Tim Dunlop reminds his readers that he 'said from the beginning... people of goodwill could have disagreed about the wisdom of the invasion [of Iraq]'. Nonetheless, he's offering free advice on ways and ways of changing one's mind about the war. To me he assigns a 'poor' for what I've said in this regard. I deal, below, with his complaints.
1. Tim says that I 'take the usual swipe at the anti-war crowd, comparing them to appeasers of Hitler'. I do not. This - integrally - is the passage on which he bases his claim:
Sometimes there is a justification for opposing tyranny and barbarism whatever the cost. Had I been of mature years during that time, I hope I would have supported the war against Nazism come what may, and not been one of the others, the nay-sayers. The same impulse was at work in my support for the Iraq war. Even so, I am bound to acknowledge that, though I never expected an easy sequel in Iraq, much less a 'cakewalk', I did not anticipate a failure on this scale, and had I done so, I would have withheld support for the war without giving my voice to the opposition to it.Tim somehow fails to pick up on the fact that, although the passage starts by identifying a common impulse motivating support for the war against Nazism and support for the war to overthrow Saddam, its main point was to emphasize a disanalogy between the two wars: for I say that I hope I would have supported the war against Nazism 'come what may' (this under the rubric 'justification for opposing tyranny and barbarism whatever the cost'); and I then say, by contrast, that had I anticipated the scale of the human costs the war in Iraq would involve, I would not have felt able to support it. This is precisely to register the considerations that legitimately led people to take opposing views about the war - which is why, like Tim, I have never condemned opposition to the war as such. See this, for example:
Those who opposed the war in the full knowledge, or some reasonable level of knowledge, of the character and record of the Saddam regime, had their reasons; and while some of these reasons weren't good ones, some of them also were: amongst which I would put the concern about international law, the principle of adhering to established multilateral procedures and the fears about the level of likely casualties, both civilian and military.(Also this. And, most recently, this.)
True, in the post Tim is criticizing I say that, even if I had better anticipated the extent of the suffering brought on by the war, I personally would not have felt able to oppose it - a matter I come to next. But this is not the same thing as treating anyone who did oppose the war as comparable to an appeaser of Hitler.
2. Tim Dunlop seems perplexed by my statement that, even foreseeing the human costs, I would not have opposed the Iraq war, although I could not then have supported it. He writes:
... if he knew then (back in 2002-2003) what he knows now, he would've sat back quietly and not objected.It is revealing that he should fail to understand this - he who says he allowed that people of goodwill could disagree over the war, and so, by implication, that some of them could support it. It's as if the only picture Tim can see, once the failure in Iraq has been anticipated, looks something like this: on one side the great cost in human life and suffering, incipient civil war etc; on the other side, nothing - or, at any rate, nothing to be weighed morally. Consequently, once you've got the material on the first side, how could you not oppose the war?
But why, in that case, does Tim imagine that those of us of goodwill who supported the war did support it?
A lot of us did so because on the other side of the moral scale from the likely costs of the war we saw, not nothing, but rather a genocidal tyranny already responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, and an appalling, ongoing regime of torture; and we wondered what that tyranny might further perpetrate by way of murder and oppression if it was permitted to remain in place, and also what the human costs would be of its later (possibly much later) demise, and by whatever other method, whether external or internal overthrow. In other words, for us it wasn't the costs of war weighed against nothing. We estimated the likely costs and outcomes of the war against what was itself certainly an enormity: 'an immensity of pain and grief, killing, torture and mutilation'.
Saying now that, with the huge human costs of the war as evident as they are and no beneficial outcome in sight, it's no longer possible to be confident the war was worth it, justified, is not the same thing as imagining that a decision the other way, against war, would have been without costs, or of knowing for a certainty that the overall costs of such a decision would have been less. I don't know. Had I had a better anticipation of the actual outcomes of the Iraq war, I would have stood aside from the polemical divisions over it because of the terrible, uncertain nature of this choice.
But how strange that Tim, even having allowed for legitimate differences amongst those of goodwill, is unable to find his way to this understanding. He might try approaching the matter again, as follows. Save for the context that I have now spelled out (of the costs if the Iraq war had not taken place) - a context well-known to anyone familiar, or who takes the least bit of trouble to acquaint themselves, with what I've written during three years about Iraq - there is no sense in my recent post. I mean, I'm going to expend energy, am I, saying that if I'd known then how bad things would be now, I'd have... er... treated them as bad, and not supported the war? It's a comparative judgement or else it's merely vacuous. Better foresight about the likely costs of the war doesn't get rid of the difficulty of the choice in 2002-2003. Unless, of course, deep down you really think there was no case at all for the war, as many of those who opposed the war did really think (though Tim insists he didn't). But we who supported the war on humanitarian, regime-change, grounds did not think that - and, speaking for myself, I still don't.
3. Tim has one other complaint, which I can deal with more swiftly. He writes:
But really, how sincere is such acknowledgement [mine of the failure of the Iraq war - NG] when it contains no word of rebuke for George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld or whomever else we might legitimately hold accountable for the failure...?Tim has a nose, then, for insincerity. Good for him. But in any case, in that 'Failure in Iraq' post I quite deliberately refrained from discussing the responsibilities of the Bush administration, mismanagement, Abu Ghraib, and so forth. Why? Because a discussion of that issue leads to cognate issues: like how far others than the Bush administration are also responsible for this failure (for example, the insurgent and jihadist forces fighting to overturn the democratically expressed will of the Iraqi electorate); and like whether what has happened in Iraq since the invasion suggests that other modes of transition away from Baathism might for their part have been very costly too. I didn't want to discuss these questions in that post, for fear of giving the appearance of trying to draw attention away from my acknowledgement, which was the post's main point, of the war's failure and my change of mind - of trying to minimize the acknowledgement with a yes-but-but. And you can be pretty confident that that is how such a discussion would have been greeted had I offered it.
I've said enough, finally, not to have to explain why I'm not extending thanks to Tim for his freely given advice. The least I can do in these circumstances, though, is to reciprocate with some advice of my own. (1) Tim should read more carefully. (2) When criticizing someone else's view he might try thinking about it a bit more, try getting some sense of its inner contours. (3) If he uses them at all, he should be sparing with imputations of bad faith. By following these simple rules, he'll have a better chance of avoiding ill-considered posts like that one.