“The great physicist Max Planck once criticized his colleague James Jeans for refusing to relinquish his theory even in the face of facts that should have caused him to do so. Jeans, Planck wrote to a mutual colleague, “is the very model of a theorist as he should not be, just as Hegel was in philosophy: so much the worse for the facts if they don’t fit.” By analogy, one can say that the people who called for an invasion of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003—many of whom, lest it be forgotten, were liberal democrats (beyond the usual suspects in Congress, these included the current editor of the New Yorker magazine and the then executive editor of the New York Times, institutions not exactly known for their support of the Bush-Cheney administration)—were the very model of interventionists as they should not be. And, again echoing Planck, it is arguably the current Hegelian consensus that history is an evolutionary progress in a positive direction toward an ideal end state in which some form of liberal, law-based, rights-observing capitalism is, as Francis Fukuyama has put it, history’s culmination, “the only viable alternative for technologically advanced societies,” a conclusion that would almost certainly bring a smile to the lips of the members of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China. But unable to free themselves from the bear trap of one version or another of contemporary Western progress narratives, Fukuyama, his erstwhile neoconservative comrades, and many prominent activists within the largely left-leaning human rights movement, either remain entirely blind to the perdurability of sectarianism, or else imagine that—rather as Marx thought that once communism had been achieved the state would wither away—once prosperity has been achieved sectarianism will also disappear.”
Got that? I don’t think we need Max Planck in there, but it wasn’t worth my while to take him out. I think Dave seriously overrates the staying power of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China, which perhaps is not smirking quite so much these days as they were a few years ago, although you could say the same thing about the rest of us as well. I do think that, ultimately, liberal democratic institutions will prevail, but I also agree with Adam Smith that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” Autocracies, whether run by politburos, royal families, or theocrats, are likely to be with us for another century or two—which, for planning purposes, is essentially “forever.”
I’d like Dave better if he’d give a bye to words like “perdurability” and “penumbral,” which shows up later, but his main point—the appetite for intervention in the name of “democracy” on the part of both the left and right halves of the modern American establishment—is only too true. However, I’d also like him better if he’d picked Afghanistan rather than Iraq as his main talking point. Here’s what he has to say about Iraq:
“There were those within the administration, notably Paul Wolfowitz (in my view, by far the most honorably idealistic prowar voice within the senior leadership), who were genuinely persuaded that democracy would follow the dictator’s fall. There were others who allowed themselves to be persuaded of this by both Wolfowitz and those aligned with him, or by Iraqi exiles like Ahmed Chalabi and Kanan Makiya (this included not just supporters of the administration but influential liberals, like Michael Ignatieff, with their vision of the US as the global enforcer of human rights norms). Some believed in the existence of weapons of mass destruction, or, at least, that what they viewed as the inevitable collapse of the sanctions regime would eventually embolden Hussein to restart the program. Still others, most prominently Vice President Cheney, were thought to have felt that the invasion of Afghanistan had not fully restored the global sense that America could not be defied with impunity, while still others, though they were never as central to the decision making as many more hard left opponents of the war imagined, indeed thought the US had a geostrategic interest in having privileged access to Iraqi oil. And at least some believed that the overthrow of Hussein would tilt the scales toward America’s Israeli ally, by eliminating one of the Jewish state’s most tenacious and, more importantly, richest enemies, or at least unblock the Middle East logjam in a way that would be to Israel’s advantage.”
I think that’s inverting the pyramid rather grossly. The right wing wanted to invade Iraq even before 9/11 because they wanted a war. Rieff simply passes over all the lies the Bush Adminstration told about Saddam’s non-existent complicity in 9/11, the non-existent threats of his non-existent “weapons of mass destruction,” which did not upset cordial U.S.-Iraqi relations back in the Eighties, when Saddam was actually using them,* not to mention his entirely non-existent nuclear program. The “honorably idealistic” Paul Wolfowitz was one of the liars in chief, and, unsurprisingly, he has never admitted his deceit, clinging vigorously to the fig leaf that “everybody thought he had weapons of mass destruction so it was an honest mistake,” when in fact no one on the right gave a damn about the weapons of mass destruction in the first place. They just wanted an American army in the Middle East, to take charge of things, to ensure “stable oil prices” (pumped by American oil companies, of course) and to guarantee the security of Israel. The rest was jive, and the whole Bush Administration knew it, and Rieff should call them on it,
Afterwords
Making David’s case for him, as only he could, is the fortunately inimitable Thomas Friedman, arguing that it’s time to, yes, invade Syria. I mean, it’s been almost ten years since Iraq, man! How long can we go without another Mid-East war? What’s our problem? Other countries need us! “The only reason Iraq has any chance for a decent outcome today is because America was on the ground with tens of thousands of troops to act as that well-armed midwife, reasonably trusted and certainly feared by all sides, to manage Iraq’s transition to more consensual politics. My gut tells me that Syria will require the same to have the same chance.”
It seems that Tom’s gut doesn’t always listen to itself, because a paragraph or two later he’s telling us that U.S. intervention in Iraq, well, it didn’t work so well—“ Because of both U.S. incompetence and the nature of Iraq, this U.S. intervention triggered a civil war in which all the parties in Iraq — Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds — tested the new balance of power, inflicting enormous casualties on each other and leading, tragically, to ethnic cleansing that rearranged the country into more homogeneous blocks of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.” But I guess in Syria maybe it’ll be different.
Hat tip to Glenn Greenwald, who administers to Tom one/thousandth of the butt-kicking His Moustache deserves.
*But only against other Muslims, so that made it okay.
