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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   27153 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."

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.

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.

"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.

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