I told you so. -- SPEAK UP

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Date Posted: 13:23:17 03/21/03 Fri
Author: Arkady
Author Host/IP: NoHost / 148.183.241.15
Subject: I told you so.

There seems to be a lot of "told you so's" coming from the right, in light of how well the war in Iraq is supposedly going.

First, let me just point out that we will have no idea how well the war is actually going for some time, since there are absolutely no circumstances under which the US government would allow a picture to form that the war was going poorly. Regardless of how well or poorly it goes, it is in the US's best interest to create the impression among Iraqis that it's an amazing success, because it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we have to falsify footage of Iraqis surrendering, lie about how quick our forces are moving, delay information about planes being shot down, suppress images of dead civilians, etc., then it would make a fair amount of strategic sense to do so. After all, when the enemy is thought to be teetering on the brink of despair and mass surrender, you want him to think you're an overwhelming force against which resistance is a wasted effort.

Anyway, even assuming the war is going well (which I assume it is), I fail to see how this supports the views the hawks have been hanging their arguments on. After all, it was the doves who were saying the threat posed by Hussein was overstated. The whole trigger for war rested on the question of whether Hussein was really disarming, or whether he was actually becoming stronger, creating an increasing risk to his neighbors and the US. If the US met stiff resistance in the field, with the battle going much worse than in Desert Storm, and Hussein's neighbors came under massive long-range rocket attacks, with biological and chemical weapons, THAT would have been a stronger support for the hawkish position that the sanctions, containment, and disarmament had not been working. If, on the other hand, Iraq collapses like a house of cards, it undermines the hawkish position that Iraq was a clear and present danger, a serious, growing threat, requiring invasion with or without the legally required Resolution.

In the bigger picture, too, a war that went poorly would seem to bolster the right-wing notions that Clinton had let our military fall to pieces. Instead, using a military that is still essentially a legacy from Clinton, we cleaned up in Afghanistan with little loss of American life, and we appear to be rolling to Baghdad quite smoothly (if you believe the official version of events thus far). That seems to suggest that, even with Bush having scattered our forces around the world in various nation-building and peacekeeping exercises (including the Phillipines and Afghanistan), and even without meaningful troop support from most of our key military allies, our legacy military was still more than up to the task of taking on Iraq. If anything, that argues that the Clintonian military-spending levels were sufficient for our purposes, and the $100B-$150B extra we're now spending is essentially corporate welfare for the defense industry, and pork-barrel spending for military dstricts.

Anyway, the tougher questions about who was right and who was wrong will not be answered for years to come. The typical anti-war message was that, even if the war wouldn't be a Vietnam-style quagmire, its long-term negative side-effects would be far worse than leaving the status quo in place. The real question is whether we're going to make violent anti-Americanism worse, alienate the allies whose cooperation we need, and destabilize the pro-American countries of the Middle East. From that perspective, the Iraq conflict is, at most, a little battle in the War on Terrorism, and we have no idea what effect it might have on the War as a whole. Just look at the first Gulf War -- it took us years before some of the negative by-products of that conflict became evident (such as the US presence in the holy land leading to the 9/11 attacks). It may be a similar length of time before we can say whether the hawks or the doves were right about this conflict.

In the end, I guess "I told you so" is a predictable reaction from right-wingers right now, but it sure isn't a very sensible one.

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Replies:

Re: I told you so. -- Okie, 14:00:01 03/21/03 Fri