Lapsed liberal Jeff Jarvis says Iraq war is "a scandal of bad PR."

[BurtWorm]

As a means of explaining his lack of interest in the DSM, which Jarvis calls "nonnews," the BuzzMachine blogger says everyone knew that WMD was not the reason the Bushists invaded Iraq. Jarvis is a liberal Democrat who was mugged by 9/11; he's now an apologist for the phony "War on Terror." Here is how he would have advised the Bushists to justify the invasion:


http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2005_06_20.html#009893

1. He should have said that he needed to finish his dad's job (and clean up his mess) and get rid of the tyrant we let stay in power to murder his own people. This is the humanitarian -- yes, liberal -- justification for war that is harder to argue against, harder to undercut.

2. After 9/11, he should have said he'd follow the Tom Friedman doctrine (and blame him for it): We have to find a foothold for democracy in the Middle East and why not Iraq?

3. He should have said that we were going to engage terrorists on their turf instead of ours. That's not to say that the 9/11 terrorists were connected to Iraq, but in the Middle East, you turn over any rock and you'll find terrorists underneath. That has been the real truth of the Iraq war: Coming there to fight us and bomb Iraqis is a regular terrorist tourist industry.

4. When we took Baghdad, he should have gone on that aircraft carrier not to declare victory but instead to warn of the long, hard, dangerous, costly war ahead. The war wasn't over. it was just beginning. He should have managed expectations.

[Inland]

1. And you know why Bush didn't do any of that?

Because not only did HE not think that was a reason for war, nobody else did, either. Only a threat to the US or the region could bring the country to sacrifice its own blood or bring international support. So he made it up.

What was true isn't justification, and what is justification wasn't true.

That's why it never occured to Bush, or anyone else, to just say "Saddam's a threat to his own people so we are going to save them no matter how many years of dangeously, costly war it takes." Nobody wants it. Bush wouldn't have gotten his war without a lie like the one he made about WMD.

Case closed.

[BurtWorm]

2. You're right. Reason #1 is so weak, the Blairites dismissed it out of hand

as being patently illegal. It's the #1 reason why the facts had to be "fixed" around the policy.

[Inland]

4. I agree with the dude that the "liberal" justification

of the sake of Iraqis as the reason for sacrificing American lives and American dollars over a generation is a BETTER justification than WMD that don't exist, or even the "threat" as it was argued by the Bush administration.

But if Bush or the US or anyone else thought that was enough to go to war, we wouldn't have been waiting. We knew Saddam was a bad guy in 1990, but there is only so much the US could or should or wanted to do for the sake of the Iraqis. It never occurred to anyone that we should go after Saddam even without a threat....at least, not that anyone said publically. I think the neocons knew that Saddam wasn't a danger. I think they saw Saddam as a palooka, but then again, they weren't looking to help Iraqis either.

[BurtWorm]

5. But the British understood implicitly that it's illegal to start a war

because you want to depose a bad guy. You have to have a compelling reason: prevention of genocide and retaliation for a (or prevention of a certifiably immanent) first strike are the only ones that leap immediately to mind. The facts were being fixed to make these seem to be the reasons because reason #1, the Brits understood, is a lousy reason.

[Inland]

6. It's certainly illegal,

One would need at least a Security Council resolution--which would never have come, because it was pretty uncertain whether Iraqis are going to be helped or hurt by an invasion to get rid of saddam. In retrospect, it's a pretty close call even assuming that things get all better soon.

[Jack Rabbit]

10. The closest justification for war, based on the Friedman doctrine

The closest justification for war, based on the Friedman doctrine, would be humanitarian intervention.

See post number 9 for the refutation.

Interestingly, there were at least two occasions during Saddam's rule when a humanitarian intervention might have been justified. One was the slaughter in Halabha in 1988; the other was the slaughter of Shia in the wake of the 1991 War. In both cases, the US government winked and nodded. In the second case, the winking and nodding was pretty much at the prompting of the interntional community, especially Saddam's neighbors who helped expel him from Kuwait. They feared that Iraq would disintegrate if Saddam were ousted; some weight is given to that fear by the fact that Iraq is disintegrating in the wake of ouster now.

Nevertheless, in the Spring of 2003, there was no humanitarian crisis in Iraq of the magnitude that justified military force to prevent or alleviate.

[Old and In the Way]

3. When's Jacoby signing up?

Another member of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders who have no problem sending other people to fight this war.

Hey Jeff, we don't need your empty rhetoric...we need you and your kindred spirits signing up and defending the indefensible. I'll bet George and Dick and the rest of the Chickenhawks were saying the same thing 35 years ago.

[Jack Rabbit]

7. Response to Jarvis

EDITED for clarity

1. He should have said that he needed to finish his dad's job (and clean up his mess) and get rid of the tyrant we let stay in power to murder his own people. This is the humanitarian -- yes, liberal -- justification for war that is harder to argue against, harder to undercut.

As the British knew and as the Downing Street documents confirm they knew, desire for regime change is not by itself a justification for war. Unless Saddam could be shown to be a threat (he wasn't) or if there was authorization from the Security Council for the use of force in order to enforce prior UN resolutions directing Saddam to disarm (Resolution 1441 was insufficient for this purpose), then there was no case for war.

If this is a valid justification for war under any liberal doctrine, then I am not a liberal. Maybe I'm not; I've been calling myself a progressive for years. War is a last resort. Any person of goodwill should strive, above all, to prevent a humanitarian disaster. The invasion of Iraq has precipitated one.

In any case, while the argument that Mr. Jarvis proposes may have made it easier to sell the war even then and would be more difficult to undercut now, it would not change the facts as they currently exist: the US is in a quagmire because, regardless of what the stated reasons given for the invasion were or could have been, the real reason was to transfer Iraq's wealth to western concerns; it was colonial piracy, pure and simple. Different insurgents have different motivations, but many are motivated by a simple desire to expel a colonial force from their country.

2. After 9/11, he should have said he'd follow the Tom Friedman doctrine (and blame him for it): We have to find a foothold for democracy in the Middle East and why not Iraq?

Friedman embraced the "let's democratize the Middle East" line.

Friedman presented better reasons for invading Iraq than Bush did, but they were still insufficient. This was the war that G. W. Bush wanted, not the one that Friedman thought it should be.

Bush has undermined democracy in America by stealing elections, curtailing civil liberties, subverting constitutional checks and balances and setting up an opaque decision-making process. He has winked and nodded at corporate corruption by his friends in the private sector and at conflict of interest by his subordinates. Bush believes in neither democracy nor the rule of law. It is ludicrous to think that he will promote these principles overseas while subverting them at home.

Consequently, even laying aside the objection that desire for regime change by itself does not justify war, instead of supporting Bush in his war effort, Friedman should have opposed any such action until Bush was safely out of office. After all, Saddam was no immediate threat and, therefore, there was no hurry to remove him from power.

In addition to this, while Bush's use of the word democracy is downright Orwellian, Friedman's is a bit twisted as well. Although Friedman is not a dyed-in-the-wool neoconservative, he is a dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal who confuses democracy with global free market capitalism. They are not the same thing and are in many respects antithetical. However, that's a digression that can be discussed elsewhere.

3. He should have said that we were going to engage terrorists on their turf instead of ours. That's not to say that the 9/11 terrorists were connected to Iraq, but in the Middle East, you turn over any rock and you'll find terrorists underneath. That has been the real truth of the Iraq war: Coming there to fight us and bomb Iraqis is a regular terrorist tourist industry.

There were no terrorists in Iraq threatening us at that time. Even now, the only reason Zarqawi can kill Americans is because they're in Iraq. That's the only place he is capable of operating.

Meanwhile, while Bush was invading Iraq for reasons that had nothing to do with terror, democracy or whatever other excuse he gave, al Qaida regrouped in Afghanistan.

Invading Iraq was a terrible way to use military resources.

4. When we took Baghdad, he should have gone on that aircraft carrier not to declare victory but instead to warn of the long, hard, dangerous, costly war ahead. The war wasn't over. it was just beginning. He should have managed expectations.

More candor from Bush (figure the odds!) would have gone a long ways in the neoconservative cause, but Americans have no desire for a long, hard, dangerous and costly war. It would still be an unnecessary war.

Taking these arguments altogether, Mr. Jarvis fails to convince. The bottom line is still that Iraq was not a threat and thus there was no hurry to do anything so soon; Afghanistan, where al Qaida could regroup, was a more important priority. If the goal was to oust Saddam and replace him with a popular government, then a direct military invasion would not have worked as well as sponsoring subversion by Iraqi nationalist groups that were willing to take up the battle. And, even after all that, the idea of trusting Bush to promote democracy is just ridiculous.

[BurtWorm]

8. Extremely well made post, Jack Rabbit!

:toast:

Jarvis seems to implicitly agree with you that the war was about none of the above, which is why he faults the *PR* used to sell it. But he doesn't seem to be able to make himself admit that the Bushists are not the "liberals" he wants them to be (i.e., the kind of "liberal" he himself has become).

[Jack Rabbit]

9. One other justification for war

One other possible justification for invading Iraq would be humanitarian intervention. Saddam was a brutal dictator and no reasonable person disputes that.

This is the critique of the humanitiarian intervention argument from Human Rights Watch. I'll let that speak for itself.

[BurtWorm]

11. Jay Rosen (PressThink) responds to Jarvis:

With "I don't get it" irritation, someone asked in the comments at PressThink: Why are you people making such a big deal of the Downing Street Memos, which are "old" and second-hand news?

Here's one reply. A representative democracy requires an elected commander-in-chief not only to have reasons, but to give reasons, publicly, for what he chooses to do. This is all the more vital post-1945, where we Americans make war without officially declaring it in order to give the President a freer hand, suspending our own Constitution in the bargain.

With this war, the reason-giving part of the operation totally failed. But that isn't what my friend Jeff says, "a scandal of bad PR." No. If you think reason-giving is PR you have already lost the battle for public choice in politics. It is a basic failure of national legitimacy to have your reason-giving go so awry as it did with this war. If you are a Bush supporter, my view is you should be doubly concerned because, as things stand, actions in Iraq you believe fully legitimate have seen their official rationale (that is, their reason-giving) fail.

I don't agree with those who say that because no weapons were found, the war lacks all logic or legitimacy. It might have an alternative logic, a broader and more expansive rationale than: Saddam has weapons, he must be stopped. The broader case has been made, after the fact. Jarvis lists it, point-by-point, in his post. But that isn't what people voted for, or Congress "voted" on. Something went seriously awry in the reason-giving.

Just as some of you don't "believe" the big deal some of us are making about the Downing Street Memos, I don't believe your small deal making about the Memo's story of reason-giving and war. Doesn't ring true to me.


Posted by Jay Rosen at June 20, 2005 10:56 PM

http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2005_06_20.html#009893