Hullabaloo

Monday, June 25, 2007

 
They'll Love Us Someday

by digby

There is a lot of chatter this morning about Roger Cohen's ignorant proposition today in the NY Times that while the Iraq invasion may have resulted in chaos and carnage it was a good idea anyway because things might turn out ok someday. It is a thoroughly reprehensible argument, but he isn't the first to make it. In fact, this has been one of the cornerstone rationales of certain elite pundits and powerful politicians for some time.

I was first exposed to it by David Ignatius when he wrote this piece of unctuous trash:

Pessimists increasingly argue that Iraq may be going the way of Lebanon in the 1970s. I hope that isn't so, and that Iraq avoids civil war. But people should realize that even Lebanonization wouldn't be the end of the story. The Lebanese turned to sectarian militias when their army and police couldn't provide security. But through more than 15 years of civil war, Lebanon continued to have a president, a prime minister, a parliament and an army. The country was on ice, in effect, while the sectarian battles raged. The national identity survived, and it came roaring back this spring in the Cedar Revolution that drove out Syrian troops.

Sickening. I wrote at the time:

Similar logic would have one believe that because Czechoslovakia is now a thriving democracy, the invasion of Hitler in 1938 was all for the best. And hey what's 30 years of human suffering? Eventually things will probably get better --- as long as the "national identity" survives.

This argument reveals something very fundamental about the way that the war hawks see this as a game of Risk rather than a catastrophic upheaval in which actual human beings are being killed and maimed and in which the everyday lives of those who live on that piece of land are affected in the most consequential ways possible. Who but the most arrogant, spoiled, pampered, elitist American could write such a thing?

[...]

This Ignatius logic is becoming more prevalent among war supporters as we see that our lame attempt at neocon nation building (which was based, as are all their "plans" upon idealistic fantasies and crossing their fingers) has failed. Therefore, they are now going to take the "long view" in which victory will be prematurely hailed because as one Bush supporter puts it: "All that matters in the long run is the liberalization Bush and Blair have unleashed."

And this convenient otion isn't confined to elite pundits. It goes all the way to the top, where the Secretary of State refers to the middle east in chaos as "birth pangs" and the president is reported to sleep well at night knowing that someday the middle east will be peaceful.

I'm a believer in looking beyond the next quarter or the next election when making decisions. But this is ridiculous. The idea that if things turn out ok in decades to come, the US will be vindicated is sophistry.

I'm sorry that Cohen is depressed that "liberal interventionism" has gotten a bad name because of the invasion of Iraq, but I don't see why he's blaming the liberals for it. Liberals have been pragmatic about the idea of humanitarian intervention from the beginning, knowing full well the limits of military power to achieve such results and only backing it where the odds were very high that it would do more good than harm. And that meant more good than harm immediately --- not in the next fifty or a hundred years. Iraq was never one of those cases as anyone above the age of 12 should have realized.

This argument makes me angry. The promoters of this war with Iraq clearly don't give a damn about democracy or freedom in the middle east. They don't even believe in freedom and democracy in the United States. They have sullied these ideals with their cynical invasion and made the whole world roll its eyes when any American dares to speak those phrases. For so-called liberals to jump on this bandwagon and whine that other liberals are betraying liberalism by failing to clap our hands and wish for ponies is just offensive.

As Matt Yglesias wrote:

The Iraq adventure was, among other things, massively costly both in dollars and in American lives. Once you start thinking about whether or not we should engage in massive expenditures for humanitarian purposes it makes sense to hold ourselves to a higher standard -- we might ask, for example, that our massive humanitarian expenditures have some clear benefits and not result in large-scale death and destruction.

No kidding. To blithely wave away the current horror on the ground and say that the death and destruction in Iraq will someday be seen as "worth it" and rest easy believing that future generations will thank us for our generous decision to invade their country and unleash hell is morally repugnant. I would say it is far more likely that they will never forgive us.


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digby 6/25/2007 10:41:00 AM |