Some Partial, Preliminary, & Unfashionable Thoughts toward Re-assessing the 2003 Iraq War – Did Anything Go Right, and What Were the Alternatives?

Lately, like a lot of other people, I’ve been mulling over the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the 2003 Iraq war and the flood of retrospective commentary it has generated. Nowadays, almost all discussions of the war are dominated by a hegemonic, almost monolithic, “anti-war” consensus that the war was both a terrible disaster and an obvious mistake. (Not just a mistake, but an obvious and unambiguous mistake, which no intelligent and morally serious person could honestly have supported at the time unless they were bamboozled by the propaganda campaign of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld administration and its lackeys and/or blinded by post-9/11 hysteria.)

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, . . .

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