Over at Open Left, Chris Bowers describes what he calls counter-intuitive polling on Iraq. Basically, people are less likely to say that want to leave Iraq the worse they think the situation is. But this isn't surprising or counter-intuitive at all: it's called guilt.
At the start of the Iraq War, roughly thirty percent of Americans opposed the war. Now, depending on the poll, roughly sixty percent think it's a bad idea. That means that half of those who currently oppose the war were former supporters.
This leads to a lot of guilt. It also means that many who now oppose this war still 'own' it. If there is any advantage in having been demonized for opposing an invasion of the wrong fucking country, it is that one definitely lacks ownership of this war. That doesn't mean, of course, that we're not horrified by its consequences or that we want it to fail (right-wing propaganda notwithstanding), but simply that we're not psychologically invested in its failure in the same way that war supporters, whether current or former are. Those who have turned against the war want to 'make it right', or at least, not hideously awful. Of course, often there is nothing you can do to make things right--you broke it and that's all there is to it. Given that most of the original opposition to the war predicted that a civil war is precisely what would happen, I think most of us think there is very little we can do to fix this problem ourselves (which is one of the reasons why we didn't want to invade in the first place).
So the less that people believe that we really fucked things up for Iraq, the more willing they are to leave because they won't feel as guilty. I think this needs to considered when formulating a strategy to pressure the Congress--as well as a strategy to give Congress political cover.
- Log in to post comments
One doesn't need to have initially supported the war to feel some sense of guilt for what has happened in Iraq. I opposed the war from the very beginning for multiple reasons: (a) the claims about WMD's seemed flimsy ("See this truck? We think it's a mobile bioweapons lab. We won't tell you why we think that." And Hans Blix was using our best intelligence to try and find weapons with surprise inspections, and was coming up with nothing. ) (b) Even if Saddam Hussein had WMDs, it wasn't clear that he'd use them, as he was far more rational than people gave him credit for--he was just working from different premises than your average American; and (c) getting rid of Saddam promised instability and civil war for the country. But I still feel guilty--not individually, but as part of this country--our nation having gone in there and messed up Iraq. And I'm not sure that instant pullout won't result in a far worse bloodbath, and I don't feel my initial and ongoing opposition to the war in any way clears me from the responsiblity of supporting whatever is best for both the Iraqis AND the US.
Michael,
I share your sentiment. It was pretty obvious to me how this little adventure was likely to turn out, so I was not a war supporter. However, my voice does matter in policy matters (especially since I lived in a district that voted out the Republican Congressman in the last election), so regardless of who started this idiotic war, I still own the consequences of a pullout if I advocate one. I've had talks with my in-laws, who are survivors of one of our other attempts at "helping" a foreign people to fight against oppression. They seem to remember the conversation going like this:
Us: "Go ahead and fight the communists! We've got your back!"
Them: "OK! Great!"
Us: "Well, never mind."
Them: "Wow. Reeducation camps suck."
The thing we have to remember is that the people we leave hanging are real people who will have real problems when we leave them behind. I don't advocate staying in Iraq at any price, but I do believe that we need to be pretty damned sure that we really can't clean up our mess before disowning it. My wife's family got away with a few people being sent off to camps for a while; the people who supported us in Iraq are going to end up dead and buried. I'm not sure whether that will be before, during, or after the civil war that results in honest to God attempts at genocide on both sides and even more massive displacement than we've already seen.
Frankly, given that we've been trying to fight this war on the cheap and enjoying tax cuts while we're at it, I'm not convinced that we can honestly tell those people that we did our best as we leave them to be piled up in mass graves.
Frog says we should stay in Iraq until we're absolutely certain we can't clean up the mess we've made. A few questions about that:
How certain is "absolutely"?
What makes you think the point of invading Iraq was to create a stable, prosperous democracy?
So the Iraqis are too stupid or inherantly warlike to solve the problems for themselves, in their own ways?
What makes you think we can solve the problem? You can't intimidate people into accepting you, or shoot them into making peace with each other.
Ummm... 6 certainty units? I'm afraid that will require more of an "I know it when I see it" sort of answer. I think that even if we're not going to commit more troops, we should be prepared to tighten our 60-inch American belts and send a truckload more money over there to start rebuilding double-time. Buy off the locals and try to create some semblance of order. It's a country whose GDP was around $60B before we ruined it, so I can't imagine that our salaries for Iraqi defense forces and police are as high as they can possibly go. We're shutting down and privatizing "inefficient" government businesses rather than pouring cash into a New Deal to bring about employment and build infrastructure and keep AK-47 owners busy. The fact that the "war on the cheap / free market solves everything" approach didn't work doesn't mean that we've lived up to our obligations.
What makes you think that I was gullible enough to believe that in the first place? This was clearly a move for what the Bush Administration saw as our geopolitical convenience. That doesn't mean that we should let it be that way. If we really wanted to play out the cynical "energy security / fuck everybody but us" plan, why not just kill everybody and build our own oil pipelines while we're at it?
I doubt that we ever could create a "stable, prosperous democracy" but I do suspect that with some more effort we can avoid the classic "sub-Saharan Africa tribal bloodbath" scenario we always seem so indifferent to. The sad reality is that we caused this one, so we have some moral obligation to trying to keep it from going too far, even if it's inconvenient to us.
No, people in general don't do well when the average person is poor and unemployed and living in a place where 2 or 3 well armed factions are bent on seizing power and murdering anybody who stands in their way. Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin probably wouldn't have been too successful if the loyalists had decided to kidnap them, drill their kneecaps out, and dump their corpses on a corner in Philadelphia. Are you suggesting that if we walk away, we'll get lucky and they'll all decide that even though they'd rather dump their enemies into mass graves, they'll share power with them instead?
That depends on what you mean by "solve." If you mean "create the democratic wonderland that so many Americans were stupid enough to believe in" I would say that we can't. If that's the only way we can succeed, we should just leave now. Maybe even burn some cities on the way out. If you mean "Keep the violence sufficiently in check to allow some government capable of keeping a modicum of peace to form" then I'd say we have a shot. There's nothing special about Iraq that makes it impossible to send peacekeeping troops in and prevent the slaughter of civilians. It's been done countless times in other countries. All I'm suggesting is that before we assume that they might as well all be dead if it's not perfect, we pour some more resources into the process and see if we can't at least save a few tens of thousands of innocent lives. There's a difference between a reasonably orderly country at a severe political impasse and a place where snipers regularly shoot people at vegetable markets and entire busloads of people are kidnapped and murdered. That's the difference I think we should be striving for. I don't think that murder-free vegetable markets are too high a bar to set.
People use catchy phrases like "refereeing a civil war" to imply that somehow, the civil war has nothing to do with us. It's like cries of "Go back to Africa!" aimed at the descendants of slaves. Yeah, who invited you here in the first place, anyway? We caused that civil war, so it's hardly fair to the majority of people caught in the middle of it to say, "Well, you guys started a civil war, and that's totally not our fault, so we're out of here." The Iraqis don't need democracy brought to them at gunpoint. They need law and order brought to them at gunpoint and infrastructure brought to them after law and order. They can handle their own government however they please as far as I'm concerned.
Troublesome frog: "Us: "Go ahead and fight the communists! We've got your back!"
Them: "OK! Great!"
Us: "Well, never mind."
Them: "Wow. Reeducation camps suck.""
Hmm. Something seems to be missing there. Perhaps several years of war?
Troublesome frog: "Us: "Go ahead and fight the communists! We've got your back!"
Them: "OK! Great!"
Us: "Well, never mind."
Them: "Wow. Reeducation camps suck.""
Hmm. Something seems to be missing there. Perhaps several years of war?
I'm certainly not saying that leaving Vietnam was a bad idea. I think that it's perfectly reasonable to conclude that certain situations are lost causes and we shouldn't waste any more lives on them. The point I was trying to make is that the people we're going to leave behind are real people and they will be slaughtered en masse when we're not there to protect them anymore. When people evaluate the costs and the benefits, they seem to think that the only "benefit" to staying there is the idea that we're going to bring democracy. They're weighing the difference between democracy and no democracy against the lives and money.
I'm saying that's the wrong calculation. Democracy doesn't enter into it. We're not fighting for democracy. We're fighting for the survival of the unlucky people who aren't in militias but count militias among their enemies. What we should be weighing is the total collapse of what little law and order they have and large scale ethnic cleansing--two things that will be 100% our fault if we leave. The question is, how much are we willing to sacrifice to prevent that, given that we're the ones who allowed it to start? I'm not convinced that we've done enough.
Perhaps I'm in the minority of people who saw the war for what it was, but I'm not able to wash my hands of it so easily simply because I didn't support it in the first place. It's an easy out to take, but I don't see how a private citizen playing the "don't blame me" card is any different from a newly elected congress refusing to buckle down and attack the hard problems left to it by the previous congress.
"Sure, the budget is messed up and we should probably raise taxes to cover the gap, but it's not our fault there's a budget shortfall. It was the last guys. If we had been in charge, there wouldn't be a shortfall, so why should we have to deal with it?"
...the people we're going to leave behind are real people and they will be slaughtered en masse when we're not there to protect them anymore.
you're right that they're real people and that's hugely important, but a couple of objections:
1. they're already being slaughtered en masse; we're doing a terrible job of protecting them [not to mention the ones we're deliberately killing]
2. many a pundit is saying that the violence will escalate sharply if we leave, but we don't actually know that for sure, nor is there anyway to prove it one way or the other
2a. suppose the violence does escalate drastically after we leave and lots of iraqis die in a short time. it's a horrific scenario, but is it truly any more awful than if we stay there 10 or 20 years more and that many iraqis are killed, only more slowly? it's more shocking if more of them die quickly, but not any worse.
we were 100% the day we first invaded, you can't change that. i suppose there are some americans for whom atonement for all the death and destruction is only going to be realized after a sufficient number of americans have died horribly too, but i'd really rather we didn't do it that way, especially since...
3. [a bonus] some pundits believe the violence will decrease markedly as soon as we leave. no way to prove this one either, of course, but i vote we leave. right away.
That's true, but it could also reasonably be considered an argument for a change of strategy. Given that this isn't the first time an intervening force has tried to keep warring factions from wreaking havoc on a civilian population, it doesn't seem implausible that we could pull it off. I wonder how many proponents of a withdrawal are calling for intervention in Darfur, for example. I simply don't see what's so special about Iraq that it's impossible to keep militias from running the streets.
No, I suppose not, but the stakes are rather high in either case. As I see it, there are only two reasons to believe that it won't get worse: 1) Everybody is fighting against us and the people who seem to be getting killed or chased from their homes because of their ethnic or religious identity are just a statistical anomaly (not buying that one) or 2) They'll successfully cleanse their neighborhoods quickly and settle down into a disharmonious collection of tribes, leaving the minorities displaced rather than dead. Option 2 is probably better than interminable conflict, but it's still not particularly appealing to me.
Certainly, if we don't think that we can make any progress in that time and that the results will be the same, we might as well pull out. I haven't really seen a compelling argument for that to be true, though. The question is whether or not this war is being managed as best it can be and it's simply an impossible goal. The other option, which I find much more likely, is that it's running sub-optimally just as every single one of the Bush administration's major efforts has. If I see evidence that this is really an intractable problem, I'll be more than ready to support a pull out and simply add it to the list of total policy disasters of this presidency.
This is why I support firing all pundits and replacing them with perl scripts that crawl cnn.com and fill out mad libs. Do they seriously believe that the sudden ethnic and religious homogeneity of previously mixed neighborhoods is just a coincidence? I don't doubt that a lot of the in discriminant killing started as a way of starting a civil war to drive us out and cause a failed state where non-state organizations could flourish. They've succeeded, though, and we're stuck with what I believe to be a civil war that will gladly sustain itself well after we're gone. The question for me is not whether the fighting will continue, but to what end. Will one side manage to largely exterminate and subjugate the other, or will they manage to separate geographically and form an uneasy peace with a dysfunctional central government?
A simple thought experiment: An infinite supply of troops and money would fix the problem nearly immediately. Ten soldiers for every Iraqi could easily create a police state in which nobody could even jaywalk. Somewhere between that option and a complete pull out is the minimally expensive solution to get the job done. We don't know where that is, but how sure are we that it's too high? Can we suck it up and pull it off with a combination of massive capital investment for infrastructure and expensive bribes (err... diplomatic agreements) to get other nations to help with peacekeeping?
At the very least, all of this should be an important lesson that I think the American public will carry with it for at least 3 or 4 years (maybe more!): Don't jump into ill-conceived military adventures assuming the best, don't dissolve governments and leave massive power vacuums, don't antagonize the indigenous population of a nation you're invading "for their own good", and for God's sake, don't try to make war "cheap" enough to become the American pastime. War is never cheap or fun, so don't do it unless you're willing to pay a terrible price.
"That's true, but it could also reasonably be considered an argument for a change of strategy. Given that this isn't the first time an intervening force has tried to keep warring factions from wreaking havoc on a civilian population, it doesn't seem implausible that we could pull it off."
After four years of failure after failure after failure, combined with happy talk after happy talk after lie after lie after bullshit, yes, it does.
Oh. My mistake, then.
yasasin iraq