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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:
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)
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.
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.
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.
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