Why does someone aspire to be a very serious "foreign policy expert" if he is unwilling to share a contrary view? It must be the cafeteria plan and the opportunity to wear a tweed jackets while smoking a pipe.

It feels like this is similar to what's going on with the Global Warming "Debate" (or what WAS going on; it's certainly a bit better now): The "debate" on the morning news shows stands in almost complete opposition to the "debate" among experts on the subject.

Is there anything that can be done to correct either such problem?

My guess is that they were intimidated by seeing what happened to those who did speak out. Remember Scott Ritter? The guy was a weapons inspector, a former Marine, a critic of Clinton for being not tough enough on Saddam, but when he started saying that there were no significant weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, his TV gigs were cancelled and he was tried in the press as a traitor, likely an agent of Saddam. Here's a 2002 Toronto Star article describing just what they did to him.

And Ritter could point to the fact that he was a Marine and a Gulf War veteran. What could a mere academic use in his/her defense? Those who had jobs in the foreign policy establishment got the message. Ari Fleischer made it explicit: watch what you say.

"Think Tank Presentations" gives away part of the reason why.

The vast bulk of "think tanks" aren't think tanks. They're propaganda machines. AEI, Heritage, CATO, Manhattan Institute, Hoover Institute are funded right wing fronts. When one confuses these "think tanks" opinions with actual intellectual discourse, one gets a very warped idea of the world.

These right wing outfits almost to the man screamed support of the war. But that doesn't mean that intellectuals actually supported the war. It means the PR guys did.

Second, don't forget that almost no-one outside of the US and Britain bought the Iraq War drivel. It was almost impossible to find a non Brit, American or Iraqi exile who thought the whole Iraqi invasion was anything but a fools' errand.

We just chose to ignore them.

I remember a series of conversations I had with Navy personnel (I am a civilain who worked forthe Navy in 2003). I was against the war as I thought the stuff on Saddam (especially the nukes) was alot of hot air and I really thought that Iraq presented no danger. But the conversations with the hawks always turned to:

That is pre 9/11 thinking. We can never be sure what these crazy dictators will do.
You LIKE Saddam Hussein (remember Sullivan's "if you are not for the war then you are objectively pro-Saddam)?
He is acting funny. He HAS to have the WMD.

In all cases, the conversations became very tense with an unsaid sense of "you do not love your country enough". I dunno about the FPC, but I definately felt cowed so I just shut up.

There were plenty of conservative hawks and liberal hawks advocating war back in 2002, but there were also plenty of dissenters. The problem is that most of them stayed silent for one reason or another.

Nonsense Kevin. There were a lot of liberals who were vocally against the liberation of Iraq. As examples, take Scott Ritter, Phil Donahue, Ward Churchill, and Michael Moore who were very vocal and voracious in their attacks on Bush and the liberation. You're simply wrong.

Even the so-called "semi-serious" people who were opposed to the unprovoked invasion were systematically excluded from the teevee, whether liberal or conservative (and there were are few conservatives).

Cranky

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

Where do we get off this widening gyre?

I'm with Joe Buck.

Bush was determined to have a war and he got one.

It would have been interesting - as an academic exercies - to see what happened if there had been a true, recognized, sustained body of dissent given Bush's determination.

Given the neocons' determination to wage unprovoked war it would be extremely timely for this body of opinion to make its views known - on a sustained basis.

But as we all know there really is no place to take such views. America is basically predisposed toward war. I think this was always beneath the surface but part of Bush's legacy is to create a lasting legitimacy for this bizarre and immoral mindset.

actually sam, most brits were opposed as well - but Tony and Jack Straw wanted a war so they got one.

Other than the republic of Palau the US was about the only ones who wanted a war.

And yes, after watching Scott Ritter being skull F****d, most dissenters were a litter hesitant to take on that nice Karl Rove man.

By God you people have short memories

in the sense that JB is talking about, sure, we can understand that it was virtually impossible to head off this war (i believe - and i'm not alone - that only the resignation of colin powell accompanied by a blistering speech on the stupidity of this war had a chance), but we're talking largely about academics and think tankers: good old-fashioned gutlessness is the explanation, as kevin noted.

how many hundreds of thousands marched in opposition to the war? doesn't really matter, does it? they were discounted as freaks and their opinions minimized by the press and the panty-wetter pundocracy.

I agree with Don B above. The problem is that it is very difficult to defend opposition to the Iraq war because it could always be redefined as support for Saddam. I was very vocal, but who cares what I think? I'm just a normal private citizen.

This is hardly a profound revelation, but if you recall the ultra nationalistic and jingoistic political environment of the time, it is not hard to see why some people chose not to be branded as unpatriotic by the loudest warmongers.

Look what happened to Scott Ritter.

For what it's worth, I wasn't that quiet about it. But then, I'm not an FP expert and didn't have my own show.

I think that Joe Buck has hit on the most powerful factor in keeping the anti-war factions of the FPC silent. Who wants to speak up when a well-established mechanism is already in place to slime you for it?

In part, this is the inevitable result of the tendency of many people to take the "everyone's entitled to their opinion" view - in other words, when an expert like Ritter goes up against a Fox Newsnik, many people, in a warped view of "fairness", will give them equal creedence. And since many of these folks will confuse forcefulness and an absolute, black-and-white worldview with truth and accuracy when compared to a nuanced, greyscale worldview, they allow themselves to be convinced by the more sure-sounding opinion, regardless of its relationship with anything resembling objective truth (if such a thing can be said to exist).

The vast bulk of "think tanks" aren't think tanks. They're propaganda machines. AEI, Heritage, CATO, Manhattan Institute, Hoover Institute are funded right wing fronts... these right wing outfits almost to the man screamed support of the war...

Not CATO. Seriously, check their archive. That's kind of their deal: they get exempted from pushing the party line on non-economic issues, on the condition that no one actually pays them any attention then.

Agreed most Brits were opposed to war - hence the huge demonstrations against the war. In fact most Americans said that they were opposed to war without UN backing - until we actually started fighting, when they appeared to change their minds.

The point was that apart from a small group of British intellectuals - no-one in the rest of the world supported the Iraq War. NO-ONE. And despite that, the US media only showed pro-war voices in the run up to the war. And mainly painted Americans questioning the war as lefty loonies.

Again - it was virtually impossible to read non-US, non-UK publications that supported the Iraq War. But in the US almost every major publication basically supported it. Doesn't make us look all that smart does it?

Funny, I got sort of blacklisted from my conservative friends at the start of the war(calling them stupid sheep to their face didn't help). But they've all apologized to me now, or just act like they were against the war all along...

It's worth some soul searching to figure out why the doubters mostly stayed so quiet.

Because otherwise the hawks wouldn't have anyone to play false-moral-equivalence games with five years later....

There were plenty of conservative hawks and liberal hawks advocating war back in 2002, but there were also plenty of dissenters. The problem is that most of them stayed silent for one reason or another.

"Dissent" and "silence" are two very different, indeed mutually exclusive, courses of action.

I think the problem here lies with an asymmetry of blame. If you support a war and it goes bad, you can always say it was still a good idea, just poorly executed. If you oppose a war and it goes well, you have no fall-back position. You were just plain wrong. These foreign policy professionals are not really trying to be right, they are just trying to avoid being wrong. Supporting a war always gives them more wiggle room to reassess their statements in the future. So they will err on the side of war to protect their careers, or they will remain on the sideline so nobody notices their position.

This, of course, begs the question* - can you be called a "dissenter" if you only silently disagree with what other people are saying, and don't actually dissent?

*Yes, I know, it's an incorrect usage. I couldn't think of any other way to say it.

Well it wasn't the FPC, but I do remember there being pretty sizable citizen demonstrations in a lot of locations in January and February. However, as I remember, it was then discovered that ANSWER may have been tengetially involved in organizing one of these demonstrations (unbeknownst to pretty much any of the participants) and then all of a sudden all of the demonstrations were painted as anti-American, communist rallies.

I do remember that a lot of critics were shot down with a lot of sophistry on the news programs. I remember Ron Silver on Crossfire (who says conservatives don't like actors being involved in politics) asking his opponent in the debate why he didn't believe in promoting democracy and why he was supporting the butcher Sadaam Hussein. Its hard to answer that question with realism in any way that appeals to a mass audience.

Hold on, did they stay silent, or were they simply ignored? I seem to recall many foreign policy "experts" claiming the invasion was a bad idea (hell, even James Baker said so), but they weren't serious.

Millions of ordinary citizens around the world and within the USA marched and protested the invasion of Iraq and nobody within the FPC listened. What does that tell you about the FPC?

James Joyner: "...the foreign policy Establishment treated the war with dispassion, seemingly afraid to take a strong stand ... treated the march to war as a mere curiosity ..."

Kevin Drum: "It's worth some soul searching to figure out why the doubters mostly stayed so quiet."

The answer is simple. They had absolutely NOTHING to lose personally. It wasn't they -- or their sons and daughters -- who would pay the war's price in any way. And they weren't going to bet their careers on being on the wrong side of the argument -- and inevitably branded as traitors.

Human nature.

They didn't stay quiet.

They shouted loudly, were called whackos, loony-liberals, moonbats, traitors, and terrorist lovers, they were shunted off into "free speech zones", they were arrested for wearing the wrong slogan on their t-shirt.

They were silenced.

Need I remind you all ONE MORE TIME:
A 2004 Democratic Presidential Candidate.
A US SENATOR.
Denis Kucinich - does that name sound familiar?
Was detained by security for simply trying to enter the building to sit in the audience of the PRIMARY debates, he was not permitted to participate in.

In 2007; he was allowed to participate on the stage.

We have completely lost all perspective if we can not even see how much of a radical change that this represents, how bad things were back then, and how much better they are now (and how much further we still have to go).

Kevin expects us to believe that this is some kind of mass-hysteria zeitgeist groupthink phenomenon. I'm not feeling all that gullible today.

22 Senators were against the war and voted that way. 133 Reps were against the war and voted that way. Did opposition to the war exceed 29% of the FP establishment? Of the general population?
Not all the media supported the war, either. For all the dumbass things he says, Chris Matthews opposed the war. Loved Bush, opposed the war.

Where leadership was needed, in Congress, electoral concerns overrode good judgment. Hence the opposition to HRC. Bad judgment on this issue presages such judgment on equally important issues.

I cannot stand this ridiculous debate one more minute.

I am beyond tired of hearing a liberal hawk who contributed to the pro-war rhetoric orgy that shuttered out all debate to the contrary lecture doves for not speaking out more loudly.

This is like the "reformed" mugger chastising his victims for not fighting back hard enough.

In fact, there were plenty of us speaking out. Plenty of us marching. Plenty of us doing everything we could to stop this damn war, and none of you folks were listening.

It is beyond time that you folks looked at yourselves in the mirror and accept responsibility for your actions, and stopped flailing about looking for others to project your self-loathing onto.

I've said it before: There were inspectors on the ground in Iraq in early 2003, they were given unprecedented access to alleged weapons sites based on US intelligence and repeatedly found ... nothing. In a normal world, this should have al least cast some doubt on the value of the intelligence ... but it didn't. In a weird, bizarro world way, these incidents were spun as further evidence of just how crafty Sadaam was. At the end of the day, everything was used to support the administration, evidence and absence of evidence. Rational thought went out the window because we dehumanized Sadaam in such a way that there was only one possible answer to the question of WMD, regardless of what the evidence showed.

I've seen this in the police context as well, where the police zero in and eventually decide that the suspect they're looking at must be the one who did the crime. At that point, it doesn't matter what the evidence says, it all points to the suspect (if only to show his cunningness in hiding the real evidence). Woe be to the guy who is pre-convicted by the police.

Don't worry, Disputo.

I'm sure they won't disappoint you in 6 years as the Clinton/Lieberman Iran occupation winds down, and Kevin's scratching his head wondering why none of us spoke up before we went in, particularly after complaining so loudly about the Iraq mess.

Per gregor's comment about "the ultra nationalistic and jingoistic political environment of the time":

What people forget about the environment in which we went/were taken to war is the rawness of 9/11. That dominated everything; the idea that we were being attacked and had to do something about it. And even if Iraq technically didn't have anything to do with it, we had to prove that we wouldn't be attacked that way; as Michael Vlahos wrote some months back in Buchanan's "American Conservative" magazine, we had to destroy the prophecy couched in 9/11. It was a mania, a hysteria; people felt swept along by it, believed we had to punch back, punch at anyone really.

As another commenter said, you are wrong. I am getting sick of this revisionism I am starting to see from those liberal hawks who are still trying to deflect blame from themselves, now by blaming those true opponents to the war who - if only they "spoke up" more - would have supposedly stopped it. Please. There was plenty of rational, objective opposition from smart folks who knew the region and history, and we were figuratively and literally threatened with our careers for speaking out. Too many people found their lives and jobs in shambles, and after some time of yelling and being marginalized, and realizing it's going to happen anyway ("The inspectors found nothing? That proves he has them!"), you just shut up.

Bgno64, this was a year and a half after 9/11. We had been largely victorious in Afghanistan. I don't buy the whole "passionate mistake" argument, Iraq was about "revenge" against muslims.

Iraq was about "revenge" against muslims.

Only ostensibly.

Iraq was their chance to see the institutional Democratic party gets Mulroney’d for a generation.

To shape the the tax policy, fiscal direction, regulatory environment, labor environment and legal system of the country into the middle of the century.

In short, not just get the keys to the bank vault, but to lay off the guards and write larceny out of the statute books.

War aims in Iraq:

Democrats in Senate: less than 30
Democrats in House: less than 150
Democratically controlled statehouses: less than 20
Democratic governors: less than 22
Reliable ‘conservative’ Supreme Court Justices: greater than 6

Whether to fight it, when to fight it, how to fight it, whom to send to fight it, whether to end it, when to end it—all based on calculation of party-political advantage.

Iraq was not so much a ‘war’ as the world’s most expensive campaign commercial, or the political version of Munchausen’s-by-proxy.

...Michael Vlahos wrote some months back in Buchanan's "American Conservative" magazine, we had to destroy the prophecy couched in 9/11. It was a mania, a hysteria; people felt swept along by it, believed we had to punch back, punch at anyone really.
Posted by: Bgno64 on August 21, 2007 at 4:10 PM | PERMALINK

That's just post-hoc rationalization, and you know it.

Because if you sit down and THINK about it - at least as long and hard as it takes an ACI officer to pick a bomb target and plot a flight path; and we've done plenty of that - even bombing the living crap out of Iraq does not guarantee that there were no more sleeper cells in the US waiting for a time or date or secret, hand-carried message to strike again. And after all that effort, and destruction, and money, and our 100k troops 10,000 miles away, to have another 9/11-style attack happen? We know damn well that our "blind flailing" in Iraq wouldn't have stopped it. (might not stop it still).

What do you think Americans will be thinking in the aftermath of the next attack?

There was a mania, an hysteria. But it was among a very small group of people, who have hundreds of millions of dollars of assets to lose in the next attack. The rest of us? We stand a much greater chance of becoming road-pizza on the way to work tomorrow morning. We don't really give a crap about this stuff. Except that somehow, this small group of billionaires have conned the government into spending a half a trillion of OUR tax dollars to get revenge for THEIR assets getting blown up.

What people forget about the environment in which we went/were taken to war is the rawness of 9/11. That dominated everything; the idea that we were being attacked and had to do something about it.

Ever been in a bar when a fight breaks out? You been hit, you gotta hit someone. Next thing you know your fists are bloody and a few teeth are missing.

But if our foreign policy is going to be based on the behavior of a mob of surly drunks just before closing time, we are f*cking lost.

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

It's funny, but I was thinking about that identical quote, djangone.

What's most striking about the "antiwar" articles mentioned in FA and elsewhere is how qualified and general rather than certain and specific they were with regard to the Iraq War.

I think that at least part of the problem with the genuine foreign policy experts -- the ones who really did perceive the real downsides of the Iraq war -- was that they seem to have been far too caught up with their own uncertainties in predicting the exact outcome.

In fact, of course, realizing that there are uncertainties is truly a mark of expertise. The very thing that makes pre-emptive war, and indeed war in general, a means of very last resort is that the outcomes are never certain, and unintended results so common.

Yet they were opposing a group of people who really did think that they could make their own realities. How do fight the stupidest and emphatic kind of certainty with reasonable conclusions couched in conditions and uncertainties?

It's not so easy for human nature to handle that dilemma. Especially in political contexts, we seem to need someone to say, not that the Iraq war has a good likelihood of turning out badly, but that it goddam will be a disaster.

I don't think the "We were all carried along by 9/11" premise holds water...because polls at the time NEVER showed significant-majority, let alone enthusiastic support for the war. The best the pollsters could do was posit a Grenada/Gulf War I outcome (three weeks, casualties under 100) and that barely carried favorability to above 50%.

Which, by the way, means Americans have been quite consistent about this war: they articulated the exact terms under which it could be considered a success; once it fell short of them, the public bailed fast.

Kevin, stop it. Just stop it. Now.

Ever been in a bar when a fight breaks out? You been hit, you gotta hit someone. Next thing you know your fists are bloody and a few teeth are missing.
Posted by: thersites on August 21, 2007 at 4:29 PM | PERMALINK

No.
Go protect my wife, and get her safely out the back as quickly as possible.

Of course, the Bush policy seems to be - pull out the illegal concealed revolver, hop behind the bar, start pouring himself drinks, empty the cash-register, and shoot randomly into the crowd.

I think more needs to be said about KFC and the war. (Well, both suck, anyway.)

My experience in the DC policy world was that the people who thought the war was likely to be a disaster were quite clear about it but were either ignored or muzzled by both the Administration and the media. The Administration's role is easy to understand; the media's, less so. Ignoring the many media outlets that are simply extensions of the Republican Party or the right wing noise machine - and for the period 2002-03, I include the Washington Post somewhere in that dysfunctional community - I have the impression that a lot of DC journalists simply did a poor job of basic investigative work. That the Knight-Ritter folks were able to do such a better job than most bears this out, I think. The tone of the media presentation, in turn, influenced the policy debate among those who lacked deep Middle Eastern expertise. (And don't discount the importance of Bill Clinton's support for the Administration in 2002-03, if not for the timing of the invasion, for the principle. Imagine how different things would have been if Mr. Big Dog had been in vocal opposition.)

obf: You don't get out enough. ;-)

But I wish I'd thought of the cash register. Damn!

Of course, the Bush policy seems to be - pull out the illegal concealed revolver, hop behind the bar, start pouring himself drinks, empty the cash-register, and shoot randomly into the crowd.

That's just about the best synopsis of the GWB admin I have seen.

Once again many seem to be missing what actually happened. The reporting on any anti-war activities or people was either slanted or non-existant. There was nothing appearing in the media that even hinted the administration might not be in possession of the "smoking gun" it claimed to have. Anyone who doubted the administration's line immediately had their intelligence or their patriotism questioned.
Many of those who contribute to this comments section undoubtedly saw through the crap. But what's the percentage of the total population that regularly reads the blogs now? What was it five years ago?
Anyone relying on the MSM (TV, print, whatever) during that time would rarely, if ever, have seen an objective interview with any major anti-war leader. I can personally testify that the anti-war marches were glossed over at best and usually were immediately followed by some pro-war speaker wondering how those people could call themselves Americans.
And to be brutally honest about it, the "war" was a success. We won that. Whether we should have ever conducted it is another matter entirely.
The present admininstration's methods of getting our country involved in Iraq might even have been forgiven had the victory in the war they plotted to bring about and finally fought, not been thrown away. By themselves.
(The opinions in the above paragraphs represent those of the writer and and are not necessarily endorsed by the owner, contributors or commenters of this blog.)

"My experience in the DC policy world was that the people who thought the war was likely to be a disaster were quite clear about it but were either ignored or muzzled by both the Administration and the media"

This conversation has been about the foreign policy experts, but you know that Bushco regards expertise as worthless--all that matters is the loyalty to the party line. So they listened to those who confirmed what they wanted to hear and demonized and ridiculed those who didn't. We aren't discussing lesser names, either. Zbigniew Brzezinksi was against it. Brent Scrowcroft, papa Bush's vox, had an NYT op-ed piece against it.

And if foreign policy expertise was ignored, moral arguments also were ignored. The pope was against it, the Archbishop of Canterbury was against it. Jimmy Carter was against --he had an op-ed in the NYTimes about the Doctrine of Just War.

Bushco had the power, and they wanted this war. They were willing to lie to Americans to get this war. They would stop at nothing to have their war. They should be tried as war criminals, if the US had any integrity left. And those that enabled these war-mongers, such as Hillary Clinton, should be eliminated from any Presidential consideration. Those with power--and all foreign policy experts have is credibility, not power--can get away with murder.

I remember in particular The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's explicit opposition to the war and debunking of Kenneth Pollock and the liberal hawks.

But it seems they were not given much air time.

Ever been in a bar when a fight breaks out? You been hit, you gotta hit someone. Next thing you know your fists are bloody and a few teeth are missing.

But if our foreign policy is going to be based on the behavior of a mob of surly drunks just before closing time, we are f*cking lost.
Posted by: thersites on August 21, 2007 at 4:29 PM
-------
That unfortunately was exactly what happened.
A horrific lack of moral leadership here....
A decent "Gunsmoke" moment where Matt Dillon stops a lynch mob from murdering the stranger in town who didn't really kill somebody's grandma didn't happen-our "leadership" was busy recruiting the lynch mob instead.

I don't understand the premise. Of course there was dissent. Bush, Sr. and Scowcroft famously laid out the case for not taking over Iraq 10 years previously. Pat Buchanan has been pointing out the threat of neoconservatives for years, but of course liberal academic intellectuals are in a state of neurotic paralysis at even the thought of criticizing an ethnic group, making them an incestuous circle jerk of impotent PCer's.

http://www.amconmag.com/03_24_03/cover.html

http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2002/12/11/should-conservatives-support-a-war-against-iraq/
"Some critics, as well as many conservatives including Colin Powell, Dick Armey, Pat Buchanan, General Schwartzkopf, Brett Scowcroft, and Lawrence Eagleburger, claim that Bush wants to invade Iraq because of a fear that Iraq will interfere with U.S. access to cheap oil in the Middle East....

Opponents of attacking Iraq point out that killing Iraqis will only escalate hostility by Arabs and Muslims towards the U.S., increasing the likelihood of more terrorist attacks against the U.S."

Joyner's piece mentions one Mearsheimer - Walt article, I think, but omits the very important ad in the NYT in Sept or Oct 2002, signed by 33 international relations scholars, opposing the war.

That was an important moment, as the frantic response from neo-cons revealed, and it deserves mention. Those 31 names change the balance in Joyner's scale.