War and History's Verdict

No time to write tonight, so instead I point you toward this excellent post by The Editors. It's sort of a long walk to nowhere, but it's entertaining and insightful nonetheless. I encourage you to read the whole thing.

But if you don't have time, here's an abridged version (which doesn't really do it justice):

These self-evident truths - that Iraq I and Kosovo were, in
some Platonic sense, good and necessary wars, and that Iraq II
was not - are, in descending order of proveability:

1. The opinions one should express if one hopes to be invited to
“whither liberalism?” panel discussions with Peter Beinart and
Tom Friedman and not Gene Healy;

2. The opinions one should express if one hopes to be elected
to national office;

3. True.

It’s worth recounting here what happened which make #1 and
#2 so. In Iraq I and Kosovo, months or years of hard, effective,
and thoroughly unsexy diplomacy and planning laid the political
groundwork for the war to follow. When the war had begun,
the military used the adequate resources they had been given
by the political leadership in order to achieve their agreed-upon,
realistic aims; the enemy obligingly refrained from throwing too
large of a wrench in the works; and so things were brought to a
more-or-less successful conclusion. In Kosovo and Iraq I, as in
Hitler’s successful conquest of France, these things were done
adequately; and in Iraq II, and indeed in ever war which right-
thinking people assure us were strategic mistakes which
should never have been fought, they were not, and now here
we all are. . . .

This is not to downplay the strategic failure of Iraq II, which is
abject - how can one succeed in disarming the unarmed? It’s
just that I doubt very strongly that we would have the same
broad consensus around this strategic failure had the
occupation been managed in a realistic way - the way the
experts explained, time and time again, that it must be done.
It is one thing to decide to do a stupid thing; it is another to do it
in a stupid way. Again, it is arguable that Afghanistan has been
mismanaged as badly as Iraq (albeit on a smaller scale), but
next to nobody thinks it was a mistake - and Beinart doesn’t
even mention it in his list of Eternal Foreign Policy Truths -
because the strategic need was so blindingly obvious. But this
point about seperating the strategic from the nuts-and-bolts
is important, especially when considering Iraq I and Kosovo. . .

Now, like I said, in the particular examples of Iraq I and
Kosovo, I believe these were wars worth fighting. But then,
I like easy positions, because I’m horribly lazy, and they’re
easier. These are rather easy positions to defend, because we
know how these wars turned out, and - because of the hard
work put in by smart and capable people - they turned out
alright in the short-to-medium term. And now we see there is
another side to the “incompetence dodge” - where supporters
of Iraq II explain away fundamental policy failures as being
the result of (absolutely true and extensive) tactical mistakes
made by the people carrying them out. The “competence dodge”
is even easier - because the diplomatic and political and military
decision-making was done well in Kosovo and Iraq I, the
fundamental policy problems underlying them become a lot
easier to ignore.

None of this is to deny that there were mistakes and dishonesty
involved in both of these conflicts - again, for further examples,
see any war ever. But it is very easy to imagine how, if George
Bush the First had decided to press on to Baghdad - as, four
years ago, all serious people agreed he should have - we would
now be talking about the disasterous aftermath of the Gulf War,
and how it proved, as all serious people would agree, that you
should never fight a land war in Asia, or something. And the
conduct of our current war leaves me with no doubt that, had
Rumsfeld & Friends been in charge during Kosovo, we would
all be speaking Serbian right now. Not to get all Man In The High
Castle here, but, had different choices been made in the past,
the present would not be what it is. So as it is a mistake for
people like Beinart to ignore as “unserious” people who saw the
strategic problems with Iraq II before the Bush administration’s
ineptitude made them too obvious to deny, I think it is equally
wrong to label as “unserious” criticisms of the wars which have
gone relatively well. Policy and execution can never be
completely decoupled, but they are distinct, and to conflate one
with the other is a mistake in every instance.