August 2007

Jim Henley's libertarian argument is the best:

The real solution to the problem of repeated deployments [of US troops] and etc. is: fewer stupid wars. Fewer overseas deployments. Recognize that the “demands for the nation’s security” have inflated to the point of absurdity. Cut “defense” (read: military) spending significantly. Pull out of South Korea, Europe and Iraq, downsize the Navy and Air Force. The United States faces no existential threats. There is no nation or movement on Earth that could conquer America or compel submission from afar. Only a handful of countries - Russia, China, France, England - could do us more than isolated damage. None of them have any reason to, and even a much smaller American military would retain the capacity to retaliate massively if one tried. The most effective of the hostile non-state and para-state groups is al-Qaeda, and they can manage at best isolated successes within the United States. Preventing those attacks requires much less military machine than we’re paying for, and a smaller global military footprint will make it harder for groups like al-Qaeda to recruit people interested in attacking the United States anyway.

This will sound boastful to anyone reading it outside the US, but it's a conversation we need to have with ourselves. A lot of people here don't realize that we're the 800 pound gorilla and will be no matter how much we throw our weight around the world.

Matthew Yglesias:

Just about the only place in the United States where you saw substantial opposition to the Afghanistan War back in the day was on college campuses. That, conveniently enough, is exactly where I was at the time, so I got to participate in a lot of arguments on this subject. One thing I'm fairly sure absolutely nobody ever pitched to me was "well, don't you see that if we invade Afghanistan we're just going to wind up failing to achieve any of our key strategic objectives because the administration will divert crucial resources and attention to invade Iraq instead?"

Atrios:

That's true in the specific but not true in a more general sense. Opposition to the war in Afghanistan, to the extent that it existed, was premised on the notion that we'd go kill a bunch of people, not help the country afterwards, and ultimately not achieve any strategic goals. Perhaps no one predicted that it would be Iraq that would be the shiny new object which would divert resources, but it certainly wasn't unreasonable to imagine that for a variety of reasons the Bush administration's commitment to reconstruction and aid in Afghanistan would be less than complete.

I'm sure that in the aftermath of 9/11 most people who were less than enthusiastic about the war had a somewhat different body count calculus than those who supported it, placing a wee bit more emphasis on the lives of potential innocent civilian casualties than was allowable in our elite discourse at the time, but the point is that with hindsight it's rather clear that such people should have been listened to a bit more.

Discussions of the utility of the conflict always took a backseat to the perceived moral righteousness of it. Yes we were attacked. Yes that gave us the "right" to do "something" and perhaps something which involved civilian casualties. But, ultimately, we must look back and ask: what did we achieve? At what cost (to us and to others)? Was there a better way?

As has been the case for some many things these past years the choices were never "nothing" or "Pony plan." The choices were always "nothing" or "George Bush's plan." The failure to comprehend that simple fact has prevented members of our very serious crowd of pundits from listening to or admitting to the validity of criticism of so many things. Years later, opponents of the Iraq invasion are almost entirely absent from our mainstream our discourse even though they were the ones who were pointing out what was going wrong in real time even as the Weekly Standard cheerleaders were simply telling us that hope was a plan and that clapping louder was the best thing we could do.

For years it's been a verbal tic of many Iraq war opponents to assert "I supported the war in Afghanistan..." as a necessary prophylactic to charges of "unserious peacenik dirty fucking hippie!" The question is dangling, however... "should you have?" At the very least, shouldn't you have tried to open the door to critics who were less than supportive, not because they hate America, but because they were concerned that George Bush would fuck the whole thing up? Because it was hard to imagine that they'd actually go in and rebuild the place?

Atrios' reason seems like another version of Yglesias' reason--it's very informed by hindsight. No one knew in 2002 that Bush would screw up so badly. Some of us opposed the Afghanistan war because no clear proof existed that "terrorist training camps" were the cause of the 9/11 attacks (did they teach them to fly jet aircraft there? or how to move freely around the US?), at least enough of a cause to justify attacking a sovereign state, especially a state that fairly recently proven to be the quagmire that hastened the end of the Soviet Union. In the eyes of the world it just looked like hitting back in anger--any Muslim would do--and that's just not smart. A good leader would have convinced angry Americans reeling from the 9/11 attacks that the best policy is "don't get mad, get even." Instead of crashing around blindly with our army and failing--exactly the policy the attackers were hoping for--the plan should have been to work quietly, over time, to bring the perpetrators to justice, using espionage, commandos, the Human Intelligence that was so lacking pre 9/11: whatever means were necessary short of full scale war. We got played and the main perps still haven't been caught. Some of us opposed the "good war" because war is bad for children and other living things, some of us opposed it because it was stupid.