very bright.... I'm certainly smarter than the President, or Doug Feith, or Joe Klein. I am seventeen times as smart as Senator Joseph Lieberman. I am twenty-five hundred percent brighter than GOP Presidential Candidate John McCain.... Distressingly, there's no practical program for improvement there.... Doug Feith can't go back in time and be born to other people. But... [y]ou didn't have to be all that bright to oppose the Iraq War in advance. Heck, polls suggest that most Americans were dubious about the idea until the war became obviously inevitable. Real enthusiasm was confined to the elite media, the bipartisan defense-policy establishment and a bunch of Republican quasi-intellectuals who had spent ten years casting about for different countries to have a war - any war - with. I mean, for crying out loud, at one point our rulers declared that Saddam Hussein might attack America with remote-controlled model planes....
I wasn't born yesterday. I had heard of the Middle East before September 12, 2001. I knew that many of the loudest advocates for war with Iraq were so-called national-greatness conservatives who spent the 1990s arguing that war was good for the soul.... People without much knowledge on the subject went looking for someone to soothe a very real hurt they felt in September 2001, and the first people they ran into were raving, nationalistic morons with a preexisting agenda, clustered around the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard.
Libertarianism. As a libertarian, I was primed to react skeptically to official pronouncements. "Hayek doesn't stop at the water's edge!"... I could tell the difference between the government and the country. People who couldn't make this distinction could not rationally cope with the idea that American foreign policy was the largest driver of anti-American terrorism because it sounded to them too much like "The American people deserve to be victims of terrorism." I could see the self-interest of the officials pushing for war - how war would benefit their political party, their department within the government, enhance their own status at the expense of rivals. Libertarianism made it clear how absurd the idealistic case was. Supposedly, wise, firm and just American guidance would usher Iraq into a new era of liberalism and comity. But none of that was going to work unless real American officials embedded in American political institutions were unusually selfless and astute, with a lofty and omniscient devotion to Iraqi welfare. And, you know, they weren't going to be that.... I wasn't unduly impressed when even Tom Friedman, or even some Clinton administration hack, assured everyone that the tinpot ruler of a two-bit despotism eight-thousand miles away would and could destroy us if we didn't get him first.... [But y]ou didn't have to be a libertarian to figure out that going to war with Iraq made even less sense than driving home to East Egg drunk off your ass and angry at your spouse. Any number of leftists and garden-variety liberals, and even a handful of conservatives, figured it out....
What all of us had in common is probably a simple recognition: War is a big deal. It isn't normal. It's not something to take up casually. Any war you can describe as "a war of choice" is a crime.... Various hawks occasionally protested that "of course" they didn't enjoy war, but they were almost always lying. Anyone who saw invading foreign lands and ruling other countries by force as extraordinary was forearmed against the lies and delusions of the time...
