I think this war was ill-conceived all around, and that in general, any 'war' against Iraq would have failed similarly, though probably not quite as spectacularly as this one has.

The problem is the fact that this is being fought like a war at all. If this was really about stopping terrorism, we'd have long shucked the idea of going after a enemy based around a state, considering terrorism is a much more amorphous entity than a rogue state. And the fact that the more we go into Iraq, the more we realize that, despite how much Saddam might have WANTED to be a major threat, and how his close council might have convinced him of such, that he was barely a regional threat makes it even more of a stunning botch up. The war was a disaster in the making, and we are seeing that disaster unfold and grow.

In my view, Iraq just wasn't a threat. So no need to do anything. If for some reason, it could be demonstrated that Iraq was a threat, and a big one (WMD), then more thought needs to be applied as to what to do (mostly about the difficulties of dealing with an artifical country, occupation issues, etc.).

But with the inspectors in there and with Powell et al giving sketchy "evidence", there was no reason to go past step one.

Kevin --

maybe I'm still missing your point.

The fact that a preventive or preventative war is illegal should be enough but has nothing to do with how it has gone -- success or failure.

In fact, the doubts that Saddam presumably harbored until it was too late allowed it to go better.

The course we have taken to this point can squarely be layed at the feet of incompetent planning, underestimation of the difficulties in occupation or the organization needed.

Whether the end run would have brought us to the emerald city if all had been done perfectly is extremely unlikely given the vagaries of war.

Given all that was left undone or made un-done, the odds are we might be at a much better point.

Trying to game the war is useful but will not lead to any definite result only a range of outcomes, of which this present might still be a possibility.

The fact that this administration still holds to all its fateful wrong assumptions means we are doomed.

Kevin, when you say that the antiwar voices who got it right deserve respect, it sounds like you are damning with faint praise. Perhaps you'll advocate a Pulitzer Prize for someone who said water was wet?

The issue is not that they were right. The issue is why their voices were excluded at the very time they were most needed. The issue is not hindsight, but foresight. I don't care how the hawks monopolized the discourse back in 2002, it's too late for that. I care about making sure it NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN.

A key difference between the Gulf War and the Iraq War was that the first was seen internationally as legitimate, and so Bush 41 led a coalition of 37 nations with 650,000 troops. Bush 43 went to war against the wishes of the UN Security Council and many Western allies, to say nothing of the Arab world.

What this meant was that in 2003, the US found itself invading Iraq largely alone (10,000 Brits the only major non-US contingent), and without any Muslim or Arab presence in the occupation force. The lack of Arabic speakers or persons sensitive to Islamic concerns seems to have contributed to the unpopularity of the occupation.

So I would say the go-it-alone nature of the Bush Administration meant that the US had to do much of the hard work itself, and this has proven to be too much.

In my view, the question isn't whether the war would've gone better if it hadn't been preventive. The current situation reminds us that any war has a good chance of going badly. So you shouldn't fight wars without a very good reason, and there isn't a very good reason to fight preventive wars.

The only thing that would have turned out different about an actual preventive war with Iraq would be a sustained mid to high level of public support. All the awful mistakes committed in this war are, I believe, inherent to the W administration. They couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with a pumpkin launcher from 20 feet away. But all the mistakes may not have translated into loss of public support if, for instance, Iraq actually used WMD or fired a Scud at Isreal or something.
IMHO, the current loss of public support is due to the mistakes made but even more to the lack of a clear objective to the war. Even people in the Red South can see that the goalposts have been moved too many times.

I thought I understood your point from the last post until I read this one: now I'm confused...

I thought when I read your last post that one war wouldn't vindicate critics wholly and absolutely. I'm with you there. Where I'm confused is that from your last post the war-critics stated there's no good reason, morally or tactically for pre-emptive war becuase the nature of the war-advocator is always going to be dishonorable. Pre-emptive war, or preventive war, is an idea latched onto by madmen. Whereas sane people discuss and bargain and engage in diplomacy. It takes a real monster to sacrifice innocent civilians for said persons personal profit.

So my question, Kevin, if you would please clarify: are you distinguishing between moral and tactical justifications for preventive war? Are you saying militarily there may be a technical tactical reason where preventive war brings positive outcomes? Wouldn't the motives and goals then have to be noble? And then aren't we back at square one, wondering what kind of person would use war - indiscriminate destruction, lies and violence - to bring about positive change?

Does my question make sense? Can we seperate the war from the warrior?

If the war wasn't preventive, the goal would be self-defense - a goal that is clearly defined and achievable. What goals in this war were/are achiveable? Maybe you're asking the wrong question: Instead of whether a war being preventive has any effect on outcome, maybe you should ask, is the war noble (in goal)? Otherwise I get stuck in a loop: Madmen like Hitler and Cheney see war as viable policy. Not diplomats. Not politicians. Positive effect cannot come from senseless violence. A preventive war that is noble can work, but I can't imagine a noble person resorting to war.

I'd have trouble matching names to arguments from four years ago. But what I do remember are the smug "We-told-you-so's" from war supporters after the fall of Baghdad.

They were quick--a little too quick--to throw the gloomier predictions in the faces of war critics, believing that they hadn't and wouldn't come true.

When U.S. troops seized Baghdad, they were greeted with cheers; there was no quagmire; there was no uprising on the Arab street; there was no mass exodus of refugees; there was no wholesale slaughter of civilians.

Those were the arguments war critics made before the invasion. And they all proved true.

I'll give the pro-invasion crowd this one: some war critics predicted an environmental catastrophe with Saddam setting the oil fields on fire. That was adequately prevented.
Is anyone

Matt Weiner --

just to add to your fine point, I would add that, by definition, a preventive war has not exhausted diplomatic means. It's really an excuse to launch a preemptive-preemptive strike. I fail to see the difference.

Only idiots like we have now could possibly play with life and treasure so casually as pieces on a game board.

It IS criminal.

Kevin Drum is right that it is not in a quagmire in Iraq because it was a "preventative war". If it truly was such a war, we could have left long ago victorious with our mission accomplished. Saddam was removed, and there are no WMDs. The quagmire stems from the war being about something else.

"But the specific quagmire that we find ourselves in now has very little to do with the fact that the Iraq war was preventive."

And this is where you are precisely wrong. Consider how much more patience, support, and effort this war would have gotten, domestically and intrenationally, had Iraq actually been the perpetrator of 9/11. That would have been a defensive war.

Also, "preventative" might describe something like the Israeli bombing of Osirak in 1981, or the U.S. blockade of Cuba in 1962. It does not describe the purveying of endless lies, half truths, and shabby fearmongering that led to this disgrace.

I can't help but perceive all this talk of preemptive and preventive war as anything more than a semantic game. Both definitions assume that there was a danger of us being attacked by Iraq, either immediately or somewhere down the line.

Shouldn't it be clear by now that Iraq was never a threat?

Or is the definition of "preventive war" so loose as to include any conceivable scenario where we could possibly be attacked? And if that's the case, couldn't the definition be used to justify attacking virtually anyone?

Would the war have gone better if it hadn't been preventive?

Again: the word you're looking for is "aggressive," not "preventive."

Kevin, you're right and you're wrong. The thing is, wars CREATE quagmires. The reason preventive wars are bad is because the risk of creating quagmires is almost always worse than whatever you think you're preventing. It's like an inversion of "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush".

There are some additional costs to preventative wars -- aggression tends to antagonize both rivals and those who get occupied, which can create a host of problems. And there's also moral questions -- is it right to invade a country that's not threatening you.

But the pragmatic point is that if you don't need to fight a war, you don't fight one. Because wars are bad. People die. Things blow up. The only reason any rational person would submit to war is because they think there's no other alternative.

And if you're curious about my reasons for opposing this war as stated on the eve of war, you can read them here. And while I was wrong on the fear that Turkey would attack the Kurds in northern Iraq, I think everything else holds up pretty well.

But the specific quagmire that we find ourselves in now has very little to do with the fact that the Iraq war was preventive. ... Would the war have gone better if it hadn't been preventive?

I think this is related to the concept of Just Wars and the old rules of casus bellum that were dismissed so quickly by the advocates for the war.

I think the Just War concepts were formulated based in part on the experience that unjust wars do not result in lasting peace. Even if victorious on the field of battle, the aggressor will never be seen as legitimate. And 2 or 5 or 10 years down the road there will be a rebellion and more war.

Maybe so, though everyone seems to think we would have been screwed in 1991 if we'd gone all the way to Baghdad in the Gulf War, and that wasn't a preventive war.

We would have been screwed in 1991 going to Baghdad because we assembled our coalition to liberate Kuwait, not to conquer Iraq. And if we moved the goalposts our Arab allies would have left the coalition, our invasion would have been seen as illegitimate, and we'd be in the same mess.

As far as it being a preventive war... I don't remember Iraq attacking us. I do remember them invading Kuwait after being given a go-ahead by one of Bush's officials.

Kevin i'm a great fan and a longtime reader, but I'm so glad you heard the concerns on this. I marched in SF before the war with a quarter of a million people who were prescient about its flaws. Were they wacky hippies? Absolutely not. It was my first protest, and most peoples first protest. There were doctors and lawyers and CEO's. There wasn't even any chanting because we were so unsure of what to do. We marched in a huge wave because we knew it was a lie, we knew there was no WMD, and we knew the sham before the UN was just that. We also knew it was a done deal --- that months before congress even voted the military had purchased tons and tons of suncreen.

Here is something I read then, that I remember being struck by, the conversation between the peacenik and the warmonger. http://www.orwelltoday.com/peacenik.shtml

A final reason why I knew the Iraq war was wrong. Its an old joke about the man who was bent down on the floor looking for something. His friend says what did you lose? He answers, "my contacts, I have to find them". The friend bends down to help saying, "you lost them somewhere in here?" and the man shakes his head.

"No, I lost them in the kitchen. But the light's better in here."

I was fairly certain that we were going to Iraq because the "light" was better than in Afghanistan, and that we were not going to find answers anymore than that man found his contacts.
I can remember arguing this point with my 70 year old father at the dinner table. We had a prewar vigil in protest in our small suburban town and 90 people showed up and signed their names.

Were liberals right for the wrong reasons? I don't think so. I think much of america was so damaged by 9/11 that they lost the ability to think critically. I think people developed a traumatic bond to this administration and were afraid to break it by seeing reality.

But the specific quagmire that we find ourselves in now has very little to do with the fact that the Iraq war was preventive.

Why are you focusing on the preventive nature of the war?

Could it be that the seeds of the quagmire lay in the deceptions that were to used to justify the war? Could it be that that real reason for the quagmire is that the warmongers came to believe their own falsehoods?

I certainly don't see that the problems with the Iraq war were at all by it being "preventive". Suppose Saddam had got up on the wrong side of the bed one day, started up the bio labs again, and shipped a big pack of anthrax to Osama who got one of his buddies to drop it on San Francisco. Further suppose we got pretty good evidence that all that happened, and ended up invading Iraq as result. Is there any reason to believe Iraq would be anything other than the howling chaos it is now?

I think what was obviously special about the Iraq war was not that it was preventative, but that the aim was to put Iraq in state that never existed.

Had somebody managed to talk the US, the UK, France, and Poland into launching a "preventative war" against Hitler in 1934, it seems reasonable to think Germany could have spun back up rational liberal democracy in short order (maybe a little autocratic on the Gaullist model, big deal.) I don't see there was ever a chance for Iraq.

(Lots of interesting wargaming on whether such an alliance could have easily defeated Germany in 1934, but I think it's not to the point.)

Would the war have gone better if it hadn't been preventive?

It wasn't *really* preventive. It was driven by the neo-con fantasy of spreading the magic beans of democracy in the middle east.

"But the specific quagmire that we find ourselves in now has very little to do with the fact that the Iraq war was preventive."

You're wrong, Kevin. One of the reasons preventive war is wrong is that it means, by definition, that the state is not yet aware of a reason that would justify preemptive war. A preventive war is, by definition, premature. Premature wars are bad for many reasons, including the possibility that the state's animating fears will turn out to be unfounded. Like WMDs. Like we'd be safer if Saddam were removed. Like there was an operational relationship between Saddam and Al-Queda. Iraq is a very good example of how preventive wars, relative to preemptive wars, are much more likely to be based on false threats.

Jesus, Kevin. That's quite a can of worms.

First, lets not group all the people that were right about the war together. They all had their reasons, some rational, some knee-jerk, and some mystical. If you're looking for answers go to some people with expertise. WMD: Scott Ridder (sp), Blitz, etc. Foreign Policy: Ford, Carter, GHWB, Clinton and cabinets, etc.

Many influential and knowledgeable people didn't say what they knew or felt at the time. It's almost more important to address the reasons behind this silence/meekness than anything else.

Second, I'd like to say that I don't think I'd trust this administration to clean my toilet; I damn well wouldn't let them walk my grandma across the street; and if it involves money, oil, giant corporations, and things that go boom I just give them my wallet and hope they don't use the pipe wrench again.

Third, they screwed up a lot more than the concept. Any number of things could have made it less of a disaster. It was a stupid idea based on many many other stupid ideas (and a few grudges) sold with stupid half-hearted propaganda to ignorant media who were really really excited about the viewership they might get. It was conducted with efficiency and skill by Clinton's military and then promptly handed back to a bunch of stupid CPA ideologues and other administration members whose concept of reality must be based upon some novels or videogames that i haven't played.

Fourth, they've killed the concept of preventative war for several decades. I'm not saying some idiot president won't break it out for a joy ride, but that only an idiot president incapable of following it through with sound and rational decisions would try to revive it.

We naturally and constantly judge the morality of those we see around us.

If I punch someone (call him USA) and he punches me back, a neutral observer might not think that USA is as moral as he might be if he turned the other cheek, but they'll still think the action is justifiable. "Not Jesus- or Gandhi-like", the observer might think, "but certainly understandable."

If I pull my fist back to take a swing at USA, but he hits me before I get a chance to hit him, the observer might think of USA: "maybe a little too quick to judge - I don't approve of being the one to draw first blood - but understandable."

But if I'm yelling at USA, or insulting him, or being generally offensive to him in some way, or taking any other sort of aggressive posture that does not meet the definition of assault, and he punches me first, both the observer and the law will say USA's an asshole, no matter how much he argues that I was probably going to punch him soon or some day.

The problem is the observer's innate moral judgment of a not-clearly-provoked attack. It's exceedingly hard to forgive dramatic losses in standard of living, or the loss of loved ones, just because some people in another country thousands of miles away thought that they might be in danger some day. And to the extent the problems in the occupation of Iraq have always been largely political, this lack of forgiveness has always been a multiplier on our difficulties. I don't think anyone knows the magnitude of that multiplier, but it's hard to deny that it's been a factor.

I thought Saddam had WMD. I didn't think it mattered much, at least as far as US concerns were the topic.

Seriously, we were told that he had the ability to deliver nerve gas via drone vehicles. Our own drones are so limited in capability...who would believe this.

It was simply obvious that the capbilities of Saddam were over-sold...only a simpleton would believe otherwise (sorry to those folks who believed this, but seriously, it was obvious). If he had WMD...so what, he couldn't get us (US) with it. Anyone with half a brain knew this.

So the question is...why did so many people believe, or make believe, that Saddam had the ability to harm us.

Who knows. But the very idea that he posed a threat is, uh, bullshit. Always has been, always will be. Takes a moment of thought.

And that, Kevin, is why pre-emptive, preventitive, etc. wars are laughable (tragically) to those of us who know what to be concerned about, and what not to be.

Face it, you squealed in delight at being threatened, knowing you could answer the threat with a massive military response.

You need to examine why you were so thrilled that a country obviously at your mercy on a military scale made you so excited.

Your putting your foot in a weak country's ass has killed innumerable people. And that is that. Pre-emptive wars have been fought by Israel and others. This was a war of choice, and sorry dude, your shiny victory and delight have not happened, and they have cost thousands their lives.

BTW, I think you have a great blog and are a great thinker, but I also feel you need to wrap your head around this. There were plenty of us who thought (wrongly, it turns out) that Saddam had WMD. We just didn't think that he was a threat to us. We were right in any case. The idea that Iraq posed an imminent or gathering threat....silly. Silly then, tragic now. What kind of person thinks that Iraq ever posed a threat to our national security? Seriously. What kind of person could reaosonably believe that?

When armies mass or your borders, or when folks with ICBMs thrathen you, that is an imminent threat. Otherwise...not so much. Not hard to understand, although the hysteria and march to war of so many on the left side of the aisle is truly incomprehensible. War ain't fun. Study it, and stop apolgizing for killing so many young men and women. Own up to it.

Done.

All this is not to mention the fact that "preventive war" is a horrible Orwellian oxymoron.

Preventive war just means aggressive war with a defensive figleaf and isn't a new doctrine, it's at least as old as civilization. These days it's insufficient political cover to maintain almost any occupation.

I retract anything that I said in my previous post that was insulting to Kevin. I don't need to do that, and I read and generally respect what he has to say.

I do stand by my main points, but I'm not trying to say neener-neener-neener, I'm just trying to make the point that being pro-war is easy, being against it is hard, and that we all tend towards fighting and not actually solving things through other channels.

It's just more fun to fight, for some sick reason.

I'm generally a fan of your blog, Kevin, but I'm really having trouble understanding what you're getting at here.

You state: "the failure in Iraq doesn't especially vindicate the argument that preventive war is almost always wrong."

Well, no single incident could prove or refute a proposition like that. If I were making a general argument that preventative war was in principal a bad idea (I dislike that phrase; war of aggression or of war of choice would be closer to the mark), I wouldn't argue that Iraq proved it; rather I'd make general arguments, and then use Iraq as a illustrative case for them, which it obviously is.

For example, I would argue that war is so potentially destructive and the consequences so unpredictable, that it is insane to ever be the one to initiate it. One should only go to war when the other party forces it, either by attacking you first, or by initiating a humanitarian disaster that cannot be addressed through any other fashion.

I would then continue that one example of how wars can be so unpredictable and destructive that one shouldn't let the genie out of the bottle is what happned in Iraq. While it's not proof that every such venture will turn out so badly (indeed, I doubt it would), it surely illustrates the general principal I am arguing. Also, I don't like saying this, but I don't think we've seen the worst of the consequences.

Again I don't like the term preventative war applied to Iraq; I think it was a war of aggression. But if we're using that terminology, I would argue that preventive wars are a bad idea, as they assume our leaders are so smart and can see the future so well, that they will be able to judge when events many years in the future will justify going to war now. As an illustration that such trust on leader's powers of predictions are misplaced, I'd point out that in Iraq, they were wrong about everything. Wrong about weapons of mass destruction, wrong about links to Al Queda, etc. Again, while one case doesn't prove an argument, Iraq offers about as powerful evidence and illustrates the principal involved as strongly as one case possibly could. How could one possibly argue that we can trust are leaders to make such judgments after a debacle like that?

Again, I'm really not sure what we're arguing about.

As for your last question, "Would the war have gone better if it hadn't been preventive?", it's hard to make sense of what you mean. Iraq wasn't such a war, so you'd have to outline how things would have gone differently precisely before it could even be addressed.

But one thing is clear. Even if it had gone as badly as it has now, if it hadn't been a war of choice as it was, we would at least know we'd gone in because we didn't have a choice. Maybe Iraq would be a mess, but we had to go in because they invaded America. Or because Saddam had a nuke and was going to use it. Or because there was genocide happening right that moment. So even though things would be screwed up, at least we'd pushed Iraq's armies off American soil, or at least we'd prevented Saddam from nuking kuwait, or at least we'd prevented a genocide (again, I'm trying to imagine what you mean by suppose this wasn't a preventive war, and this what I come up with; I'm still not sure I get what you're driving at) At least we'd have something to show for the nightmare we've unleashed. And I suspect America's reputation would not now be so far in the toilet. People supported us when we invaded Afghanistan, because they recognized we were responding to aggression against us.

Hope that addresses your questions; again I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

--Rick Taylor

Kevin, are you going to lump in as "anti-war" the Representatives and Senators who voted against the Iraq war resolution? Did a "nay" vote there constitute "opposition" to the war in your eyes?

Because there were over 120 Democratic members of the House -- most of them still there -- who voted against the AUMF in October 2002. There were also 21 Senators. Five of the Senators who voted against the AUMF were on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; that was a majority of the Democrats on the committee. One of them -- Bob Graham -- was the chairman of the committee, because the Democrats had a slight majority in the Senate at the time.

So basically, I have to wonder what your argument is. People on the anti-war "left" were in agreement with 60% of the Democrats in the House and 40% of the Democrats in the Senate -- including a majority of the Democratic Senators who are supposed to have the best intelligence available to the legislative branch -- that Bush should not have had the authority given to him by the AUMF. Carl Levin, Ron Wyden, Dick Durbin, Barbara Mikulski, and Bob Graham all voted against the AUMF. All of them were on the Intelligence committee. Those aren't exactly wild-eyed bloggers people like myself were in agreement with.

I wasn't just paying attention to bloggers or some sort of ideological theory of preventative/pre-emptive war when I made my decision about whether Iraq had WMDs. I looked at the evidence presented in the media. I listened to the words coming out of the mouths of various elected officials. I used my little knowledge of science to consider how the Iraqis could build drones that could fly around the world when even the US couldn't do that. I got the same sort of feeling I did in the 80s when I heard about how Nicaraguans (a population of a few million at the time) were going to be driving their tanks across the border into Brownsville, Texas ("It's only a day's drive!") which was why it was justifiable for Ollie North to sell arms to Iran to fund the contras. It was prevention!

I view the whole preventative war thing sort of like the death penalty. Which it is writ large, because you kill a lot of people in a war. I'm not totally opposed to the death penalty. But you sure as hell better not be killing people who don't deserve to be killed.

Your statement "But the specific quagmire that we find ourselves in now has very little to do with the fact that the Iraq war was preventive" is based on a number of mistaken assumptions.

First, the way you phrase it gives the Bush Administration and its supporters the benefit of the doubt on an issue where it is clear that they do not deserve it. Calling the war a "preventive" one not only treats the stated rationale offered by Cheney et al. (WMDs, tubes, yellow cake, drones, mushroom clouds, etc., etc.) as if it were the actual reason they dragged us into war, but assumes that it is the only conceivable reason. But everything we know about this crowd tells us that the decision to go to war was not a series of blunders, but an an imperial adventure, in which the goal was to turn Iraq into the world's largest air base in order to dominate the region for the next several decades. March 2003 was not August 1914.

On the other hand, if by "preventive," you mean a war of aggression, in violation of international law, then saying that the quagmire we are in has very little to do with the fact that we attacked Iran without justification is astonishingly naive. If I hear you correctly, you are saying that if we had gone in with 250,000 troops instead of 150,000 and avoided the egregious blunders of the CPA (debaathifying every institution, privatizing everything in sight, leveling Fallujah to pacify it, allowing the Shi'a militias to return fully armed, etc.),.then the Iraqi people would have meekly accepted the leaders we gave them?

That was the dream that the supporters of the war had. But the Iraqi people never accepted the Chalabis and Allawis we chose for them. The politicians they did elect may depend on the U.S. military for their immediate personal safety, and sometimes as an instrument to use against their enemies, but they have no use for our political plans. Nor is there any reason to think that the dynamics of Iraqi politics would have somehow produced the era of good feelings if we had kept the crowds from looting the museum and the ministries in April 2003. Or that we will get there by 2013 if we embrace the alternative -- an occupation of indefinite length, probably lasting a decade or more, in which we resume our authority to countermand any decision we do not approve of.

We never belonged in Iraq in the first place. Ignoring that point in order to imagine, as you do, that things could have gone okay if only we had let Colin Powell run the war, is not merely wishful thinking, it's wishful self-delusion.

I also regret the somewhat personal tone that this message takes, since I also like you from what I can glean from your blog, but these are serious issues that deserve serious thought.

Here's a link to some representative thinking on the war and its justification before the war (from Slate):

http://www.slate.com/id/2078766

And here's one very interesting and relevant entry:

Paul Glastris is editor in chief of the Washington Monthly.

The case for invading Iraq grows stronger with every day that Saddam defies the U.N., and with each new ally that signs up to challenge him. Presuming that present trends continue—that Saddam does not back down, that Dick Cheney's unilateralist urgings are ignored, and that Colin Powell is allowed to continue to build as much international support as is possible—I favor an invasion sooner rather than later.

For what it's worth, I called this war a fraud before it started and still believe that to be the case. Also, I clearly didn't come up with that opinion in a vacuum, but informed myself through alternative media outlets (including web-based), so there were plenty of others coming to the same conclusions. I also haven't forgotten the 1/2 million people protesting in New York, the site of Ground Zero, against the impending war, or the millions around the world, North South East West, similarly registering their protest and grievance.

In terms of informed opinion, I'd say a very small minority of folks supported the war.

One more from the Slate piece...I encourage all of you to go read the whole thing, as there are a few dozen cases presented:

Arianna Huffington is the author of Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America.

I'm against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The administration has not proven how Iraq constitutes a clear and present danger or why it presents a graver threat than al-Qaida or indeed North Korea. It's particularly ironic that as we ratchet up the war preparations, the nation's security alert went from yellow to orange, but it's not Iraq that is threatening us.

http://www.slate.com/id/2078766

Okay, the last, best and most cogent response from the Slate article I'll drop here, from Spike Lee:

Not in favor of war on Iraq. Bush is hoodwinking and bamboozling the American public.

Kevin: "Would the war have gone better if it hadn't been preventive?"

Military occupations of Mesopatamia have historically never been long term for good reason. Even the Ottoman Empire found it prudent to allow the region to be self-governing. The British went in and then pulled out several times in the first half of the 20th century. Why the neocons would presume that our experience would be any different, I don't know.

Oh, that's right -- white House aide Dan Bartlett told journalist Ron Suskind that we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

Never mind.

Kevin --
First, try to posit some why for the contrapositive to be true. The war would not be preventative if it were, say, the result of getting involved in a preexisting war.

But that actually did happen -- Saddam was at war with "his" own population, the Kurds. And the US and UN went to war against him for it: with a no-fly zone, and a very modest footprint on the ground in Kurdistan. It worked extremely well, and only went bad when the larger environment changed. By all accounts Kurdistan was thriving in 2001. It is doing worse today; there were no raids on Iranian consulates in those days.

So yes, getting involved in a non-preventative war does tend to have better outcome, because from the start you are going against a genuine common enemy. And you are not making the immediate environment worse, by going from peace, however awful, to outright war. There aren't nearly as many obstacles to overcome for genuine progress to be made.

It's the difference between being occupied by liberators and by invaders. There is very little patience for the latter, with concommitantly little room for mistakes.

The proper view point isn't about the word "preventive"; It's about wisdom, as in: "Because you can, Should you? And if you do, was it done well"?

All military actions are two parters: "Decide on action, and How well was the action done".

This is the dilemma of a superhero: If a village needs saving, and you decide to save the village because you can stop that which is threatening the village, how do you go about it?

Do you fight the supervillain in the village? The end result could be a destroyed village. What was the purpose again? Save or destroy the village? If the village is destroyed then who's the supervillian? The superhero, or the supervillian who wanted to have the village destroyed anyway? (Thanks superhero. You did my job for me, even though you defeated me in the end.)

The arguement about Iraq is like the superhero and supervillian.

Back to the two parter: Do I go in? If I go, do I do it CORRECTLY?

Iraq COULD have been invaded correctly. It wasn't.

Bush COULD have been a hero even though in the eyes of the world the reason for the invasion was wrong. (ie, Bush got away with it.)

Bush didn't simply guess if he should take military action.

Bush created a fake world and thought it was reality. [1st part of the two parter: "Must take action".]

On the 2nd part: "How to do it", Bush's complete belief in his fake world coupled with his unprincipled character assured Bush would take completely wrong actions that insured failure.

Does the term tilting-at-windmills mean anything to the reader?

Bush was a character in his own story, and many many people helped Bush create the fairy tale Bush , (and all of his kind like him), is living.

Some fairy tales end in tragedy...like a Greek play; This sad fairy tale is almost done.

However, I also made a specific comment about preventive war: namely that the failure in Iraq doesn't especially vindicate the argument that preventive war is almost always wrong. It is almost always wrong, and the fact that Iraq was a preventive war was a good reason to oppose it. But the specific quagmire that we find ourselves in now has very little to do with the fact that the Iraq war was preventive.

You're conflating two related but ultimately separate questions: (i) was the war successful (i.e. the fact that it's now a quagmire) and (ii) was the war right?

The first is largely a question of strategy and tactics, and can be divorced from morality. The second, however, cannot be. So even if the war had gone well, even if we were winning and the only injury to our troops had been due to being pelted with roses, it still wouldn't get to heart of the issue of whether an illegal and unprovoked invasion of a country which hasn't attacked one can be morally justified. Or, more simpy, might does not make right, and a good result does not justify evil means.

I wish people on our side, such as Drum, would stop using the Bush regime's Orwellian use of "preventive" war since, as we all know, there was nothing to prevent -- no WMD, no ties to al Qaeda, no threat to the neighbors, etc. Our attack on Iraq is an aggressive war, plain and simple.

Otherwise we might as well say that Hitler's invasion of France and the Soviet Union were "preventive" wars -- after all, he was just doing to them what they wanted to do to him someday....

Kevin,
I have been reading you almost daily from the time you were Calpundit.

This is the first time I have ever heard you sound, well, stupid.

Would the war have gone better? Well, that's not the question really. The war wouldn't have gone AT ALL because the only excuse they had to launch it in the first place was the doctrine of Preventive War. However, if you want an answer, JUST LOOK AT OUR FIRST WAR WITH IRAQ! I think we can all agree it was a success.

This war was doomed to failure before it began. How anyone with half a brain could fail to see that is an absolute mystery to me. Hell, even Bush '41, in the midst of his greatest triumph, had better sense than to continue on to Baghdad and depose Saddam.

Charlie dont surf: "The issue is not that they were right. The issue is why their voices were excluded at the very time they were most needed."

Shrink in SF: "I think much of america was so damaged by 9/11 that they lost the ability to think critically. I think people developed a traumatic bond to this administration and were afraid to break it by seeing reality."

The most salient and urgent question is WHY the anti-war voices were so aggressively overruled and dismissed. Four year too late & one clusterfuck on-going, repentent Hawks are finally beinning to allow the possiblity that those who opposed the war were...well...you know...right. But they still protect their bullheaded egos by adding, "for the wrong reasons!"

That's interesting. They were so deeply, passionately, emotionally committed to this particular act that they could pridefully, willfully override the objections raised by wise people and our leaders and friends: the Pope, Jimmy Carter, Brent Scrowcroft, our French friends, and millions of people worldwide. That raging passion is what we need to comprehend and heal.

It is a powerful enough metamorphosis that it can be framed in religious terms: Having willfully committed evil, we need to repent, that is, we need to become aware of why we were led to do such wrong, and with that awareness, transform our hearts and move forward, doing good.

Wasn't it obvious, even to Americans, that ...

taking to a hornet's nest with a baseball bat wouldn't work?

'cops' who don't talk the lingo couldn't handle the post shock and awe phase?

a clown who'd been nattering on about an 'axis of evil' was not a guy for details, or even rationality?

guys like Saddam & Bin Laden don't mix?

nutzoid neocons, already champing at the bit, were seizing their opportunity?

a military infested with fundamentalist pseudo-christianity was incapable of dealing with the arab street?

a country infested with fundamentalist pseudo-christianity just wanted to kick arab ass and any arab would do?

oil men and likudniks were running the show?

FoxNews was batshit crazy? (I was in NYC in Oct 2002 and saw O'Reilly interview Ritter and couldn't believe the insane aggro)

Chalabi was a con man?

mainstream US media was obsequious pap?

unbought europe knew the score?

Blix was being excessively polite to the US?

the 'intelligence' was dodgy? (Powell's presentation to the UN was woefully unconvincing)

Hell, I could go on and on with zero benefit of hindsight.

Kevin,

On that last point, I'd welcome argument. Maybe I'm off base. Would the war have gone better if it hadn't been preventive?

Yes, it would have gone better, because of several reasons, but the biggest is that we would have had much more material support from other nations, and would have had enough troops on the ground.

That said, any non-preventive war that still demand the complete disintegration of the current government (i.e. Saddam's regime) would not have gotten support from the whole world.

Is there any example where a coalition of nations took it as their policy 'regime change?' World War II is not an example, because the stated goal was not the change of regime in Germany and Japan.

The Iraq situation as is, would not have had the needed support anyways.

I guess I really need to follow up on my earlier post about the left and the war. It must have been written pretty poorly for so many people to misconstrue it so badly.

—Kevin Drum

Fair enough. Then, why don't you start by FULLY retracting this slick, evasive and totally bankrupt statement from the previous post:

"After all, Iraq didn't fail because it was preemptive (though that didn't help); it failed either because George Bush is incompetent or because militarized nation building in the 21st century is doomed to failure no matter who does it."

This statement is SO fucking wrong -- so out of the Joe Klein playbook -- that it shows you've learned nothing from either the events on the ground or all the posts that the vast majority of your readers have made over the last three years about the war.

The statement implies that had Bush only been competent and/or were nation building feasible in the 21st century -- never stated as an objective of the war in the first place, by the way, by a president who ran against the idea explicitly -- Iraq may have been a success.

The statement has NO fucking redeeming value. None. It is total bullshit -- simply more self-vindicating flailing by a would-be pundit who got the largest moral and strategic question of his lifetime WRONG and won't admit it.

Stop digging, for Christ's sake!

I have to make a comment here that Kevin and maybe others won't appreciate, but have you ever heard of a library? God forbid that anyone might actually set foot in a house of books in this day and age of the Internet!

Kevin, you make it sound like it is the hardest thing in the world to do some historical research about the mood of the country four or five years ago! Take your laptop to the nearest library and go through the microfiche or microfilm and read the newspapers from that time. It is easy to get a sense of the way people felt. The library probably has a Wi-fi connection, so you can blog from there. For Chrissakes people, so many of you act like if you can't Google something up on your computer, it doesn't exist.

Start using libraries, or we will lose them forever!

There is something unsavory in all this hair-splitting.

First of all, there is no way of knowing what would have happened in some hypothetical world.

Second, what preemptive scenario would have necessitated an invasion and decapitation of the regime? How is regime change ever justified under the banner of preemption?

Third, it is difficult to imagine that having the support of the international community could possibly have made things worse or failed to make things better. Granted, we can't be sure.

Bottom line: Why are we splitting hairs here? What is our purpose other than shoring up our instinctive urge for aggression?

If anything Kevin, you have it exactly backwards.

The reason not to wage preventive war is because it is wrong. Just because this war was also incompetently run, poorly planned and has devolved into the debacle we have now is no reason to assume that preventive war is any more correct in retrospect. Those add to the wrongness of this particular war, but do nothing to subtract from the wrongness of preventive war as a doctrine or strategy.

At its heart and by definition you are attacking a country who has not attacked you, and has no immediate plans to attack your nation. You are trying to discern the intent of a country 10, 20, 30 years down the road and acting on your assumptions about what that country's future actions will be.

By that same logic and reasoning, if we were somehow "right" to attack Iraq based on actions they had yet to take, then Iraq would have been "right" to have attacked us to "prevent" our future attack.

If, charitably, Iraq was 10 years away from developing WMD and becoming a real threat and that is our threshold for having a "justifiable" preventive war, then Iraq would have been correct in 1993 to invade the U.S., since at that point we were 10 years away from attacking Iraq!

Iran or Syria would have been correct to begin attacking us in 1997, 10 years before whatever debacle of a war escalation Bush unleashes on us next. That way leads to a bitter spiral of unproved attacks that is just absurd to even contemplate.

It is an unjustifiable downward spiral that clearly and predictably leads to constant war and turmoil. And nothing that has happened since has done anything to show that preventive war is any more correct. It was correct to oppose it for that reason alone.

I think for the intellectuals and pundits who supported the War (which includes most of them, and almost all the most prominent ones outside the blogosphere) did so primarily based on ideology, theory, and political science 101. They liked to argue about the benefits of preventive War.

Orwell recommended that we avoid arguments like that, and to a large degree the Left argued specifically that this was not the argument to have. The Left viewed that as fundamentally flawed - a detachment from reality and escape into the worst kinds of vanity.

Preventive Wars will almost always be a bad idea, but if there is one lesson to take from this debacle, it's that you have to discuss the war you're going to have, not the theoretical war you want.

Most Hawk criticism of the Left actually boils down to - "you're arguing specific concerns about Iraq and the current Administration. That's not fair! you are obligated to prove that all preventive wars are wrong in political science 101 BS land." The left doesn't want to do that because it's WRONG. It's WRONG to debate a real War in the real world involving a Nation of 24 million people with an epic history and an American political culture with it's own epic history based on political science 101 BS land. It's morally wrong. It's empirically wrong. It's a horribly bad idea. It leads to wars like Iraq.

We have a fundamental disagreement about what "seriousness" is, and I think the Left has proven that our approach is preferable.

It is true that the wrongness of the war and the incompetence with which it is being fought are two seperate issues. A war of agression, which is what this is, is wrong whether it goes well or not. Speaking purely for myself, I have never suggested that the fact that the war is going badly is the reson the war was wrong. Although, there were many who opposed the war because they knew that it was going to end up exactly like this, and those people have every right to feel vindicated. I take no comfort in the quagmire that Iraq has become. But I must say that, had things gone well, the supporters of this war would have seized on that as justification for their aggression. (Remember the toppling of the statue?) So, I do take some small comfort in the fact that I do not have to endure the insufferable rantings of those who claim that might makes right.

People who get big questions right deserve respect.

Conversely, of course, the people who get the big questions wrong don't deserve respect. Or columns in prominent newspapers, for that matter.

Kevin,

Part of the problem is the very framing of the question, as you noted in your earlier post. The prevention part in Iraq was the UN inspection regime. Just like crime prevention isn't about going out and arresting everyone you think might commit a crime.

What Bush and his supporters did was preemption, as you said, and it has worked about as well as Japans preemptive war against the United States in 1941, albeit for different reasons.

But, it is true, that Iraq is not a failure because it was preemptive, per se. Why that matters, I'm not sure, other than some desire to say, "Well, I was wrong about Iraq being a good preemption, but not all preemption is wrong. So, I wasn't wrong for supporting preemption because sometimes preemption is right. So, I may have been wrong, but not totally wrong."

The preemptive part in Iraq is a marker for why it has failed, though. It has failed because it was based on a pipe-dream. And that was perfectly obvious to reasoning observers before the invasion.

I opposed the invasion of Iraq before it happened because I came across the Project for a New American Century report (probably because I found it linked on Kos or Atrios or Juan Cole) before the invasion. That told anyone who read it what Iraq has always really been all about. And it was thinking that the report represented any kind of reality that led folks on the right who didn't simply buy into the I'm-scared-Daddy-do-whatever-it-takes-to -protect-me-Iraq=9/11-perpetrators lie into supporting the war.

Seeing the PNAC report and having a basic understanding of the region made the outcome in Iraq perfectly predictable. Of course our military would easily overwhelm the Iraqi army, but then what. According the the PNAC, democracy would magically mushroom in the power vacuum that followed. But what I and other saw as the realistic probability was that Shia, who had been repressed for decades, but represented the majority, who rush to fill the power vacuum, supported by and aligned with their Shia brethren in Iran, democratically, or not - although there would be battles over who their Iraqi leader would be, i.e., which Shiite sect would control. Sunni Baathists, used to power, would not go quietly into that good night. Kurdish nationalists would press for an independent Kurdish state, and both Iran and Turkey would fiercely oppose that. Etc.

Iraq was a failure because it wasn't well thought through. Nothing was done, if anything could have been, to prevent what I described above.

Afghanistan may have been more morally correct (although randomly bombing Afghanistanis from 30,000 feet, not so much), but the outcome there was also predictable to anyone who watched the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. After all, we trained the Taliban in how to resist a mighty army.

So, as I said, preemption wasn't the reason for the failure, but so what. The Soviet preemption in Czechoslavkia in 1968 was a "success." Did that make it right? The opposition's argument about preemption wasn't that the invasion would fail because it was preemptive. We opposed preemption because it was wrong and illegal in and of itself.

What was the war intended to prevent? Essentially, it was sold as a war to prevent Saddam from having an opportunity to use WMD we supposed he probably had but weren't sure he had. But that rationale was effectively mitigated by Saddam's agreement to let the arms inspectors back in. After that point the war could no longer legitimately be construed as a war meant to prevent Iraq from having an opportunity to use WMD it had - we could wait to see if he actually had WMD. So, if someone still wanted to call it a preventative war, what was it that the war was supposed to prevent - some nebulous long term threat that Saddam might be at some future point in time? Geez, on that basis we could rationalize going to war with dozens of nations right now - and probably forever.

Most of the anti-war left thought in 2002 that the US would have a relatively easy time toppling Saddam, but would have a very difficult time governing Iraq afterward. We predicted that we were almost guaranteed to face an insurgency. Bush consistently presented rosy scenarios about occupation troops being greeted as liberators but NEVER offered a coherent plan for after the war. Once Baghdad fell and the looting went unabated, our predictions were confirmed.

There were other measures that could have been used to pressure Saddam to leave short of invading the country.

I missed the first debate, but I'll put in my two cents. I don't pretend to be a major voice on the left, but on my own then-blog and in comments here and elsewhere, I opposed invading and occupying Iraq for the same reasons George H. W. Bush and Colin Powell did: The risks inherent in occupying a Muslim country, topped by the difficulties in maintaining a balance among Iraq's competing factions.

No warflogger was ever able to address these arguments with anything other than facile "we'll be greeted as liberators" bullshit, which, I might add, Bush I and Powell knew better than to claim.

And given that the arguments about Saddam's so-called "threat" and alleged ties to al Qaeda never held up to even a moment's scrutiny -- not to mention the fact that we had inspectors, you know, actually in the country* and they found nothing -- pretty much sealed the deal.

*The irony is, that if Bush's rhetoric forced Saddam to accept inspectors, and Bush had had the sense to be satisfied with demonstrating, through his actions, that Saddam was in fact no threat, it would have been in fact a stunning foreign relations victory, and I'd readily admit it. That Bush was obviously lusting for war no matter what information surfaced, of course, was all the more reasons to oppose him.

This war wasn't preventive-it was ginned up with false evidence, lies and exagerations. It was done as an exapmple to the middle east that the US could kick the ass of any middle eastern country. As reports now say, the war was undertaken because it was "possible". War with Iran or Syria was seen as too difficult. Mussharef was rolling on his back like a submissive dog. It was part of grand experiment to remake the middle east. Why else was there so quick a move to dismantle all of the systems of order in Iraq (dismantling the army and bureaucracy) and putting into place all of the wet-dream laws favored by the Republican looters in the US. This was not a preventative war, it was an expansionist war based on ideology. Also, it didn't hurt that there was a lot of oil there. That is why Afghanistan is not seen as being as important an example as Iraq could be. This administration still harbors the delusion that a short bombing campaign in Iran will result in Iranians rising up and overthowing their government and replacing it with the glorious future of the American dream of the benevolent democracy of big business.

The failure of the war came about because the Republican looters within this administration thought you could start and run a country with inexperienced GOP political operatives, ass-kissers, and incompetents, utilizing wet-dream programs that have no basis in real-life situations.

What many people have forgotten about the lead-up to the war is that even then it was clear that the Bush administration was either embellishing the truth or outright lying about the situation in Iraq. This makes the Iraq War not merely a "preventive war" but "a preventive war under dubious pretenses." Those may not be always, always, ALWAYS wrong - but they are indeed, almost always wrong.

This would have been a good post to test drive as a sock-puppet comment. It wouldn't have got people quite as excited though.

If it hadn't been preventive we would have committed more resources to it and we would have an endgame -- an objective -- that is a lot more tangible than prevention. It also would have been more explicable not only to us but to our opponents. For those three simple reasons and probably some others, the war might have gone better.

Wrong model. It's not "preventive war", whatever that is; it is 4GW.

This explains 4GW better than I ever could:
http://www.d-n-i.net/lind/lind_archive.htm

Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. You have bought into Bush's arguments, haven't you?

So by agreeing that it is possible that preventive war COULD be justified you reduce the argument to one thing: is this war worth fighting. The Bushites would be proud of you.

All preemptive war is crime. To assume that it is OK to attack another country before you yourself are attacked means that any tyrant can use the excuse to attack first. It becomes only a matter of details, not principal.

I wrote previously that Americans have not learned any lessons from Iraq, and I still believe that. Americans believe, in general, that they alone have the insight necessary to judge their fellow human beings -- and the war has not changed that.

See how many of these statements you can agree with:
1) there should have been more troops
2) there should have been a plan for after the war
3) the lack of WMD makes the war a lie.
4) you can't fight a war without the support of the American people

If you agree with even one of these statements then you have learned nothing.

1) there should have been more troops: wrong, no troops should have ever crossed the border at all. Introducing more troops only makes the invasion more success, not more justified.
2) a plan. Hitler had a plan for after his war. So a plan to dominate the after war environment is all you need to justify breaking international law?
3) WMD. How does this justify war. China, Russia and Israel (etc) all have WMD. Hell, just about everyone does.
4) Support. So what if a majority of the people are in favor of committing a crime, it still doesn't justify committing the crime.

Why is so much time spent trying to figure out how this crime could have been done better. It was, and is, a crime to invade a nation that does not threaten you. (And, I might add, what if Saddam HAD threaten the U.S. So what. )

Americans are still belligerent, still arrogant, and quite capable of repeating the mistakes of Iraq again and again. Nothing has changed.

To do a preventative (preventive? . . . I'd consult Luntz before settling on the adjective) war correctly you have to follow through and place threatening populations under close watch in small enclosed areas. You also need an excellent propaganda machine, less free press, a nationalistic youth program named after your party's leader, and some sort of signature salute/phrase to signify loyalty to the cause.

Was it morally wrong, or just stupid?

It was both.

. Would the war have gone better if it hadn't been preventive?

This is the wrong question. In the first place, it wasn't really a preventative war. It was an imperial adventure. Once you accept the notion that there was something in Iraq that had to be prevented, you've already left the world of reality. Mind you, this was absolutely clear before the invasion was launched. Blix's team said that very clearly, and the Security Council agreed that there was no reason to move to military action.

Starting with that pretext makes hash of any kind of analysis of the real situation. It is, in fact, very difficult to conceive of a preventative war that could be justified. No nation has the capability of threatening the United States.

Leave aside that it's not a true characterization of the war. It's still the wrong question--because the reason for a war is not necessarily relevant to its success. Even if there were good and true reasons to wage this war, that doesn't make it more or less winnable. There were better reasons to direct a war at NK or Iran.

But even though there were better reasons, in fact, because of those better reasons, it was deemed imprudent. An easier target was needed.

Now, could the war have been run better? Yes. But the way in which it could have been run better would have made it impossible to wage. The way it could have been run better is if they had planned for what was going to be needed, ten years or more of occupation, starting off with the imposition of martial law enforced by the troop levels Shinseki said would be necessary.

Raising those troop levels, if it could be done at all without a draft, would have taken at least six months, more likely a year. By that time, it would have been clear to everybody--except Bush, Laura and Barney--that there was nothing to prevent, nothing to preempt, no threat at all.

Moreover, there would have been very little public support for an expensive, protracted imperial adventure in Iraq. The reason this was done on the cheap was because that's the only way it could have been done.

Making things still worse was the continued unwillingness, for public relations purposes to confront what was really happening on the ground. First, you couldn't say "guerrilla. "Then you couldn't say "insurgency." Now you can't say "civil war." The insistence on painting the situation as rosily as possible profoundly detracted the ability of the military to respond to what was really happening.

However, I also made a specific comment about preventive war: namely that the failure in Iraq doesn't especially vindicate the argument that preventive war is almost always wrong. It is almost always wrong, and the fact that Iraq was a preventive war was a good reason to oppose it. But the specific quagmire that we find ourselves in now has very little to do with the fact that the Iraq war was preventive.

And, again, I think you are in part right and in part wrong here. It doesn't "especially" vindicate the argument because the argument is largely deontological and thus not subject to vindication through facts. Nevertheless, to the extent that the argument is pragmatic (that the absence of any substantive provocation, as well as making war a priori immoral, also negatively affects the perceived moral position of the aggressor and prevents that party from having the kind of relations with the people that would be necessary to have any chance of carrying out the kind of nation-building that was clearly going to be necessary for a guided democratic transformation) the results are consistent with it.

There simply is no basis for the claim that the problems in Iraq have nothing to do with the lack of justification of the war, you are simply asserting the point in controversy.

Would the war have gone better if it hadn't been preventive?

Hard to tell. Particularly, you can't just have the same war and call it "not preventive". A "not preventive" war would have occurred in radically different factual circumstances, its not a single factor that logically can be changed in isolation, even hypothetically.

Maybe so, though everyone seems to think we would have been screwed in 1991 if we'd gone all the way to Baghdad in the Gulf War, and that wasn't a preventive war.

That depends on who the "we" was. If every nation involved in the war had agreed, then "we" wouldn't, IMO, have been screwed. If just the US had gone to Baghdad against the wishes of much of the Coalition, it would have been bad, for reasons other than it being preventive, but the fact that other problems could occur in a nonpreventive war does not mean that substantial problems in the present war do not stem from it being "preventive".

Iraq wasn't a 'preventive' war. It was and is an oil war. All the given justifications, from WMD to spreading democracy, are pablum for the masses.

Hi Kevin,

I'm on thin ice here. At the risk of being unfair (and insensitive myself) I think that you, by your manner of addressing these issues, resemble the pro-war pundits.

You're intellectualizing something that desperately (I'm not exaggerating) needs to be responded to with moral outrage, deep contrition, and very, very vigorous attempts by all of us to stop it and, to the extent that it's possible, repair the damage.

Detachment is an appropriate response down the road somewhere. Not now.

The common thread in most of the comments to your earlier post was passion. That's the correct response to an unnecessary war that's causing the destruction of a society and is requiring a fourth tour of duty to get it done.

If you want to post on the war, Kevin, nail the pro-war pundits. Discuss our (definition of insanity) compulsion to repeat this catastrophic error (because when we honor the people who talked us into it the first time, we must be displaying our willingness to do it again....)

This all seems a bit silly. Every argument that was given in favor of the war has been proven wrong, while nearly every argument against the war has been proven right. The only question at this point is why did anyone fall for any of those ridiculous pro-war arguments.

And if your point is the preemptive/preventive war thing, I don't see how you can not interpret this fiasco as a big smack down on that theory. It highlighted all the shortcomings of the theory and produced none of the supposed benefits--we are clearly less secure now then before. If this doesn't sour you on preemptive war and convince you that the horrors of war must wait for a real threat (like armies massed on the border), then you must be a lunatic.

Let me take a crack at that last point. We all know war should be the very last resort to acheiving whatever. But why? Obviously, because it kills people, it makes others into killers, which can fuck them up, and costs a huge amount of money. All good reasons not to want to go to war.

But also, war should be a last resort because it's a policy instrument that's inherently full of all kinds of nasty uncertainties. All else equal, it's *much* more likely to result is all kinds of bad unintended consequecnes than is, say, diplomacy or sanctions or whatever. Bad consequences like a massive destablization of a strategically important region of the world, just to name one.

Now, the Iraq war offers an argument against preventive war in just this sense. Consider someone who was not inclined to take the above considerations seriously when weighing the pros and cons of going to preventive way--i.e., a war that wasn't *absolutely necessary.* Now, in 2007, the Iraq war stands as an illustration of how that thinking was badly misguided.

Preventive war is something you could think was a generally useful policy instrument *only if* you you forgot that wars, by their very nature, can and sometimes do turn into clusterfucks, and therefore not useful policy instruments. The Iraq war shows what's wrong with that thinking.

Mr. Drum,

You neglect the fact that if the war hadn't been preventive it would have had *goals,* besides prevention. Those goals would then have driven strategic decision-making, which would then drive tactical decision-making. Success becomes possible when it becomes a meaningful category.

Since the war was preventive, and AIMED AT PREVENTING SOMETHING THAT WASN'T HAPPENING regardless, it lacked proper war aims. This is where the war's moral enormity dovetails with its catastrophic outcome. (And yes, I think preventive war is a moral enormity regardless, because there's nothing in the structure of its definition to prevent demagogues from launching them willy-nilly.)

The war is a fiasco not because it had the wrong kind of goals but because it had NO COHERENT GOAL at all. The military means did not match any political ends. Deposing someone isn't a goal unless you know what comes afterward.

All of this was proven even to dunderheads by the revelations about al-Qaqaa before the 2004 election, if only analysts with a pulpit had been able to connect the dots. It's very simple: NO WAR PLAN that had ANY interest in creating a stable Iraq would have left enormous caches of high-grade plastic explosives unguarded. (And likewise no plan focused on establishing the moral legitimacy of anti-WMD sanctions would have left the ministry containing all the weapons paperwork unguarded, a fact that emerged recently.)

See my op-ed in the Harvard Crimson from May '06 for more on the anti-intellectualism of goal-oriented thinking that neglects the question of WHAT THE GOAL EVEN IS.

Al-Qaqaa should be one of the first topics on the lips of anyone who wants to have this argument again. I'm not clear why you do, since the main point right now is to keep momentum in the effort for there to be accountability for this disgusting Republican Party with its cynicism and its six years of disgusting 'party discipline' trumping American values.

(Wishful thinking alert, to change the tone of this back-and-forth.) The GOP should disband now that its incoherence as a moral force has been exposed. Corporatism and theocracy can each form their own party, and maybe a legitimate second party of libertarianism could congeal from elsewhere to oppose future Democratic excesses.

Jim von der Heydt

There is, of course, one way in which fighting a legitimate war would have made it easier to fight: troops and bankroll from other countries. Nobody would help us this time (as opposed to Gulf War I), because our motives were plainly illegitimate. Why Kevin refuses to see this, I don't know.

Kevin, I disagree with your assessment that Iraq was enough of a potential threat to characterize the war as "preventive".

If you accept the Iraq War was preventive then what war of aggression wasn't a preventive war?

Life entails risks. C'est la vie. Nations need to be able to not go to war just because at some future point another country may pose a risk.

Please reflect on the Golden Rule and preventive war.

I did a google on April Glaspie.

Wiki has this:
It has been argued that Saddam would not have invaded Kuwait had he been given an explicit warning that such an invasion would be met with force by the United States as turned out to be the case.

Also, you may find this from The Moderate Independent useful in understanding some of the back story on the current Iraq War.