This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The most salient lesson of the post-Cold War era: Get nukes or die trying.
A nation's relationship to other states, up to and especially including superpowers, is completely different once it's in the nuclear club. Pakistan can host bin Laden for years and still enjoy US military funding. North Korea can literally fire missiles over South Korea and Japan and get a strongly-worded letter of condemnation, along with a generous increase in foreign aid. We can know, for a fact, that the 2003 Iraq War coalition didn't actually believe their own WMD propaganda. If they thought that Saddam could vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance, he'd still be in power today. Putin knows perfectly well that NATO isn't going to invade Russia, so he can strip every last soldier from the Baltic borders and throw them into the Ukrainian meat grinder.
Aside from deterring attack, it also discourages powerful outside actors from fomenting revolutions. The worry becomes who gets the nukes if the central government falls.
Iran's assumption seems to have been that by permanently remaining n steps away from having nukes (n varying according to the current political and diplomatic climate), you get all the benefits of being a nuclear-armed state without the blowback of going straight for them. But no, you need to have the actual weapons in your arsenal, ready to use at a moment's notice.
My advice for rulers, especially ones on the outs with major geopolitical powers: Pour one out for Gaddafi, then hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
?
The Iraq War coalition was framed as a pre-emptive war on the basis that Saddam did not yet have nukes (the only WMD to 'vaporize), but that he was trying to maintain the ability to create them in the future. The theory- propaganda, if you prefer- was that he was known to have pursued them in the past, there was reason to believe he was trying to maintain capabilities while actively circumventing sanctions, and that the consequences would be in the future if not acted upon now.
It was a casus belli premised on the argument that Saddam could not vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance.
I'm wondering if we watched a different Iraq war.
I remember nothing but breathless exhortations about him definitely having WMDs. And that there was evidence because of yellow cake refinement. I don't even really know what that is. But then we invaded Iraq and there was a two or three year search for WMDs that then turned out to be totally fruitless. The only thing approaching WMDs were the defunct chemical weapons stockpiles we gave to them to fight Iran.
For a lot of people it was a huge black pill moment on media credibility.
Agreed on "breathless exhortations", but ... there is a but. Certainly many people walked away thinking the purpose of Iraq war to get rid of Saddam's nukes but I can't really find evidence anyone ever said they had nukes. Overuse of word "WMD" is another move that was both brilliant yet frustrating: conflated anything from mustard gas to nerve agents and nuclear weapons.
Like, here's the press release of February 5 2003 briefing to UNSC by Colin Powell. Powell made many claims: that Iraq was hiding stuff from the inspectors and that Iraq had had a biological and chemical weapons programs in 1990s (true), that Saddam had mobile laboratories (not), that Saddam "remained determined to acquire nuclear weapons" and was trying to acquire various machines such as high-specification aluminum tubes and magnets and machines (not really). Afterwards, it became evident the Saddam's nuclear program was vaporware and had been after the 1990s, but notice how elusive the original claims were here: "Those illicit procurement efforts showed that Saddam Hussein was very much focused on putting in place the key missing piece from his nuclear weapons programme -– the ability to produce fissile material." Tubes, magnets, "Saddam Hussein very focused on", "key missing piece". Sounds very scary indeed, but it was not a claim that Saddam had yet nukes.
There was a set of statements that Saddam was procuring uranium material ("yellow cake") from Africa (GWBs State of the Union 2003 and many statements by Dick Cheney). Again, it was nearly all claims about obtaining uranium, not having weapons. While searching for sources for all this, apparently there's bunch of anti-war websites who love to quote how Dick Cheney said "And we believe he has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons" on Meet the Press aired March 16, 2003. Looking at the transcript that particular phrase looks like bit of word salad to me. He did say (twice!) "reconstituting his nuclear programs", which makes more grammatical sense, probably the phrase he was supposed to repeat. If Cheney was making a claim Saddam had nukes, he was being surprisingly circumspect about it. Its all "what could happen" "if they had a nuclear weapon", "he’s out trying once again to produce nuclear weapon", "it’s only a matter of time until he acquires nuclear weapons". (Later on, the US troops found yellow cake, only it was material IAEA knew of.)
To me, the 'historiography' of media reporting looks like gaslighting twice over. First round in 2003, with a frenzy of statements by admin trying to make Saddam's alleged WMD program appear maximally bad while alluding more than what they exactly said, knowing they were warmongering on flimsy ground and hypotheticals but tiptoeing close to some imagined line they thought was supported by "evidence". Too bad that all the evidence and intelligence was blatantly false or fabricated. Second round of mischaracterization happened after the war, when everyone was angry or disillusioned or both, with anti-war side painting a picture where GWB and Cheney and Powell had said all the maximal claims of Iraqi nukes everybody thought they had heard.
Disclaimer: I was like 10 at the time, so directly I most remember just like, graphics on TV of the invasion with arrows and stuff.
I very much agree. I think what's also missing in the conversation is that it seems to me that the US population was also still pretty bloodthirsty at the time and honestly was relatively easy to convince. A lot of post-9/11 anger still without easy outlets (Afghanistan's insurgency hadn't yet kicked into major gear and was relatively quiet, Bin Laden was elusive, etc) was still in the air. Sure, Bush coined the Axis of Evil but a ton of people ate that stuff right up (maybe we didn't learn the Cold War lessons as deeply as we should have...) All of this means that when Iraq's stability had majorly deteriorated by early to mid 2004, at the same time that year the big post-op intel reports were coming out to the public and were pretty damning. In that context, I think there's a very human motivation to try and wash your own hands and absolve yourself of responsibility, and it's very easy and cheap to say "I was tricked". And even then, there's some major revisionism going on. Polling data and the behavior of politicians both seem to agree that a lot of the regret only started to spike when Iraq and then later Afghanistan war deaths continued to rise, which was well after the facts of Iraq's WMD's were well known. So yeah, people also "backdated" their opposition to the war quite a bit. All you need to do is simply look at the contrast of the 2004 and 2008 election seasons.
I always refer to this video lecture as a counter argument of why, at the time, the decision to invade Iraq can be justified by US/UK head of governement
It detailed the information available at the time for US/UK, then laid out the potential internal political backfire in case of Iraq actually having WMD and used it
After listening to the lecture, to me it always seems like invading Iraq is the rational move at the time with the available intel, while simultaneously and evidently a wrong decision after the fact as we gain more information due to the war
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link