by von
ROSS DOUTHAT, last Tuesday:
Two out of two Matts agree: If the U.S. pulls out of Iraq or fails to bomb Iran, the "stab in the back" narrative is going to become the centerpiece of a revived post-Bush conservatism, and progressives need to steel themselves to combat it.
Myself, I think that liberals should be praying that the Right embraces the "stabbed in the back" theory of what went wrong in Iraq (and possibly Iran as well), because it will push conservatives toward political irrelevance.
Professor Reynolds, today, ignoring Douthat's advice:
JUST BACK FROM IRAQ, J.D. JOHANNES HAS A COLUMN ON RICHARD LUGAR: "Is it possible to win a war on the ground, and lose it in Congress?"
J.D. Johannes, Reynolds' support, explaining:
The principal accomplishment of the surge to date is solidifying the “Anbar Awakening,” the significance of which has been under-reported by the media and ill-understood by the public. If any piece of territory in Iraq qualified as a “terrorist safe haven,” it was bloody Anbar. .....
The virtual extinction of the insurgency in the province — a victory that I was privileged to witness first-hand — represented not some momentary quirk of tribal alliances, but a diligent application of the revised tactics that coalition forces have implemented under skilled, battle-proven officers and Gen. Petraeus.
Anbar province and Baghdad, this week:
[June 24] Iraqi authorities say a suicide bomber driving a fuel tanker has killed at least 10 people in an attack on police headquarters in the city of Baiji.
[June 25] A stealthy suicide bomber slipped into a busy Baghdad hotel Monday and blew himself up in the midst of a gathering of U.S.-allied tribal sheiks, undermining efforts to forge a front against the extremists of al Qaeda in Iraq. Four of the tribal chiefs were among the 13 victims, police said.
[June 26] The Petraeus team's attempt to try to (at least temporarily) change the game in Iraq's Anbar province by arming some tribes against the ISI (the loose Islamic State of Iraq) looks like it is already over. A significant failure in security allowed a suicide attack in the Mansour hotel lobby that killed key leaders (made critically important due to the imposed hierarchy deemed necessary to create a single Sunni "front") of the "Anbar Salvation Council." In parallel, there are rumors of bitter rivalry and that a tribal leader ("Anbar Awakening") absconded with $75 m in US money given to fund militia development.[June 26] Iraqi commandos raided the home of a Sunni Cabinet member Tuesday after a warrant was issued for his arrest, outraging Sunni politicians and jeopardizing U.S.-backed reconciliation efforts within the Shiite-led government.
The move against Culture Minister Asad Kamal al-Hashimi came after he was identified by two suspected militants as the mastermind of a Feb. 8, 2005, ambush against secular politician Mithal al-Alusi, an Iraqi government spokesman said. Al-Alusi escaped unharmed but two of his sons were killed.
[June 26] An Iraqi tribal leader has been shot and killed in southern Baghdad, one day after at least four Sunni tribal leaders were killed in a suicide bombing at a hotel in Iraq's capital.
[June 27] Iraqi officials say a car bomb has exploded in northern Baghdad, killing at least seven people.
Authorities say the blast in the Kadhimiya district on Wednesday evening injured at least 14 others.
Bomb attacks and other violence Wednesday in Iraq killed about 50 people overall, many in the Baghdad area.
[June 27] Insurgents killed a US marine during combat operations in the restive Sunni province of Anbar in western Iraq, the military said Wednesday.
[June 27] Police found the bodies of 21 people in Baghdad on Wednesday. Most had been shot. ....Four Iraqi policemen were killed in an ambush near the oil city of Kirkuk, 250 km (155 miles) north of Baghdad, when gunmen opened fire on their vehicles, police said. .... The Iraqi army have killed four insurgents and detained 85 others during the last 24 hours in different districts of Baghdad, the Defence Ministry said. ....Gunmen killed two members of the Assyrian's Beth-Nahrain Association Union in a drive-by shooting in central Mosul, 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. .... A suicide car bomb targeting a police commando checkpoint killed one policeman and wounded three other officers in the al-Jaderiyia district of southern Baghdad, police said. .... A roadside bomb killed seven people, including five police commandoes in Samarra, 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad, police said, adding that two civilians were killed when security forces opened fire in the aftermath of the blast. .... A car bomb killed at least three people in an attack on police vehicles near a busy market in northern Baghdad, a witness said. Police said there had been an explosion in the Suleikh district and 10 people were wounded. .... Fourteen insurgents were killed when a truck they were rigging with explosives blew up overnight in the town of Shirqat, 310 km (190 miles) north of Baghdad, police said. .... Five people were killed and three wounded in different attacks by gunmen on Tuesday in Mosul, police said. .... An athletic club in Mosul was badly damaged when gunmen planted bombs inside the building overnight, police said.
[June 28] A massive car bomb exploded at a street-side bus depot during Baghdad's Thursday morning rush hour, killing at least 22 people and wounding more than 40 others in a tremendous explosion that set fire to scores of vehicles, Iraqi police said.
Authorities say at least 18 others were wounded by the blast in the northern town.
Earlier Monday, a suicide car bomber killed eight people and wounded 25 in an attack on the governor's offices in Hillah, a predominantly Shi'ite city, south of Baghdad.
It took four years of failure for the President and his supporters to heed the advice of Senator John McCain and others. It took four years for them to admit that, maybe, McCain, Powell, and Shinseki were right. Now, they complain that we do not trust their judgment. Now, wars are not lost by the Commander in Chief or the Secretary of Defense, but by the U.S. Senate. Now, we are the ones who are oblivious to reality. Now, we cannot ask whether the surge is "Too Little, Too Late." Now, they are right and we are wrong. Now, four years on, they still do not get it.
It may well be that the troops have been stabbed in the back. Reynolds and Johannes, however, are pointing their fingers in the wrong direction.
Title:
They disembarked in '45
and no one spoke and no one smiled
there were too many spaces in the line
gathered at the cenotaph
all agreed with the hand on heart
to sheath the sacrificial knifes
but now
she stands upon Southampton dock
with her handkerchief
and her summer frock clings
to her wet body in the rain
in quiet desperation knuckles
white upon the slippery reins
she bravely waves the boys goodbye again
and still the dark stain spreads between
his shoulder blades
a mute reminder of the poppy fields and graves
and when the fight was over
we spent what they had made
but in the bottom of our hearts
we felt the final cut
Pink Floyd, "Southampton Dock," The Final Cut
I've always thought that they were stabbed in the back by an administration that had so little concern for their welfare that it invaded a country without bothering to plan for what to do next, or secure sites full of high explosives suitble for use in IEDs, or appoint experts rather than 20something Heritage intern wannabes to positions of greaqt responsibility in the CPA, etc., etc., etc.
Also, that their seconds, the people who wiped the knife off after use and handed it back to them, were people like the writers of the NRO, who were willing to call anyone who questioned the administration's conduct of the war defeatists or traitors.
But hey, maybe that's just me ;)
Posted by: hilzoy | June 28, 2007 at 11:57 AM
Wow: now I've read Johannes' article. What a piece of work.
There's one of my favorite tricks, "benefit analysis", in which you cite a benefit and then say "see?", without considering whether it has any costs, and if so, whether they outweigh it. (There's also "cost analysis", when you don't like something.) "There is some progress in Anbar, so we can't leave!" -- when not only is this not obviously true, as von says, but it also completely leaves out the costs of achieving this benefit -- not just the costs in terms of lives, money, etc., but also the opportunity costs of not doing something else.
And this was breathtaking:
"Lugar bases his plea for downsizing and redeployment on three premises: the state of the Iraqi government, the stress of the war on our military, and the “constraints of our domestic political timetable.”
The first two are canards."
Mwahahaha! The stated goal was the surge was to provide the Maliki government the breathing room to work towards reunification, but the state of the Iraqi government, and in particular its manifest failure to do any of the things we are giving it breathing room to do, and the fact that it doesn't seem to be capable of doing these things no matter how much breathing room we give it, is a "canard".
Wow.
Posted by: hilzoy | June 28, 2007 at 12:05 PM
Good post, von. It is sad.
I wish Lugar would stick to his guns, but I am grateful that he is moving the Overton window over toward a better place.
Posted by: wonkie | June 28, 2007 at 12:15 PM
But don't forget, Washington D.C. is more dangerous than Iraq.
Posted by: Ugh | June 28, 2007 at 12:16 PM
Unfortunately the stab-in-the-back tactic usually works quite well. And if one can campaign with he lie that the Democrats will outlaw the bible when winning without getting laughed out of town, the old Dolchstoß should sound uncommonly reasonable to the same non-negligible voter segment. It worked with Vietnam, why should it not work today?
The lie will need some time to catch on but I predict that it will stick successfully in less than a generation.
Retch!Barf!Eating-Backwards!
Posted by: Hartmut | June 28, 2007 at 12:56 PM
Replace 'he' with 'the' in second line!
Posted by: Hartmut | June 28, 2007 at 12:58 PM
Iraq was lost by Bush failing to take it as a serious war.
Posted by: Sebastian Holsclaw | June 28, 2007 at 01:14 PM
Iraq was lost by Bush failing to take it as a serious war.
Yeah, and possibly before that - but we can at least all agree that he failed in this and that such failure at the very least exacerbated the problem.
Good post Von.
Posted by: Eric Martin | June 28, 2007 at 01:22 PM
Iraqi commandos raided the home of a Sunni Cabinet member Tuesday after a warrant was issued for his arrest, outraging Sunni politicians and jeopardizing U.S.-backed reconciliation efforts within the Shiite-led government.
The move against Culture Minister Asad Kamal al-Hashimi came after he was identified by two suspected militants as the mastermind of a Feb. 8, 2005, ambush against secular politician Mithal al-Alusi, an Iraqi government spokesman said. Al-Alusi escaped unharmed but two of his sons were killed.
Ouch. Attempting to arrest a cabinet member, killing two of his sons. On the word of "suspected militants".
If iraq had something more like our Constitution, and they had to wait until he was actually in parliament to present his crimes to parliament, this wouldn't have happened.
What a mess. This is a bigger setback than it looks like at first glance.
Posted by: J Thomas | June 28, 2007 at 01:22 PM
Iraq wasn't lost as a war. It was lost as an experiment in democratizing a nation. We won the war (or at least successfully invaded and deposed the leader, that is) back in 2003.
And I don't think, honestly, even when accounting for my natural cynicism, that Bush ever lost sight of what he went in to do. He doesn't act like a man who's been defeated. He either truly believes history will show him to have made the right (clearly never stated honestly) decision or he's getting exactly what he wants from the invasion. I tend to feel it's the latter.
Posted by: Edward_ | June 28, 2007 at 01:25 PM
IIJM, or does the latest deluge of "surge" reporting from Iraq (especially the stuff mainly disseminated via the Internet) put anyone else in mind of the PR blitz the government put on over Vietnam? Especially in the post-expansion period in 1970-71?
There seems to be the same sort of reportorial dynamic at work: a focus almost exclusively on our military; an obsession with operational minutiae ("... 1 Bn of 2 Bd/3 Div conducted a sweep south of al-Bugalu in support of Operation Shocking Awesomeness which resulted in the deaths of 954 Al-Qaeda fighters at the cost of only three wounded..."); a near-complete lack of interest in the concerns of the people or the government for whom we are supposed to be doing all this; and, finally, a sort of ritualistic invocation of stab-in-the-back memes to ward off any criticism of either the military or the political structure which created the intervention in the first place. Because, you know, we're America; and thus: we're always right.
The big difference, though (and it quite strange to type these words!) is that in comparison to Iraq, the "rationales" of the Vietnam conflict seem far easier to comprehend. They both, I think will be recorded in history very much as "not-worth-the-sacrifice" wars; but George W. Bush's invasion/occupation will, I think, take place of pride in the March of Folly.
Posted by: Jay C | June 28, 2007 at 01:47 PM
Unfortunately from what I heard of an interview with Lugar on NPR, he's just spectering, and is unwilling to follow through on his talk with any meaningful action.
Posted by: KCinDC | June 28, 2007 at 02:02 PM
It worked with Vietnam, why should it not work today?
I'm not old enough to remember the Vietnam era, but I think there's a very big difference in terms of public opinion. With Vietnam, there was always a significant number of people who felt the problem was that we weren't prosecuting the war aggressively enough. In the current war, only the far right takes that view; unlike Vietnam, the general public has never really been behind the goals of this war outside of Saddam and WMD, which are dead issues. We're not trying to stop Communism here.
Most people see no point to the continuation of this war, and I think they'll remember that they felt that way. There's just not anywhere for the stab-in-the-back theory to take root other than among the dead-enders. They won't be persuading anyone.
Posted by: Steve | June 28, 2007 at 02:28 PM
With Vietnam, there was always a significant number of people who felt the problem was that we weren't prosecuting the war aggressively enough.
I don't recall that. There were serious problems with morale, training and equipment, but for the first few years of the war, the generals got all the troops they wanted. Sure, there were folks like Curtis Lemay who wanted to bomb Hanoi back to the stone age, but his position of widening the war wasn't that popular, even among the conservatives. They recalled what happened when we got too close to China in the Korean War.
Had we overrun North Vietnam, people expected either a huge response from China or a huge problem occupying a country that had been fighting foreigners for decades -- with a great deal of success.
Posted by: freelunch | June 28, 2007 at 02:48 PM
Good post, Von. (Even though for some odd reason you use four dots and one period and two spaces redundantly to make an ellipsis and two periods, rather than the perfectly simple ellipsis and a period; we don't actually use two periods in a row in English. :-))
I'd also like to encourage you to consider reconsidering the wisdom of supporting proxy war in Somalia, if my mere suggestion doesn't put you off that.
Posted by: Gary Farber | June 28, 2007 at 03:25 PM
J Thomas, you read that wrong. We tried to arrest a cabinet member who was implicated in the attempted killing of second politican.
It wasn't us that killed the sons, it was the cabinet member we tried to capture.
Posted by: Jon H | June 28, 2007 at 06:19 PM
I don't recall that. There were serious problems with morale, training and equipment, but for the first few years of the war, the generals got all the troops they wanted.
For example:
The same was true later in the war as well. The polls show plenty of people who disapproved of the war because they wanted us to just commit overwhelming force and get it over with. Among people who oppose the current war, there's not very many who take a similar position.
Posted by: Steve | June 28, 2007 at 06:59 PM
Jon H, the iraqi government tried to arrest an iraqi government cabinet member and killed two of his sons in the process, based on the testimony of two "suspected militants".
I don't see how you can look at this as not a giant setback. Unless you've already given up on the iraqi government.
Ideally they'd call the guy to come in and defend himself in some sort of law court, or before the assembly. If he refuses to come in maybe you have the trial in absentia and remove him from office if he's proven guilty.
But they didn't do it that way. They attacked his home and killed his sons. If that happens to a sunni cabinet member, what sunni is safe? Opening the door to a bunch of guys wearing shia police uniforms is sometimes a death sentence.
The last time the police came to my door, it wasn't a no-knock warrant. So they knocked and told me to let them in. I could have asked, "Do you have a warrant", and they would have answered "No, do you want us to go get one and come back?". I didn't want them to be in a bad mood so I let them in without a warrant, but I could have gone that route. If they had said they had a warrant for my arrest, it would have been mostly OK for me to ask for a badge number and call the police station to confirm that they were really police with a real warrant. They would have thought I was a kook and maybe treated me worse, but I could have done it.
This is nothing like rule of law. When there are far more than 2 factions in the iraqi government, it's quite possible for one of them to kill a member of another faction and then frame a member of a third faction for it.
Violent arrest of a sunni cabinet member, that could have been a kidnap-assassination. Why would any sunni run for office in this government? The claim was our surge was going to give them time to work out their differences. What's the odds of that now?
Posted by: J Thomas | June 28, 2007 at 08:56 PM
Another point of agreement between me & von (alert the media): The Final Cut. Thanks for reminding me. What a bitterly prescient work.
Posted by: Doctor Science | June 28, 2007 at 09:41 PM
But did we-were-stabbed-in-the-back-in-Vietnam even work that well, as a political tactic? Carter won in '76, and, despite a dreadful four years, nearly won in '80. The Democrats controlled the House until '94, and had the Senate much of the time.
Also, it seems like that kind of ressentiment works on the kind of people who already have a lot of ressentiment (about liberals, The Gay, the Marquess of Queensbury, whoever's on Fox's list tomorrow morning) It keeps the old rubes in the tent, but I don't see how it gets the new rubes in.
Posted by: Delicious Pundit | June 28, 2007 at 11:36 PM
I am pessimistic. The public today has a much shorter attention span and a far more malleable memory than in the past. Few will believe the stab-in-the-back now. But after a constant low-level barrage for a decade or so, it will catch on with enough people to have an influence. Especially if the next POTUS is a Democrat and takes the decision to withdraw from Iraq (completely or partially), the "cut-and-run" meme will take solid roots. Already Bush is accused to be a crypto-liberal who betrayed the "true" conservatism.
Probably the only way to avoid that would be Chain-Eye/Shrub attacking Iran followed by a huge blowback (but that could also mean an open coup d'etat in the name of national security).
I still suspect Cheney of doing/planning a Ludendorff. If/when Iraq fails, he will shift the blame to the Dems and they will (as usual) be either too stupid or too caring to not take it (i.e. cleaning up the GOP mess and being attacked for it).
Semper aliquid haeret = if you accuse someone long and persistently enough even with the most preposterous charges, some of them will stick. The Rabid Right has much experience with that (more than the Loony Left).
Posted by: Hartmut | June 29, 2007 at 04:58 AM
There are actually two questions that need to be asked and answered here.
First question: Will the GOP attempt to create a stab-in-the-back myth in order to blame the "loss" of Iraq on the Democrats?
The answer, needless to say, is "yes".
Second question: Will conservatives continue to have a stranglehold on the public discourse, and use that stranglehold to keep pushing the stab-in-the-back myth until it becomes the accepted conventional wisdom?
The answer, I believe, is also "yes".
So Ross is wrong. The forthcoming "Dems lost Iraq" narrative is bad news for the Dems, and if they're smart, they'll do everything in their power to counteract it.
(This leaves aside the questions of whether the Dems will in fact be smart enough to counteract the narrative, or whether, even if they are, they can manage to stem the rightwing media tidal wave.)
Posted by: Johnny Pez | June 29, 2007 at 08:43 PM
Will the GOP attempt to create a stab-in-the-back myth in order to blame the "loss" of Iraq on the Democrats?
The answer, needless to say, is "yes".
Second question: Will conservatives continue to have a stranglehold on the public discourse [....]
The answer, I believe, is also "yes".
So Ross is wrong. The forthcoming "Dems lost Iraq" narrative is bad news for the Dems, and if they're smart, they'll do everything in their power to counteract it.
If the lying bad guys are going to push this lie, and if they control the media, what can democrats possibly do to counteract it?
Even if they were to continue to roll over and play dead, that wouldn't help in the least. They'd still get blamed for the loss.
Posted by: J Thomas | June 29, 2007 at 10:16 PM