Except history has proven they were right. Which trumps any argument about their methodology.
They don’t change with the whims of WillFarnaby either.
Here are my recollections from the pre-war time:
[ol]
[li]There was definitely skepticism regarding the WMD claims in LW circles, and in general, acceptance of claims re WMD was correlated to a large extent with position on the RW/LW scale.[/li][li]However, this is more about the fringes. At the government leadership level, pretty much everyone accepted that the claims were largely true.[/li][li]Even in LW circles, opposition to the war was primarily driven by the notions that 1) the sanctions need to be given more time to work and 2) that the war was “illegal” without adequate UN authorization.[/li][/ol]
FWIW, IMO Bush (& pretty much everyone else) was blinded by one of the central and enduring parts of American mythology. That being the idea (consistent with democratic (lower case) ideals) that “the people” are good and just - good and just being defined as what contemporary American/Western culture defines as good and just - and that any examples of societies which seem to contradict this are just examples of a Bad Guy (or a few Bad Guys) at the top terrorizing and persecuting the people, and forcing these evils on them.
The upshot of all this is to assume that you can remove some Bad Guy and a few of his Evil Henchmen and have the rest fall into place - the “Democratic” opposition will naturally hold free and open elections, and the people will get along nicely and possibly even take to playing baseball and eating hotdogs, and whoever triggered all this will bask in the pleasant glow that he made the world a better place.
Which would all be great, if not for the fact that it’s a myth. But this myth is a central one and hard to dislodge, and it influences assessments over what would happen if this or that government is overthrown.
I believe there were a few voices who pointed out that the aftermath of an invasion could be bloody (on this board, Collounsbury stands out in my memory) but they were very few, and this was not a major part of the opposition to the war, even on the left.
I wasn’t rocket science to know that the Shi’a Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Sunni Kurds had long standing animosities to be worked out. If we didn’t learn anything from Yugoslavia, we’re a bunch of idiots.
That’s hindsight.
There was actually not much history of widespread violence in Iraq, and although in hindsight it’s apparent that this was due to the iron fist of Saddam Hussein, at the time he was viewed as Mr. Violence himself, and the assumption was that the people, if freed from his persecution, would be less violent, not more.
As the saying goes, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and part of the terrorist/freedom fighter assessment is whether the guy is a bloody thug out to persecute his enemies, or a basically peaceful non-violent guy only driven to take up arms by the unbearable persecution he’s enduring.
I’m getting a bit sick of all this talk about hindsight and 20-20 vision.
I also remember how those opposed to war and slaughter and who did predict (only common sense) that it wasn’t going to be rose pettles strewn in front of the american liberators, were, in the same tone, if they were clairvoyant. That they couldn’t know. No we had to give it a few years. We would see a prosperous free democratic Iraq and peace wouldspill over into the surrounding countries. Just hold your tongue and you will see.
Now that that it is clear we were right it is all hindsight? Fuck that.
What is even more sickening is that some of those that still cling to and support the very propaganda phrases that turned a modern country into a hell-hole and brought misery, fear and death of loved ones for milions of normal people, have the audacity to speak of good form on a message board.
Obviously it’s not hindsight for someone who actually forsaw it in advance.
But it’s hindsight to claim that it would have been obvious to everyone, especially in light of the mindset described above. I mean, obviously I don’t think much of that mindset, of course. So it’s an explanation rather than an excuse.
If you foresaw what was coming, you certainly get to crow about it now.
[FTR, I myself was kind of conflicted and neutral about the war in advance. I thought there were WMD, and I did not anticipate the full ferocity of the sectarian conflict that was to come, but I tend to be wary of military conflicts in general, and think the outcomes are hard to predict but generally involve a lot of dead people, so it’s hard to say, especially for someone with no expertise himself.]
So did Bush run as a liberal on foreign policy or was his invasion of Iraq guided by liberal doctrine?
I was wrong when talking to my friends prior to the war. I did accurately predict that “everyone is going to settle everyone else’s hash” after the invasion was over and the Saddam cork was off the bottle. I was wrong in thinking that it would spread to Syria in short order. It turns out that it was a different chain of events that triggered that happening in Syria.
Since even conservatives aren’t a monolithic block, here’s what I can draw from the conservatives’ posts in this thread so far (with my editorializations) :
- We were wrong, but no one could have predicted we were wrong. (Not backed up by fact, IMHO)
- We were right all along, WMD were found. (Laughable, IMHO. Let’s go get drunk instead of talking about this.)
- Hi, Opal (Succinct, but not germane to the problem)
- WMD weren’t the focus, so that’s a red herring. (See my opinion on #1, but slightly more justifiable)
- We were wrong, but it was pretty much a done deal by the time we knew we were wrong. The cost of the deployment meant that the invasion would proceed. Mistakes were made, and very bad things happened. The jury is still out on whether the whole thing will be evil, on the balance. (I consider myself a moderate, there’s just a bit of daylight between my position and this one.)
Is there a door #6?
Apparently there’s “Anytime conservatives are wrong, it means they’re actually liberals.”
Or maybe you and Eric Bolling are mistaken in believing an anti-Iraq War stance is liberal and the conservative view would be pro- Iraq War.
Ok, yeah, I missed that. See my editorial to #2.
ETA: Seriously, PNAC was not a liberal or Liberal movement. They were totally for an invasion of Iraq.
No, it’s learning from history. Remember how shocked, SHOCKED everyone was that the Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox Yugoslavs starting killing each other as soon as Tito died and the country tried to go “democratic”? We’ve seen the same thing over and over and over again. If people thought things would be different this time, they were idiots.
Or people who thought India’s troubles would be over as soon as the British left. Or thought the Balkans and the Middle East would be quiet and peaceful once the Ottomans were kicked out. Or thought Latin America would be a showcase for democracy once the Spanish went away.
Saying “no one could have predicted it!” makes sense for officials behind each month’s new disaster or scandal as a CYA move after they fired and ostracized everyone who did just that, but if you’re just a shlub like the rest of us it’s unbecoming. If you’re a Pax Americana kinda guy it’s no reason to downplay it either, since you should be criticizing the architects of imperialism for not being prepared to fully exert American’s strength in the most effective manner. That’s just feeding ammo to anti-war people.
Good heavens, you don’t even know the basic facts, even after they have been posted and cited several times.
The inspectors went back into Iraq in November, 2002. They had been in the country for two months by the time Bush gave his bogus SOTU address, and they had been in the country almost four months before Bush signed the letter to Congress saying nothing short of war could save the US from the horrible threat of Iraq.
It sure is, so you should stop using that particular straw man. But it WAS absolutely certain that the CIA analysis had been wrong, and that the Iraqi defectors were lying. And that didn’t slow Bush down one bit.
Actually, they used them in the 1980s, shortly before Reagan sent Rumsfeld over to personally assure Saddam of his friendship. After the first Gulf War in the early 90’s, the UN destroyed their stockpiles. They didn’t realize at the time they had gotten all of them, but it turns out they pretty much did, except for a few odds and ends. And the shelf life of the type of mustard gas shells Iraq had was only a few years, so if any of them remained, they were far less dangerous than a conventional warhead half their size.
Nope. Had my last B-day @52. Which is what I’ll turn to every year till I am no longer here. So he is certainly catching-up – as are you! 
The sheeple in the US you mean, 'cause hardly anyone else in the WORLD believed that steaming pile.
UN votes, polls, etc.
ETA: Never mind all reported facts on the ground.
You continue to amaze me. How could anyone who watched the Palestinians throw rocks at tanks for decades, or who saw the Afghans outlast the Soviets, have thought that the Iraqis were going to greet us with candy and flowers? My god, we were fighting insurgents in Afghanistan AT THE TIME. The wonder is that anybody DIDN’T see it coming.
Which is why I don’t take much credit for predicting it myself. I thought it was obvious that our army would make very short work of Saddam’s army, but that guerilla warfare would last as long as we were there. I wasn’t a member of this board at the time, but I wrote exactly that, all through 2002, in posts to a board called Colloquy. It is closed to the public, but if you qualify for membership, I’ll be glad to give you the dates.
But it took very little time for me to find more famous people saying the same thing. Here is an excerpt from an article that James Webb, a Democrat who was Secretary of the Navy under Reagan, wrote in the WaPo in 2002:
I remember posting here at the time that I didn’t want to hear about WMDs. I didn’t care about WMDs. WMDs are all over the place. What kind of idiot terrorist would go to Iraq, which was the most constrained and monitored country on earth, to get WMDs? There were all kinds of ex-Soviet republics awash in WMDs. It just made no sense to poke a stick in the hornets’ nest to chase after WMDs which were a dime a dozen elsewhere if anyone really wanted them.