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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   28196 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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John Psmith reviewed "Leap of Faith," about the institutional failures or collective "non-decision" leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The review begins:

There are two stories from the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq that I can’t get out of my head. The first is that in the final stages of war planning, the US Air Force was drawing up targeting lists for the sorties they expected to make. They already had detailed plans for striking Iraq’s air defense systems, but they worried that they would also be asked to disable Iraqi WMD sites. So the Air Force pulled together a special team of intelligence officers to figure out the right coordinates for all the secret factories and labs that were churning out biological weapons and nuclear materials. Try as they might, they couldn’t find them. So…they just kept on looking.

The second story comes from an anonymous source who described to Michael Mazarr, the author of this book, the basic occupation strategy that the National Security Council was settling on. The concept was that once you “cut off the head” of the Iraqi government, you would witness a “rapid and inevitable march toward Jeffersonian democracy.” What I find amazing about this is that nobody even stopped to think about the metaphor — how many things march rapidly and decisively after being decapitated?

By his description, everybody involved wanted to invade Iraq, but the dynamic that resulted in an invasion seemed to be that of the Abilene Paradox. He links it to CW issues, with discussion of "moralism" in American foreign policy and due to it being a major issue about which American government went against the overwhelming preference of the populace, and Trump being an outlier critic of the war being a big part of his early appeal. A handful of thoughts:

  • Coincidentally, I just listened to a long interview with an early American casualty in the "First Battle of Fallujah" - it's worth a listen

  • It's hard to square the Powell Doctrine with the description of Powell, which raises a lot of questions

  • I'm skeptical of the accuracy and/or probative value of the psychoanalyses of the people involved, more generally, and it's unclear if it's Psmith's own interpretation or him relaying that of the original author

  • One point raised is that the perceived easy success in Afghanistan was a major factor, which makes me wonder if military campaigns should be deliberately made to seem more difficult than they are

  • I don't remember any defenses of the war to contrast against Trump

  • While one can debate the merits of NATO Expansion, which Psmith criticizes at the end, I don't remember anyone advocating it on moralistic grounds (or the basis of specific alleged strategic threats) or think it's a good parallel, in general (you could say that it's an issue with a disconnect between government policy and the preferences of populace, but the disconnect would be in the general vein of the proverbial man on the street not following that area of foreign policy)

I remember seeing stories on the news about how our troops deployed to Iraq weren't properly equipped, that either they didn't have gas masks or the gas masks didn't work properly. This seemed kind of insane, since the whole reason to go to war was because Iraq had chemical weapons, so in that case wouldn't you want to be really sure the gas masks worked? Probably was not a conspiracy though, probably just normal incompetence.

I'm skeptical of the accuracy and/or probative value of the psychoanalyses of the people involved, more generally, and it's unclear if it's Psmith's own interpretation or him relaying that of the original author

A foreign policy guy I sometimes reply to recommended to me that I read this book. So I picked it up. Couldn't finish it.

The whole thing seems like an exercise in exculpatory back-scratching, ..all these fine people, operating on the best intentions, reasonably well informed fucked up.. a story they really need now because the then neoconservative view - that Americans have the right to intervene whenever they need to preserve US primacy and interests - came to dominate the entire foreign policy establishment and it'd simply not do to allow the monumental failure of the conquest of Iraq to keep spreading bad smell.

What I remember about the time seems different. More along the lines of 'the war was a pet project of very specific people (PNAC alumni), they were saying they'd invade Iraq in october of '01 before they even got the dodgy evidence they needed to sell that war.

Part of the problem was that the left was too successful in casting things like HBD and culture being deep as unthinkably racist. They were extremely taboo on the mainstream right.

To put things in perspective, ousting the Soviets from Eastern Europe was largely successful. It was still highly taboo to talk about the problems in places like Zimbabwe and South Africa.

As a result it was impossible for anyone on the right to assemble an argument about how removing Saddam wouldn't result in a democratic revolution.

You'd sound too racist to be on TV.

Liberals from a more cosmopolitan background often have the attitude of "everybody knows X, it's just not polite to say it". But Republicans from small white towns frequently don't know it. They're going to go along with poor decisions if you don't let anyone tell them.

Edit:

I seem to be having some communications difficulties with this post. Back in 2009 or so HBD blogs were the only places having discussions about things like cousin marriage in Arab cultures leading to clannishness which caused problems when trying to impose individualist democracy on them.

I'm not even endorsing any particular theory. I'm just saying that the limits on public conversation made it difficult to fight a bad idea.

Part of the problem was that the left was too successful in casting things like HBD and culture being deep as unthinkably racist. They were extremely taboo on the mainstream right.

This is not what happened at all.

The Republican party chose it's name as an allusion to Plato and classical (pre-Imperial) Rome. A focus on individual virtue/responsibility coupled with a distaste for collectivism bordering on taboo have been consistent threads on the US right going back at least as far as reconstruction, and it is the US left that has been consistently pushing back against that taboo in an effort to promote collectivism/class consciousness.

I assume your basic HBD-related argument here is that democratic transition was largely successful in Eastern Europe in 1989 because White Christians live there, as opposed to Zimbabwe and South Africa (or something).

Either way, I don’t mean this as an insult of some sort, I’d rather go ahead and nitpick.

The obvious commonality among the Eastern European nations that more or less successfully transitioned to democracy in 1989 is that they all have some past legacy of applied democratic norms, rule of law, parliamentary systems, Western orientation and (some differing level of) Germanic cultural influence. Belarus, for example, is a clear exception. (And the question of whether the area of the former GDR was ‘properly’ democratized or not is seemingly an ever thornier one on the minds of West German normies.) In contrast, the Russian, Central Asian and Caucasian republics of the former USSR clearly lack this and continued the norms of authoritarianism and repression accordingly. Whatever marginal democratic tendencies might have even been present at the beginning clearly went nowhere. This was already clear as day back in 2003, and was available as an argument against rosy neocon predictions regarding Iraq’s future.

I won’t argue about the basket case Rhodesia has turned into; with respect to South Africa though I’d point out that it’s easy to get dispirited about developments there instead of comparing what ended up happening to the absolute bloodbath and misery the country could easily have slipped into after Apartheid collapsed.

On one hand I'll repeat my broken-record line of "don't damn peoples down seven generations", and even though I think genetic group differences are a thing, I'm much more skeptical of sweeping statements about specific groups being incapable organizing in of specific political systems. On the other hand, this is a liberal just-so story that glosses over anything inconvenient, and invents several convenient "facts" to salvage it's own argument.

they all have some past legacy of applied democratic norms, rule of law, parliamentary systems

Ah yes, the long rich democratic tradition of the 20 years between the World Wars, that were imposed by Woodrow Wilson's deranged fantasies, and managed to revert to authoritarianism even within that short timespan. The attachment to democracy was so short that we were seriously debating if it's not better to take the Asian Tiger route, and only implement democracy after authoritarian reforms.

And the question of whether the area of the former GDR was ‘properly’ democratized or not is seemingly an ever thornier one on the minds of West German normies.

Which only shows how democracy is a luxury system. It can work if the stars align just right, but has the tendency of taking it's necessary conditions (like everybody having roughly the same values) for granted. The moment these conditions are not met the democracy enjoyers themselves will start begging for it's end, arresting opposition candidates, and seriously considering the banning of political parties, for the high crime of people voting the wrong way.

Ah yes, the long rich democratic tradition of the 20 years between the World Wars, that were imposed by Woodrow Wilson's deranged fantasies, and managed to revert to authoritarianism even within that short timespan.

What is this meant to be a reference to please? Czechoslovakia? Because there was no reversion to authoritarianism in that case.

The attachment to democracy was so short that we were seriously debating if it's not better to take the Asian Tiger route, and only implement democracy after authoritarian reforms.

The Asian Tiger route was a strictly Southeast Asian (Confucian) phenomenon in the specific context of the Cold War and facilitated by generous and targeted American capital investment and the proto version of offshoring. None of that applied to Eastern Europe after 1989.

It can work if the stars align just right, but has the tendency of taking it's necessary conditions (like everybody having roughly the same values) for granted. The moment these conditions are not met the democracy enjoyers themselves will start begging for it's end, arresting opposition candidates, and seriously considering the banning of political parties, for the high crime of people voting the wrong way.

It was all a long-term consequence of German 'reunification' (the annexation of the former GDR into an unchanged federal state structure) being a complete shitshow which incidentally the Americans played no part in.

What is this meant to be a reference to please? Czechoslovakia? Because there was no reversion to authoritarianism in that case.

Estonia? Latvia? Lithuania? Poland? Romania? Bulgaria? Hungary? And yes, contrary to what you said below Germany also counts, of course. I'm almost impressed how you put your finger on the single country in the region that did not revert to authoritarianism, and are acting flabbergasted how I could possibly think they're not representative.

The "democratic tradition", the way the term is being used nowadays, of western Europe is more a result of the Cold War and it's alliance with the USA, than it does with anything that happened before the war. Even Spain and Portugal were dictatorships until the 70's.

The Asian Tiger route was a str ictly Southeast Asian (Confucian) phenomenon in the specific context of the Cold War and facilitated by generous and targeted American capital investment and the proto version of offshoring. None of that applied to Eastern Europe after 1989.

Whether or not it would work is another question (and the explanation of why it worked for Asia is another liberal just-so story that they had to scramble for after the fact, as they do with many things), all I'm saying is that it was an idea floated by public intellectuals at the time, although ultimately not attempted.

It was all a long-term consequence of German 'reunification' (the annexation of the former GDR into an unchanged federal state structure) being a complete shitshow which incidentally the Americans played no part in.

First of all it's worth reiterating that the "it" is "people voting the wrong way", something that clearly shows the "democratic traditions" are a cruel joke.

As to the causes, I mean, maybe? I could imagine that if the reunification went well the east Germans could be bread-and-circused into complacency, and would be just fine with brilliant ideas like importing seven zillion Syrians and Afghans, putting people in prison for speech, but locking them in a women's cell after they declare themselves a woman, and fining people €10K for misgendering them, but it's not immediately obvious to me. The psyops ran by the Americans on their western counterparts are legendary, to the point that anyone coming from a country with any amount of healthy patriotism comes away shaken after seeing the end result of what they were put through.

The "democratic tradition", the way the term is being used nowadays, of western Europe is more a result of the Cold War and it's alliance with the USA, than it does with anything that happened before the war. Even Spain and Portugal were dictatorships until the 70's.

Huh? France and the Benelux states had already been democracies for a long time before WW2, and France was already a republic to boot.

Spain and Portugal joined NATO only after those dictatorships fell, which I think bears mentioning here.

Estonia? Latvia? Lithuania? Poland? Romania? Bulgaria? Hungary?

To be fair, 4 of these didn't even exist as sovereign nations before 1918, which complicates matters. Regarding Hungary I already replied in a different comment. The Baltics used to be ruled by German/Germanized nobles for a long time and thus have a shared legacy of Western orientation; that much is certainly relevant in this case. The Poles have a bygone but long and cherished legacy of being a republic with a parliament which, for example, is very markedly different from the Russian experience.

I could imagine that if the reunification went well the east Germans could be bread-and-circused into complacency, and would be just fine with brilliant ideas like importing seven zillion Syrians and Afghans, putting people in prison for speech, but locking them in a women's cell after they declare themselves a woman, and fining people €10K for misgendering them, but it's not immediately obvious to me.

It could have probably worked but nobody even tried. East Germans have consistently been shut out from positions of power and influence in the 'reunified' German state to an extent that makes the past discrimination against African-Americans in the US pale in comparison. They were seen as hillbillies with poisoned minds who don't matter. The economic transition was also completely bungled.

Huh? France and the Benelux states had already been democracies for a long time before WW2, and France was already a republic to boot.

Sorry, I phrased it poorly. "the way the term is being used nowadays" is carrying some weight in that statement, as that way involves ideas like "you're doing democracy wrong if you vote in the way we disapprove of".

Spain and Portugal joined NATO only after those dictatorships fell, which I think bears mentioning here.

The US had military bases in Spain with Franco still in power. Admittedly, I know less about Portugal.

The Baltics used to be ruled by German/Germanized nobles for a long time and thus have a shared legacy of Western orientation; that much is certainly relevant in this case.

Southkraut allready summed up what I think about the German democracy, but aside from that, If it worked like that, and if Poland's tradition was relevant (more on that later), Belarus should have been one of the better democratized nations.

The Poles have a bygone but long and cherished legacy of being a republic with a parliament which, for example

Similarly to what German democracy looked like in practice, Poland was an "elite state" through and through. The nobles may have organized themselves as a democracy, but they'd scoff idea of having the society ran as anything other than a class based hierarchy. There's a throwaway line in Game of Thrones where Sandor Clegane says it makes as much sense to give the vote to his horse as much as does to give it to a peasant, and given their affinity for horses, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if the line was first spoken in Poland.

Sure they have a democratic legacy that is both cherished and long, with the caveat that the part that's long isn't particularly cherished - they literally see it as the proximate cause of the collapse of their empire - and that part that is cherished - a last ditch attempt at reforming their system - lasted all 4 years.

It could have probably worked but nobody even tried.

Like I said, I don't necessarily disagree, but it's hard for me to tell what the world would look like if things panned out differently. Is a Germany where Eastern ideas were taken seriously one where Easterners don't vote AfD because their ideas don't resonate, or because AfD-ish / BSW-ish ideas are already incorporated into the mainstream?

Referring to Weimar Germany I assume.

Dude literally picked the only country in the region that didn't have an authoritarian "back"slide at the time.

Since you specifically referred to ‘Wilson's deranged fantasies’ I picked Czechoslovakia because if there’s one tangible Eastern European development that can be called the result of Wilson's deranged fantasies, it’s the creation of Czechoslovakia. Also, just to nitpick further: in the case of Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania there was zero democratic tendency after WW1 to slide back from towards authoritarianism.

if there’s one tangible Eastern European development that can be called the result of Wilson's deranged fantasies, it’s the creation of Czechoslovakia

You think Germany and Russia gave up so much territory between them, because they were such jolly old chums?

in the case of Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania there was zero democratic tendency after WW1 to slide back from towards authoritarianism.

Pretty sure they all had some parliamentary system that got couped at some point between the wars. Hungary speed-ran it, but they still had it for a brief period after the war. The "zero democratic tendency" thing is my argument, thank you very much.

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There are two glaring problems with that. Imperial Germany had a legacy of democratic norms already - there was a legislative assembly, elections, political parties, political discussions in a free press etc. Also, Germany isn't in Eastern Europe.

And yet, somehow the state of Russia is explained by a lack of democratic norms.

If we consider the period before the outbreak of WW1 in Eastern Europe, we can absolutely surely say that the ideas of freely functioning political parties, democratic elections, rule of law, civil society, parliamentarianism, personal liberty, freedom of expression etc. had precisely zero influence in Russia, and that this was the case ever since the Russian state existed. And yes, this is true even when compared to imperial Germany.

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Whoa, whoa, hold your horses. Imperial Germany was absolutely an Obrigkeitsstaat (elite-state?) ruled by a small number of people with very token democratic institutions that were meant to channel republicanism into wearing itself out and discrediting itself via fruitless procedures conducted within a powerless framework. That "democracy" never amounted to anything, wasn't taken very seriously by non-activists, and got absolutely bulldozed over by the actual rulers whenever they didn't jump according to orders. The Prussians in general and Bismarck specifically had a habit of allowing seemingly republican instutions to take the wind out of activists' sails, only to pull the rug out from under them and have riot police beat the shit out of them a few years later. The counterrevolution was still very much going on in Imperial Germany.

So the "legacy of democratic" norms was really the legacy that democracy was a farce. Does that square with your perception of inter-war Germany?

As opposed to Russia, where the meekest similar attempts even at creating token institutions were likely to land you in a Siberian penal colony. Degrees of differences do matter.

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That distinction does not matter though. When Bismarck implemented social democratic policies “to undermine the social democrats”, that last part is irrelevant. When John Lackland granted the Magna Carta he didn’t do it because in his heart he loved the freedom of his subjects more than his own power.

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I thought Dradis was just saying that Westerners could honestly and accurately speak and reason about problems with Eastern Europe without sounding racist, so they were able to effectively deal with reality and achieve their goals.

Also until about 2010, the Eastern European former Soviet states had a reputation for being corrupt war-torn economically depressed hell holes so I’m not sure they would have been held up as a shining beacon of the benefits of regime change. I think @DradisPing might be anachronistically applying the good reputations that countries like Poland have now, rather than how everyone saw that region fresh off the Balkan Wars.

Even by 2000 if you dove in to the numbers it was obvious in the band of countries running from Hungry to Estonia that things had dramatically improved. A lot of people hadn't updated their priors about how bad things there were in the 80s, we only started to get the real numbers in the 90s.

Certainly in right wing circles it was well known.

The former Yugoslavia was seen as it's own weird thing with a lot of ethic tensions we didn't understand.

Really just said ~ "Only white people have a high enough IQ to form democracies".

I mean, I don't even find it useful to engage that assertion, but it is funny to contrast that with the take that I often see here that democracy in the west is now dysfunctional due to low IQ HBD dysgenics and only might concentrated in a single infallible strongman avatar can save us (Deus vult).

(+1 to aceventura's "History is longer than the last 70 years." which is approximately "read a book". I doubt the Greeks who invented democracy would've identified closely with your self identification on the HBD spectrum, you know, based on who they were geographically interacting with: southern Italy, Egypt, Anatolia, and Persia).

The IQ gaps have been investigated a lot more and the evidence regarding them is stronger. It is only natural to focus on them. The other things you mention are much more speculative, generally have a lot of room to plausibly be downstream of intelligence or culture, and are probably much less impactful than intelligence in any case. Sure we can acknowledge the possibility of genetic differences in other impactful traits, but that doesn't mean we can just assume that based on observing some difference between the population groups. In general I am wary about building castles of speculation on scant evidence, it might seem more sophisticated and cutting-edge but I think it's a much less likely to be true than something simple and well-tested.

As I suggested elsewhere in the thread, I think the burden of proof should be on the person who would argue that it works this way for every single animal except humans.

The real question is how strong the proclivities are and how effectively culture can enhance or curb them. That's a great question and I wish anyone were looking into it.

Did I argue otherwise?

FWIW I don't have a position on European genetic tendencies to hygiene, though I'd guess orderliness does come in when the subject expands to such things as keeping one's house clean. Who can say?

Don't recall where but I remember being flabbergasted by descriptions of pre-industrial European cities where all the roads, yards, etc. were just constantly covered in human and animal dung. Sometimes even indoors! The French in particular were noted for their penchant for pissing on staircases, also even indoors. Germans meanwhile were noted for fastidiously keeping interiors spotless. How much selection has taken place in the last couple hundred years, I cannot guess.

I feel like people take the wrong impression from those stories of historical roads covered in dung. Back then, all humans were a lot closer to nature so they were less grossed out by it. That dung was a sign of wealth. Animals were one of the most expensive things humans could owb, especially horses. In most societies, owning a horse made you a weslthy man. The manure was carefully collected and used for crop fertilizer.

It would have been mind blowing for most historical societies to see a European city with so many horses they cant even pick up all the dung. It would be like living in an oil field.

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I think your idea here is plausible, but I have trouble seeing how you'd isolate nature from nurture here for these axes without some industrial-scale twin studies that seem implausible.

Well, I think the burden of proof is much higher for the person who wants to argue that it works this way for every single animal except humans.

To your actual point though adoption studies seem useful.

A lot of HBD advocates in spaces like these do want it to just be about IQ, and a lot of people who call themselves pro-HBD will say it is just about IQ. It's one fracture on the DR regarding the Jewish Question, for example.

Arguing against specific highly spurious claims is very different to arguing that intelligence is the only feature of the mind that is inherited. In any case, you might add that the more anti-Jewish side of the DR is actually split between “Jewish IQ is a psy-op, see Unz, myth of American meritocracy, IQ stats from Brooklyn high schools in the 1930s don’t map to Israel” etc and “it’s real but it doesn’t matter because they’re also hereditary cheats, sex pests, clannish narcissists”.

Well, that perspective makes no sense and I've never seen it advocated; only implied by those who don't seem to know what they're talking about.

One sees it everywhere, even by those who otherwise denounce HBD.

The basic formula is: [My ingroup's positive attributes] are genetic, set in stone, impossible to imitate; while [ingroup's negative attributes] are the random result of circumstance or interest or are entirely mythical. [My outgroup's positive attributes] are random results of circumstance or interest, or are entirely fake; but [outgroup's negative attributes] are genetic, set in stone, impossible to improve or mitigate.

As I said, it doesn't make sense.

The Greeks actually wrote a lot about the conditions for democracy and what separated Greeks from barbarians in being able to do it.

The Virgin Nietzche vs ths Chads Aristotle and Plato.

I don’t think that’s what the person was saying at all.

The implication is that the culture of Afghanistan and Iraq and most of Africa and numerous other parts of the world, along with substandard intelligence, means that those places aren’t ready to be part of the better world.

This seems true.

If you were to say ‘ white people are clearly the most intelligent people, and the most innovative ‘ I would also agree and just kinda point to absolutely everything that they’ve accomplished (I’m Slavic - I don’t count) and how they’re the envy of the world.

I do believe the rest of the world will catch up - and I do believe if you steal a baby from some shit he country and stick ‘em in an average American home that they’ll just be like everyone else.

But why pretend they won’t be flooded with bad culture on top of bad genes on top of bad environment where they currently are and won’t accomplish much ?

My understanding of the HBD hypothesis is that the differences in outcomes across the world are, by a wide margin, mostly explainable by IQ differences in population. My understanding is that it's not a hypothesis founded or invoked with nuance, which is what you're trying to insert here. It's just trying to simplify complex geopolitical, domestic, and historical dynamics with "well, they're stupid". So please excuse me if my response to its invocation is equally terse and lacking in nuance.

Edit: Also, the thrust of my comment was more that it's funny to see the contrast of "Only white people are smart enough to form democracy" alongside (presumably) white people begging for the boot of autocracy to save them from the boogeyman.

My understanding is that it's not a hypothesis founded or invoked with nuance, which is what you're trying to insert here.

Disproof by example: I'm most favourably disposed to genetic explanations of group differences in a few specific cases.

  1. Sub-Saharan Africans, because of longer timescales of the main, H. s. s. component (100,000+ years of relative isolation in some cases), and because of very low hybridisation with Neanderthals (whereas everyone else has ~3%).

  2. Austronesians, because they're essentially the only group with substantial Denisovan ancestry.

  3. Shitty immune systems from those that didn't settle down until recently, because of the massive and sustained selection for plague resistance since we started building cities. I'm normally sceptical of recent-significant-change explanations, but this one has actually met the high burden of proof given the Columbian Exchange and the similar effects on Australian Aborigines, and it's a relatively-simple tweak compared to stuff "upstairs".

What's not there? I'm highly sceptical of any attempt to explain differences within Eurasia by HBD; the timescales of divergence are quite short, with in most cases significant gene-flow for the entire period, and we've all been civilised for long enough. That includes people going on about Near Easterners (except to the - relatively minor AIUI - degree that there's sub-Saharan African introgression) and, yes, Jews.

So I'm not really with @DradisPing about Iraqis being genetically unsuited to democracy, though I will note that he did also mention "deep culture" and I don't see anything wrong with that claim.

My understanding is that it's not a hypothesis founded or invoked with nuance, which is what you're trying to insert here.

Oh, no, there are a lot of nuanced HBD people who will talk to you all day about mitochondrial haplotype this and Y-chromosome that. Or there were, anyway, I haven't seen them around in a while; they just got called racists like all the others.

I speculate that people who want to talk all day about haplotypes are too, well, boring to draw that much controversy. If you're very interested in the science of genetics there might be a good conversation there, but most people are not. Moreover, people who want to talk about that will probably learn that the Motte isn't a great place for deep dives into genetic science. That sort of conversation requires a lot of specialised knowledge that most Motters don't have.

By contrast, people who enjoy making edgy generalisations about this or that racial group seem like they're optimising more for drama and controversy, and this is a better place to get that. It's the culture war angle. Diving into the arcane complexities of genetic science is interesting, but it's not incendiary. It doesn't pick fights the way that its edgier cousin does.

Naturally get more of the latter type.

Or there were, anyway, I haven't seen them around in a while; they just got called racists like all the others.

I have a different hypothesis.

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If that's your definition of nuance, then I'm sure phrenology and alchemy are right up your alley as well.

There's the difference between HBD as-in "Human genetics drift over time as populations are isolated, let's explore those differences" and HBD as-in "The genetic differences between populations can explain why the world looks like it does today[1]." Too often the former acts as a Trojan horse for the latter, and I guess people can't be trusted with the responsibility of communicating with nuance so they get called racist.

[1] Nearly every grand-theory-of-everything of why the world looks like it does today gets laughed out of any room with people who capable of deep critical thought in adjacent topics (see how anthropologists feel about Guns, Germs, and Steel) - HBD is not unique in this regard.

Edit: To add, the invocation of HBD in this thread was of the latter type, and not of the former type.

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see how anthropologists feel about Guns, Germs, and Steel

My understanding was that GGS was deprecated because it got objective facts wrong about the subjects it purports to address, not because it was ambitious in scope.

The facts it got objectively wrong aren't accepted as objectively wrong by anyone except online far-right autists. My impression is that it got depracated because it was meant to be compatible with 90's liberalism, which itself got depracated.

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There's the difference between HBD as-in "Human genetics drift over time as populations are isolated, let's explore those differences" and HBD as-in "The genetic differences between populations can explain why the world looks like it does today[1]."

This is not the difference between 'nuance' and 'not-nuance', this is the difference between 'crimestop' and science. It is in a way similar to the Catholic Church's acceptance of heliocentrism as a mere 'calculating device'. 'Nuance' does not require that what you are studying have no effect on the real world.

Alright Jordan Peterson, let's shift the debate to the definition of the word "nuance".

My core point stands uncontested. HBD the theory hides behind HBD the science in order to try to gain legitimacy as a "grand-theory of why the world is the way it is" despite every "grand-theory of why the world is the way it is" being half-baked and not capable of standing up to any critical analysis.

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Nearly every grand-theory-of-everything of why the world looks like it does today gets laughed out of any room with people who capable of deep critical thought in adjacent topics

Cool, I'm glad you found a way to dismiss a whole belief system based on how you imagine the relative status of people who believe in it compared to those who don't. I'm sure there's no need to engage with the object matter on this, your preconceived ideas are probably 100% right about everything.

Yes I often dismiss whole belief systems, because there are many quite shit belief systems - history is filled with them. I recommend you spend as much time engaging in the same practice, lest you become a lemming in someone else's schemes.

how you imagine the relative status of people who believe in it compared to those who don't

I don't know what this means, but yes, I do tend to hold those in lower regard who fall prey to believing in shitty belief systems. But, since I'm not a misanthrope, it's more of "pity" than "hate". I look at the pictures of cultists clutching onto empty goblets sprawled around tents and I feel sad, but then I see the children in the photo and I feel angry. It's more complex than what you're trying to paint me as.

I'm sure there's no need to engage with the object matter on this, your preconceived ideas are probably 100% right about everything.

I do engage. Like my example, I read Guns, Germs, and Steel - but then I also read the criticisms and appreciated those just as much if not more than the original source material. And then I adjust my priors.

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I don’t think you can blame this on the naivety of republicans because it was an elite stratum doing the invading.

When do you hold the rank and file accountable for the policies they voted for, versus blaming elites?

Say what you like about Dubya, Lord knows I have, but he was the most sincerely religious president since at least 1920. He had support from virtually all protestant Christian religious groups and leaders across America. One has to do some of kind of two-step to place him and his actions and their consequences outside the conservative movement or Red Tribe more broadly.

Bush was genuinely pious, but he wasn’t some townie(which is what the poster I replied to was getting at). He was, literally, a coastal elite who was educated in the Ivy League. He may have had blinders from ideology or end times prophecy but he and his admin weren’t villagers who had no choice but to believe what the scribes pronounced.

By his description, everybody involved wanted to invade Iraq, but the dynamic that resulted in an invasion seemed to be that of the Abilene Paradox.

This doesn't really square with widely shared testimony from people like Richard Clarke, talking about the Pentagon meetings immediately after 9/11, like literally the next day:

I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002.

On the morning of the 12th DOD's focus was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda. CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, was not persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor—Iraq must have been helping them. I had a flashback to Wolfowitz saying the very same thing in April when the administration had finally held its first deputy secretary-level meeting on terrorism. When I had urged action on al Qaeda then, Wolfowitz had harked back to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, saying al Qaeda could not have done that alone and must have had help from Iraq. The focus on al Qaeda was wrong, he had said in April, we must go after Iraqi-sponsored terrorism. He had rejected my assertion and CIA's that there had been no Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the United States since 1993. Now this line of thinking was coming back.

By the afternoon on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and "getting Iraq." Secretary Powell pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda. Relieved to have some support, I thanked Colin Powell and his deputy, Rich Armitage. "I thought I was missing something here," I vented. "Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response Evacuate the White House 31 would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor." Powell shook his head. "It's not over yet." Indeed, it was not. Later in the day, Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq. Instead, he noted that what we needed to do with Iraq was to change the government, not just hit it with more cruise missiles, as Rumsfeld had implied.

Any stick will do to beat a dog. Dubya and his team intended to invade Iraq from the beginning, the GWOT and the absurd claims of ties to Bin Laden and the Axis of Evil and the invention of the WMD concept and the "welcome us as liberators" and madman theory and whatever else got thrown around at the time that I've since forgotten about; all that fundamentally didn't matter to the decision makers, they wanted to invade Iraq for mostly unrelated reasons. So for the rational planners further down the food chain, like the air force guys, the whole thing was confusing because the reasons they were getting for what they were doing were unrelated to the actual plan.

What amazes me is the number of people who understand that the Iraq war, Vietnam war and Afghanistan war were spectacular fiascos and the whole establishment lied. But the next time the media sells a war they get all hyped up for it! This time there is a new supervillan who for absolutely no reason and with absolutely no historical context just behaves like a cartoon villian and we have to take him out now!

During Iraq there was at least some critical media and Baghdad bob was at least allowed on CNN. In Ukraine there are now dissenting opinions allowed. The people who spent 120 000 000 000 dollars building a 300 000 man army in Afghanistan and then told us the troops didn't exist yet the spending did, are supposed to be trusted blindly.

One of the main reasons why politicians are so freaked out about Ukraine is that they lied as much about Ukraine as they lied about every other war and they are afraid of the piles of lies being exposed. One day would could have a Ukrainian Ed Snowden or Bradley Manning.

It seems like the Ukraine invasion is mostly an analogue to the Iraq war from Russia’s perspective, not the USA’s.

In what way? I am seriously struggling to think of any analogoes other than a vague “it isn’t going as planned”. And even then it’s going badly in a wholly different and opposite way. In the occupied territories Russia has zero resistance and can govern as if everything is normal. But the initial battle plan was a fiasco. This is the exact literal opposite of Iraq invasion

One of the main reasons why politicians are so freaked out about Ukraine is that they lied as much about Ukraine as they lied about every other war and they are afraid of the piles of lies being exposed. One day would could have a Ukrainian Ed Snowden or Bradley Manning.

You can make a strong argument for helping Ukraine defend itself based entirely on publicly-available information - that Russia invaded Ukraine is not in doubt, Putin has repeatedly said that his goals in invading Ukraine include annexing territory and forced Russification of the inhabitants (i.e. technical genocide), and Putin has in fact annexed Ukrainian territory and kidnapped the inhabitants' children for purposes of forced Russification. If you think stopping these things is worth $100 billion or so, then nothing the US might have lied about is relevant to the argument. All a Ukrainian Ed Snowden or Bradley Manning could do is demonstrate that NATO was opposing Russian interests in Ukraine in a way that would mean Putin's invasion was smart and evil rather than crazy and evil.

If a FDR-era Ed Snowden or Bradley Manning had come up with smoking-gun evidence that the US was acting against Japanese interests in a way which made Pearl Harbor smart and evil rather than crazy and evil (and the Axis-sympathetic US right thinks they have one, not entirely without justification) it wouldn't change the moral or practical case for defending America after Pearl Harbor. The situation in Ukraine is broadly analogous.

Iraq is different - both the "Iraq is helping Al-Quaeda" lie and the "Iraq is building scary WMD" lie/mistake/high-on-own-supply motivated deception arguments were based on non-public information where you had to trust the US government. And those were the best arguments for the Iraq war. If you try to defend the Iraq war based entirely on publicly-available information you end up with an argument that makes Bush look crazy and evil - something like "We need to invade a third world country every ten years to remind people that we can, and Iraq is convenient."

I mean just to make the point from the perspective of Russia, this is to them much more like the civil war — rogue states decide to break away and the Russians not being willing to allow them to leave and to make alliances with rival powers. The color revolution to us looks like they chose us, but to Russia it looks like a hostile state being formed on its border, potentially armed with weapons supplied by its enemies. If Puerto Rico declared independence, allied with Russia and started buying Russian weapons, we might well invade too.

kidnapped the inhabitants' children for purposes of forced Russification

Does this narrative of cartoonish supervillainy, which so obviously maximises pushing Western buttons while having dubious practicality (for starters, the complete disinterest and dysfunctionality in the (post-)Soviet space as far as upbringing of orphans is concerned is a matter of lore), not trigger the slightest bit of skepticism?

As far as I can tell, the real core of this story is that children that were found orphaned in Russian-captured territory were put in the Russian orphanage system, which seems like a normal thing to do. Can you think of any example of a war of conquest (e.g. the Franco-German wars over Alsace-Lorraine) where the conqueror also surrendered orphaned children from territories it captured to the target country, and if not, would you consider those wars genocidal as well?

It's obvious that Ukraine's preference, if they must lose the territories, is to have all of the population transferred to the territories they control - that is, what they really want is for Russia to commit ethnic cleansing, and they are incentivised to frame any failure to do so as genocide. At some point, though, this framing just starts turning all these "war crimes" into a military necessity - if Russia per the implicit Ukrainian argument can't fulfill its war goal of removing Ukraine's ability to serve as a NATO outpost without either committing ethnic cleansing or genocide as defined by the Ukrainians, then how can they be persuaded to not choose at least one?

Putin has repeatedly said that his goals in invading Ukraine include (...) forced Russification of the inhabitants

Source? The search results I get with this claim usually link it with an intent to issue Russian passports to the inhabitants. Is making people of a conquered territory citizens of your country genocidal? This would, again, make a lot of other wars into genocides, such as the Franco-Prussian one or everything in the Yugoslavian wars including NATO's Kosovo (Ethnic Serbians on the territory of Kosovo were issued Kosovan passports), and also make Georgia's intent to assert its authority over South Ossetia and Abkhazia (which presumably involves issuing Georgian passports to all the people of other ethnicities who live there) look rather so. In fact, if this is the standard, Azerbaijan's capture of Nagorno-Karabakh is starting to look like the least genocidal of all the US-approved conquests, since they just expelled all of the inhabitants rather than villainously issuing them Azerbaijani citizenship.

(I am not even going to address the implicit assumption that all citizens/residents of Ukraine are of Ukrainian ethnicity, which presupposes that a genocide/assimilation happened there in the past)

This would, again, make a lot of other wars into genocides,

Yes, yes it would. A majority of historical wars were genocidal in intent; wanting to exterminate your enemies is in fact an extremely common motivation for warfare, and if it's not what you start out wanting, you sure want it once the bastards have butchered thousands of your lads on the battlefield.

A lot of the confusion about Israel-Palestine and Ukraine-Russia comes from the relevant countries and their advocates protesting that they're not engaging in Unprecedented Evil Behavior, just fighting wars like they've been fought for thousands of years. And in a way, they're right! But "the kind of wars our ancestors have been fighting since the Neolithic" is in fact what we've been trying to ban out of existence once and for all, because they sucked. There is an under-discussed gap between people who think of the modern notion of war crimes in terms of "the World Wars were anomalies, we need to ban the sort of thing that went on in WWII to ensure we only fight normal wars like we had before", and people who think of the modern notion of war crimes in terms of "the scale of the World Wars showed that we urgently need to ban a whole lot of things that had been rampant in practically every war until that point, but never made quite so starkly obvious in their horror than when they were implemented on an industrial scale".

A majority of historical wars were genocidal in intent; wanting to exterminate your enemies is in fact an extremely common motivation for warfare

Citation very much needed. Wanting to kill the enemy country's elites and replace them is common, wanting to loot the enemy country's stuff is common, wanting to reduce the enemy people to servitude or slavery is common, even wanting to displace and take territory from the enemy group is common. But even in "barbaric" ancient wars outright eliminating the enemy people root and branch is usually too much work for an unclear reward.

As far as I can tell, the real core of this story is that children that were found orphaned in Russian-captured territory were put in the Russian orphanage system, which seems like a normal thing to do.

Russia could have returned them to Ukraine. Russia is happy to do extensive prisoner swaps, so why not allow innocent children to go?

Because the regime does not believe that is What Russia Should Do with Ukraine.

Because Putin does not believe the Ukrainian people exist.

Thanks - fixed.

A regime change operation in Ukraine with the goal of pushing the US sphere of influence right into Russia's back yard even though they repeatedly warned against it. The US was doing everything it could to get a war and the war has gone a lot worse than reported.

The cost will be in the multiple trillions as interest rates have gone up sharply since the start of the war and the equipment that is replacing the stuff sent to Ukraine costs multiples of the equipment sent to Ukraine. Not to mention that NATO is inheriting a basket case nation that makes nation building in Afghanistan look like a cake walk. NATO now has to finance a military a quarter the size of the US military that is supposed to be capable of fighting a high intensity war in a country that has no arms production and now tax base to support it. Ukraine is going to be an endless foreign aid black hole

Iraq was definitely different. It was a completely unprovoked land grab on the other side of the planet. It wasn't really any different then the Belgians grabbing the Congo. The goal was to occupy and control Iraq while giving them zero legal status within the empire.

Have you really missed naval remote-controlled boats that resulted in Russia losing naval war to navy that has no active traditional surface vessels?

The Starlink ones developed by the US for the defence of Taiwan that are sent to targets located by US surveillance? The Ukrainian naval projects also have a strong British component.

Ukraine's main arms production is assembling Chinese drone components. This is mainly a cottage industry of building parts made to fit together into a small plastic drone. That is fairly far from large scale industry.

Not to mention that NATO is inheriting a basket case nation that makes nation building in Afghanistan look like a cake walk.

The odds of Russia folding completely and needing NATO occupation as a result of their invasion of Ukraine seems extremely low.

NATO will inherit the rump state of what is left of Ukraine which is the part without the mines and the good agricultural land.

Assuming Russia breaks with all previous tradition and manages to fight somewhat competently, sure, but what part is supposed to make nation building in Afghanistan look like a cake walk?

They have effectively beaten NATO in a conventional land war. They are fighting an enemy in which every operation is run by NATO, the equptment is NATO, thousands of NATO mercs are running things on the ground.

While Israel and the US can't take an area the size of a municipality in Gaza against enemies with no resources Russia took the area the size of Denmark in a week against an enemy with 3x larger force.

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So the Russian army never actually managed to fight somewhat competently any time in history? Really?

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It would shock me if Galicia didn’t have mines and good land, and Russia doesn’t want that part.

It has neither actually.

A regime change operation in Ukraine

As of 2025, the only people trying to change the regime in Ukraine are Russia and some currently-not-in-charge Russophile elements in the Trump administration - even the Ukrainian opposition don't want a change of government under fire. That wouldn't change if it turned out the US was lying about their involvement with the Euromaidan. In any case, there have been two free and fair Presidential elections in Ukraine since the Euromaidan, and Zelenskyy came to power in 2019 by beating the man who Victoria Nuland allegedly installed.

I'm not claiming that the US had clean hands in the Euromaidan (I have no idea if they do or not) - I am claiming that there is nothing within the normal range of US foreign policy lies that could come out about Euromaidan that would affect the moral or political logic of what is happening in Ukraine in 2025. If the crux of our policy disagreement is "As a matter of resource allocation across various theatres in the New Cold War between the US, NATO and other allies on our side and China/Russia/Iran/North Korea on the other side, should the US be sending cash and materiel to Ukraine?" (and it sounds like it is) then discovering the truth about what Victoria Nuland said to Poroshenko doesn't change the calculation.

And now I am going to disagree with you about resource allocation, making arguments based on publicly-avaialable information that work just as well as a matter of strategic logic if Euromaidan had been a CIA plot

the war has gone a lot worse than reported.

Both the position of the front lines and the approximate losses of heavy equipment have been verified by OSINT. The best case for the Russians now is a Pyrrhic victory - which incidentally undermines the norm against aggressive war a lot less than a clean victory would have done (see Iraq). Russophiles claiming to have non-public information that the war is going badly for Ukraine have predicted dozens of the last one (Ukraine being driven out of Kursk oblast) Ukrainian defeats. Ukraine isn't winning, but the MSM aren't claiming otherwise.

equipment that is replacing the stuff sent to Ukraine costs multiples of the equipment sent to Ukraine

Yeah - we are sending borderline-obsolete kit to Ukraine (because it is good enough to kill Russians) and replacing it with new stuff that is hopefully good enough to kill Chinese. Essentially none of the stuff being sent to Ukraine would be used in a mostly-naval war against China. As of now, some air defence equipment promised to Ukraine is being held back in case Israel needs it.

basket case nation

I thought Ukraine was a basket case too, but empirically they are not. If they were, they would have lost by now - you can't prop up a basket case against a peer competitor without boots on the ground.

no arms production

Ukraine is now the third (after China and Turkey) largest producer of military drones - admittedly mostly by after-market modification of Chinese-made civilian drones.

Yeah - we are sending borderline-obsolete kit to Ukraine (because it is good enough to kill Russians) and replacing it with new stuff that is hopefully good enough to kill Chinese. Essentially none of the stuff being sent to Ukraine would be used in a mostly-naval war against China. As of now, some air defence equipment promised to Ukraine is being held back in case Israel needs it.

This is the point I always have to disagree on. Stuff like HIMARS would absolutely be useful in a Pacific war. Javelins aren't just for killing Russian tanks, they're useful even against insurgents because they are a standoff infantry weapon that can blow up fortifications and stuff - they were expensive, but useful in Iraq. And artillery shells being depleted is a real issue against China, the logistics here are sort of fungible, and spending a lot of resources resupplying Ukraine is going to demand we replace that (we have to be prepared to fight more than just China, a military's job isn't only to prepare for the most obvious threat), and the resources that go into replacing those assets, plus their losses, will eat up resources that could go into the Pacific. Sending shells to Ukraine is going to cut down on our available R&D. It's really not accurate to frame it as us giving them outdated old junk that would have fallen apart anyway, they got some pretty high-end stuff, and this commitment depleted important reserves of the conventional arsenal.

To be clear, putting a stop to Russia's antics is not bad foreign policy, but the part I find frustrating is that I don't think this should be America's responsibility to this extent. The EU constantly goes on about how strong and independent it is, so Ukraine shouldn't even be Trump's ship to sink. But it somehow falls upon America to disentangle a conflict we have little to do with, suddenly everyone is demanding us to be world police.

But it somehow falls upon America to disentangle a conflict we have little to do with

lol, lmao even.

The US has been playing stupid games in that region for the 10-15 years preceding the war- they wanted that war, and they got it. And Trump is still responsible for it, given that the destabilization efforts continued under his administration; we can blame upper military brass for hiding shit all we want but at the end of the day it's still the responsibility of the guy at the top.

And we can discuss the fact the war had significant economic consequences for the Fourth Reich Germany, too- the US took their cheap natural gas away (it wasn't the Russians that blew it up) and now they get to experience a 1973-style price shock in manufacturing because they were too stupid to figure out how to frack for themselves.

It's unwise to meet NATO spending targets because every non-US nation in that alliance is very well aware that the way they actually pay for it is "the US does something that damages our economy, which causes our GDP to drop by about the same measure that it would if we were paying for our own defense". And paying for their own defense is something that grows the middle class, because the elites are forced to pay their own countrymen for it (this is the idea behind the military-industrial complex), which is why just taking the hit and allowing the US to break client economies is deemed acceptable in said client states.

And [as stated below] if the US is intending to bail out the middle class (which is why Trump II, a reformer, was ultimately elected over the arch-conservative Harris), amping up R&D in the military-industrial complex is the way to do it, because it forces the elites to take a step back from their current objectives of enclosure [no growth ever + environmentalism] and race war and actually start approving development projects for once.

So I think the appropriate question that Europe should be asking is "how much should Europeans allow the Americans to wreck the pan-European economy because they wanted to go to war with Russia for shits and giggles"? If I were Chancellor of the Fourth Reich, my protestations would be as loud as my contributions symbolic, and I'd only start making stuff the Americans might be directly dependent on if they go to war somewhere else... which is probably why their military-industrial policy is currently exactly that.

"Responsibility" is a bad way to look at foreign policy. I support Ukraine because of potential outcomes.

Russia is our 2nd largest geopolitical enemy and ally to our largest. Resources destroyed in Ukraine reduces their overall power. Russia frequently attempts salami-slicing operations against the west using plainclothed soldiers, hacking, and political assassinations.

To me the biggest factor is that Russia's success would be a disaster for nuclear policy. Russia being able to do whatever they want and threaten nuclear war if anyone interferes encourages them to repeat their antics. It also encourages other parties to get their own nukes, either to defend against such actions or initiate their own.

And artillery shells being depleted is a real issue against China, the logistics here are sort of fungible, and spending a lot of resources resupplying Ukraine is going to demand we replace that (we have to be prepared to fight more than just China, a military's job isn't only to prepare for the most obvious threat), and the resources that go into replacing those assets, plus their losses, will eat up resources that could go into the Pacific.

This seems plausible, but there is a claim the opposite direction that the Ukraine conflict gives the US and its allies cover to invest heavily in war materiel production while still notionally in a time of peace without large domestic or foreign suspicion about warmongering or wasteful spending. In 1941 the US benefited heavily from having already tooled up for lend-lease production and broadly expecting to get dragged into the conflict eventually. Designs for aircraft and tanks that would only get fielded later in the war were in development, and Iowa's keel was laid before Pearl Harbor.

Iraq didn't stay a popular war for very long, but was it a genuinely unpopular invasion at the time? My impression is that when everyone thought the Iraqis would take to democracy easily once their evil tyrant(and that is what Saddam was) was replaced it was a generally-approved of war domestically, and it only became super unpopular when it became clear that the Iraqis would prefer armed nuts to democracy.

That discussion of Bush also reminds me a lot of Trump. He's clearly leading on vibes, not ideology or policy briefs. They're different vibes but they're vibes nonetheless.

The war was always unpopular with the left, though at the time even anti-war activists would do a lot of throat clearing about how evil Saddam was. It was very popular with the right, who mostly, as you say, thought removing Saddam would turn Iraqis into democracy-lovers. (Remember all those photos of Iraqis proudly showing off their purple fingers?)

To this very day my boomer Dad recalls those photos of Iraqi women casting votes. That was powerful enough to him to support the war.

The war was always unpopular with the anti-establishment left, who have always been more visible than they deserve given their actual level of public support. It was also unpopular with the anti-establishment right, although I don't know how many people noticed given that the anti-establishment right didn't have a megaphone at the time.

The pro-establishment left mostly supported the war, although my read at the time was I was not the only person with pro-establishment left sympathies who only did so because I trusted Blair to tell the truth about WMD etc. in a way that I didn't trust the Bush administration. Pro-establishment left elites like Senate Democrats or NYT access journalists had access to the same stovepiped intelligence that the Bush administration did, and almost entirely supported the war. That Obama was a notable exception is why he was a strong Presidential candidate in 2008.

The war was net-unpopular by the 2004 election (which is surprisingly close given the good economy) at which point it had become clear that the WMD were at best a small legacy stockpile that had never been a real threat to anything except an invading army and that the administration had got itself into a quagmire by failing to plan for the aftermath of victory. It didn't become shockingly unpopular until about 2006 when it became clear that the US had failed to find anyone capable of governing Iraq except Iranian proxies or Salafi jihadis.

I don't know how many people noticed given that the anti-establishment right didn't have a megaphone at the time.

The American Conservative is the big one that I remember, and their opposition to the Iraq War is how I remember finding them. But they were certainly a tiny percentage of the right. There was also libertarian opposition at Reason and Raimondo's antiwar dot com, but again pretty small audiences in the grand scheme of things.

I do remember all those photos; I remember lots of democrats awful proud of Iraqi elections even if they didn't like Bush. The war was well-defended on 'liberal' grounds and maybe I'm just confusing liberal and leftist here but I recall plenty of definitely-not-Bush voters awfully supportive of the war.

Iraq didn't stay a popular war for very long, but was it a genuinely unpopular invasion at the time?

Iraq was wildly popular at the start, though the people that make excuses that no one opposed it are equally wrong. It wasn't underwater until around 2006 or so. It didn't become unpopular until it became clear that the USA was not going to be able to get anything to stick.

@MadMonzer You’re both right about 2006. The insurgency took about a year to really get going and 2006 is when the coalition casualties started to pile up. People forget that the Iraq War was much more intense than Afghanistan. The casualties sort of evened out in the end, given that Afghanistan lasted 10 years longer. But the Iraq War caused more coalition casualties in three years than the entire twenty year long Afghanistan conflict.

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