A thousand ways
With a thousand ways to win why worry about the ways we could lose
the tarbaby I have an old post which never got beyond a series of sentence fragments on a sticky (Mac OS X) which has been cluttering my desktop for months now. Finally a Metafilter thread
Iraq | Metafilter inspired me to wrap it up and kick it out the door. The war in Iraq has become a tarbaby of U S prestige and energy. I've always kept in mind my brother-in-law Al's reply last year to my question of what people in this town, who were not administration true believers, thought about the war in Iraq and its architects. He said "people see them as coming from your world" - by which he meant, notwithstanding my being just a clerk, academia. Further he said, most people think it will end in disaster. The Iraq war alarmed me. Not only from a moral/ethical standpoint of what does and doesn't constitute a just war. Which just leaves you open to being despised by 'men' like Victor Davis Hanson as being one who would sit idly by the kingdom of David as the violent bear it away. Yea and I have sat by the waters of babylon and seen it borne back and forth, so go down to the beach with your little shovel -- Victor -- and pack sand up your asshole. The thinness, transparency, of the reasons given, the tangentialness to the problem of jihadists. The vulgar browbeating of dissenters. These things bothered me. Even from a practical standpoint; of the war being fought to accomplish good objectives. Am I the only one who accounts the near impossibility of war and its limited ways of being, doing anything more cheaply - more efficiently than the universe of not war. But the people who made policy in this town are players and players are real men and real men don't negotiate they make fists  and take action.
Its not just that the Iraq war was a cooked up adventure, it might have succeeded for that. It had more to do with the fact that they -the neoconservative military policy contingent - didn't seem to understand what they were doing. They didn't appreciate the enormity and complexity of their undertaking, They over-regarded the value of technoligized military. Over-played their hand in a ill conceived march to war. They under-regarded the reality of invading and occupying a sovereign state. A few months ago I listened to William Kristol editor of the Weekly Standard on the Terry Gross show Fresh Air 18 May 2004 brush aside questions about the war: the American people not misled [because] everyone understood the true geo-political underpinnings involved ... [the costs?] defense spending -[the U S is a] Rich Country we can afford it. He then went on to call the Bush administration incompetent for losing [his] war. That which is not in brackets above comes from notes I scribbled at the time. Even if its leaders were dangerous and of doubtful character and stability. Sovereignty withdraws from illegitmate rulers - back to the people who gave it, and no where else. There was something rotten about the Iraq endeavor from the beginning, something seen in the distance between what they were saying and what they were doing. Something the Iraqi people could only come to see as a subversion of their sovereignty. The whole endeavor was not sensible and not just in hindsight, but obviously and from it's inception.
Closing of the Neo-conservative Mind One of the questions in all this is why couldn't anyone in the administration see this. Holding together let alone wholly transforming a culture comprised of three mutually ant-ethical population elements. For all the supposed intellectualism in the jerky version of dream this administration is transfixed by, there just seems to be a lot they don't get. They believe themselves immune to the possibility of failure - never let public policy be made by people who cannot be wrong. The dream they had - part of that is what you find in Naomi Klein's article in the current Harper's Baghdad Year Zero (they don't do linking, p. 43- Sept. 2004). This is the other thing you get from that metafilter thread above. Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of of a neocon Utopia Iraq was going to be the ultimate example of mass experimental social engineering a society set up on a ßpure free market foundation. This is no longer news. The Washington Post's David Ignatius, and the AEI fellow who wrote the memo the Village Voice recounted in April, have recounted L. Paul Bremmer's sense of mandate in some depth. So to has the procession of carpet bags to Iraq. Naomi Klein's contribution is to point out that this desire and need for Iraq to perform as showcase to laissez fair principles even when flexibility and pragmatism were called for undercut any possibility of success on the grounds initially outlined. That this conceptual vision was too intertwined with the fundamental reasons for this war to be cast aside to prevent insurrection and civil war. These were the fruits of victory. The money was authorized, seed money only was needed. The contracts prepared. The ideological wages of war sat in stacks waiting to be paid out. Feeding into all this was the elusive sense of destiny that hung about this administration and its camp followers like the shadow of a carrion bird. Listen to this last blast of the true believer trumpet and disparagement of pragmatism ...foolhardy adventurers head out to eradicate some evil and to realize some golden future. They get halfway along their journey and find they are unprepared for the harsh reality they suddenly face. It's too late to turn back, so they reinvent their mission. They toss out illusions and adopt an almost desperate pragmatism. They never do realize the utopia they initially dreamed about, but they do build something better than what came before.
In Iraq, America's Shakeout Moment
Considering pragmatism and wanting be partresponsible faction has no time now for the witless applause lines and not the the jeering jackdaws on left and right repeat to themselves to their own perpetual self-admiration and delight. of David Brooks' imagination. I note two recent Alternet articles
AlterNet: The Unbearable Costs of Empire and
AlterNet: War on Iraq: Empire Falls
The first article asks
is/was the United States ever able to pay for empire, a coherent campaign of wars of preemption, or even a de facto policing of the world. In many undiscussed ways this war was an attempt to spin a relative advantage in military prowess now into a more permanent advantage they knew could not afford and would not exist later. It all depended on being able to be done as cheaply as they envisioned it.
The second looks at the hollow bean that bounces on the surface of this roil.
Is the United States able within the bounds of its constituted national character able to play part of any kind of overt political empire with out changing. Without being led by a faction of men to become a different country. This is opposed to economic and moral leadership americans always believed we espouse and found expression with President Wilson in World War i and its aftermath.
An episode like the iraq war which even if in the long run settles into a more muted struggle can never be counted a success. For all ridicule that the Neo-conservatives have heaped on modern education and multiculturalism, one cannot look at the array of post graduate degrees behind this debacle unparalleled in the stunning ignorance of its approach, and ask these people to take a look at their own programs, valuations, ideos, and conceptions of rigor. And answer for what it lacks.
Thoughtlessness I want to shoe horn one last thought in here. I read a book review of two new issues of work by Hannah Arendt a while back
Arendt's Judgment | Mark Greif. The reviewer turned the piece around two thoughts: the meaning of Arendt's well-known phrase from Eichmann in Jerusalem "the banality of evil" a construct pointing a ordinariness or accessibility to evil. The other question is why Arendt continued to write and defend Heidegger after the war. Greif assigned to these a concept of thoughtlessness. The seed of adopting bad opinions, allowing them in others, and the absence of re examination. Similarly In this war It's architects saw a number of goals and a number of outcomes. It seemed to them that the enterprise could easily survive any number of partial failures, because regime change in Iraq would accomplish so many positive things. The ultimate failure of imagination, foresight,and moral sensibility, the downside to their intoxication with themselves, is that for all the thousand ways to win in this gamble. There were also a thousand ways to lose.
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