I’m officially confused about the 16 words debate (that is, the debate about Bush’s claim in his State of the Union address that Iraq had attempted to procure uranium from Niger). As far as I can tell, either Josh Marshall is a biased hack or Gregory Djerejian is.

The back and forth is dizzying. Check out this post from Gregory Djerejian, for an example of the kind of criticism Marshall is getting.

Innocent question from the sidelines of this debate: Does Djerejian expect me to keep a straight face when he ends a post slagging Marshall for inaccuracy and partisanship by approvingly linking to a column of William Safire’s which is, typically, riddled with errors?

Anyone who cares about the U.N. will want to see a thorough investigation of the U.N.’s behaviour throughout the period of the Iraq-sanctions regime. Of course, people who don’t give a hoot about the U.N. will also want to see an investigation of the organization, so long as it embarrasses and discredits it.

Which side is William Safire on? Not sure. He does seem to be hot on the trail of the corruption story. But, you know, it would be easier to take Safire seriously if he mentioned that Chalabi has been sitting on some very important documents formerly in the possession of the Ba’ath party in Iraq.

It doesn’t matter here whether you think Chalabi really is corrupt or whether you think he’s the finest Arab since Mohammad. At the very least, it creates an appearance of impropriety that Chalabi – wanted for embezzlement, suspected of being an Iranian spy, and whose past operations are known to have involved document forging – has had these documents in his exclusive possession for an awfully long time.

If Safire cares about the integrity of an investigation partially dependent on these documents, why does he not utter a peep about the issue? Sorry I keep going on about this. But it’s been – what? – three columns on this issue now, and he still hasn’t gotten around to addressing this point.

No, actually. They weren’t. But some people are panting over a recent report that “WMD components” were shipped out of Iraq both before the fall of the Ba’ath regime and after. Jim Henley devotes a long post to tearing the piece apart. I will just add that the discovery of significant WMDs in Iraq any time after the war would have been absolutely damning to the case for the war. Such a discovery would have meant that Saddam Hussein was deterred from using – or otherwise unable to use – WMDs even in the face of an existential threat to himself and his regime.

Tim Burke recently wrote a long and interesting piece on Iraq at his web site. In that post, Burke identifies a common error in support for the war on both the left and the right. It is
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Norm Geras has helpfully corrected some of my confusions about his position on humanitarian intervention. I’m still mulling over the whole question of a threshold for humanitarian intervention, and I might as well confess that I’m a bit stuck. Still mulling over the issue raised in this post, too.

Norm Geras approvingly quotes this passage from Pamela Bone:

The sound Tory view is that if we are not threatened we don’t need to act. The left view, or at least of that part of the left that sees itself as internationalist, is that the world does not stand by while dictators murder and torture their citizens. Words like international solidarity and global unity come to mind.

I make this point to give comfort to those members of the old left who supported the Iraq war (you’d be surprised how many of us there are). Because heaven knows, the war’s opponents have been getting more than their share of comfort.

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Jim Henley wonders. As do I.

Josh Marshall beats up on Safire for his latest nonsense about Iraq. And he does a decent enough job of it that I’ll forgive him for his habit of overusing the rhetorical device: “It’s so bad/stupid/awful/dishonest, it’s hard to know where to begin/start.” I’ll limit myself to one modest complaint. I thought this bit was really funny:

You never saw such a rush to dismiss this [i.e. alleged discovery of Sarin] as not news. U.N. weapons inspectors whose reputations rest on denial of Saddam’s W.M.D. pooh-poohed the report. “It doesn’t strike me as a big deal,” said David Kay.

Right. David Kay. Has Safire gone and mixed Kay up with Scott Ritter? Or has he forgotten that Kay made a pre-war career out of claiming that Iraq had WsMD? Or does he think that Kay’s post-war conversion on the issue of WsMD is slam-dunk evidence that he’s now unreliable? Could he simply be lying about Kay? Is it possible that Safire’s writing is so sloppy that the quote from Kay is not supposed to illustrate the point made in the preceding sentence? Might the paragraph have gotten garbled in the copy-editing process?

I don’t know. As I’ve said before, if Safire had a blog, I’d just ignore it. Instead he has one of the most coveted columns in all of journalism. That doesn’t just give him influence he doesn’t deserve. It also says something about the media that a man of his abilities managed to achieve this kind of position. (At the same time, I admit that he is now unhinged enough that I doubt many people are really listening anymore.) I suppose this is as good a time as any to ask why this political culture thinks that Safire is acceptable but that someone like Noam Chomsky is beyond the pale. Remember, this isn’t the same as asking whether Noam Chomsky is right. I’m asking why he should be considered beyond the pale.

Brad DeLong wants:

to protest the failure to distinguish between “possession of weapons of mass destruction” and “threat to the United States of America.” We were told that we were going to war because Saddam Hussein would soon become a threat to the United States of America. I can see how people might conclude that Saddam Hussein had effective weapons of mass destruction programs. I cannot see how people could conclude that he was a threat to the United States of America.

This isn’t quite right, in my opinion. I can certainly see how people could conclude that Saddam Hussein was a long-term threat to the U.S. As much as I dislike Kenneth Pollack, I see no reason to doubt his claim that one or two short-range nuclear missiles launched at Saudi Arabia’s oil fields would have plunged the world into the worst depression since the Middle Ages. This wasn’t something Saddam Hussein was especially likely to do, but the capacity would surely have emboldened him and cowed the U.S. That was something to worry about, even if the best estimates put his ability to do this 10 years in the future (assuming the sanctions would have held, which they might well not have).

What I cannot see is how people could conclude that, in a world full of very serious risks, Saddam Hussein was more dangerous than the other dangers that litter our world. That is the mystery. And it is the failure to consider this question more carefully that is the real shame of the pro-war folks who like so much to congratulate themselves for grasping how the world works. For the prudential test depended not on the bare claim that Saddam Hussein was dangerous, but rather on the claim that he was so dangerous that it would make sense to divert much of the U.S.’s diplomatic, military and economic resources toward that problem, and away from other methods of dealing with the main threats to the U.S., the larger problem of nuclear proliferation and the threat from Islamic extremism foremost among them.

That, I think, is one of the main defects with the debate leading up to the war, at least regarding the prudential question: that it focused very closely on the issue of how dangerous Iraq was, and rarely on the comparative question of how dangerous Iraq was compared to other threats. This bias massively advantaged the pro-war camp, since it was always easy to think of reasonably plausible horror stories involving Iraq in the future. Only after the occupation went sour did we really see the mainstream begin to clue in to the bigger picture. But they’re still only grasping at the outlines of the story, which is one of resources squandered and opportunities foregone.

Everyone is talking about the piece in Salon about Chalabi. Here’s a part I don’t understand:

Zell, a Jerusalem attorney, continues to be a partner in the firm that Feith left in 2001 to take the Pentagon job. He also helped Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew Salem set up a new law office in Baghdad in late 2003. Chalabi met with Zell and other neoconservatives many times from the mid-1990s on in London, Turkey, and the U.S. Zell outlines what Chalabi was promising the neocons before the Iraq war: “He said he would end Iraq’s boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in the northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location of a major refinery].” But Chalabi, Zell says, has delivered on none of them. The bitter ex-Chalabi backer believes his former friend’s moves were a deliberate bait and switch designed to win support for his designs to return to Iraq and run the country.

What I don’t understand is how Zell could have known that Chalabi could make good on these promises. After all, opinion polling in Ba’athist Iraq couldn’t have been very easy. And yet Zell must have had some very good reason to think that a democratic Iraq would do everything Chalabi said it would, since otherwise he wouldn’t be so disappointed now.

I’m completely stumped on this one.

During the buildup to the war, and a few times recently, I’ve read people who claim that Iraq always wanted to sell the U.S. oil. And so it did. (Indeed, Iraq was selling the U.S. oil through the long sanction years, through intermediaries.) So fears about Iraq and its control over oil were always misguided, this line of argument goes, because it was in Saddam Hussein’s interests to sell that oil. And this leads to the suggestion: Stop worrying, get out of the region, and just buy the damn oil which they want to sell. After all, what else are they gonna do with it?

Well, yes and no. Yes, for the most part. But I think U.S. foreign policymakers have long feared a situation in which OPEC, or some other group of oil exporters, would be able to damage the American economy by halting oil exports for a period of time. If OPEC countries had a bit of cash in the bank, and were willing to gamble that the action wouldn’t provoke military action by the U.S., then it would be a very effective way of punishing the U.S. If this sounds familiar, then congratulations: you remember (or remember reading about) the oil crisis in the 70s.

A sudden spike in oil prices can act as a real shock to an economy. The permanent threat of such an action can therefore act as a permanent bargaining advantage, and that might have all kinds of influence on the U.S.’s ability to disregard opinion in the Middle East. So it’s not quite so simple as pointing out that they’ve got oil and we want it.

It’s funny how little the OPEC oil crisis is mentioned today. I think it actually looms over everything that has happened since, and that the motivations of U.S. policymakers are impossible to understand without it.

Anyway, you may not like this, but that’s the concern you have to address, and it can’t be addressed simply by complaining that they all just want to get along.

The other day, I did a little fulminatin’ about the UN food-for-oil scandal. The basic point was that the credibility of the UN depends on an open and thorough investigation of the matter, and anyone who argued against the war because it would undermine the UN ought to be just as outraged about this threat to the credibility of the UN.

Just a small point to add to this: The credibility of the investigation is inevitably going to depend partly on documentary evidence taken from Ba’ath party files dating from the time of the sanctions. But if I’m not mistaken, these files are now in the grubby little hands of Mr. Chalabi and his cronies, who aren’t letting anyone else at them. Chalabi knows perfectly well that the documents give him the dirt on any number of potential rivals within Iraq. For the really paranoid, Chalabi’s possession of these documents also opens up the possibility that he might seed the evidence with forgeries to discredit rivals, if real documents cannot be found for this purpose. At any rate, here as in so many other areas, the appearance of propriety matters as well as the substance.

All of this raises legitimate concerns about evidence tampering and also selective treatment of the evidence. Remember that Chalabi has an angle here, and the some of the first rivals for him to face down are rivals at the U.N. who don’t seem especially keen on the Pentagon’s favourite Iraqi.

Anyone who takes this investigation seriously will want the documents removed immediately and put in the care of a credible and independent third party. On this issue, I find myself in agreement with a number of critics of the UN, at least on the point that there is a very strong prima facie case for serious, systematic corruption. Where I suspect we part ways is in how seriously we take the investigation. Here is a test: If they really do take the investigation seriously, they should also call for Chalabi to release all the relevant documentary evidence immediately to an independent third party. It’s already too late for this, but better late than never.

I can’t remember now where I saw it first, or where I’ve seen it since, but I’ve been meaning to take a quick poke at a pro-war argument making the rounds. It goes: “You on the anti-war left say that you wanted a better life for Iraqis. But you can’t will the ends without willing the means, as Kant pointed out. I willed the end, and that is why I also willed the means. Why did you not do the same?”

To which I respond: Before we can have a discussion about ends and means, you must descend from your lofty Kantian perch to the region of hard fact and plausible forcast, and once there, you must explain to me how exactly the means you advocate are related to the end you’ve identified. Unless and until you can explain how your favoured means really were plausibly adapted to those ends, we can’t have a worthwhile discussion of whether the ends justified the means.

It’s an explanation of this sort that so many of us in the anti-war left have been begging our dear comrades on the pro-war left for these past two years. And I have never seen a remotely plausible attempt to meet our concerns.

(After writing this, I discovered this thoughtful post at A Fistful of Euros, which comes at the question of means and ends in a different way.)

Before the war, many people said that it was admittedly bad that the U.S. had been complicit in some of Saddam Hussein’s misdeeds during the 80s, but that that wasn’t an argument against invasion. It would be perverse, they argued, to insist that the main actor in the circumstances have clean hands when such a great opportunity to do good was at hand. To think this way was to resign ourselves to perpetual inaction, since the world is, alas, a desperately imperfect place. We can’t be so choosy. We have to take our interventions against great evil where we can get them.

As I’ve pointed out, I’m not sure that the same commentators would have been so sanguine if the intervener had been Iran, but set that aside. I do think that there is some real merit in this general line of thought. But one of its many flaws when applied to Iraq started irritating me again the other day. It is this: An important part of reconstructing Iraq was always going to be a full and honest airing of grievances about the crimes of the past. One of the problems with American interveners is that they simply will not allow this. If Americans, and especially their political leadership, haven’t the stomach to really examine American complicity with Saddam Hussein’s regime, then it’s pretty obvious they won’t be able to get behind the far harder effort to help Iraqis confront their own demons in a way that won’t tear the country apart.

The point is sort of a moot one lately, since the idea that things will soon be quiet enough to start dealing with the past is pretty absurd. Still, this is something that I wish proponents of the war for humanitarian reasons had given a bit more thought to.

Mickey Kaus, chief blogger at Slate, posed an interesting question about admin policy in the weeks before the war began: Either the admin knew where the WMD were, or it didn’t. If it did know, then it should have told the UN inspectors where to look. Failure to do this looks suspiciously like helping to ensure that the inspections would fail. If it didn’t know, then it couldn’t be trusted to effectively track them and prevent their use as Iraq fell apart in the final days of a military campaign. Either way, it looks bad. Admin officials didn’t help much on this, because they seemed to encourage both suspicious possibilities by both claiming that they were doing all they could to help the inspectors and by claiming that they knew where the stuff was, and so could be trusted to track it down before it was used or slipped out of the country.

Whether or not they ultimately find anything, it’s now clear that the admin was indulging in the second kind of dishonesty in the debate leading up to war. (A decent WaPo story this morning details an increasingly panicky attempt to track down the admin’s favorite casus belli.)

Press coverage on this angle of the story is already taking a familiar shape: The admin needs to produce evidence of WMD to retrospectively validate its case for war. If it finds them, it’s off the hook. If it doesn’t, it’s screwed. There are lots of problems with this way of presenting the issue. Here are three:
a) Whatever they find, the press has caught the admin in a rather serious lie. Why don’t journalists get off their asses and hammer this point home?
b) To be fair to the admin, it should be admitted that it was reasonable to guess that Iraq would have WMD programs. Given Iraq’s record, it will be very surprising if it turns out to have put these programs on the backburner. Apart from what the actual facts are, the case for or against the war had to rest on reasonable assumptions. When we evaluate that case, we have to consider not just what actually was the case, but also what it was reasonable to assume given the available evidence.
c) But suppose we decide to evaluate the case for war entirely by appeal to what actually turns up. The U.S., it should be remembered, just waged a preventative war. I think these are almost always (perhaps just plain always) morally wrong. But suppose that preventative wars are morally allowable. Still, we should want to insist that the threat be extremely serious. But that means that to even begin to retrospectively justify the war, the admin is going to have to turn up evidence of a massive and very successful WMD program. Turning up a few chemical weapons or a sluggish and unsuccessful program isn’t going to do the trick.

It’s c) that’s really lost on the press, unfortunately. And it’s a shame because it unfairly biases the retrospective argument in favour of war. It seems that the idiots on Fox break out champaigne every time a fresh rumour of WMD evidence surfaces. I can see how holding such obnoxious political views might lead one to drink. Still, I think they should hold off on the bubbly until they have evidence of a substantial and successful program. Then we can begin to argue about the retrospective justification for war.