This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
One of the greatest questions of the Iraq War, and a question with significant implications for our understanding of the competence of the 'deep state', Pentagon and intelligence services in general, is this:
Why didn't the CIA fake evidence of WMDs in Iraq?
As time has passed since 2003, the 'mainstream' antiwar narrative, in which every important person supposedly 'knew' there were no WMDs but advocated for invasion anyway, has been shown to be largely ridiculous. It is likely, as discussed by Jervis and others who have done the most research into the cause of the intelligence failures in Iraq, that a substantial proportion of the intelligence establishment, including senior officials at the CIA and MI6, considered it highly likely that Saddam was, at the least, in posession of extensive chemical weapon stocks. The long since retired head of MI6 at the time said just this year that he was convinced they were there:
They weren't united about what to do, hence certain Cheney actions, and they didn't have much proof, thus the Office of Special Plans and intense efforts to convince Powell etc to act, but even many of those who didn't advocate invasion believed it was likely that he had these weapons. Most crucially, as Jervis argues, they overfocused on Saddam's refusal to allow international weapons inspectors as almost a guarantee that he was hiding WMDs, because why else would he refuse them? (Saddam ultimately claimed, under interrogation in 2004, that he refused to allow them because he didn't want Iran to find out how 'degraded' his weapon stocks were.)
So why, after it became clear weeks - and certainly months - into the invasion that there were no WMDs, did the US 'deep state' (including the intelligence services, perhaps with Pentagon assistance and/or with WH approval) not fake them? This anti-conspiracy is critically important for a few reasons:
It would likely have been significantly easier to fake chemical and/or biological weapon stocks in Iraq than to commit many of the other conspiracies placed at the foot of Western Intelligence services or the 'deep state'. The US didn't destroy its own chemical weapon stocks until 2022, and anthrax would be a trivial process for a small, highly focused internal intelligence unit to acquire or manufacture. No 'Bush planned 9/11' tier conspiracy theory is required, this would have been a focused, limited program in the vein of countless mid-late 20th century US intelligence operations involving a small number of operatives. While the coalition alleged variably the existence of (official link) chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, the nuclear allegations were extremely vague and largely amounted to the idea that Iraq 'might' have started such a program, or that Saddam had 'met with' nuclear scientists or tried to acquire nuclear material.
It was not, therefore, necessary to manufacture the presence of nuclear weapons or nuclear material, for which a longer, riskier and more complex supply chain would be necessary. The presence of moderate stocks of chemical weapons, plus some anthrax, would have been sufficient to make the pre-war claims largely accurate, or at least accurate enough to be respectable.
It's unlikely the international press would have trusted the denials of ex-Baathist officials or scientists around planted evidence, and in the event of requiring an eyewitness, only a few people would had to have been paid. Even if the fakes weren't universally believed, they would have sowed enough FUD that US motives for the war wouldn't have been thoroughly discredited. There was no need to 'prove' the full extent of the pre-war allegations, only to lend them broad credence. 'There were no WMDs in Iraq' served as a major argument used by people hostile to the policies of the Bush and Blair administrations after 2003, led to major protests and enquiries, and soured the popular perception of those governments extensively.
The Iraq War led to a climate in which CIA regime change operations supported by boots-on-the-ground became substantially less easy to slip through the political process. Even if we assume that (a) the CIA was ambivalent about an invasion, thus the OSP and (b) that the CIA didn't particularly care to prop up the careers of neoconservative politicians who suffered if they didn't find WMDs, the number of US regime change ops, and the number of direct military interventions involving ground soldiers, have declined significantly since 2003, even relative to the 1990s. Military involvement was (beyond those existing engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan) limited to Syria, Libya and some support for Yemen and Ukraine, civil involvement to Ukraine and a couple of others, and the Iraq War's intelligence failures have led to a political climate in which committing ground soldiers to foreign conflicts is extremely unpopular. The presence of WMDs would have made all this significantly easier. For example, the CIA's failed rebel training program in Syria was in part a consequence of the US' steadfast refusal under Obama and Trump to support their regime change operation with a substantial number of ground forces.
Categories of explanation:
/
/
What do you think?
Who'd have thought there would be a new, interesting idea about a topic as tired as the Iraq War. Kudos, sincerely.
I question both that the CIA does the type of long term planning about reduced operational flexibility (so, they didn't care) and also that Iraq (or, more precisely, the lack of finding meaningful WMD in Iraq) constrained later activity. A faked WMD cache would barely have nudged domestic or international opinion: it was the piling up bodies and dollars that made people domestically turn against it, not the accuracy of WMD claims, which were more or less apparent a couple weeks after the invasion, to general shrugging.
I'd attribute the CIA's increasing operational reluctance to a more general trend of institutions becoming more hidebound and risk averse as time goes on. You exist to push papers around, not to change the material world in any way. Why bother to throw a coup or kill Epstein or anything, when it doesn't get you much of anything except exposing you to the risk of losing your organizational fiefdom?
(This is why I don't put much stock into contemporary conspiracy theories either.)
I’m not sure how true that is. It’s similar to the argument that the Afghan War would have been equally unpopular if bin Laden had been captured in Afghanistan in like 2004. It might have been eventually, sure, but one of the core reasons the public’s perception of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is so poor is that some of the primary war objectives were never reached. If you take it to the most extreme extent, if the US had found, say, almost ready nukes in Iraq, the war narrative would have been “we stayed too long”, not “we shouldn’t have gone”. That’s a huge difference.
That said, I mostly otherwise agree with you.
The difference is that public opinion of the Iraq War was never really based on the presence or absence of WMDs. I don't know how old you were in the run up to the war in 2002/early 2003, but this was never really a huge selling point among the American public. It was the official justification, and it was the one Colin Powell pushed in front of the UN, but I don't remember anyone who really felt like that was the best justification. Most of the people who would fervently denounce the war later were denouncing it before it even started. Most of the people in favor of the war were pushing some muddled narrative about how since Sadaam was a bad, anti-American Arab actor in the Middle East he was somehow responsible for terrorist activity including 9/11. They all mentioned the WMD angle when they were arguing in favor of the war before it actually happened, but few of them flinched when the evidence turned out to be underwhelming. And lest you think that there was some middle ground where pro-war Democrats lost faith in the war after they saw how flimsy the initial justification was, they didn't exactly back off right away. Even the 2004 election, largely viewed as a referendum on the war at the time, didn't really have any war-related policy angle. John Kerry had no plans on withdrawing and didn't claim that he did. He claimed that it was a mistake in retrospect but that didn't translate into any concrete proposals.
What happened was that the people who had always been opposed to the war started pointing to the lack of WMDs as proof that it was built on a faulty foundation, and as the years went by this narrative became more prominent. The real problem with the Iraq War was the unexpected insurgency and inability to deal with the sectarian tensions that bubbled to the surface in Sadaam's absence. The problem with the war in 2004 was that a year on from Bush proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" the war continued to drag on with no real end in sight. If the US had gone in in 2003 and installed an effective government the no one would really care about the lack of WMDs. The outcome would have been used as an object lesson that most of the unfree people in the world simply desire democracy and the US military can make their dreams come true by simple removing whatever impediments are preventing it. Afghanistan had already started to shatter that illusion, but it was easy to gloss over Afghanistan because it had been relatively anarchic to begin with and was considered absolutely necessary by pretty much everybody, given that they were responsible for an attack on our country. Iraq was seen as optional. There's also the fact that casualties were much higher in Iraq; annual casualties in Afghanistan measured in the tens, while casualties in Iraq measured in the thousands. These casualties were also higher in the insurgency than they were during the initial invasion. Even accounting for the fact that there was a good 2 1/2 months of 2003 before any action started, 2004 saw by far the highest casualty totals of the war. There were fewer than 3,000 total casualties in 2003; in 2004 there were over 8,000, and the following 3 years would see casualties in the 5,000–7,000 range. The totals plummeted in 2008, but by this time even the war's former supporters had to distance themselves from it. There was no doubt that whoever the Democratic candidate was would have to unequivocally commit to ending the war in his (or her) first term, and John McCain's support of the war (he was actually one of the few people in government who advocated for sending more troops to Iraq) was viewed as a major impediment to his electability.
The general, but the Democratic primaries were dominated by the question. Howard Dean's raison d'etre was opposition to the war.
In the end, though, the majority of Democrats shrugged, and John Kerry got the nomination. And his position was, at best, muddled, sometimes calling for withdrawal early in the new term, sometimes suggesting increased troop presence. (You actually can come up with a coherent statement of his position beyond "Bush bad," but it's clearly synthetic and mostly because he was very reticent when it came to committing to any particular concrete policy.) And, in fairness to the politics at the time, him adopting a strong anti-war stance would have probably lost him votes; his issue was waffling badly, not waffling itself.
Yep, that's me. And to add a bit of color, although I would tactically deploy arguments about WMD when convenient, in all honesty I didn't give a shit: finding anything short of a nuke wouldn't have phased me, and even with a nuke I would have probably just gone quiet for a month. I still think that's the correct perspective, but the matter of WMD was just a pretextual battlefield for the larger question of whether the war on Iraq was good or bad. And I'm pretty sure that's not unique to me.
You mean "fazed". The way you spelled it is a hypercorrection.
Good catch, appreciated.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link