To skip this introduction and go directly to read Jeff Weintraub’s In-Depth Analysis “Some Partial, Preliminary & Unfashionable Thoughts Toward Reassessing the 2003 Iraq War – Did Anything Go Right and What Were The Alternatives?” click here.

I was sure in the lead up to the Iraq War that it wouldn’t happen. It seemed obvious to me that it made no sense, and I couldn’t believe that the U.S. would embark on such foolishness. One of my big mistakes, obviously. While Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden and American capacity to wage two wars, one clearly by choice, seemed to be a huge strategic mistake, the war proceeded and escalated, and we have paid.

Nonetheless, I did understand why deposing Saddam was desirable. His regime was reprehensible. I respected those who called for opposition to its totalitarianism, from the informed Kanan Makiya to my Central European friends, Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel, et al. I even said so at an anti-war rally.

Yet, connecting the means at our disposal with the desirable end of a free and democratic Iraq seemed to me to be an extraordinarily difficult project, and I had absolutely no confidence that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Company could pull it off. How could my intelligent friends who supported the war not see that? I actually had a number of heated public discussions with Michnik about that.

Once begun, I hoped that the intervention would be short and sweet, and hoped that a democratic transition could be managed, but as we now know these hopes were frustrated. From every point of view, the war was a disaster: for the Iraq, the region, the U.S., and the project of democracy, and the way the war was fought, as it was part of a purported global war against terror, compromised American democratic principles. As time has passed many of the early supporters see all this and have changed their judgments, and those who haven’t, such as John McCain, choose not to focus in their speech and action on the question of entrance into the war, but rather on the exit, the so called surge, which they purport explains limited American successes.

But I am curious: what have become of those who as a matter of principle supported the war? And what have become of their arguments? A few brave souls have stuck to their positions. To have a richer understanding of our recent past and to reflect on the challenges of the day, I think it is worth paying attention. Thus, today’s In-Depth post: Jeff Weintraub’s “Some Partial, Preliminary & Unfashionable Thoughts Toward Reassessing the 2003 Iraq War – Did Anything Go Right and What Were The Alternatives?”

To read Jeff Weintraub’s In-Depth Analysis, “Some Partial, Preliminary & Unfashionable Thoughts Toward Reassessing the 2003 Iraq War – Did Anything Go Right and What Were The Alternatives?”click here.

There are clearly some good grounds for holding those views (as well as a lot of bad, dishonest, intellectually lazy, and morally evasive ones); and for anyone who supported the war, like me, the past decade has often been a morally harrowing time (or should have been, at least). But I remain convinced that the question was more complicated than that in 2002-2003 and is still more complicated today.

Nor, I would like to believe, do I say that merely to cover my own ass (morally and analytically speaking) with a mealy-mouthed unwillingness to face up honestly to the moral and intellectual issues involved. Back in 2002-2003 I thought (and said quite explicitly) that there were good and bad arguments on both sides of the question (with more bad ones than good ones on both sides), and I think that’s still true now … though any serious discussion would also have to take account of what has actually happened in the past decade. (I could no longer simply repeat all the arguments I made back in 2002-2003 without serious revisions or modifications, but making a full-scale public recantation, as some other one-time supporters of the war have done, wouldn’t be honest in my case either.)

I have been struck, in particular, that the vast bulk of recent discussions expressing the “anti-war” groupthink, which is rarely challenged, are marked by two massive omissions.

=> First, while they properly emphasize the terrible results of the war and its aftermath for Iraqis, for Americans, and for others, they almost never consider the actual and probable costs—human, economic, geopolitical, etc.—of the alternatives to war that were realistically available in 2002-2003.  In fact, now as in 2002-2003, almost none of the people expressing the “anti-war” consensus even try to outline or propose, let alone defend, any serious alternative policies that they think could and should have been followed to deal with the very special problems posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq a decade after the 1991 Gulf War.

I’ve raised those issues in the past from time to time (e.g., here & here), and they still strike me as valid.  For the moment, I will just reiterate some of the relevant points from a post I wrote in 2005.

[…] I did not support the war because I expected rosy outcomes. Instead, I became (and remain) convinced that the war was necessary and justified primarily because I became (and remain) convinced that, by the end of the 1990s, all the realistically (as opposed to wishfully) available alternative options led almost certainly to politically catastrophic and morally appalling consequences.

The key point was that, by the end of the 1990s, the whole sanctions-&-containment system cobbled together in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War was becoming increasingly unsustainable (politically, diplomatically, and also morally), not least because it had been systematically and deliberately undermined by a range of governments acting in loose collusion with the Iraqi Ba’ath regime, and by 2000 or so it was on the verge of terminal disintegration. The perceived economic & political interests of a number of key states, reinforced by a massively successful propaganda campaign which convinced large sectors of public opinion across the world that US-imposed sanctions were starving Iraqi babies, all pushed in that direction. (How many opponents of war in 2002-2003 had previously been urging a policy of tightening up sanctions and continuing them indefinitely?)  [….]

Thus, for these and other reasons, simply doing nothing and assuming that the status quo would automatically continue indefinitely was not a realistically viable option. Inaction would also have been a choice with serious and unpleasant consequences.

(Michael Walzer, who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was one of the few opponents of the war who recognized this problem and faced it squarely. Walzer proposed a third option—an escalation of the “little war” that the US and its allies had already been waging in Iraq since the 1991 armistice. But it’s not clear that this was really a viable option in 2002-2003; and, at all events, it’s not an option that most opponents of the 2003 Iraq war, in the US or abroad, would actually have been willing to pursue.)

[B]y the middle of 2002, there were really only two realistically available outcomes—military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein & his regime, or a victory for Saddam Hussein & his foreign backers. The latter would have been a prelude to the final disintegration of the sanctions-&-containment system, a disintegration which in practical terms would have been irreversible. In realistic terms (and I mean realistic, not “realist”), those were the genuine options—in my possibly fallible but firm opinion—and any serious discussion of the issues surrounding the 2003 Iraq war has to begin by facing up to this reality.

Now, some people might argue that the collapse of containment would have been no big deal, or at least that the consequences couldn’t possibly have been as bad as the consequences of military action that we’ve actually seen. I believe that’s wrong.  [JW: And the current death throes of the other Ba’athist regime, in Syria, only reinforce the point that we can’t simply take that assumption for granted.]

Most of the discussion of Saddam Hussein’s missing “weapons of mass destruction” have had a certain irrelevance and unreality from the start. The size of his existing stockpiles was never the key question. Most informed analysts (including all the major intelligence services), however much they disagreed on details, generally agreed that Saddam Hussein had active nuclear, biological, & chemical weapons programs. (It was German intelligence, not the CIA, that said in 2001 that Saddam was probably about 3 years away from getting nuclear weapons.) It turned out they were all wrong, and the whole thing was a fantastically successful bluff on Saddam’s part—though the only reason we know this is precisely that the Iraqi Ba’ath regime was overthrown—but, fundamentally, so what? This was just a matter of timing. Once containment had collapsed and Saddam Hussein was out of the box, he would have been ready and eager to resume his NBC weapons programs. (Scott Ritter, for example, explained this all quite cogently in 1998, before he experienced his strange conversion over Iraq.) It would no doubt have taken Saddam Hussein a while to get a nuclear weapon, and perhaps some stroke of luck in the meantime might have prevented this, but otherwise it was just a matter of time. In the medium term, given everything we know about the nature and history of the Iraqi Ba’ath regime and Saddam Hussein’s own history and inclinations, one could expect renewed military adventurism, another of his catastrophic miscalculations, and a bigger and more destructive war down the line.

In the relatively short run, one predictable and almost certain consequence of the collapse of containment would have been another genocidal bloodbath in Iraqi Kurdistan—which, it is quite safe to predict, no one would have lifted a finger to stop. Perhaps I have some kind of strange psychological quirk, since the genocidal mass murder of ethnic minorities seems to upset me more than it does some other people, but I think the prevention of this genocidal bloodbath has to be seen as one argument (among others) in favor of taking serious action against Saddam Hussein & his regime. [….]

And so on. I don’t want to leave the impression that these are the only likely and predictable catastrophic consequences that would have followed the imminent collapse of the sanctions-&-containment system, but it would take a while to lay them all out in detail, and those will do to suggest the key background considerations.

I waited all through the debates of 2002-2003 for opponents of the war to offer any half-way honest and plausible alternative to military action that took these realities seriously, and that offered a plausible likelihood of preventing the consequences I’ve just outlined. I never heard anyone offer any such proposal that struck me as even remotely realistic or convincing—which is part of the reason I decided that, on balance, the war was necessary and justified.

I’m still waiting. Here’s what I said to Sam Rosenfeld & Matthew Yglesias back in 2005 (in response to their American Prospect piece, “The Incompetence Dodge“), and I would offer the same challenge today to readers who subscribe to the now-hegemonic “anti-war” consensus:

Political judgment requires making choices between a range of realistically available options, based in large part on an assessment of the likely consequences of different courses of action. Your piece argues, in effect, that many of the negative consequences of the decision to take military action against Saddam Hussein & his regime in 2003 were readily predictable and, in fact, highly likely. OK, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you’re right.

That’s not enough. The relevant comparison has to be with the likely consequences of other possible courses of action available at the time (including inaction). So, to reiterate, what do you think would have been a superior alternative back in 2002-2003? Can you identify and defend a realistically available, morally acceptable, politically workable alternative course of action whose likely and predictable consequences would have been less disastrous than the ones we’ve actually seen so far?

This is not a rhetorical question, by the way. If you or anyone else could (hypothetically) present such an alternative scenario that I found at all plausible & convincing, then I might be forced to reconsider whether my support for the war (trepidations and all) was actually intelligent or justifiable. In the absence of such an account, then it seems to me—rightly or wrongly—that your discussion fundamentally begs the question.

=> Second, people who take it for granted that the war and its consequences were an unmitigated disaster for Iraqis tend to focus exclusively on Arab Iraq.  They almost uniformly ignore Iraqi Kurdistan.  It’s understandable why they would do that, and the Arab part of Iraq does account for about three-quarters of Iraqis … but any assessment of the 2003 Iraq war and its consequences that ignores Iraqi Kurds is obviously incomplete, misleading, and less than fully honest.  It’s not just that the actual outcomes in Iraqi Kurdistan have been (on balance, and under the circumstances) remarkably good … but also that the probable consequences of the realistically available alternatives to the 2003 Iraq war (which would almost certainly have included the final disintegration of the whole sanctions-&-containment system, which had been unraveling at a rapidly accelerating rate, followed pretty soon by another genocidal bloodbath in Iraqi Kurdistan, as I noted earlier) would have been especially awful for Iraq’s Kurdish population.

Instead, Iraqi Kurdistan is now autonomous, secure, and thriving.  And depending on the contingencies of regional geopolitics, there are good prospects for that situation to continue.  Iraqi Kurdistan tends to get a lot less attention from the news media than Arab Iraq, but an article in the current issue of the Economist sums up some of the good news.

The relative order, security and wealth enjoyed by the 5m residents of Iraq’s three Kurdish provinces [JW: see the maps at the end of this post] are the envy of the remaining 25m who live in the battered bulk of Iraq, and of others too. Since 2011 some 130,000 Syrian refugees, nearly all of them ethnic Kurds, have been welcomed in as brothers; the UN says that number could reach 350,000 by the year’s end. From the east come Iranian Kurds eager to work on the building sites that bristle across a territory the size of Switzerland. [….] Iraq is now Turkey’s second export market after Germany, with 70% of that trade directed to the Kurdish part; 4,000 trucks cross the border daily.

It was not always like this. Surveying a dusty vista of tents at Domiz, a camp housing more than 50,000 destitute Syrians outside the booming city of Dohuk, an Iraqi Kurd shrugs and says, “Twenty years ago this was us.” He is referring to the aftermath of the Anfal, a campaign in the late 1980s by Iraq’s then-leader Saddam Hussein to crush a Kurdish uprising. It left at least 100,000 dead, destroyed 4,000 villages and created 1m refugees.

Since the American-led invasion in 2003 Iraqi Kurds have rebuilt villages, raised GDP per person tenfold, maintained law and order and turned the peshmerga into a formidable army. Daily blackouts may plague Baghdad, but the KRG exports surplus power to adjacent Iraqi towns. Divided at home, the Kurds have united to deal successfully with the federal government, securing good terms in the 2005 constitution and high office in the capital. [….]

So long as most of Iraq’s oil output came from the south, and so long as it controlled export pipelines, Baghdad held the upper hand. But Kurdistan turns out to have a lot of oil. [JW: Under Saddam Hussein, of course, Kurdistan’s oil reserves were a curse, not a blessing–helping to motivate savage repression by the Ba’athist regime, ethnic cleansing and forced Arabization in the oil-rich area around Kirkuk, etc.] [….] Squabbles with Baghdad have led to repeated shutdowns of the main pipeline to Turkey, but growing volumes go by tanker truck, solidifying a budding Kurdish-Turkish alliance that would have shocked both peoples only a few years ago. [….]

Another straw in the wind:  In March I happened to notice a piece in the Washington Post, written by someone who headed an interdenominational religious delegation visiting Iraqi Kurdistan, which was willing to declare unequivocally that Kurdistan has been “an Iraqi success story“.

There are actually at least two Iraqs. Because it continues to make headlines, most Americans are familiar only with the southern region and its capital city, Baghdad. The northern region is rarely in the news. By every measure, it is a success story.

And—this is significant—not just for the Muslim majority.

Iraqi Kurdistan has been an autonomous region since 1991, when the United States and its allies in the first Gulf War declared the “Northern No-Fly Zone.” The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has used that security shield to create one of the few safe harbors for religious freedom and pluralism in the Middle East. Remarkably, this liberty extends beyond simple freedom of worship. The KRG has rebuilt seminaries and churches, supported church-related schools and welcomed Christian refugees from southern Iraq and Syria.

This is an impressive achievement in a region with a tragic past and an uncertain future. [JW: Elsewhere in the Middle East, the remaining Christian minorities are almost all shrinking or disappearing, and are often subject to violent persecution.]

Of course, there are a lot of things wrong with Iraqi Kurdistan.  By Scandinavian standards it doesn’t measure up very well on a lot of social, economic, or political criteria.  But by Middle Eastern standards, which are more appropriate, it looks pretty good in terms of both present conditions and plausible prospects. And in assessing the overall consequences of the 2003 Iraq war, those outcomes should also count in the balance.

=> Again, this post doesn’t pretend to be a comprehensive retrospective assessment of the 2003 Iraq war and its significance.  The relevant issues are sprawling and complex (and the ones I’ve mentioned above are only part of the Big Picture), so I need to reflect on them a bit longer.  But in the meantime, I offer these unfashionable thoughts for people to consider. More on all of this soon, perhaps…

This post, along with descriptive maps, also appears in Jeff Weintraub’s Commentaries and Controversies.

The new Obama campaign video, “The Road We’ve Traveled,” is a compelling piece of political expression. It’s not art. It’s not news. It’s a form of effective political speech. The Obama campaign calls the video a documentary, and that it is: a documentary advocating a partisan position that is meant to rally supporters, and convince opponents and the undecided.

Partisan Republicans have criticized the video for being propaganda: a serious charge coming from people who often label President Obama, a moderate left of center Democrat, as a socialist, and speak ominously about the end of America as we have known it if the President were to be reelected. Mitt Romney, more lightly, perhaps in fact revealing that he is a moderate, dismissed the video as an infomercial. I understand the Republican objections. They see a political move and are trying to counter it by suggesting it should be dismissed and not watched.

Less understandable is the performance yesterday of CNN talk show host, Piers Morgan, who aggressively criticized Davis Guggenheim, the director of the film, for not balancing its advocacy with any criticisms of the President. This baffles me. Just because the video is the creation of an award winning filmmaker doesn’t mean that his political expression in this work should be measured by the same standards as his art. Guggenheim, as he tried to explain last night in his interview with Morgan, is politically committed and the work on the video is his way of being politically active.

When I go to the movies, read a novel or see an art exhibit, I think it is important to distinguished between art and politics. Works that have noble messages do not necessarily make fine art. As Malgorzata Bakalarz examined in her last post, there is a difference between good and politically important art. On the other hand, and this is central here, it is just as important to not mistake political expression with art, or with news. The Obama campaign and Guggenheim do not do this. They are advocating, something important in democratic life, attempting to convince, not manipulate.

If, indeed, “The Road We’ve Traveled” were presented as news with state funding, it would be correctly understood as propaganda. If it pretended that it was presenting unbiased information with private funding, instead of an argument with campaign funding, it would be accurate to describe it as an infomercial. Republican labeling “The Road We’ve Traveled” as propaganda and an infomercial is an attempt to turn the viewer away from the video, to not see it at all, or to not seriously consider the argument. As I said this is understandable, but it is also cynical, a move to dismiss an argument in order not to confront it.

I think the argument is compelling. It makes one major move, which I find quite convincing. It presents an overview of the accomplishments of Obama’s first term, drawing back from the messages of day-to-day political bickering and the calculations of who is up and who is down. Key achievements of the Obama administration in the voice of key members of the team and its supporters are presented. Adverting a financial collapse, saving the auto industry, health care reform, killing Osama bin Laden, withdrawal from the war in Iraq, restoring science to its rightful place, education and student loan reforms, consumer protection, ending “don’t ask don’t tell,” working to reduce foreign oil imports, passing legislation to insure equal pay for equal work for women, restoring the view of America and Americans in the eyes of the world. All of this is mentioned and explored, placed in the historical and comparative context. It is underscored that Obama took major risks in pursuing many of these policies, including his steadfastness not only in the operation against Bin Laden (this is a bit too gung ho for me), but also in the passing of the health care legislation. The video is artfully produced. I especially found the use of still black and white photos moving. It monumentalized decisions, highlighting the agency of Obama, when this is often lost in the noise of daily accounts. In sum, the video made a strong argument for achievement.

Of course, many will contest the argument. Partisan Republicans, true-believing conservatives, will not be convinced. But I think two groups may be moved by the video. Those to the left of Obama who have been dismissive of his presidency, who have accepted the story that he has not been resolute in supporting progressive causes. The video argues from the left from beginning to end (with the exception of the killing of Bin Laden). But I also think that the film appeals to the center and even to conservatives. It makes the argument for health care reform, an unbiased military, economic recovery and the rest in a way that appeals to common American sense.

The film expresses what I have long understood as Obama’s stance: in the center, attempting to move the center left. It’s power reveals that this is not only the project, promised by Barack Obama in the 2008 election. It is the achievement of the first term of the Obama Presidency, thus making a cogent and strong argument for re-election. It is the hope of the campaign that the video will go viral. If it does, it would reveal the way serious political argument still lives. “The Road We’ve Traveled” is not propaganda nor is it an infomercial. It is serious political argument in the age of the Internet.