Herbert Marcuse had some interesting things to say about certain political acronyms.
The meaning is fixed, doctored, loaded. Once it has become an official vocable, constantly repeated in general usage, “sanctioned” by the intellectuals, it has lost all cognitive value and serves merely for recognition of an unquestionable fact.
This style is of overwhelming concreteness. The “thing identified with its function” is more real than the thing distinguished from its function and the linguistic expression of this identification (in the functional noun, and in the many forms of syntactical abridgement) creates a basic vocabulary and syntax which stand in the way of differentiation, separation, and distinction. This language, which constantly imposes images, militates against the development and expression of concepts. In its immediacy and directness it impedes conceptual thinking; thus, it impedes thinking.
I bring this up because of Tom Nichols’ thoughtful piece on assessing the Iraq War. His basic point: the persistence of Bush Derangement Syndrome among liberals, academics, and especially liberal academics makes it “too soon” for a sober assessment of the war. I’ll have a few words to say about that at the end of this post, but for now I want to focus on the issue of Iraqi WMD.
Nichols argues that:
More recently, Steve did a piece in the Wall Street Journal pointing out that there was a time when almost everyone on the planet agreed that there were WMD in Iraq. (He also tells a great story about how someone in the Clinton administration, likely Madeleine Albright, wanted to engineer a military crisis with Iraq. How soon we forget.) Steve tells me that he has gotten hate mail for that piece like he’s never seen before. He’s a little surprised. I’m not.
The opinion-editorial is gated, so I can’t respond to the specific claims. But I do think this general point is, well, pretty misleading.
On the one hand, the Bush Administration’s fears concerning Iraqi nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons were at least somewhat comprehensible. Back in 1991 the George H.W. Bush administration invoked Iraqi nuclear proliferation as one of the justifications for going to war, but after the war ended most observers were surprised at how close Hussein was to acquiring nuclear capability. And, as we now know, Hussein dissembled about his programs before the 2003 war because he thought inflating Iraq’s capability enhanced his ability to deter other states.
On the other hand, the Bush Administration’s claims about the Iraqi nuclear program were simply outlandish. And they involved a ginormous bait-and-switch in which the term “WMD” played a central role. Indeed, this is a theme we’ve talked a lot about at the Duck.
Here’s an excellent piece by Roger Payne on the subject. He quotes the introductory chapter of a volume, edited by Keller and Mitchell, that he contributed to:
This semantic leveling obscures the fact that each class of weapons falling under the “WMD” umbrella varies significantly with regard to potential lethality and destructive power; the feasibility of protection and defenses; and potential missions. When dimensions of threat are blurred in this fashion, inaccuracies are easy to introduce. For example, the rhetorical flexibility afforded by the omnibus category “weapons of mass destruction” enabled Bush administration officials to support claims of an Iraqi “WMD” threat (replete with ominous “mushroom cloud” imagery) by pointing to evidence of possible Iraqi chemical weapons development. Obviously, chemical weapons lack the capacity for nuclear destruction, yet as Wolfgang Panofsky points out, “Linking these three classes of weapons in a single WMD category elevates the status of both biological and chemical weapons.”
Or as I wrote back in 2005:
… most “people who should know” thought that Hussein had some biological and chemical agents, but not necessarily weapons of mass destruction….
One can have biological or chemical weapons without having WMD. Take anthrax, for example. A state can have lots and lots of anthrax. If it isn’t weapons-grade and/or the state lacks an effective delivery system, though, it doesn’t constitute a WMD. As one of my colleagues put it (I paraphrase): “the bioweapons capability we assumed Hussein had would be very deadly if you lined up lots and lots of people in the desert and injected each of them with a syringe.”
I know that I’m making a big deal out of a parenthetical, but this is a common refrain among apologists for the Bush Administration and the pro-war crowd. I find it frustrating precisely because it hinges on accepting the veracity of a sleight-of-hand that even many of us who were ambivalent about the war recognized, and recoiled at, from the start.
Now, I noted that I would say something about Nichols’ fundamental argument. I don’t doubt that there are liberals, academics, and academic liberals who can’t stand Bush and that this distorts their analysis of the Bush Administration. I don’t doubt it because I’ve encountered them. But there’s something worn out about this line of argument.
The tell is Nichols’ repeated invocation of the readership of The New York Times as a shorthand for insecure, self-important, irrational liberalism. There’s a certain irony here, given the well-documented role of the paper — via Judith Miller — as a conduit for pro-war propaganda. A bit more liberal bias would have, in retrospect, done the paper good.
But the substantive problem is certainly more important. Here’s Nichols:
My own theory is that intellectuals hated Bush not for what he did, but for who he was. Specifically, they hated him because he didn’t care about them. It’s important to remember that many people espouse politics as a form of self-actualization: they choose political positions based on what they think those positions say about themselves to others: “I support Obamacare because I love the poor, and that makes me a good person, and certainly a better person than you,” or “I hate gay marriage because Jesus loves me more than you and I’m going to Heaven.” Sanctimony is always the dread companion of political conviction.
Bush, in going to war, clearly didn’t care what a group of professors wanted, or what they said in a New York Times full-page ad. That whole thing, in fact, reminded me of a story I heard about Jesse Helms, which I could swear was printed somewhere back in the ‘90s, so maybe it’s not apocryphal. The short version is that some staffer came in all in a lather because the Times had, as usual, dumped on Helms, and the kid wanted to write a rebuttal. Helms said: “Well, son, that’s just fine, and you go ahead and do that, but I have to tell you: I don’t read the New York Times. And nobody I know reads the New York Times.”
If you want to piss off the New York Times and the people who adore it, that’s the quickest way to do it, because it says to them the one thing they cannot bear: You did not matter in this decision. And until those psychic wounds heal, a lot of people are going to carry just too much baggage into this discussion.
It is always much easier to diagnose people as deranged, irrational, or simply too emotional to see straight (see ‘Tea Part, liberal criticisms of’) than to confront their actual arguments. Although I’m sure Nichols doesn’t intend it, this kind of dismissal also reeks of a certain old-style gender politics. So, I think a few things are worth keeping in mind:
- Partisanship certainly colored the entire debate; and
- Many academics were, in fact, growing increasingly frustrated with the Bush Administration’s apparent lack of interest in fact-based policy making; but
- The Bush Administration was not exactly devoid of academics;
- Many academic opponents of the Iraq War were not reflexively anti-war (nor were they all particularly liberal); and
- Although a number of the more alarmist claims about the consequences of the war did not come to pass, a large number of the critics’ core claims–that the threat posed by Hussein was inflated, that the war would be immensely costly, and that diverting resources from Afghanistan would not end well–were vindicated.
I’ll repeat that: the critics were vindicated. Not the supporters. Not the ambivalent-torn-between-liberal-hawkishness-and-concerns-about-the-competency-of-the-administration-and-the-timing-of-the-war (e.g., me). The critics were right. That’s the starting point for any discussion, not the dismissal of said critics for being knee-jerk stopped clocks with Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Regardless, I don’t feel qualified to judge the inner psychological motivations of people that I don’t know terribly well. I can speak for myself, though.
I see the Bush Administration as having committed a series of foreign and domestic policy blunders that, while not ranking it the worst administration in history, certainly puts it at least two standard deviations below the mean. I also think its overall performance improved significantly after 2006–even if it did botch the design of TARP in some significant ways and its penchant for appointing hacks to run organizations like FEMA turned out to be a bigger problem than anyone anticipated. It is also clear now that Bush moderated some of the worst impulse of the GOP base, such as the anti-Muslim tide that peaked after he left office. At the same time, the gay-baiting that marked the 2004 strategy isn’t going to sit well with future generations.
But all this is a bit beside the point. I think the simplest explanations are sometimes the right ones: we are, after all, talking about an administration that nearly destroyed the Republican brand. It wasn’t only liberal academics who wound up rejecting it. This isn’t about some kind of mythological George W. Bush who ignored the views of pointy-headed elites and hurt their widdle feelings. At heart, the Bush Administration made some terrible mistakes–mistakes that involved pursuing policies inconsistent with the preferences of liberal academics. Given that, there’s nothing mysterious going on here.
While I was against the war in Iraq. I marched against in London. Nichols is right about the radical academic “left” being deranged about Bush and Obama. Their opinion is basically everything ever done by Bush or other Republicans since 1967 is evil and everything done by Obama and other Democrats is by definition good. For instance I have noticed a glorification of LBJ recently by the so called radical left in US academia. A glorification that totally ignores that LBJ got the US involved in a lot worse and more costly war in Vietnam than anything Bush did. But, hey the CRA like Stalin’s defeat of the Nazis justifies any and all crimes right?
Wrong about everything, you are. See my other comment regarding your cluelessness about any bush derangement syndrome. And no, Stalin was no liberal hero; that’s just an extreme right-wing talking point and self-serving slander that’s never really been true. Even if you actually marched against the Iraq war, which I doubt, everything you said was said first and better by a host of right-wing paranoid cranks. Also, LBJ was just as reviled by liberals, as Bush later was, for how he forced the Vietnam conflict to metastasize into the horrors it later became. We do like LBJ’s civil rights legislation and Medicare and some other programs, but that does not mean we were fans of warmonger LBJ; quite the contrary. Or don’t you remember the millions marching in the streets for years and burning of draft cards, etc? Hey, guess what? Those were liberals. The same with people in 2003 marching in the streets by the millions, around the world even. We didn’t give a damn about Bush consulting us; we just wish he’d consulted reality before destroying it. Sheesh. I wish you had the least bit credibility so there could be a discussion, but you seem too around the bend for that.
Indeed. I don’t think conservatives were chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today.”
“Not enough.” (Sorry, but if you think that we should bombed the dikes, as many conservatives do, then the answer is that LBJ did not kill a sufficient number.)
Come on tell em how you really feel! Haha right on ALL counts. Conservatives particularly fanatically partisan American Republicans tend to paint the opposition as “like them.” when they’re not at all. Also they seem to be big fans of conflating any two things that “sound kind of alike…”
As soon as I read the phrase “so-called” in a comment, I know that I am dealing with a person who deals in bloviation and straw men. The flip comment about Stalin further confirms my conclusion that you have no clue what you are writing about. Anybody with more than a minute grasp of history will know that the US involvement in vietnam reached back to the Eisenhower era in the 1950’s, when the Domino Theory held sway in geopolitics and diplomacy.
Stalin has been rehabilitated in Russia and Central Asia on the basis of his defeat of Germany makes all his actions justifiable. This isn’t debatable. I lived in Central Asia for three years.
Eisenhower did not send US combat soldiers to Vietnam. But, even if he had it would not have made Johnson’s decision to escalate in Vietnam the sole moral responsibility of Eisenhower and the Republicans which is what you are implying. The Domino Theory was a bipartisan idea supported by Democrats as well. US military advisers to Vietnam were sent under Kennedy, but only reached about 16,000. There was also a considerable escalation of CIA operations in Laos under Kennedy. But, the massive increase in US military intervention in Vietnam took place under Johnson after the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964. Eisenhower did not send 500,000 men to Vietnam, LBJ did. The fact that Eisenhower provided arms and backing to the French did not make LBJ’s decision to land troops at Da Nang inevitable. I fail to see how you can place all the blame for US involvement in Vietnam on Eisenhower and completely exonerate LBJ.
1. Clearly we need a Stalin corollary for Goodwin’s Law. The Stalin analogy is needlessly inflammatory. Stalin was a paranoid totalitarian who killed tens of millions of people. There’s no equivalence with GWB or LBJ. Whatever stature he has in the Former Soviet Union is simply irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
2. If you want to understand how little LBJ “gets a pass” for Vietnam among liberals, you need look no further than the degree to which JFK’s hagiographers bent over backwards attempting to argue that if JFK had lived he would not have followed Johnson’s path in Vietnam. It is true that historians have started to reassess LBJ’s presidency by shifting away from Vietnam and toward his domestic achievements. Anyway, this would be an easier case to make if Vietnam apologists weren’t made up almost entirely of conservatives (see Tom’s own post where he claims archival evidence vindicates the domino theory rather than, say, reveals no new information about Marxist-Leninist aspirations to overthrow pro-US governments in the Third World).
3. On that note, there’s a world of difference between “giving a President a pass” and recognizing the complexity of his legacy. I don’t see the difficulty in being horrified by FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans and the ways that the New Deal was crafted to garner support from white supremacists in the South but also appreciating the fact that he, for example, created the infrastructure of the modern capitalist welfare state.
4. The problem for Bush is that the rest of the legacy doesn’t look that great if you’re a liberal. Medicare Part D was a pretty irresponsible way of implementing prescription drug coverage; there’s no question that a Democratic alternative would have produced a better benefit at lower cost. NCLB — Bush’s great bipartisan achievement — is a mixed bag. The tax cuts were a domestic policy blunder of epic proportions. I think most liberals are unhappy with the way that the Bush Administration reshaped the US national security state — indeed, the thing they like least about Obama is that he’s done little to alter that legacy. But yes, Tom is right that it will be interesting to see what gets hashed out in future waves of “Bush revisionism” and “Bush post-revisionism” and all that.
Dan,
You perhaps aren’t that familiar with J. Otto Pohl’s online behavior. Although he can be somewhat rational when he wants to be or is discussing something he knows a lot about (e.g. Stalin’s nationalities policies), his m.o. is to troll by making patently absurd claims (e.g. “glorification of LBJ by the radical left”). He’s obsessed w supposed ‘left-wing’ US academics whom he despises for reasons not worth taking the time to go into. There’s more, but I think you get the picture.
Hmmm. I hadn’t realized he’d moved into troll territory. I used to enjoy his comments. That’s too bad.
Dan – I have more to say on your response (which raises some tough issues for me), but amen and yes, there needs to be a Stalin corollary to Goodwin’s Law. Cripes.
From a slightly different point of view…
I’ve written a longer version of what I thought about the war, at the time, here.
I agree with Dan that the term “WMD” elevates chemical and biological weapons in such a way that it was easy for the Bush administration to imply terrible goings-on in Iraq. But for those of us on the technical/scientific side, there were very few open questions on that subject. By and large, the UN inspectors in Iraq felt that there were no WMD there, certainly no nukes and probably little or no chem/bio.
Further, the people who know how to build centrifuges said that the aluminum tubes could not be used for that purpose. This is a straightforward judgement: if the quality of the material and the precision of the tolerances aren’t at certain levels, the tubes simply cannot be used for that purpose. They will break and fly apart when they are spun. That was what the DOE and the DOS INR said in the intelligence assessment – I’ve pulled that snippet from the now-available assessment and have it at the link.
But that straightforward judgement was muddied up and ultimately tossed by the other agencies involved. I’d like to know more about how that happened and why. You’re discussing some of that, but there might be different answers if the investigations started from this point.
J.ottopohl. You’re just wrong. I personally know this as a fact. Just because it’s YOUR opinion doesn’t give it any magical pass from being mere opinion. I met Bush as TX governor, his wife let me exhibit my artwork in his state Capitol offices for three years, and we had a cordial professional relationship, though minor, and I respected the both of them. Yet I’m liberal politically, and far from hating Bush, I could later easily see the horrific ramifications of what Bush as prez was trying to do, as did countless liberals who desperately didn’t want to see the entire world thrown open to chaos and destruction, which later also included the cratering of the world economic picture, all thanks to Bush’s plans and actions. I opposed Iraq and Bush’s wars, and much of his domestic policy, vociferously and adamantly. Yet I didn’t think EVERYTHING Bush tried to do was evil and other accusations you ignorantly described, and as governor he was actually kind of moderate. I’m not the only liberal who felt that way. We wondered where the mildy moderate governor went and why an extremist had surfaced in his place. By far the great majority of liberals I know were like me in that it was the sad results and outcomes of Bush’s policies, that we could see developing, that aggrieved us and made us stand up strongly against our perceived shortcomings and counterproductiveness of his administration. However, I am 100% positive though that YOU HAVE A LIBERAL DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. After all, you make a supposition based on ZERO EVIDENCE, a supposition that with the least amount of effort you could have disproven yourself if you wanted to, and a supposition that BETRAYS YOUR IRRATIONAL IF NOT HATEFUL PREJUDICE against people you may disagree with but whom you do not even know. Deranged? I think you know this condition from the inside very well.
Dan- With a few days to take this in, let me suggest a couple of things.
First, it wasn’t just the GOP that ignored the academic bien-pensants on this, it was almost everybody, since the top Dems ran for political cover by voting for…well, whatever it was they later claimed they were voting for. (Before they were against it.) That, I firmly believe, stung some of our colleagues with contacts among the Dems; they really thought that academic arguments could trump politics. (Happened in ’91, too. I saw it first-hand from the Senate.)
Second, you’re making a classic logical error by noting that because the war went badly, the critics therefore weren’t irrational in their opposition, and that they are not irrational now. One thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other.
I’m risking violating a much-needed McCarthy corollary to Godwin’s Law, but to me, this is like saying that Joe McCarthy was vindicated because he was right about Soviet spies in America. Well, he was right, but he couldn’t have known that, and being right in the end doesn’t mean his position was principled or rational at the outset. Having your biases match up to an outcome doesn’t retroactively mean you were thinking clearly.
Third, I take your point about not reading minds, but holy crap, do you not remember the sulfurous nature of the debate at the time? Or notice that even now, so many of these arguments merely degenerate into “Bush lied. The end?”
More specifically, the reason I think this a lot of this had to do with a psychological block where Bush was concerned was because no one seemed to have those same worries when it looked like Clinton was going to do the same thing.
I’ll give you an example. I was at a Chatham House-rules meeting in NYC a few years into the war where there were a lot of journalists wringing their hands about why they hadn’t been more forceful in questioning the war. I was blown away, since I regarded the MSM pretty much as the official voice of the opposition. But I said: “I can think of one reason you didn’t write more about it: you didn’t want to ask Tom Daschle why he was beating war drums in 1998 but not in 2003.”
This evoked the usual outcry of protest, but there is such as thing as groupthink, and I doubt it occurred to anyone to do that “why then but not now” story. The answer is that Clinton — one of us, a guy we love, an intellectual — was okay, and dorky, twangy Bush wasn’t.
Anyway – I do take your point that all of this can’t be just dismissed as Bush Derangement Syndrome. But I think you vastly underestimate the degree to which intellectuals, and especially academics, loathe Bush on a visceral level, and cannot get past that, or at least haven’t gotten past it enough yet to have a real debate about the war. I think it’s too early to say that anyone was “vindicated” — did I mention Vietnam? — but we’re certainly not going to get an honest discussion about that from people who are now personally invested in the issue in way I haven’t seen since the debates over the nature of the USSR in the 80s.
Finally, as to the “who really believed in WMD,” if you’re not going to buy it from me, I’ll direct you to Mel Leffler’s new piece in DH, where he writes:
“Virtually every memoir makes clear that officials in the Bush administration did believe that Saddam had WMD (specifically biological and/or chemical weapons) or would soon acquire them or seek to develop them. Even the harsh critics of the war—for example, Pillar, Clarke, and Duelfer—acknowledge that they, too, believed that Saddam possessed WMD (of some sort) or would develop them as soon as he successfully evaded sanctions and inspections. Their criticism is based on their belief that Saddam was not as grave a threat as was al Qaeda (Clarke), was not foolhardy enough to hand WMD to terrorists and could be contained (Pillar), or could be removed without war (Duelfer). Pillar’s claim that fear of WMD was not an important factor shaping decision-making is belied by the memoirs of most civilian officials in the Bush administration, by high-ranking military officers, and by other intelligence analysts like Carl Ford, director of the State Department’s Intelligence and Research office.”
My experience has been that to say this in conversation is to get an eye-roll, because that’s not the acceptable narrative anymore. But it’s what happened.
Obviously, there’s more to this, but I’ve gone on too long.
Cheers,
Tom
“But I think you vastly underestimate the degree to which intellectuals,
and especially academics, loathe Bush on a visceral level, and cannot
get past that, or at least haven’t gotten past it enough yet to have a
real debate about the war”
Once again, do you have any actual evidence beyond your own prejudices? On certain Dems supporting the war, believing in WMDs, being hawkish..sure. Who’s denying that? You’re knocking down a pretty feeble strawman here.
This is a line of argument straight out of the 2003 playbook, and it’s not really that cute anymore. If you want to argue the Iraq war might have some long term beneficial outcomes then fine, do it. Otherwise, and once again, I really don’t see what your point is (And it really is just parochial whining to those of us who don’t give a damn one way or the other about US partisan politics)
I’ll leave aside the rest of your arguments about “military fetishists” and whatnot, and say only this: If you don’t give a damn one way or another about U.S. partisan politics, then you have absolutely no chance of understanding what happened between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
“Second, you’re making a classic logical error by noting that because
the war went badly, the critics therefore weren’t irrational in their
opposition, and that they are not irrational now. One thing doesn’t have
anything to do with the other.”
Let’s classify ‘rational’ opposition along two lines. (1) Saddam is not a threat, either regionally (the sanctions destroyed his military capabilities) or internationally (no real links to Al Qaeda, possible WMDs but overstated and no intent to use against the US) (2) You can’t impose western style democcracy on Iraq. You won’t be able to stabilise the country. It will lead to violence in the country, and possibly increase terror attacks globally.
I’ll come back to this later with cites to people making these arguments, before during and after the invasion. Of course you can contradict this by quoting someone yelling on a street corner, but to claim, with a straight face, that these arguments didnt exist is disingenous, at best.
The Iraq War showed, once again, who the adults in the room are, and it’s not the military fethisists and utopian warmongers and American firsters. They are the ones who produced illogical, emotion driven reactive policies, not the strawman anti war protester you seem so intent on creating
“I’m risking violating a much-needed McCarthy corollary to Godwin’s Law,
but to me, this is like saying that Joe McCarthy was vindicated because
he was right about Soviet spies in America. Well, he was right,
but he couldn’t have known that, and being right in the end doesn’t mean
his position was principled or rational at the outset. ”
This argument is back to front. A relevant argument here might be, McCarthy (Bush) wasn’t irrational to think there were Soviet spies in the US, (WMDs in Iraq) ..they were irrational in the way they dealt with these ‘threats’.
Now if you want to elaborate this argument on to the anti war lobby, I guess the argument is..they weren’t wrong in thinking it would turn out badly, but the way ‘they’ expressed themselves was over the top. Or something. I don’t know. Once again it doesnt make a great deal of sense
“I regarded the MSM pretty much as the official voice of the opposition”
With respect, I don’t know how anyone who didnt literally live next door to Bill O Reilly for the last 10 years, under house arrest, with no access to anyone else, could come to this conclusion
Bravo