Friday, July 24, 2015

Iraq and Iran

Peter Beinart supported the invasion of Iraq, and regrets it; partly for that reason he now supports the deal with Iran. He wonders why others who supported the war aren't asked about it when they pontificate about Iran:
The Iraq War was one of the most important, and damaging, episodes in the history of U.S. foreign policy. The debate preceding it pitted people who believed Saddam Hussein was malevolent but rational against people who believed he might well nuke the United States. It pitted people who trusted that International Atomic Energy Agency inspections could contain Saddam’s nuclear program against people who thought he would build a nuke under the IAEA’s nose. Most fundamentally, it pitted people who believed that the only way to keep America safe was to force Iraq’s utter capitulation, via regime change, against people who preferred an imperfect accommodation that did not risk war. Sound familiar? . . .

It’s as if there are no relevant precedents (except, perhaps, Munich). Again and again, pundits who championed the invasion of Iraq—people like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer—appear on television advocating the same worldview they advocated in 2002 and 2003, and get to pretend that nothing has happened over the last 15 years to throw that worldview into question. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which championed the invasion of Iraq, can mount a mammoth lobbying campaign against the Iran deal without being asked why, given its track record, anyone should listen to it this time. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in 2002 told Congress that “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is … advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons” and that “If you take out … Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” can appear on Sunday show after Sunday show smugly lecturing the host about the state of Iran’s nuclear program and the Iran deal’s implications for the Middle East without having his earlier comments read back to him.
As Obama has long said, ending the war was a small thing compared to ending the attitudes that led to the war.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm surprised the containment of the Soviets is not more often brought up as a successful strategy to be copied in a case like Iran. Leftists tend to think of containment as an abomination, since it involved things like Vietnam, CIA coups everywhere, and so on, but it's worth remembering that the most important opposition to it at the time came from rightists who thought containment was a spineless, Munich-like sellout to tyranny. At the time, containment was actually the moderate policy.

G. Verloren said...

"It’s as if there are no relevant precedents (except, perhaps, Munich). Again and again, pundits who championed the invasion of Iraq—people like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer—appear on television advocating the same worldview they advocated in 2002 and 2003, and get to pretend that nothing has happened over the last 15 years to throw that worldview into question."

A worryingly large portion of the US population is fundamentally irrational. They believe what they believe, and no amount of evidence contrary to those beliefs can sway them - they view such evidence as malicious fabrications by their "enemies", whose dissent is seen as proof of their being wicked and evil.

Sanity is in startlingly short supply in America these days, largely supplanted by "Faith". I mean that entirely literally. The trend in thinking is that if you just believe something hard enough, it miraculously becomes true - and if that level of magical thinking and disconnect from reality isn't textbook insanity, I don't know what is.