The muddled hunt for ponies
Jan. 5th, 2007 04:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ebonlockThe Editors respond to this odious Jacob Weisberg piece with what can only be described as genius:
Ah, the soft bigotry of low expectations. You could invade the greater Tigris/Euphrates region at any point in human history, and the end result could be a peaceful, functioning Iraqi state at a tolerable cost. I know of no physical law which would prevent it. You get lucky, you work smart, and anything is possible, right? You could invade Sweden tomorrow, re-name it “Iraq”, and have yourself a marvelous, if slightly Nordic, Iraqi state. Heck, you could have left the whole mess alone four years ago, and you would have had a relatively peaceful, functioning, pain-in-the-ass Iraqi state (and by the standards of Iraq today, it was practically Sweden) at the extremely tolerable cost of nuthin. This was a very do-able, pretty well un-fuck-up-able plan. Funny story about that.
[...]
So, again, if we decide to ignore the fact that Kosovo had a coherent justification, and Iraq didn’t, then yeah, the primary remaining difference is that the Kosovo war was not run by total morons, a staffing decision which everyone outside the Bush administration agrees was wise. And so, abracadabra, all serious persons approve of Kosovo and distain Iraq. But notably absent from Weisberg’s list of recent wars is Afghanistan, because it really shows the pointlessness of this entire exercise. If we ignore the reasons for things, the primary difference between Iraq and Afghanistan is, well, not a whole lot. Afghanistan is not on its way to peace or functionality any more than Iraq is. But while the conditions in both countries are similarly awful, it is generally agreed that Afghanistan - while totally fucked up in execution - is not a strategic failure, because the justification for the war was clear, and, by these clear standards, an (incomplete) victory was achieved. Meanwhile Iraq has morphed from a mission with a surplus of grand goals into this desperately muddled hunt for ponies. Now, wars often end up having evolving goals, but when the justification for the war ends up becoming completely exinct, Darwin would say this says something about the fitness of these ideas. This seems like a topic for discussion.
Ah, the soft bigotry of low expectations. You could invade the greater Tigris/Euphrates region at any point in human history, and the end result could be a peaceful, functioning Iraqi state at a tolerable cost. I know of no physical law which would prevent it. You get lucky, you work smart, and anything is possible, right? You could invade Sweden tomorrow, re-name it “Iraq”, and have yourself a marvelous, if slightly Nordic, Iraqi state. Heck, you could have left the whole mess alone four years ago, and you would have had a relatively peaceful, functioning, pain-in-the-ass Iraqi state (and by the standards of Iraq today, it was practically Sweden) at the extremely tolerable cost of nuthin. This was a very do-able, pretty well un-fuck-up-able plan. Funny story about that.
[...]
So, again, if we decide to ignore the fact that Kosovo had a coherent justification, and Iraq didn’t, then yeah, the primary remaining difference is that the Kosovo war was not run by total morons, a staffing decision which everyone outside the Bush administration agrees was wise. And so, abracadabra, all serious persons approve of Kosovo and distain Iraq. But notably absent from Weisberg’s list of recent wars is Afghanistan, because it really shows the pointlessness of this entire exercise. If we ignore the reasons for things, the primary difference between Iraq and Afghanistan is, well, not a whole lot. Afghanistan is not on its way to peace or functionality any more than Iraq is. But while the conditions in both countries are similarly awful, it is generally agreed that Afghanistan - while totally fucked up in execution - is not a strategic failure, because the justification for the war was clear, and, by these clear standards, an (incomplete) victory was achieved. Meanwhile Iraq has morphed from a mission with a surplus of grand goals into this desperately muddled hunt for ponies. Now, wars often end up having evolving goals, but when the justification for the war ends up becoming completely exinct, Darwin would say this says something about the fitness of these ideas. This seems like a topic for discussion.
