Pandagon’s Jesse Taylor, on what he sees as the Bushies’ attempt to redefine victory in Iraq:
Here’s the thing—both sides are right. Bush is still calling for “victory”—it’s just that the standard definition of “victory” has been misapplied so many times that getting Iraqi troops trained and us the hell out is pretty much the only standard that can remain consisten [sic] until it actually happens. Victory was getting the WMD, until there weren’t any; then it was ending Saddam’s ties to terrorists, until there not only weren’t any ties, but a lot more terrorists in Iraq after the fall than before; then it was providing freedom and democracy, which has pretty much devolved to not letting the current constitutional convention fall apart without producing something (don’t put Mohammed Atta’s picture on it, because it will never be seen again); it’s also, at various times, been the “model state” theory, the “democracy domino” theory, the “staging ground for a wider military transformation” theory, and, at various points, the “otherwise America fails” theory, the “Iraq has good hummus” theory and the “Ted Kennedy’s in one of those silos” theory.
Bush wants “victory”, but like most everything else about this war, what he’s talking about and what the War Brigade wants him to be talking about are getting smashed together into a delicious, rich paste of failure [my emphases]
What is so astounding about this piece of garbled thinking is not so much its failure to recognize that there really can be many smaller victories that, taken together, make up a larger “victory”—and that it’s both possible and reasonable to separate the two for diagnostic or descriptive purposes without having “misapplied” anything—but rather, Taylor’s blatant and willful disregard for the facts, an epistemological failing laced through the entire threadbare tapestry of his piece.
First, Bush never defined victory in Iraq as “getting the WMD,” though clearly had we found them that would have been a victory—just as toppling Saddam’s regime was a victory in the Iraq campaign (which both President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have always held would be a long and difficult one).
Second, to claim that Saddam had no ties to terrorists is simply breathtaking, given his funding of Palestinian suicide bombers, his connections to both Abu Nidal and Zarqawi, Salman Pak, and his leadership of a Ba’athist regime that was itself running a terrorist state (not to mention the warnings we received from foreign leaders suggesting that Saddam was planning terror strikes). Clearly, what Jesse is so poorly trying to point out is that Saddam didn’t have ties to al Qaeda terrorists, something that the 911 Commission Report refutes, though it does say that no evidence of an operational relationship could be proven. Which means only that no documentation has turned up to verify that Hussein and al Qaeda entered into any kind of formal agreement—though it’s an established fact that they had worked together before, and that bin Laden did, in fact, meet with Iraqi intelligence.
Third, it is simply ridiculous to suggest, as Jesse does, that the Administration did not expect foreign terrorists to flock to Iraq in the wake of Saddam’s fall. Whether or not you agree with the flypaper theory (intentional), or whether you view this influx of enemy fighters as a problem for US forces (contingent), the objective fact is, the US both expected and prepared for foreign fighters to pour into Iraq to take a stand against the potential formation of a mideast democracy, though they underestimated the numbers [ed – the Drezner link points to an August 2003 LA Times story detailing how the US had been seeking another U.N. Security Council resolution in Iraq, one that would “call on Iraq’s neighbors, particularly Iran and Syria, to block the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq”.]
Fourth, democracy is taking place in Iraq; and though I worry about some provisions of the Iraq draft constitution—and will willingly declare the entire Iraq enterprise a failure if the country doesn’t come out of this with a constitution that guarantees minority rights and the rule of law—such is simply not the case, I don’t think. And again, it is not true to claim that the State Department or the military will be happy with any old “something” coming out of the constitutional convention, though clearly one of the inconveniences of providing others with freedom is that, in asserting it, they may not agree with you on every point of governance.
The point of all this being that Taylor’s strained attempt to reframe the Iraq situation as a “delicious, rich paste of failure” depends entirely upon his readers’ willingness to accept the false premises he sets up in an effort to suggest Bush’s supposed deviations. The truth is, Bush has wanted the same thing all along: a free and self-sufficient Iraq, governed by Iraqis, whose leadership will no longer pose a threat to the US by potentially providing state sponsered aid and succor to al Qaeda terrorists.
Which means that, rather than the Bushies, it is people like Jesse¹—those who continue to insist, cynically and dishonestly, that WMD was the casus belli rather than a single bullet point (for clarification, see the bipartisan Joint Resolution, and before that, the Clinton-era Iraq Regime Change legislation)—who keep trying to redefine every victory into a defeat, be it by declaring everything short of perfection a dismal failure, or by minimizing each success by characterizing it as baseline given rather than a goal actively achieved.
¹to be fair, some on the right have begun making such revisionist claims, as well.
Nah, Alan Colmes is more like the dry, blecchy fruitcake of failure.
Jesse needs to read up on Zarqawi. He is an al Qaeda terrorist. He ran an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan before our invasion there forced him out. He fled to Iraq where Saddam gave him sancuary in Bagdad, medical treatment, and then allowed him to set up a training camp in northern Iraq. But I guess since they didn’t sign some kind of treaty with Saddam that means that he had no ties to al Qaeda. Other than, you know, allowing them to set up shop in Iraq.
One more thing. Even if what he’s written was correct, which it clearly isn’t, what kind sorry fuck would describe the failure of the Presisdent during wartime as “delicious”?
Saddam didn’t support terrorism?
Two words: “Salman Pak”
Or were they training “Iraqi Air” flight attendants on that jetliner?
The bitter, angry, defeated kind. In other words, a DU-er.
I think the Left’s problem is that they’ve had to redefine failure so many times.
We failed to provoke Saddam into using bioweapons.
We failed to create a humanitarian disaster.
We failed to do a lot of the things the Left predicted would happen.
Seriously, imagine going back to March of 2003 and telling your favorite lefty that:
– We’d depose Saddam Hussein’s regime in 3 weeks
– We’d do it with less than 600 US soldiers dead
– By February, 2005, Iraqis will have voted in a fair, impartial election
– By August, 2006, the Iraqis would have drafted and accepted a constitution.
Would they have accepted those events as “success”? My guess is yes.
The left needs to find new ingredients for their “delicious, rich paste” recipe. This one tastes like burning strawmen; rancid and several years past the sell-by date.
Masterful link-rich takedown!
Don’t forget our many failures in Afghanistan:
– we failed to spark a massive famine with resulting civilian casualties in the millions (c.f. Noam Chomsky);
– we failed to get bogged down in a Soviet style quagmire;
– we failed to strip Afghanistan of its diverse and bountiful natural resources for our own pernincious uses.
God, the “failures” just keep coming and coming.
It’s safe to say that no matter how things turn out in Iraq -even if the constitution turns out for the best in terms of rule of law and minority/gender rights- and the Iraqi’s celebrate their newfound freedoms by showing their gratitude towards the Coalition forces, defeatists from the left will never accept the fact that what was done in Iraq was a positive step in the war against Islamic extremists.
As Jeff points out, Operation Iraqi Freedom is technically over. Saddam and the Baathist power structure are gone, and by the way that was done in sheer record time with the utmost precision ever seen in modern warfare. The Iraqi’s are signing up to fight the terrorists invading their country side by side with US troops. The “war” that is being fought in Iraq right now is no longer against Iraqi’s per se (besides holdout ex-baathists/Sunnis), but against the various nations surrounding it that are terrified that Iraq becomes a functioning democracy. It is no secret that Iran and Syria are pumping jihadists as fast as they can in to Iraq to slow down the democratic process. But they are destined to fail, much the way the Taliban continues to fail to stop the democratic process in Afghanistan.
You would think that the defeatists on the left would get tired of continually being so completely wrong about the actions of this administration prosecuting this war against Islamic extremists.
You would be wrong apparently.
SUCCESSOPHOBE!!
Failures?
You mean delayed successes, right?
I’ve come to think that Bush’s major problem is August.
Jeff makes a fantastic argument and, in the note at the end of his piece, makes mention of those on the right, who traditionally supported the war, that have turned into defeatists. These people are of great concern, as they are giving the Left a reason to entrench, reload and fire hyperbole filled barrages back at those of us who still think we can pull this off.
For example, reading Bill Quick over at Daily Pundit makes my freaking headache.
TF6S, you are absolutely right about Bill Quick, and quite frankly he ought to know better.
Failures?
You mean delayed successes, right?
(snicker)
SB: bed
lie in it.
Lefties have never been known to let mere trifles, like facts or truth, get in the way of their rhetoric.
Why should they change now?
Bush wants “victoryâ€Â, but like most everything else about this war, what he’s talking about and what the War Brigade wants him to be talking about are getting smashed together into a delicious, rich paste of failure
Very illustrative of the Angry Left mindset about Iraq:
1. Bush wants “victory”, not victory, as there can be no victory under any circumstance. All “victories” in this war are actually failures but the Bush groupies are too blinded by their adulation to see this eternal truth.
2. Those failures must be celebrated (delicious, rich) uncategorically and without reservation.
Jeff is a bigger man than I; I am done trying to engage these intellectually dishonest sophists. Of course, that announcement is nothing new.
Never quit quitting, tongueboy!
Let’s just stipulate, as a threshold matter, that Jesse Taylor and his ilk are cretinous jerkweeds afflicted with rhetorical incontinence who, so bereft of anything approaching social skills never mind actual capacity for anything approaching policy analysis, are forced to slap their sad little nubbins on their keyboards since nothing with actual tits will take them seriously.
Honestly, if I ever met this guy in real life, I’d take a giant steaming dump in his corn flakes and then slap him across the face when he tried to protest.
I worry more about some non-provisions of the Iraqi draft constitution, at least the draft I’ve seen. Things like actually setting up different branches of government, enumerating the powers (and limits thereon) of each, an independent judiciary; you know, constitutional stuff. This draft looks like the output of a high-school civics class project. But I am comforted by the fact that Iraqis will be able to teach their children Turkomen and Assyrian.
Iraq under Saddam didn’t support terrorism?
Jon Henke at Pej’s new site lists the statements by a famous Vice President to undercut that argument:
<a href=”http://www.chequer-board.net/story/2005/8/24/142345/243″ target=”_blank”>
But who remembers the 90s anyway?
SMG
Hmmmm…it seems like there’s something missing from this comment thread. What could it be? Oh, yeah:
CHICKENHAWKS!!!
There, now that’s better.
”…those who continue to insist, cynically and dishonestly, that WMD was the casus belli rather than a single bullet point (for clarification, see the bipartisan Joint Resolution, and before that, the Clinton-era Iraq Regime Change legislation)â€â€who keep trying to redefine every victory into a defeat, be it by declaring everything short of perfection a dismal failure, or by minimizing each success by characterizing it as baseline given rather than a goal actively achieved.”
Absolutely. Spot. On.
If your dumps are giant and steaming, you have more problems than unhinged liberals bleating endlessly.
Now, them there are some bo–na fi–des.
Only thing left is for Master Taylor to take his delicious, rich paste of failure and shove it up his arse.
This kind of government building takes time, best to take the long view. With the onset of fall, comes Sept. 11th, and all the memories of that day. plus, Iraq will have more elections in Oct., and Roberts will be confirmed. Plus, all this political funk will not be percolating along after the 100+ degree days of August end. At least Bush takes the idiotic press to Crawford, where it hotter than hell. I hope they are enjoying themselves.
Arghh! I used “plus” too much in my post, PLUS I did not preview. I blame the stupid heat
Another lefty dead ender moonbat to ridicule:
“When we came back from exile, we thought we were going to improve rights and the position of women. But look what has happened—we have lost all the gains we made over the last 30 years. It’s a big disappointment.”
“We have received news that we were not backed by our friends including the Americans. They left the Islamists to come to an agreement with the Kurds,” she said.”
Safia Taleb al-Souhail
Iraq’s ambassador to Egypt
We have now redefined victory as an Islamic Theocracy. Wouldn’t it have been easier if Reagan hadn’t saved Saddam’s ass and just let the Iranians win back then?
Suppose we read the newspapers in 1944. Suppose the articles dated June 6, 1944 had as its headline “Another 2,500 Allied soldiers Killed.†The story was about deaths of Allied soldiers via machine gun and cannon fire. Entire Allied companies decimated; bodies blown apart and bobbing in the waves. And that was it; the focus was on American and British casualties. Perhaps the follow up stories were of grieving mothers and fathers, wives and sweethearts of those killed that day. Would you have been reading the truth?
Yes, in a way.
How about a story about nearly 6,000 American Marines killed, 20,000 wounded in a god-forsaken rock in the middle of the Pacific whose civilian inhabitants had been evacuated? What in God’s name could they have died for?
If the American news media of that day was populated by the same people as the American news media of today, you may have missed the importance of June 6th which we memorialize as D-Day. And the Pacific atoll was named Iwo Jima.
Read the whole post HERE
I haven’t “redefined victory as an Islamic Theocracy,” Jim, and I don’t think the administration has, either. At least not yet.
As I said in my post, though (and I’ve said this several times now) if we come away with an Islamic theocracy, this war will have been for naught and I’ll condemn the Administration and the State Department for wasting the military effort.
But then, I suspect you don’t want what I’m calling for as a remedy under those circumstances, which is to force our imperial will on the constitutional process in order to make sure minority and women’s rights are protected, and that the rule of civil law is ascendent.
This may work out as a true compromise. And you know what a compromise is?–one that makes everyone happy.
When it came time for the Founding Fathers to vote on our own Constitution, there was nothing but argument, day after day after day.
Finally, Ben Franklin got up and said, “I think this is the best we’re going to do. Sure, we all hate it. But let’s vote this puppy in.”
I’m keeping my powder dry till I see a translation of the final document. But I have high hopes that it won’t suck–or, that it’ll suck equally as far as all the factions are concerned.
Mr. Golden at least takes the novel approach of blaming the whole thing on Reagan.
You don’t know that Saddam himself or any of his regime gave him sanctuary. Big porous place Bagdad, and Iraq. As the US now know. You have assumed this link.
Sure, Saddam allowed him to set up right under the US and British controlled no-fly zones. He forced the Kurds to be nice to him.
Is this evidence of US-Saddam collusion?
TW: daily .. the plot thickens
remeber the “brutal Afghan winter” and “graveyard of armys?” The pentagon had to get two Vermont National Guard officers to give a breif before the press beleived that yes, the army does actually train in cold weather and in high altitude.
Add in “Baghdad-grad” “operational pause” and stories about how soldiers driving north only had two MREs a day because of supply problems.
The media has completely missed every big story in the war so far, I’m not surprised they are still gloom and doom. Of course sometime in the future the dems will talk about how they were all behind the war and how well it went, compared to some crisis they are complaining about.
To casualty reports in Normandy, add stories about hillbilly armor added to underarmored deathtraps called sherman tanks.
‘Cept that Saddam was secular. Wrong enemy.
It will be judged a success by history if Iraq gets anything resembling democracy and there is no blowback for you or your kids in the form of a more virulent AQ type terrorism or home-grown copycats like in London. A much lesser success will occur if an informal Shiite crescent forms runing from Iran, Southern Iraq and Syria. This could happen. Al Sistani has been a big winner so far if you think about it.
Right, Saddam was so damned secular he sent thousands of dollars to the families of Palestinian (Islamic) suicide bombers.
Sir, you are a troll, and not a very good one.
MLD
and started to build the largets mosque in the world, and had a copy of the Koran printed in his blood, and wrote books about how he was the savior of Islam.
The whole “Saddam was secular, so, you know, no problem” is so retarded its not even worth refuting with his later day conversion to a more robust form of Islam.
All one need say is “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” and you understand all you need to understand about Saddam and AQ.
Period.
Wasn’t this “secular” Saddam, the same Saddam who had a Koran…oops, sorry, “holy” Qu’ran written is own blood?
I SAID PERIOD!
So you wouldn’t consider it providing him sanctuary unless Saddam or government officials actually set up accomodations in person for him? Medical care in a state-run hospital and allowing him and his al Qaeda buddies to have a base of operations in Bagdad don’t cut the mustard? Sure Wadard. Anyone in Baathist Iraq could take out offices in the middle of Bagdad and congregate there by the dozens plotting mischief. They didn’t need government permission at all for that kind of thing. I guess I assumed it and so did Colin Powell and the entire intelligence community.
I’ll give you a quick history reminder here, Wadard. The US and Britain did not control a damn thing in the no-fly zone except the air above it. We were stationed in Saudi Arabia and Turkey and sent aircraft into Iraq to make sure that Iraqi aircraft didn’t fly there which was why we called it a no-fly zone and not a US-controlled zone. Saddam was fimrly in control of things on the gound in nearly all of Iraq as tens of thousands of butchered Kurds and Shiites would testify if they could. That’s why we had to fight our way through those areas when we invaded again.
O….kay. ‘Cause the Kurds are a homogonous group and operate with some type of racial hive-mind I guess. Every single Kurd hated Saddam and the Baath party, no way any of them supported Saddam. Christ, Wadard, learn something about the area for crying out loud.
And yet, still an enemy. One which may or may not have had “direct ties” (you can parse that one any way you choose, it’s not germane to my argument at the moment), but had nonetheless proven a considerable threat:
(from President Bush’s 10/7/02 press release)
And furthermore, whether or not Saddam’s regime formally harbored terrorists (I believe it did), it did nothing to root them out. As the President said on 9/20/01:
Saddam chose to refuse weapon inspections, and to refuse cooperate with America in apprehending terrorists within its borders. He made his choice, and we’re dealing with the consequences of that choice now.
Waddard, you can pooh-pooh the progress we’re making in Iraq and redefine the meanings of success and failure all you like. When it’s all said and done, you’ll be in good company: all of the nay-sayers who prophesied doom in the aftermath of WWII, those who predicted the Soviet Union would triumph over the free world, and the rest of history’s losers.
Taken together, that has a rathar unsavory sound to it.
“Fourth, democracy is taking place in Iraq; and though I worry about some provisions of the Iraq draft constitutionâ€â€and will willingly declare the entire Iraq enterprise a failure if the country doesn’t come out of this with a constitution that guarantees minority rights and the rule of law”
While I certainly recognize that the conditions you specify (minority rights and the rule of law) are desirable, I think that you need to avoid easy generalizations regarding what would constitute failure in Iraq. Certainly when the United States endeavored to protect South Korea from Communist invasion in 1950 it didn’t foresee that that nation would spend the next 30+ years alternating between corrupt and often brutal one-party rule and periods of military dictatorship. Despite the obviously undesirable human rights situation, South Korea was, during its post-war period, able to field fairly capable armed forces that helped to deter future Communist aggression and on the economic front was able to provide growth and stability.
Conditions created by an imperfect South Korean political order were then able to establish the basis by which that nation would eventually become a more democratic. Had the U.S. just said “to hell with it, these folks are brutal and corrupt and they’ll never get this democracy thing right anyway” (as Jimmy Carter seemed on the verge of doing at one point), we might have risked emboldening the North Koreans to attempt another invasion, which, had it succeeded, could have resulted in a human rights catastrophe of a horrendous magnitude as the Communists eradicated those aspects of South Korean society that were seen as incompatible with the cult created by Kim Il Sung.
In Iraq we as a nation should keep the South Korean experience in mind and be willing to view the situation in Iraq as a long-term endeavor rather than as a case where we can just sow Democracy dust and then expect centuries of political and religious pathology to disappear. This means being able to deal with imperfect Iraqi actors. Such actors are more likely to see things our way if we maintain cordial relations and provide tangible rewards for desirable behavior. Finally you should keep in mind that there are more than enough folks over at the New York Times who are perfectly willing to declare this enterprise a failure no matter how it turns out…no need to encourage them.
1) We will lose Iraq…because the Left and the media wants us to lose Iraq.
2) The Iraq War will be a defeat…because Bush and the American people were shamed into submission by the Left and the media.
3) Bush will lose…because he and his supporters chose to listen to those who want the US to fail, mainly the Left and the media.
4) Bush and his supporters biggest failure will be trusting the Left and the media to not stab our military in the back.
5) The brave US military men and women will have died in vain because the Left and the media wanted them to.
6) Millions of Iraqis will perish, and it will be the fault of the US, Bush and the war supporters… because they let the Left and the media subvert the military effort.
7) The GOP will lose elections because it lost the war…because the Left and the media wanted to lose the war.
8) The Islamists will grow in power by beating the US and showing how weak and powerless the West is…because the Left and the media wants the West weak and powerless.
9) The US will lose the War on Terror, and deserve to..because it is really is weak and powerless in the face of Islam, which is what the Left and the media set out to prove in the first plance.
10) The Left and media wants the US to lose the War on Terror…and they will win because the anti-leftists let them win.
AWG:
Jeff, what makes you think we have the ability to force our imperial will on the Iraqi constitutional process, assuming that we don’t want to maintain present troop comitments for the next few decades? The insurgents are not opposed to American occupation because Cindy Sheehan encourages them, but (for the sake of argument) at least partly because foreingers are occupying their country. Turning their constitution into an American-dictated Imperial Decree would only add legitimacy to the terrorists’ cause. Imagine what would have happened if the Soviets tried that in Afghanistan? Incidentally, I liked the prototype constitution we submitted under Bremer, with its universal health care and gun control, but it had no chance of success in Iraq. I sincerely hope that the Iraqi’s see the folly in theocracy, but it doesnt’ look like it.
Some housekeeping:
Mr. Moore: Are you taking the novel approach that Reagan did not provide critical aid to Saddam in the Iran/Iraq war?
Please, no more WWII/Iraq comparisions. It only cheapens the memory of my father.
The reason Saddam’s secular government is important is that he was regarded as an enemy of the Isalmic crazies who dream of a global caliphate. They are happy that Saddam is gone and we look bad. We couldn’t have designed a war that pleased them more. The Palestinians are not viewed as terrorist by the Arabs any more than we viewed the Contras as terrorists. Saddam’s support for the families of the bombers was the equivalent of Reagan’s support for the Contras: despicable use of terror for political gain.
The Left and the Media were not responsible for the Vietnam debacle, and they are not responsible for this one either. Anyone who watched television in 2003 knows that the Media breathlessly repeated every now-disproven pro-war statement without question.
I’m actually more optimistic about an outcome than, say, Timothy Garton Ash in Stanford:
It’s an interesting take for me since my great-grandfather fought in the Boer War.
Not to mention that they weaken your assertion that the current round of post-war doomsaying in the press is unique in history.
“The Left and the Media were not responsible for the Vietnam debacle”
Yes. They were.
The Left’s leadership was working directly with the Viet Cong, Soviet intellegence and the American Communist Party to subvert the military and cause the US to lose the war (though it was already won on the ground).
Read David Horowitz. He saw it firsthand.
You might be blind, or you might be trying to blind us. But we are not blind.
By forcing our imperial will on the constitutional process, Jim, I’m not envisioning some British / India type scenario, complete with pith helmets and nabobs. Instead, I’m advocating behind the scenes insistence (only a bit stronger and more pointed than the previous rounds of such State Department pressures)—the difference this time being that we make it clear that certain provisions must be included in the constitution, or else we’ll agitate for the disbanding of the provisional government, remain as occupying powers, and start from scratch until such time as certain conditions are met—for instance, that the judiciary exclude clerics as authorities.
As it stands, though, the document they created seems to me a pretty decent piece of work; the question concerning role of Islam looks to be an interpretive one, but other provisions seem in place, at least at the outset, to prevent their overextension. Application will be key here.