Category: War

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Guilty With an Explanation

Saddam – “guilty, with an explanation.” Why is he on trial in a country that has no government, in the hands of a country that has no legal authorization to hold him, before a judge who was never appointed by any legitimate, democratically elected authority?

Why is Saddam not being tried by the International Court of Justice in The Hague? Because the Americans cannot manipulate the outcome of that court, and because the World Court will not sentence anybody to death. But that is where he should be tried.

And the Americans don’t support the World Court because there are few Americans who could actually be put on trail for war crimes.

If there was ever a particular action by the Americans for which one could say they will probably be sorry for it later, this is it. The court in Baghdad has no legitimacy in the eyes of anyone but the Americans. Saddam is a confirmed psychopath and mass-murderer. The U.S. does not need to manipulate the outcome of this trial, but by pulling strings it will forever raise questions in the minds of people everywhere– especially Moslems– about whether he was ever really quite as bad as the Americans claim he is. Someone will say, the evidence was planted by the Americans. And a reasonable Arab might just nod and say, “could be.”

[2011-05: I was wrong about that. Nobody, even in the Arab or Moslem world, gives a damn about Saddam Hussein. I should have realized that.]

 

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Arresting George W. Bush

I know what you’re thinking: you can’t arrest the President of the United States!

Here’s my idea. I want to set up a camp on Manitoulin Island (that’s up there north of Tobermory, if you didn’t know where it was) with a bunch of cages and holding cells and guard dogs. Then I’ll get a couple of friends and go down to the White House and arrest George Bush and Tom Delay and John Ashcroft and Condoleeza Rice, and take them there and lock them all up.

If the Secret Service tries to stop us, we’ll inform them that George Bush is a threat to peace and good order and commerce and must be locked up.

If they ask what proof we have, we’ll tell them that we don’t need any proof. Do they really expect us to wait around for Bush to commit a nefarious act before locking him up? Not in today’s post-0303 world. I mean, March, 2003, the date of the invasion of Iraq.

If he wants to call his lawyer, we’ll inform him that, sorry, he doesn’t get access to a lawyer until we’re good and ready to let him have access to a lawyer.

If he says, what about my rights, we’ll laugh our heads off. Your what? Hoo haw! It’s all right for those pansy liberals like Ted Kennedy and John McCain to talk about rights– but we’re in a war. This is a war on our nation and our values. It is a war on common sense and good taste and my personal happiness. If I sit around and wait for pansy legislatures to provide me with the correct legal frame-work and documentation in order to proceed with arresting the most dangerous man in world…

And after they admit that we are fully vetted legally, and we get them up to Manitoulin Island and into the compound…. we bring out the water-boarding equipment and cattle prods and electrodes.

Honestly– I just want to hear what they have to say.

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Leonard Cohen Farts at the WTC

Leonard Cohen is over 70 and he’s been living in Los Angeles for too long.

As soon as I realized that he had a song about 9/11 on his new album (Dear Heather), I knew what it would be about, and I knew what it would sound like. That is depressing.

I knew it would express this coy expectation that the old radical left would somehow approve of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, or think America deserved them in some way, and that Cohen himself was just too smart to be taken in by that. At the same time, he would modulate the stridency of the right– so he couldn’t be accused of being too conventional or, heaven forbid, reactionary. He would feign disinterest, and neutrality, coyly, to try to imbue what is fundamentally an utterly conventional response to the event with some kind of mystique:

Some people say
They hate us of old
Our women unveiled
Our slaves and our gold
I wouldn’t know
I’m just holding the fort

I’m just holding the fort, as if I am above partisan politics and hold only reasonable views on the matter. Or worse– what is “reasonable” is what I am now about. I have forgotten what is so unreasonable about the reasonable.

“I wouldn’t know”, as if, unlike everyone else, his judgment is grounded in thoughtful reflection, not knee-jerk platitudes.   This, from a man who doesn’t seem to be aware of the history of American involvement in the Middle East, the interventions, the coups sponsored by the CIA, the extraction of oil, the tolerance of authoritarian regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and, before 1979, Iran.

So he thinks, why on earth are they mad at us?  We haven’t done anything.

And then he stops short of giving an actual opinion. He wants you to project your own feelings about the subject onto his ambiguous lines:

Did you go crazy
Or did you report
On that day

But if you knew it was coming, the mystique is gone. It’s gone. Cohen is too smart to wrap himself in the flag, but he’s got a pin on his lapel. He is too smart to resort to slogans, but comes down safely on the side of those educated but insular suburban minds of middle America like the editorial board of the New York Times or the reporters at “60 Minutes”.

I’m really quite progressive on many issues, but, after all, America really does have enemies.  Am I still hip?

Added March 2005:

I don’t mind that he plays his politics close to the vest. What I mind is that it is a weak song. “Some people say” takes you nowhere. What people? Who?  Why do they say that? And, Leonard, do you think people should go crazy, or should they report for duty? You don’t seem to care. If you don’t care, you have nothing to say. If you have nothing to say, don’t say waste the space on your album.

Neither option, of course, provides you with the option of yawning. Neither does Cohen seem even dimly aware of the fact that America is not the center of the universe, and just because 9/11 was tragedy does not mean that yawning is not an option.

He did far better on “There is a War” from New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1976):

There is a war between the left and right
A war between the black and white
A war between the odd and the even…
Why don’t you come on back to the war,
That’s right, get in it.
Why don’t you come on back to the war,
It’s just beginning.

That was a provocative song. You might or might not agree with him, but at least he came at with creative energy and inspiration.

Or how about “The Future”:

Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that’s left
And stuff it up the hole in your culture

You see, it’s not his politics that have gone soft.  It’s his aesthetic.  “The Future” implies as conservative an outlook as “I’d Love to Change the World“, with, perhaps more subtlety.

By the way, like Neil Young and Bob Dylan, Cohen’s talent does not translate into film: the “official video” is terrible.   Cohen obviously had no clue of what to do in front of a camera.  I just watched it.  My God– they bleeped out “crack” and “anal sex”.  What kind of fucking regime is managing Cohen’s videos now?  (Cohen himself changed “anal sex” to “careless sex” in live performances:     Here’s the live version with the self-bastardization.)

That is unspeakably disappointing: the grocer of despair has become the checkout cashier of minor annoyance.  The background singers, by the way, in this live version don’t cut it: where’s Julie Christensen?

[2011-03] I don’t think I gave enough credit to those lyrics from “There is a War”. Is the natural state of humanity war? War with each other, because every soul seeks to possess reality, to extend the ego to every conquerable continent, emotional or otherwise? Yeah… “I wouldn’t know”.

I’m not sure where Cohen comes down on The Patriot Act, but I know lame lyrics when I hear them: “some people say” and that very tired and boring “I’m just holding the fort”. Rolling Stone Magazine seems to think he’s attained a kind of zen-like simplicity that is deeply profound. I think that if anybody else had written those lyrics, Rolling Stone would not be bending over backwards to explain why those lyrics are not merely sophomoric.

Leonard, it’s time to retire. No, wait– I can see that you already have.

An interesting cover of “There is a War”.

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Boing! Your Taxes at Play

Darleen A. Druyun was a top official in the Air Force who played a large role in negotiations with Boeing for big fat air force contracts. She was your representative. She was in charge of seeing that American tax-payers got honest value for their dollar.

She was so good at her job, that a lawyer for Boeing bought her house. Yes, indeed. And her daughter got a job with Boeing– no sense wasting that family of expertise.

Ms. Druyun was not heartless by any means. When Boeing was under severe pressure by a competitor, Airbus, for a major tanking contract, Ms. Druyun was kind enough to pass along some specs about the Airbus contract to Boeing.

By golly, she was so ruthless about getting maximum value for the taxpayer’s dollar that Boeing went out and hired her in 2002. Now, she works for Boeing.

Now?

It appears, she was always working for Boeing.

Yeah. Well, you might be wondering by now just how tough this lady was. But you would be reassured to know that the Air Force and the FBI are going to thoroughly investigate the matter. When they are done, I bet all those Boeing shareholders who have been collecting big fat dividends are all going to have to pay big fat fines!

Oink! Oink!

Don’t forget: when the government gives money to people who haven’t worked to earn it, that is called a “dependency” and it is bad, bad, bad.

When the government gives money to corporations who lie and cheat: that’s called capitalism, and that’s what makes our country great.

 

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Quagmire

The eerie thing about the Bush press conference on April 13 is how much he sounded like Lyndon Johnson. All the same arguments he made about staying in Viet Nam— no matter how grim it looked– are now presented by George W. Bush– in that same drawl– to justify staying in Iraq. He even has the beginnings of what some people used to call Johnson’s “shame-faced” expression.

You felt bad for Johnson (I did– a little) because it wasn’t through malice or greed that he got into Viet Nam. It was just plain stupidity.

That doesn’t mean Iraq is inevitably going to be like Viet Nam. I think it is fairly likely, but I’m not willing to give up entirely just yet.

But it does bring to mind a few interesting issues related to game theory.   What is game theory?  Suppose that you entered an auction in which you are required to pay even if you lose the bidding? At a certain point, you will realize that you are bidding more than the item is worth. But if you stop bidding, you get nothing. So you can’t stop.

In other words, suppose your soldiers are killed even if you don’t win the war? That’s what happened in Viet Nam. As the war progressed, the cost to the U.S. (in soldier’s lives) became higher and higher compared to the value of winning the war and stopping the spread of communism dead in it’s tracks. Therefore, the cost of losing the war also became higher and higher. Whereas the U.S. could have withdrawn relatively painlessly in 1963 (as John Kennedy seems to have intended), by 1965 the cost of withdrawing had become immense, and was growing larger by the moment. So Johnson felt he had no choice but to continue “bidding” it up. It took another eight years before Richard Nixon finally ended the bidding, and the U.S. lost the item (Viet Nam) and 55,000 lives.

So, if, in 1963, the U.S. public knew that it would cost 55,000 lives, they would probably have never tried to “purchase” the victory.

It would be hard to believe that the Bush White House is too stupid to realize that they are in precisely this kind of auction in Iraq. The more expensive the overthrow of Saddam becomes, the more unacceptable it will appear to be to withdraw. The more unacceptable it is to withdraw, the higher the U.S. must “bid”.

That doesn’t mean the U.S. should withdraw. Not necessarily. Not yet.

The U.S. could win this war. It could turn over political power to an Iraqi government at the end of June and establish a democracy in the heart of the middle east. All that oil will keep flowing for America’s SUV’s. Iraqi’s will start establishing new businesses and industries and enjoy the fruits of capitalism: new cars, wide-screen tv’s, personal computers, iPods… The country won’t be wracked by continuous civil war between the Shiites and the Sunnis and the Kurds. There won’t be terrorists who perceive the democratic government to be a sell-out to the decadent west. Iran will mind it’s own business. Syria will block the border. Israel will be safe.

Or does that all seem rather unlikely to you now?

It is up to the American public, with an election coming up in November, to assess George Bush’s grip on events. Does the U.S. have a realistic chance of obtaining it’s objectives in Iraq? Or will it devolve into an endless cycle of violence, repression, retribution, and chaos?

I don’t think John Kerry has a viable alternative plan. That’s the nature of a quagmire. But Kerry will be hamstrung by circumstance. If he withdraws American troops, he leaves Iraq in the hands of violent, intolerant extremists, or, perhaps, civil war. If he stays, he may have to deal with increasing numbers of casualties and the inevitable comparisons with Viet Nam. I don’t see how Kerry can be a white knight on this issue. All the voters can do right now is punish the man who got them into this mess with an electoral defeat.

Nixon took over for Johnson in 1968. It took him 5 years before he could withdraw from Viet Nam, in 1973, with “peace with honor”. Shortly afterwards, South Viet Nam collapsed. Thirty years later, it’s easy to look back and see what should have been readily apparent at the time: all of the death and destruction of the Viet Nam War was for nothing.

The problem is that real U.S. objectives in Iraq are not the same as the objectives that appear to be at stake in public statements about the U.S. position. The U.S. claims that democracy and the freedom of the Iraqi people are at stake. I think that George Bush really believes it, but even George Bush’s friends admit he doesn’t think deeply about anything.

The problem is that the U.S. doesn’t really care about democracy or freedom in any other Arab dictatorship. The U.S. seems to smile fondly on the governments of Egypt and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and obviously has no interest in the victims of oppression in Sudan. So why does it care about it in Iraq? It doesn’t. The real objective, all along, was to depose Saddam, to punish him for having fought George Bush Sr. and for his arrogant refusal to allow the U.S. unfettered access to it’s alleged weapons laboratories, and, of course, to ensure a ready supply of cheap oil for the massive engine of the U.S. economy.

If these are the real stakes, the real thing that the U.S. is “bidding” on, it becomes clear that Iraq will not be free to choose, even in a supposedly free election, a government that is inimical to the interests of the United States. Any political party that declares itself to be opposed to U.S. interests in Iraq, will be declared to be an enemy of democracy, and will not be permitted to contest an election, even if a majority of Iraqi citizens appear to support it.

What the U.S. is doing right now, with it’s interim ruling council, is trying to ensure that the outcome of any future election will be to it’s liking, while appearing to represent the will of the majority of Iraqi citizens.

That may all be beside the point. The real question is, can the U.S. impose a democracy upon a nation that is unwilling to stand up for itself against the violent tactics of a minority of Islamic extremists? The general population of Iraq might prefer a democracy to an Islamic republic, but they don’t appear to be willing to fight for it. There are no demonstrations or rallies in support of the U.S., or the interim ruling council. The Iraqi policemen and soldiers the U.S. is training flee at the first sign of a mujahidin. There is no political party or leader with popular support to speak in favor of continued U.S. occupation. The members of the interim council that are friendly to the U.S. will be perceived to be stooges of the West, almost by definition.

It is fundamentally irrational for the U.S. to attempt to impose a democracy upon a nation that doesn’t want it badly enough to pay even a portion of it’s cost. If people are unwilling to fight for it now, why would they be willing to fight for it after the U.S. leaves and the Islamic fundamentalists have even more room to maneuver?

If the U.S. couldn’t plant democracy in Kuwait after liberating it from the first Iraqi invasion, why does it think it can plant democracy in Iraq? If our “friends”, the Saudis, have no inclination to hold democratic elections, why should Iraq?

If Libya now meets our standard of good world citizen….

It’s not going to happen. The U.S. can never leave. It’s going to get uglier and uglier as the U.S. is forced to aggressively defend itself against determined fanatical enemies.

My guess is that the U.S. will eventually begin to devise some kind of window-dressing, a strategy that would allow it to pull most of it’s soldiers out of Iraq without appearing to be surrendering the country to the forces of darkness and chaos. It may take five more years before they begin this process, and then another five years before it really gets under way. Some kind of Iraqi strong-man congenial to the U.S. will have to emerge, with the backing of the new Iraqi army. Radical Islamic movements will have to be violently repressed. Iran will grow interested.

Quagmire.

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The Fog of McNamara

There is a remarkable moment in “Fog of War” when Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and architect of the Viet Nam War, states that the U.S. should never enter a war without the support and assistance of it’s allies.

Everybody knows that for all the window-dressing applied to the support of Great Britain and Poland and a few other states, the U.S. entered Iraq not only without the active support of most of its allies, but with their active opposition.

It’s a hard lesson to learn.

But then, the point of “Fog of War” is that every assumption has to be re-examined in the light of experience and new information. Robert McNamara has more experience than most. I’m not sure what he’d make of the Iraq war. He might observe that another piece of wisdom America should have learned by now is that when the reasons given for military action prove to be invalid, instead of finding new reasons, find new actions.

If Bush had said right from the beginning that the U.S. would now be the world’s marshal, patrolling countries near and far, saving citizens from the abusive practices of dictators and bullies, and building democracies where none existed before, we might be able to have an honest and interesting debate about how it should be done, and or even whether it should be done. We could talk about whether the United Nations should play a part, or not, and whether the U.S., like Gary Cooper, should walk down Main Street alone at High Noon,

[added 2023-05-16]

Well, screw McNamara, if he thinks that was the problem.  The problem was not that the U.S. did not have a plausible path to victory: the problem was that the U.S. had no business getting into those wars in the first place.  The problem was that the U.S. frequently intervened not on behalf of democratic, liberal political parties and leaders, but on behalf of authoritarian leaders who could be counted on to turn over their economies or raw goods to U.S. corporations.

 

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The Incomprehensible Scabrous Viciousness of Ann Coulter

Ann Coulter, bless her little heart, doesn’t want you to buy into a false patriotism.

You might be confused, you see. You might look at two men who are now fixed beside each other in the public mind– the two likely candidates for President of the United States– and you might sort of realize that one of them has actually served in war, and the other sends other young men to do the fighting, while giving the richest citizens of the United States of America a big fat pass on paying the costs of this war.

Well, look at him. Bush has the face of a pretty little frat boy who might have pulled a few strings to make sure he didn’t get sent into any danger over there in Viet Nam. John Kerry looks like Herman Munster. But he also looks like someone who has paid some dues.

It’s not a political thing. John McCain has obviously paid some dues. Clinton didn’t look like he paid any dues (but he was a pretty effective president). Bush Sr. paid dues. Reagan didn’t. Check out the chicken-hawks.

But Ann Coulter is concerned lest you actually think that a man who served in the air National Guard and probably had daddy pull strings to get him there so he never had to face enemy fire is somehow less courageous and heroic than someone who actually went to war for his country. This is the remarkable topsy-turvy world of Republican blonde bimbo columnists: Of course he is less courageous and heroic. Even a rational Republican should be able to admit that a man who actually served in war time has made a slightly greater sacrifice than someone who joined the weekend frolics of the Texas Air National Guard?

You might not like Kerry’s politics, but don’t be silly about the military record.

The only thing that is baffling to me is why the Republicans are missing a rather wonderful opportunity to show that they can occasionally rise above petty, vindictive, party politics and do something with class. Why not acknowledge Kerry’s honorable service? Why not praise him?

Instead, we have Ann Coulter actually trying to make it sound like George Bush wanted to serve in Viet Nam, but the war, unfortunately, ended before he could finish his National Guard duties. Ann– duh!– he was in the National Guard precisely so he could avoid Viet Nam. Hello!

And then, from the scurrilous, to the despicable:

Ann Coulter says, of Max Cleland:

Indeed, if Cleland had dropped a grenade on himself at Fort Dix rather than in Vietnam, he would never have been a U.S. senator in the first place.

That’s pretty shameless. Max Cleland, unlike George Bush, went to Viet Nam to serve his country honorably. One day he picked up a grenade that he saw lying in the ground below a helicopter from which he had just disembarked. He thought it was his, and had fallen from his belt, and was therefore safe. It turned out to have belonged to someone else, and it was alive, and it blew up in his hands. He lost both arms and a leg.

Wow! Talk about hardball. All you can do is look at Ms. Coulter with astonishment, and wonder if the Democrats have the testicles to go up against people with such piercing, stiletto wits. Imagine that– attacking the war record of a paraplegic!

Will any patriotic Republicans have the character, courage, or integrity to stand up to Ann Coulter and put her in her place? (Ha ha.) She is attacking a war hero! She is dishonoring a veteran! Not bloody likely, of course, since most Republican leaders never served in any wars, and therefore don’t feel any real sense of obligation to those who did.

They are famously known as “chicken-hawks”.

Those who did– like John McCain and Chuck Hagel– have, in fact, made known their distaste for those who attack the patriotism of war veterans who happen to be political opponents.

And shouldn’t Ms. Coulter leave it to a few veterans to take up the issue of Max Cleland’s fitness for office, seeing as, obviously– I mean, as obvious as anything has ever been obvious– Ann Coulter never served and never will serve in any kind of military?

But then, Ann Coulter is a puff of air anyway, a blonde bimbo recruited by Republican fund-raisers to counter-act the image of the party as an old white boy’s club. See? It’s hip to be vindictive and scabrous.

I doubt we’ll soon see a Tom Delay talking action figure in a mini-skirt.

Order the Ann Coulter action figure doll! Now! Or else!

Well, hey, I thought it was a joke. There, at the bottom of her column, on www.townhall.com, is the ad for the Ann Coulter “Talking Action Figure”. You know it’s going to talk, of course.. What else does it do? Does it wear a uniform as Ann Coulter, obviously, never has and never will? Does it go out and visit people and interview them and research important issues? What? And confuse the issues?

This is classic. Ann Coulter, in a mini-skirt, attacking those racist liberals

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George W. Bush’s “What is ‘is’?”

I never heard Bush use the word “wrong” yet. Or “sorry”. Conservatives can be assholes at times, just as liberals can, but they are never more assholeish than in the rank hypocrisy of their horrible outrage that Bill Clinton lied about Monica Lewinsky, while they blithely look the other way as Bush lies about Iraq.

Bush could argue that he was misinformed– so I would accept a simple “we were wrong” or “I was wrong” or “we were mistaken and we’ll try not to be mistaken the next time we talk you into invading a foreign country and killing 100,000 people”.

Not a chance. Bush acts as if he never claimed there were weapons of mass destruction, or that they were mere days away from deployment. He acts as if he never said that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. He acts as if his office never heaped scorn and ridicule upon those who believed that the UN inspection process was working reasonably well.

That is deceit. It is dishonest. It is as slimy as any “what is ‘is'” from the lips of Bill Clinton.

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Thomas Friedman’s Bourgeois Militarism

The New York Times, you must remember, is probably one of the few actual media outlets that lives up to the conservative bugaboo of “liberal”. Maybe. William Safire, who is very conservative, writes OpEd pieces for them. But so does Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, who are polite liberals, which means that they are different from mainstream conservatism (it there is such a thing nowadays) but not too different.* Paul Krugman writes from more of a traditional liberal perspective. (Can you show me a conservative paper that gives equal prominence to a few liberals?)

Thomas Friedman just wrote an editorial on Iraq that excoriated Howard Dean for having the temerity to suggest that it was wrong to make war on Iraq. At roughly the same time that George W. Bush was tacitly admitting that there never were any weapons of mass destruction (just, in his weasel words, “programs” of research for weapons of mass destruction). Thomas Friedman insists that Dean’s position against the war is not “serious” or “credible”. Not like his plan to reach out to our good friends in Syria and Iran for help in stabilizing Iraq. Not like Mr. Friedman’s very credible plan to bring peace to Israel by….. well, I don’t know. Why shouldn’t Bush get out there and join Israel and whack the Palestinians as well, if it is supposed to help?

Do you understand the state of diversity of public opinion in the United States? It is okay to think that Bush could be doing a better job at whacking Islamic militants where-ever they are, but it is not okay, even for a supposed liberal like Friedman, to question the very idea of aggressive pre-emptive militaristic tactics against America’s “enemies”. I think Friedman really believes that no reasonable person would think that there is ever any solution other than bombs and tanks.

Here’s Mr. Friedman’s concept of diversity on the subject of Iraq:

I define “serious” as one that connects with the gut middle-American feeling that the Islamist threat had to be confronted, but one that lays out a smarter approach than the Bush team’s

Okay, now I understand. “Serious” is middle-class. Middle-class people like war, because they usually don’t have to actually fight in person, and middle-class people understand the importance of maintaining an adequate supply of oil for their SUV’s.

I don’t mind Friedman saying that he supports the war on Iraq, which is as much as to say that Democrats and everybody else should agree with him. What pisses me off is his insistence that opinions other than his or George Bush’s, are not allowed to be taken seriously, and can’t be respectable, and should not be allowed as a political platform. How can you have serious political discourse in this country if members of the opposition have the temerity to actually disagree with the administration?

That is essentially what he is saying: it’s okay to have diversity of opinion, but not too much diversity.*

The generals in the Pentagon and the masters of intrigue and John Ashcroft would surely be happy to hear that the supposed flagship media outlet of the global liberal conspiracy thinks that pre-emptive war is okay and that it’s just plain silly to think otherwise.

The odd thing is, that Friedman may not even be right about the political viability of a pro-war position. Iraq is looking more and more like a dumb idea, like a quagmire that just might explode in a few years. We’ll never know** about it, because CNN and ABC will pull up their tent-pegs and disappear long before the consequences of it become apparent, just as they have deserted Afghanistan, and just as they deserted Nicaragua many years ago. But it just might. The average American believes in capital punishment (though less-so than they used to) but he also believes in minding your own business, generally, unless you really need to do something, and it’s looking more and more like we didn’t really have any more business in Iraq than we do in Libya, Syria, or Saudi Arabia or dozens of other countries.

* I am alluding, of course, to the hilarious scene in Woody Allen’s “Bananas” wherein Miss America is called to testify at the trial of Fielding Mellish (Allen) for treason, and asserts that, in America, it’s okay to be “different, but not too different”.

** 2022-04-30  Of course, in fact we do know, in spades, and the media have more or less acknowledged that Iraq was a massive blunder.

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Wrong About Being Wrong About Afghanistan

I’m trying not to forget, by the way, that I was wrong about Afghanistan.

February 2007: Wow. If you actually look up what I said about Afghanistan… well, here it is:

There are good reasons why the U.S. would not want to invade or occupy Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen or whoever. It would take a long time, and there would be an enormous cost in lives. It would likely introduce instability into a potentially volatile region. It would create a large pool of new, future terrorists. It would create alarm and concern in China and Russia and Pakistan. If the U.S. occupied the nation, it would have to constantly contend with terrorists and insurrectionists.

It would result in disaster.

How about that? I was wrong.

I was wrong when I thought I had been wrong about Afghanistan.