The dirty little (but open) secret is that people like Jonah Goldberg never really cared for all the finer points of the case for or against war, all the geopolitical calculations. They wanted blood and revenge for the attacks of 9/11 and the people of Iraq and Afghanistan were merely the most convenient targets for their bloodlust. In a macabre way we are fortunate, despite the barbarism of his views, to have people like Goldberg because he moves around in the circles of influential opinion makers, and he often reveals what they say in limited circles and might prefer not to have repeated to a broader public. He is like a child who blurts out to visitors the unflattering things his parents said about them just before their arrival, causing red-faced embarrassment all around.
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The pro-war agitators other attempt at rewriting history is to say that the people who opposed the war were partisan simpletons who were against anything that Bush did, while supporting the wars that Democrats started. This is blatantly false as Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo has repeatedly pointed out.

Raimondo delivers a blistering dissection of the phony apologias of these once cock-a-hoop warmongers, such as that they were right to support the war but that they were let down by the incompetence in executing it. They now call for more troops, firing Donald Rumsfeld, or other tactical changes, without conceding that the invasion of Iraq was a massive strategic blunder and that the current debacle followed inexorably from it.

In the veritable tsunami of recantations and recriminations pouring out of former supporters of the war, from Francis Fukuyama to various Republican members of Congress, there is one constant theme: Don’t blame us! Who knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction? No one could have known about the rise of the insurgency. Nobody told us!

The only proper answer to this is: Poppycock!
. . .
America’s looming defeat in Iraq was easily predictable: after all, the British, the Turks, the Ottomans, and, further back, the Romans, the Persians, the Mongols, and the Macedonians under Alexander the Great had all been driven out of Mesopotamia, some quicker than others. Why did anyone think the Americans would be the exception?
. . .
If only we knew then what we know now” – that’s the mantra we’re hearing from the excuse-makers, Democrats as well as Republicans and repentant neocons, now that the truth about this rotten war is out there in the open, plain enough for even the willfully blind to see. Well, I’m not buying it. There were plenty of indications that the “intelligence” cooked up by the neocons was faked, but nobody in Washington wanted to hear it.

Raimondo takes to task warmonger Andrew Sullivan who, like Jonah Goldberg and Francis Fukuyama, has now come to the same realization that his prior support for Iraq war was a mistake, not because it was the wrong thing to do in principle, but because he misjudged the competence of the Bush administration in implementing it.

Sullivan’s appeal to the “incompetence” angle shows that there is no shame, no real remorse, for having led us all down the garden path: according to his lights, he was right, in principle – it was only in the execution that the administration got it all wrong. Instead of regretting that we ever sent our troops into the Iraqi maelstrom, Andrew opines that we sent too few.

The fact is that many who opposed the war made a much more fundamental claim, that a “preventive war” was illegal and immoral, that Iraq had neither attacked nor threatened to attack the US, and thus there was no grounds for attacking it.

The fact also remains that many of the reasons for invading Iraq were base and shameful and the current attempts at rewriting history should be exposed. Take for example, another example from war enthusiast Jonah Goldberg. He wrote recently: “The failure to find weapons of mass destruction is a side issue. The WMD fiasco was a global intelligence failure, but calling Saddam Hussein’s bluff after 9/11 was the right thing to do.”

Really? WMDs were a side issue? Who would have guessed? Where was he during all of 2002 and 2003 when that was constantly given as the rationale for the war, in press conference after press conference, and then echoed in talk show after talk show? What about all the images of mushroom clouds billowing all over the world? And what exactly was Saddam Hussein’s ‘bluff’ that Goldberg is referring to? He doesn’t say. Does he think war is like a card game? Does he think the 600,000 Iraqi lives lost in this war are just so many poker chips?

Goldberg then goes on to further castigate the antiwar activists for their supposed naivete:

Those who say that it’s not the central front in the war on terror are in a worse state of denial than they think Bush is in. Of course it’s the central front in the war on terror. That it has become so is a valid criticism of Bush, but it’s also strong reason for seeing our Iraqi intervention through. If we pull out precipitously, jihadism will open a franchise in Iraq and gain steam around the world, and the U.S. will be weakened. (my emphasis)

His statement that “If we pull out precipitously, jihadism will open a franchise in Iraq and gain steam around the world, and the U.S. will be weakened” is another one of those sweeping generalizations which are pure fancy with no empirical basis. When the British withdrew from India, did the Indians start marauding the streets of London? When the US withdrew from Vietnam and Lebanon, did the people of those countries roam around the world, wreaking havoc? When the people of Afghanistan drove out the Soviet Union, did they follow them to Moscow? As is usually the case, when an occupying force has been driven out, the people of those countries go back about their own business.

Goldberg gives merely a casual acknowledgment to the fact that thanks to this unnecessary war, the Iraqi people are dying in their hundreds of thousands, and are now the victims of their country becoming a magnet for violent extremists and a battlefield for warring factions that he himself acknowledges was never the case before. He seems to think its quite ok for the US to have made Iraq a “central front in the war on terror.” Who cares what tragedy it has created for the Iraqi people? For these ‘hardheaded political realists’ with their grand geopolitical calculations, it does not matter if hundreds of thousands of people are killed and the remainder live in constant terror because of the violence and instability that has been unleashed by their actions.

As long as the deaths happen elsewhere to people they don’t know, they can sleep well at night, blissfully dreaming of future wars that they can advocate.

The best indicator that the current Iraq policy has failed is that in the US, many former gung-ho and giddy war advocates have now decided that the war was a mistake and are now desperately casting around for excuses and planning where to lay the blame. And as they do, the policy itself descends into incoherence as people start making different claims about the causes for the war, the current status, and the reasons for the setbacks.
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Recently the ceasefire between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tiger separatist rebels (the official name being the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or LTTE) broke down and there has been a rapid escalation of violence with large numbers of casualties on both sides and, inevitably, civilians bearing the brunt of it and being forced to flee their homes.

The US government has been trying to get the warring parties to desist from fighting and get back to the negotiating table, and two senior State Department officials have gone to the region to try and move the negotiation process along.

The United States has said that it strongly supported peace talks between Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers as there was no military solution for the conflict in the island nation.
But the US also asserted that it would not deal with the rebels who use reprehensible and bloody tactics to kill innocent people.

“We believe that there is no military solution for this kind, and we are strong supporters of negotiations,” Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns told a round table of South Asian journalists.

Meanwhile Richard Boucher, US Assistant Secretary of State for Central and South Asian Affairs, said that “hostilities must cease and both sides need to exercise maximum restraint.” He went on:

“We are pleased that the government and the LTTE are committed to peace talks to go to Geneva and to begin discussions again.”

“We think it is important to discuss all the issues. It is also important to begin a process that can lead to a serious negotiation, and eventually, to a political solution with legitimate interest of all the communities: of Tamils, Muslims of Sinhalese,” Mr. Richard Boucher told the press.

“It can be accommodated with a unitary Sri Lanka.”

Accepting that a military solution was not likely to occur shows a sense of realism, and encouraging talks and negotiations are worthy goals. The reason I highlight them is because the Tamil Tigers have been designated by the US State Department as a terrorist organization. Hence these actions seem to be in contradiction with the oft-stated US government policy of never negotiating with terrorists or with so-called state sponsors of terrorism.

I have never agreed with that policy. You should be willing to talk with anybody because that is the only way you get to understand your opponents and it may even lead to a non-violent solution.

But it looks like the US policy applies only to selected groups of terrorists. Or perhaps the US government does not talk to certain ‘terrorists’ not out of any lofty principle, but because it serves their own political interests.

POST SCRIPT: Privacy? We don’t need no stinkin’ privacy!

Here’s a wonderful and short animated cartoon about the NSA wiretapping of phones.

Some time ago I wrote about the laughably feeble attempts to portray George Bush as some sort of intellectual giant. I mentioned John Hinderaker who had written: “It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.”

Now White House press secretary Tony Snow tries to better Hinderaker. The New York Times, reporting on a speech he gave quotes him about his boss, says: On the intellectual acumen of his boss: “He reminds me of one of those guys at the gym who plays about 40 chessboards at once.”
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(See part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.)
In the part 4previous post I stated that peer-reviewed papers have prima facie credibility and if you want to challenge their veracity, the burden shifts to you to do so. If you want to discredit it, you have to produce contrary data or detect a serious flaw in the methodology, or show that there has been an error in the calculation.

None of these things has been done, at least as far as I have seen. All that the people condemning the study have said is that they do not believe it. I wonder if they have even read the study before condemning it. Take for example, this report from Norman Solomon, about how the media and pundits respond to such estimates. He points out that the present large numbers of casualties were predicted by reputable groups before the war but were dismissed by the media.

While we stare at numbers that do nothing to convey the suffering and anguish of the war in Iraq, we might want to ask: How could we correlate the horrific realities with the evasive discussions that proliferated in U.S. news media during the lead-up to the invasion?

In mid-November 2002 – four months before the invasion began – a report surfaced from health professionals with the Medact organization and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. “The avowed U.S. aim of regime change means any new conflict will be much more intense and destructive than the [1991] Gulf War,” they warned, “and will involve more deadly weapons developed in the interim.”

At the time, journalists routinely gave short shrift to that report – treating it as alarmist and unworthy of much attention. The report found that “credible estimates of the total possible deaths on all sides during the conflict and the following three months range from 48,000 to over 260,000. Civil war within Iraq could add another 20,000 deaths. Additional later deaths from postwar adverse health effects would reach 200,000. … In all scenarios the majority of casualties will be civilians.”

During a live TV debate on Dec. 3, 2002, I cited the report’s estimates of the bloodshed ahead and then asked: “What kind of message is that from the Bush administration against terrorism and against violence for political ends?”

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer turned to the other guest: “Jonah Goldberg, do you accept that assumption in that report on these huge casualties, including a lot of children, if there were an effort to go forward with so-called regime change in Baghdad?”

Goldberg, a pundit with National Review Online, replied: “Frankly, I don’t. I mean, I haven’t looked at the exact report, and I think that there are a lot of groups out there that inflate a lot of these numbers precisely because they’re against the war no matter what.”

Notice that Goldberg had not even read the report, or shown any indication that he had at least read the critiques of knowledgeable people. This kind of behavior is typical for these people. All they do is speculate based on political biases. For Goldberg, the report numbers are too large for him to stomach, so the authors must be having a political ax to grind.

In showing such a cavalier disregard for actual reading documents or citing sources, Goldberg is following in the footsteps of his hero George Bush. Bush said he did not believe the numbers and cited General Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, as supporting him. It is true that Casey said “That 650,000 number seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen. I’ve not seen a number higher than 50,000. And so I don’t give it that much credibility at all.” But where did Casey get his own number? According to an AFP report, when questioned as to his source: “Casey said he did not know where he had seen the estimate of 50,000 or whether it was produced by the military.” In other words, he simply pulled it out of the air. It is this kind of flim-flam that is practiced by these people, hoping that the public will not notice that they have not provided any substantive critique of the 655,000 figure.

Other people have challenged the latest Lancet as “obviously” political because it was released just before the 2006 elections, and the 2004 study was also released before the elections that year.

I find this a curious argument. The Iraq war is perhaps the biggest issue of the day. Surely the voting public should have the best information on it when they vote for their leaders? It is in fact an obligation of the authors of such studies to try to release it in time for voters to evaluate the numbers and make decisions. The assertion that facts about the war and its consequences should not be given to voters is a bizarre idea. It has appeal only to those who genuflect at the thrones of power, who feel that the “leaders” are all wise and knowing and we, the public have no right to the facts, but must simply defer to their judgments.

The claim of unfair bias can only be justifiably leveled if the authors had (say) obtained very low numbers of deaths (which would have pleased the Bush administration) and deliberately withheld it until after the election. Or if they had cut corners in their data collection and analysis and rushed to print with a flawed paper purely in order to embarrass the administration. But such arguments have not been made by anyone. Instead the critics point to the timing of the release as if that were a sufficient argument against it.

A final point. While a lot of the focus has been on the number of violent deaths, I was disturbed to read in the report that about 53,000 deaths were “due to non-violent causes were estimated to have occurred above the pre-invasion mortality rate, most of them in recent months, suggesting a worsening of health status and access to health care.” These deaths rose above the pre-war levels only in 2006. This is a very disturbing but predictable sign. Wars are not only violent, they also let loose pernicious silent killers. They destroy water and sewage systems, they disrupt farming and agriculture, food distribution networks break down, medicines become scarce, hospitals suffer from lack of supplies and electricity, and people cannot earn enough to get food or medicines. All these things lead to serious health problems which last for a long time and whose effects are hard to reverse.

There will come a time when active warfare comes to an end in Iraq. People’s attention will shift away. But the breakdown of the health, sanitation, and food networks will remain, becoming a silent killer that will enact its cruel will on the Iraqi people for a long time to come.