Daniel Larison: The long run authorizes every king of humbug

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The Long Run Authorizes Every King Of Humbug

Posted on September 1st, 2010 by Daniel Larison

Since, unlike the present, tomorrow is always imaginary, such idolatry can be manipulated in many ways. On the one hand, of course, the Stalins of the world can demand the death of millions in the name of a future paradise. This is an especial concern of Camus, who complains of those who “glorify a future state of happiness, about which no one knows anything, so that the future authorizes every kind of humbug.”…


Given the ironic character of history, we should, at the very least, make sure that our actions have some value in the present. The future that we imagine is unlikely to come about, if it does come about it will not last, and when it does come about we will probably despise it. ~Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

It seems perverse to speculate on how much worse things might have been in Iraq had the United States not launched an unnecessary and illegal invasion that toppled Hussein’s regime. Much like the demagoguing of Iraq’s potential threat to the U.S. before the war, supporters of the invasion make up for their complete lack of evidence by asking us to imagine the very worst things that might occur if we had done nothing.



One thing we can be fairly sure about is that thousands of Americans who are now dead would still be alive and tens of thousands of Americans who are now wounded, some of them catastrophically, would not have been. We also know that America would not be perceived throughout the region and the world as lawless aggressor, our relations with any number of important allies, including Turkey, would not have been badly damaged, and jihadists would not have been given an open killing field on which they were largely free to murder people by the thousands, nor would jihadists have been given such a powerful boost to their propaganda and recruiting.



We know that American attention and resources would not have been distracted for years from the war in Afghanistan, which might have otherwise been brought to a close by now, and the American military would not be so badly strained and overstretched. If the U.S. had not invaded, Iranian influence in the region would not have grown as much as it has, a refugee crisis in which millions have been displaced and Iraq’s professional classes have been decimated would not have occurred, and the complete dismantling of the Iraqi state and military apparatus would not have happened.



It is actually very difficult to imagine the anarchy and mass violence that we did see if there had not been an international occupier disbanding the Iraqi army and an outside political force causing the collapse of state ins utions. If the U.S. did not directly cause the sectarian violence that followed, we made it impossible to contain. Hussein’s regime would probably have been succeeded by another dictatorship, and possibly it would have been one that is no more prone to torture and disappear its enemies than the current Iraqi government.



Last night, Obama referred to the invasion as a “war to disarm a state,” which was the official justification given by his predecessor. If we grant that this was the purpose of the war and not the pretext for regime change, it really makes no difference whether a far-off post-Saddam Iraq would have been better or worse than the one that has emerged now, because it means that the U.S. had no business invading on the Bush administration’s own terms. As Ross wrote in early 2009:

Strip away Saddam’s (supposed) rearmament and the imminent threat it (supposedly) posed, and the fact that you had nine other “here’s why this might be a good idea” reasons for war did not a strong-enough justification for war make.

Similarly, one cannot summon the specter of possible worse disasters that might have unfolded in the absence of an invasion to get around the responsibility supporters of the invasion have for the consequences of the war. Then again, if the primary purpose of the war was always regime change regardless of whether or not Hussein was already disarmed, an antiwar argument focused on preserving Iraqi and regional stability becomes even stronger.



Yes, the oil boom of the 2000s would have made Hussein’s regime richer, but like all the other petro-states that flourished during the boom Iraq would still have been limited to projecting power in its immediate neighborhood. In other words, Iraq would have continued to be an annoyance in the way that Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela is an annoyance. Meanwhile, if Hussein were still in power, there would still be a fiercely anti-Iranian Iraqi government in Baghdad rather than a fairly pro-Iranian one. I am less concerned about that than most, but it doesn’t make much sense why people who irrationally exaggerate the threat from Iran are so comfortable with this outcome. Once the financial crisis and recession happened, and the price of oil dropped from the stratospheric heights of mid-2008, Iraq would have gone from being an annoyance to being something even less menacing. So instead of having a minor annoyance that represented no meaningful threat to U.S. interests, the U.S. has a dysfunctional sectarian dependency, and the U.S. will continue to have 50,000 soldiers in the country to continue enabling its dysfunction, sectarianism, and abuses of power.

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Turning the Page

Posted on September 1st, 2010 by Daniel McCarthy

In his remarks last night, President Obama said the time has come “to turn the page” on the Iraq War. That’s fine, except that Obama clearly didn’t read what was on the page before he turned it, as TAC contributing editor Andrew Bacevich contends in the New Republic today:

After seven-plus years, Operation Iraqi Freedom has concluded. Operation New Dawn, its name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid, now begins. (What ever happened to the practice of using terms like Torch or Overlord or Dragoon to describe military campaigns?) Although something like 50,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq, their mission is not to fight, but simply to advise and assist their Iraqi counterparts. In another year, if all goes well, even this last remnant of an American military presence will disappear.


So the Americans are bowing out, having achieved few of the ambitious goals articulated in the heady aftermath of Baghdad’s fall. The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as a smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation, and waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to forget.


Back in Iraq, meanwhile, nothing has been resolved and nothing settled. … As the United States removes itself from the scene, Iraqis will avail themselves of the opportunity to decide their own fate, a process almost certain to be rife with ethnic, sectarian, and tribal bloodletting. What the outcome will be, no one can say with certainty, but it won’t be pretty.

Lather, rinse, repeat in Afghanistan…


The two wars of the past decade have ostensibly been fought as part of larger War on Terror. But the conditions the U.S. will eventually leave behind in both places promise to be virtually indistinguishable from those that gave rise to the Afghan Taliban in the first place. In Afghanistan, that’s no change at all, and in Iraq that’s a change for the worse, at least as far as U.S. interests are concerned. With nation-building wars, victory is the identical twin of defeat.