Iconoclasm: thy name is Andrew.
Andrew Cory
Yesterday was a day that will be remembered in the history books only if our intervention in Iraq ends successfully. Indeed I will go further-- the elections yesterday were indicative not of success, but rather of the fact that we have not yet failed...
Imagine if no one showed up at the elections yesterday-- that would have been a failure. Alternately, had there been a million deaths yesterday, that would also have been a failure. Since we had relatively high turnout at the elections (though not as high a turnout as Saddam had [note: this is where sarcasm tags would be handy]), and a relatively low death toll, we can say that our Iraq policy has not yielded disaster-- though nothing more than that...
Elections qua elections are not good enough. The end goal, I think, is an independent Iraq which respects the basic human rights of all its inhabitants. Elections do not bring this about: [1] constitutions dedicated to human rights and [2] citizens and [3] armies dedicated to preserving those constitutions bring this about. Yesterday we saw the first step towards the beginning of the creation of the first of these, during that time; we saw the first signs of the second. The third is so nascent that it almost doesn't bear mentioning...
Yesterday's elections were certainly [!] a day for hopeful smiles, but not a day for triumphant back patting. There is still a lot of work that needs doing. Overconfidence at this point could be deadly...
Is the day you *finally* pour the foundation for your new house not a day for back patting?
The day you get admitted to a top school?
There are many *first steps* that have themselves required considerable effort to get to. This election is sure as hell one of them.
Celebrate away!!!
The day you get admitted to a top school?
Is pouring the foundation an absolute vindication of the entire construction plan for the building of your new house?
Is getting admitted the same as getting a degree?
I think Andrew's just trying to offer a mild counterpoint to the smug, self-congratulatory triumphalism on display throughout the pro-war blogosphere and punditry today. I have to admit, despite being an opponent of the war (though not, I would hope, a "reactionary, anti-progressive, anti-humanist pissant"), to feeling a greater degree of optimism now that the election has actually happened and so many Iraqis seem to have been truly motivated to participate. I'm happy to see the pictures of Iraqis with ink-stained fingers, and I'm happy to hear the stories of people voting for something they actually believe in. I really hope it works, but I think Andrew's point is well made that this is merely the first step, and we'll see how things pan out in the coming months (and years).
Good point! Has anyone seen any numbers on this? If the Baathists won in a landslide, we’re all in trouble...
As far as I understand it (and my knowledge here is fairly shaky) the election yesterday was to send people to a constitutional convention. Elections based on proportional representation might not be the best way to create a constitution based on ideals of human equality...
I think it's a complete triumph. We have a democracy and a big chunk of the population can't even get off their collective asses to vote. The Iraqis came out in large numbers, many of them risking their lives to vote (and, this is coming from me, a "pissant"--heh.). So, yeah, no matter what else happens, this was a huge victory for democracy.
Seriously, let people enjoy the moment without trying to piss in their cheerios.
Andrew is fundamentally correct that there are no Successes in this world, only Failures and Works-in-progress. (This is why so many people are afraid to act.)
But this is what so many critics of the war have also failed to understand — the criteria is not Success, it is success. Success with a small s is not considering the moment as if it were the end of time, but considering it as the beginning — whether an action is a success or failure is determined entirely by what we can make of it.
Thus the elections were not a Success — there's no such thing in this world, but they were a success — because the elections can lead to good things if we (using a very collective 'we' which really is mostly the Iraqi people) make them.
You don't say "Oh, I've made only one teeny little step and it's so far to go, I'll never make it". You say "Hurrah, I made the first step! I risked something and it was a success! I feel strong and confident. Let's do it - show me that next step. I'M READY MAN!!"
Only those who are willing to risk something meaningful ever know what success is.
You said exactly what I was going to say, only better. Thank you.
I think Sunday's election indicates that the possibility of such a civil war is lower than many people (including me) feared, but Sunday's victory is a fragile one, and it will require the same dedication and perseverance that brought it about to preserve it into the future.
God grant that any 8 million Americans have that sort of pure guts when it comes to proclaiming their love of liberty.
It wasn't our first democratic election under our constitution which sealed our liberty - it was the men who suffered through Valley Forge, who kept faith through the worst of times; it was they, long before there was a well-established constitutional order, who sealed our liberty.
Thousands of Iraqi's have died fighting the terrorists - millions just risked their lives to vindicate the blood of their fellow Iraqi's who paid the supreme price for liberty. No, there's no going back - people who would do that will not fall prey to tryanny ever again.
Likewise, the freedom of speech is a wonderful freedom but only if there freedom AFTER speech.
"You there! Yes, you! Stop celebrating that freedom there. Get out of it!"
Dean knows what I mean.
Excellent.
You can call me an iconodule.
In other words, stop being so pessimistic over every little bit of bad news, and we promise we won't crow at every bit of good news.
As things are, the constant funeral dirge drives us nuts, especially when most of the verifiable claims turn up wrong.
(Not directed at Andrew, per se; those people who seem to wallow in the bad news should know who they are.)
Does it make sense to ask whether those who supported the Afghanistan invasion but not the Iraq invasion seem less happy about the elections in Iraq, while those who supported the Iraq was seem more happy about this election?
Finding WMDs was not "the" point of the war. There were many reasons enumerated many times; back then and since. And, frankly, I'm sick of pointing this out to people who are too damned lazy, stupid, or dogmatic to find out on their own.
I'm not even touching the "what we found" thread. That's so mickey-mouse, well... "ooh, look, we found three whole warheads!!" "well, they're old warheads from 1990, so the don't count." "do so!" "don't!!" Bleah.
If you're concerned about that, let's find out how the CIA screwed up so badly, and fix it. I can tell you one thing: adding yet another layer of bureacracy on top of the current intelligence community ain't gonna fix it.
Oh, yeah, for Mister "pessimistic" Drew: toldyaso, toldyaso! Nyaaahh. Heh.
Thank You!
It's a lie.
WMDs were certainly the cassus belli we presented to the UN to ask for the Security Council's help. We thought the evidence was sufficient but also, we made the point that even if it was not sufficient it was Saddam's job to cooperate and prove he didn't have them and everyone agreed that he wasn't cooperating--that lack of cooperation plus even fragmentary evidence that they might be there was enough.
This all happened AFTER we had a year-long debate in this country--I know, I participated in it at great length on this blog, and many others did too--and then the Congress authorized the President to go to war by issuing a war declaration. In that war declaration, well over a dozen reasons besides WMDs were specified. All of those reasons had been mentioned many times by the President and the administration. All of them were discussed and debated on the floor of the Congress--ALL OF THEM, and ANY ONE OF THEM was sufficient.
This also continues to miss the point that all we had to have was EVIDENCE that Saddam was hiding them. It was his job to cooperate to prove that he wasn't and he consistently faile to do this.
Continually insisting that WMDs were "the reason" can only come from one of two things: Partisan lies, or rank ignorance. There really is no other choice. You either believe lies that partisans have forwarded for purely partisan reasons, or, you haven't educated yourself enough on the issues and weren't paying attention two years ago while these debates were going on.
It's mighty frustrating to have to continually debunk this nonsense, it really is.
Yeah, among the more than a dozen reasons we had (any one of which was good enough) was we were sure the WMDs were there. Well we were wrong on that, but so what? That wasn't the requirement. Until we got there we had no way of being sure--and unfortunately, since some have chosen to be so viciously and irresponsibly partisan, the question of "well where did they go?" gets forgotten. And it shouldn't. Where were they? Intelligence is never 100% reliable, never, but we had reason to think they were there. Now there's evidence that they may have been moved to Russia, they may have been moved to Syria, they may have been destroyed, they may have been hidden--but because of some people's obsessive need to slam the administration, the entire question winds up being just a quiet subcurrent and never gets the attention it deserves.
It's really rather obscene.
The pre-war focus on WMD was a PR manuever to build support for the war. The current focus on democracy promotion is no different.
As far as I'm concerned, none of the Bush Administration's proposed justifications for war, before, during, or since, were sufficient. For me, no justification is or can be sufficient without a showing that war is the only viable option, or at least clearly the best option. I never thought it was, and a successful election doesn't change that.
And I'm not sure how much serious speculation there is about Saddam's WMD stockpiles having been moved or hidden. Everything that I've seen, from U.S. and U.N. sources, seems pretty emphatic that Saddam had no WMD, no capacity to build WMD, and no active programs to create capacity to build WMD, when the war began.
You ask "Where did they go?" Most of them never existed in the first place. You're right, we honestly believed Saddam had WMD, and there were good reasons to believe that at the time. But those reasons were based on the faulty assumption that Saddam restarted his WMD development programs as soon as the U.N. inspectors left in 1998. We now know he did no such thing.
Sufficient to justify invasion and forcible removal of Saddam. Every single reason--there were more than a dozen--was all by itself sufficient to make the war entirely legal and entirely justifiable militaryily and morally.
The fact that there were so many just made it all the more damning.
As for who it's sufficient for: our democratically elected Congress, that's who. They debated the issue at length on the floor of the House and Senate, discussed every one of the many reasons, and in overwhelming bipartisan fashion passed the war declaration giving the President authority to act.
This, by the way, is another reason why I'm sick of the partisan liars (yeah, I've had enough, it's time to call these people liars because it's what they are) who pretend that this all falls on the President. Bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. Only Congress can declare war, and that's exactly what the Congress did. A Congress which has not just the right but the duty to demand to see all the intelligence (and they saw everything the President did), to demand more if they want more, and so on. They are MORE responsible than the President, not less!
And that Congress, our elected representatives and Senators, in overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion passed the war declaration that detailed the well over a dozen reasons for action.
And by the way, thank God for Dick Gephardt's fearless leadership in getting most of the Democrats in the House to vote for the resolution. I'd also say thanks to John Kerry since he was one of the most vocal and hawkish and was very loud in his support, but given his flip-flops and later denials I can't thank him anymore. If he'd had the guts to stand by everything he'd been saying in 2001 (he was talking about Iraq on news shows as much as the administration was in the weeks after 9/11).
The focus on WMDs became a minor marketing maneuver in the final weeks of the year-long debate because the administration's critics--quite disingenuously, in my view--started whining that the administration was bringing up too may reasons. They claimed that the administration was "changing its story," because every time they were asked they gave so many different reasons. So then the focus, only at the very end, became on the fact that Saddam wasn't keeping up with his requirements to show he'd given up his WMDs, and on the human rights situation.
I was there dude, I watched it all go down, and it's maddening to watch people revise history (and I'm being kind because in some cases they're obviously just baldfaced liars) and pretend that WMDs were "the reason." Bull-fucking-SHIT!
You don't believe me? I can go back and show you all my archives here on this blog where I linked numerous news stories at the time, and commented myself. Or you could just cut to the chase and click here to read the war declaration that was overwhelmingly passed by the Congress with huge support from the Democrats.
Just read it. Every single one of the reasons mentioned in it was mentioned by the administration repeatedly during the year-long debate we had in this country. Every one was debated on the floor of the congress. EVERY SINGLE ONE!
I don't mind people who want to debate whether we should have gone, although it seems like a waste of energy. But it would be nice if they'd at least stop changing history and making up baldfaced lies about what our reasons were, which were numerous and substantial and debated at length in the press, among everyday citizens, and among those who bear the ultimate responsibility: THE CONGRESS.
Yes, the Congress, and especially the Democrats, bear a large part of that responsibility for so irresponsbily punting on their most solemn constitutional duty. Call me a revisionist historian if you want to, Dean, but my memory is no more clouded or skewed by bias than your own. You were there? Boffo! So was I. You were blogging at the time. Terrific! So was I. And while I would never stoop to calling you a liar, I must point out that your memory of the events doesn't quite match with mine, and I know that I'm not a liar.
Barron's post
Dean: I apologize since I posted something about the "multiple reasons" problem in your later post on "Reasons" which might be considered superfluous in terms of your comment that *any* of the reasons in and of themselves would be sufficient, though I'm not sure that would be true of those in Congress actually posted votes. I.e. a congress person who approved the resolution might actually have disagreed with, discounted, or even forgotten some of the reasons.
Drew Vogel's comment is interesting too. If true, the "reasons" that the resolution was approved become part of the slippery slope of trying to measure intent. It is a data point that the resolution was approved. One would presumably then have to survey members of Congress to find out why they voted - e.g. hope to get re-elected, personal conviction. I don't see that as overly informative.