As Anna’s King of Siam might have put it: "Is a puzzlement." As the grim milestones of five years of U.S. involvement in war and insurgency and possible civil war in Iraq and 4,000 U.S. deaths (and more than 29,000 wounded, but who’s counted) occurred only a few days apart, various elements of what are laughingly called the mainstream media engaged in a paroxysm of navel-gazing. However, it was navel-gazing of a curious kind, especially considering that around 70 percent of Americans and most so-called elite journalists now consider the war to have been a mistake.
Both Slate online magazine and the New York Times hosted symposia to consider just how the United States managed to blunder into what retired General and Hudson Institute fellow William E. Odom has called the biggest strategic blunder in our history. But instead of asking those who advised against starting the war in the first place, they invited some of the architects and cheerleaders of the war to consider, as the Slate symposium put it, "How I got Iraq wrong."
Thus Jacob Weisberg lamented that he believed the groupthink and contributed to it, Andrew Sullivan said he misjudged Bush’s sense of morality, Jeffrey Goldberg said he didn’t imagine that the Bush administration could be so incompetent, William Saletan at least tried to draw some lessons, Josef Joffe said he forgot that security must precede democracy, Richard Cohen confesses to a desire to strike back and an unwarranted faith in securing stability through military invasion, Fred Kaplan said he put too much trust in Colin Powell (a common mistake that should have been easier to avoid), and Iraqi native Kanan Makiya said he underestimated Iraq sectarianism.
Timothy Noah, bless his heart, at least said it was the wrong question, that we should be wondering how Barack Obama and Mary McGrory got it right. And Christopher Hitchens, bless his stubborn little pea-brain, still insists it was the right call and things are getting better. Really.
The sad thing about all this is that some people did get it right at the time, and rather than being hailed as sages to be listened to in the future, they are still, most of them (of us), marginalized.
To be sure, as Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle put it, there is value in assessing and analyzing error. But what almost all the Slate revisionists still failed to do (Andrew Sullivan excepted) was to acknowledge that war is not simply the bloodless testing of a hypothesis in a laboratory or late-night bull session. War, as any member or former member of the military will tell you, is killing people and breaking things. War is dead bodies and destroyed buildings and infrastructure. War is lives full of promise lost forever. War is dreams of some hope for the future irretrievably lost. War is unpredictable and surprising, even to those who plan it carefully, as the U.S. masters of war did not do, at least this time. War means the accretion and centralization of power, and is therefore the enemy of freedom.
War, in short, should be the last resort in any country that aspires to be even remotely civilized, to be contemplated only when the crisis is truly existential, that is when the very existence of the society or civilization in question is at stake. The war in Iraq did not remotely meet this standard. It was a war of choice, not necessity. It wasn’t even a preemptive war, undertaken in the face of an imminent threat. It was what students of international relations call a "preventive" war, undertaken to eliminate a potential threat that might (or might not) materialize somewhere down the road. It was a war of aggression, against an admittedly repulsive regime that did not remotely threaten the United States or even its neighbors.
The United States should never do such an immoral thing again. That’s what we still haven’t learned about the war in Iraq.
