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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27905 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)

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.

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."

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.

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