Ordinarily, I wouldn’t take the time to respond to Donald Douglas — a “pro-victory” professor of poly sci and A-List troll at Lawyers, Guns and Money — but I’m unable to let this golden nugget of wingnutty goodness pass without the appropriate hosannahs:
But more than this, the notes from Party of Defeat reveal a research process relying heavily on primary documents, archival materials, and first-person accounts and biographies that are central to the methods of diplomatic history.
Douglas is surely correct, so long as we limit the scope of “primary documents, archival materials, and first-person accounts and biographies” to the following items:
- Books by Douglas Feith
- Books by Stephen Hayes
- Articles by Stephen Hayes
- LOL Cats
- Articles from FrontPage Magazine
- animals of the following kinds
- belonging to the emperor
- embalmed
- tame
- sucking pigs
- sirens
- fabulous
- stray dogs
- drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
Other than that, you’d have an extraordinarily difficult time distinguishing between the work of David Horowitz and Melvyn Leffler or John Lewis Gaddis.
The Edge of the American West 
30 comments
December 9, 2008 at 1:52 pm
ari
Truth be told, I’ve never seen Horowitz and John Lewis Gaddis in the same place at the time. Are they same person? Prove that they’re not, I say.
December 9, 2008 at 2:01 pm
davenoon
The frightening thing is that D’Ho looks (but doesn’t sound) like my undergraduate adviser….
December 9, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Vance
The word “heavily” is doing a lot of work there.
December 9, 2008 at 2:37 pm
jazzbumpa
“suckling Pigs?”
It’s also cognitively dissonant to couple Douglas’s self-assessment” “I also abhor irrationalism in argumentation. I welcome comments and debate, and I’ll defend my positions vigorously. Yet in friendship, you’ll find no one more dignified, trustworthy, nor loyal.” with “A-list Troll.”
I report. You decide.
December 9, 2008 at 3:00 pm
jazzbumpa
Sorry, I can’t make myself resist this ad hominem: Douglas has a “Sarah Palin in 2012” banner on his blog.
Just sayin’ . . .
December 9, 2008 at 3:49 pm
davenoon
There’s part of me that thinks Douglas is really one of our era’s great performance artists….
December 9, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Colin
You and your hegemonic project.
I always thought of “hard left” and “pacifist” as mutually exclusive, but I guess I read the wrong blogs.
December 9, 2008 at 5:09 pm
TF Smith
Is “victory” defined anywhere on the professor’s website? I’m curious what the current thinking among those who think a land wars in Asia is a good idea is on that question…
Just asking…
December 9, 2008 at 5:51 pm
jazzbumpa
“I can’t define ‘victory,’ but I’ll know it when I see it.”
— Harry Potter Stewart Brewing
December 9, 2008 at 9:37 pm
Michael Turner
Pro-life : Pro-choice :: Pro-victory : Pro-_____
Admit it, this makes your brain hurt bad. But whatever you do, please don’t call George Lakoff about it.
December 9, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Vance
Does “civilian control of the military” fit in that blank, Michael?
December 9, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Michael Turner
Does “civilian control of the military” fit in that blank, Michael?
No, it has to be one word, and it can’t exceed three syllables (OK, four) and it has to embody some gross oversimplification of the issues, while still referring to a key point of one of the more important arguments. “Civilian control” was never the issue — remember that Gen. Shinseki was sent into unpersonhood by a civilian (Donald Rumsfeld) for daring to suggest we didn’t have enough troops for a stable occupation of Iraq.
Gross oversimplification goes with this territory. For example, Obama had to “admit” that the Surge “worked.” He had already pointed out that it wasn’t that simple. To no avail. As I read the situation, there were probably four major factors, and Obama cited at least #2 and #3. Citing #1 would have left him no climb-down position with the Shi’ite-dominated Iraqi government, if he became president.
(1) To the extent that the Surge was about increasing troop levels and street-level deployments in strife-torn urban areas, chiefly Baghdad, it was to police a slow-motion ethnic cleansing so as to be significantly less bloody.
(2) The Anbar Awakening, which to some extent meant outbidding or coopting insurgents, undoubtedly including at least some “Al Qaeda” recruits. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” — no, we just make them offers they can’t refuse.
(3) The Sadrists backing off (for now, anyway.)
(4) Iraqis getting genuinely sick of all the violence.
I could be off on one reading or another here, but the point is, Obama stopped talking about all this, and went with “admitting” that the Surge “worked.” By then, it was a Clinton Redux campaign anyway — “It’s the economy, stupid.” Obama could afford to brush past the discussion, even if it meant contradicting his previous position. But that was then. Now, he’s president-elect. Soon, he’s commander-in-chief. Soon, it’s his war.
To call oneself “pro-victory” is, of course, to ignore a whole range of issues. But what exactly are you in favor of, when you position yourself against such people? So far, what I’m readinging is that most liberals and progressives are OK with keeping Gates as SecDef if that’s what it takes to shut up Republicans. Well, “pro-Gates” is not a position.
If I had to choose a word, it would be “restitution.” Iraq had a lousy national government (the Tikriti Mafia under Saddam), that operated under a lousy international government (the U.N. sanctions). But at least there was stability. Iraqis at minimum deserve some stability. Almost half the population of Iraq is under 21. So even if every Iraqi adult could somehow be considered culpable for any chaos that might ensue with a precipitate withdrawal, I don’t see how these kids would deserve to grow up in a civil war that wouldn’t be happening if we hadn’t invaded.
December 10, 2008 at 5:59 am
Roger Albin
Douglas clearly hasn’t read Weber’s book.
December 10, 2008 at 6:12 am
Ahistoricality
Pro-life : Pro-choice :: Pro-victory : Pro-security
A Pyrhhic Potemkin victory in Iraq has reduced our resources and our will to create real, sustainable security, domestic and international.
That wasn’t hard.
December 10, 2008 at 6:30 am
silbey
But what exactly are you in favor of, when you position yourself against such people?
I think the phrase is “we’re done.” Okay, so you say the surge worked and we’ve won the war. Excellent. Now it’s time to go home.
December 10, 2008 at 7:19 am
Michael Turner
OK, so if you voted for Obama in part for his Iraq stance, you voted for a 16-month withdrawal, with the option to “pause” (pauses not being defined in maximum length) and for leaving a troop commitment sufficient to protect whatever the civilian commitment is at that point — which, at this point, substantially outnumbers the troop commitment.
Obama called for getting out of Iraq as carefully as the invasion was careless. By not-terribly-different reasoning, the U.S. is still engaged in the most careful withdrawal possible from the Korean peninsula.
In any case, what Obama apparently plans to do is is a far cry from “OK, we admit the Surge worked then we pull out now.” How would you feel if (as some are projecting) we still have 30-50,000 troops in Iraq in 2012, still being fired upon at least occasionally, with Obama saying those troops have to stay in Iraq to defend 100,000 or more U.S. civilians still working in the country? How would you feel if he’d indefinitely “paused” the withdrawal at 70,000 troops, in response to a resurgence among the Sadrists, or in response to Kirkuk boiling over in the wake of a referendum declaring it in the Kurdish zone of control, or to any number of destabilizing events that we can’t easily predict at the moment?
Frankly, I never quite got this argument that you get peace in Iraq if we just leave now. Or that, if it’s not that simple, it’s still as simple as other nations stepping in to fill any gaps we might leave, as we leave. Are there precedents for that? Or iron-clad reasoning to support that, in the absence of precedents?
December 10, 2008 at 7:47 am
jazzbumpa
My enthusiasm for Obama continued to increase throughout the election cycle. Despite that, I was basically voting *against* Republicans in general, and McCain/Palin in particular.
The Bush administration has left us with many situations where there are no easy answers or simple solutions. In Iraq, there might not even be any right course of action. So –in 2012, I would feel we are still muddling along, with a fallible human being at the helm trying to figure out these difficult problems.
If we leave now, there’s no telling what happens. I doubt that instant peace is a high probability.
December 10, 2008 at 8:22 am
Ahistoricality
OK, so if you voted for Obama in part for his Iraq stance, you voted for a 16-month withdrawal, with the option to “pause….j
Strawman.
If you voted for Obama in part due to his stance on the Iraq conflict, you voted for someone who would avoid getting us into further quagmires, while taking a practical and non-ideological approach to getting us out of this one.
December 10, 2008 at 9:28 am
Charlieford
Of the many elements that led to reduced violence in Iraq in 2007 (including emigration, ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods, Sadr’s stand-down, increased troops, etc.), one of the most significant but over-looked is the effect of the November 2006 elections in the US. That sent a message to Sunnis and Shi’as alike that the US was, in fact, going to leave, and rearranged their respective plans. In sum, the lesson many drew was “conserve resources–including man-power–for the resumption of civil war.” Look at the stats on attacks in Anthony Cordesman’s recent document http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/081117_iraq_war_progress.pdf (check page 40, eg) and you’ll note a levelling off of violence (though it’s still very high) beginning in the winter of 2006 and extending into the spring, even before the surge troops were on the ground. That those extra troops have had a tremendous effect is true, of course, but just as removing troops might lead to a resumption of violence, so might a continued large deployment that convinces Iraqis that the US government has chosen to ignore the “referendum on the war” of November 2006. How that will go is anyone’s guess. Somewhat clearer is the disaster we’re creating in Afghanistan, and I’m surprised more people aren’t warning that this may be Obama’s foreign policy disaster-zone. He campaigned on getting troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan to finish the job there–presumably to defeat the Taliban. But, as Gwynne Dyer has argued, this is a fool’s errand. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/war/news/article.cfm?c_id=359&objectid=10469334&pnum=0 The Taliban are resurgent precisely because we’re perceived as being anti-Pashtun (just as in 2003-2005 we were perceived as anti-Sunni in Iraq). The more troops we pour into Afghanistan to “defeat” the Taliban (who are Islamic fundamentalists, but who aren’t all terrorists and who aren’t determined to launch a global jihad) the more the Pashtuns will believe they are fighting for their survival, and it will be Vietnam all over again.
December 10, 2008 at 1:05 pm
TF Smith
I like “Pro-security” but how about “anti-self-inflicted-gunshot-wound-to-the-head”?
“Anti-quagmire” is good, too.
December 10, 2008 at 1:29 pm
matt w
Just as the appropriate complement to “anti-idiotarian” is not “idiotarian,” the appropraite complement to “pro-victory” is “bwahahahaha! LOSER.”
That is to say, “pro-victory” isn’t accepted into the lexicon, someone who describes themselves that way makes themselves like a nut (not just to me, I’m fairly confident), and so we don’t need to worry about the frame it sets up.
December 11, 2008 at 4:16 am
Michael Turner
Somewhat clearer is the disaster we’re creating in Afghanistan, and I’m surprised more people aren’t warning that this may be Obama’s foreign policy disaster-zone.
Yeah, it’s muted now, but I wonder. I worry that it’s like this:
Korea : Vietnam :: Iraq : Afghanistan.
I don’t so much mind getting out of Afghanistan because it was already pretty hopeless when we went in. It’s just one of those places where outsiders can’t get much traction, as several empires (not least the Soviet one) learned all too painfully.
Iraq had decades of secular rule under the Ba’athists, and centuries of rule under the Ottoman Empire. It’s been part of the civilized world for a very long time. If you can’t put the Iraq pieces back together again, maybe the pieces can still effectively rule themselves autonomously, and be dealt with reasonably. If superior American firepower can keep the pieces from slamming into each other too hard, some halfway acceptable upshot might still be possible over the next few years.
But Afghanistan? My picture of Afghanistan is that it has allowed civilization to visit now and again, but never really allows civilization to settle in. I bet if you looked into it, you’d find one fatwah after another, from Tangiers to Jakarta, condemning the blowing up of those buddhaa statues. If any word of that condemnation reached the Taleban, they probably reacted with “fuck civilizations, we always send them packing.”
As for “pro-victory” being a self-appellation along the lines of “Me crazy watch out dude I is armed too”, I’d say you better watch who you’re framing with that frame. We’ve got polls showing majority (admittedly a slim one) of Americans now think we can “win” in Iraq, other polls just about even, and CNN/Opinion Research Corporation in August with 58% on “can win”). I don’t think all of these people are out to lunch — clearly, it’s a statistical certainty that a lot of the same people are in favor of withdrawing from Iraq on some kind of schedule, a lot of them think the invasion was a big mistake and/or simply wrong, a lot of them think BushCo lied us into a war, a lot of them think it will never turn out to have been worth it, and a lot of them voted for Obama. They’ve got some ideas about what “winning” means. I’m not sure what those ideas are. But even if they are misguided ideas, I hesitate to call them crazy. What I call “restitution” (an Iraq with a stable government, pumping oil again) might be what some of these people would call “victory.”
I’d rather call it “shame” or something else entirely. Still, if letting people call it “victory” gets Iraqis what I’d prefer to call “restitution”, I think that’s better than just leaving Iraq as if Bush had been some drunk driver, and we had protested feebly when he did a DUI hit-and-run, but we didn’t go back to the scene and try to help out, ‘cuz, y’know — not our fault, dude, we were just in the back seat, some of us yelling stop, some others yelling “mow down the terrorist scum!”, sure, but either way not our fault, no. We were misled. So let others clean it up, or let the bleeding continue and worsen, we’re not on the hook for it.
What I’d call that is: “shameless”. Not as shameless as BushCo, of course. Nobody except maybe Al Qaeda beats them in the shamelessness department. But it’s still pretty aloof. And that’s not a rap America needs at the moment.
December 11, 2008 at 6:29 am
Charlieford
“We’ve got polls showing majority (admittedly a slim one) of Americans now think we can “win” in Iraq, other polls just about even, and CNN/Opinion Research Corporation in August with 58% on “can win”). I don’t think all of these people are out to lunch . . .” Had polls during Vietnam too, and they even bumped a bit when Nixon took office in ’69. Americans are inveterate optimists. But ask them what is meant by “win.”
December 11, 2008 at 7:26 am
jazzbumpa
Decades ago, when I was a kid, I read the Sherlock Holmes stories. When he first met Watson, he deduced that the good Dr., with his sunburn and war wounds, had just returned from — Tada . . . Afghanistan!
Still goin’ . . .
December 11, 2008 at 7:55 am
Michael Turner
Decades ago, when I was a kid, I read National Lampoon. They had a great diagram showing a tournament ladder of the world’s nations and their records of victory and defeat in wars. At the top was a scheduled playoff for world champion, between Afghanistan and — Vietnam.
Charlieford, I understand what you’re saying, but there are two key differences:
(1) During Vietnam, polling showed there wasn’t much of a partisan split on sentiment about the war. There were even some brief periods where Repubs were stronger on a pullout than Dems.
(2) I don’t know if you can call it “incurable optimism” that most Americans now believe that invading Iraq was wrong/stupid, that they were hoodwinked into it, etc., etc. “Incurable optimism” would dictate that the decision will ultimately be vindicated, that we’ll find that darn WMD, etc., etc.
U.S. presence is inescapably an irritant, but at the same time, in its monopoly of heavy weaponry, might be the main obstacle to a wider and far more intense civil war. I still haven’t heard a solid argument that such a civil war can be avoided if we withdraw on a fixed and compressed timetable. At best, I hear a case made that Iraq’s neighbors and this amorphous entity called “the Internation Community” will prevent any such conflagration, because a major civil war in Iraq is not in their best interests. Possibly, but . . . it’s still civil war, it’s not necessarily something they can stop, and once it’s started, Iraq’s various neighbors might simply choose various sides and start arming the contestants — with heavy artillery, tanks, helicopter gunships, all that stuff that the U.S. occupation forces somehow never get around to giving the Iraqis (and that no sane Iraqi politician or major military leader seems to be insisting on receiving, at the moment.) I suppose that’s because they have become . . . incurable pessimists.
December 11, 2008 at 8:44 am
jazzbumpa
Michael –
I don’t know if it’s pessimism or a quasi-inevitable outcome. Iraq is a make-believe country, invented by Winston Churchill with the stroke of a pen. Is there anyone in Iraq who considers himself an Iraqi first, rather that member of a tribe, clan, and/or religious sect?
Is a Jugoslavian analogy totally off-base? In the absence of a strong (i.e. brutal, iron-fisted) ruler, there is no national unity.
The suppressed hostilities are centuries old. Is civil war inevitable in these circumstances?
December 11, 2008 at 9:12 am
Michael Turner
Loyalties, yes. I’ve read that Iraq is one of the top three consanguinous nations, and one of the bottom three in generalized social trust; Transparency International has ranked it near the bottom of its rankings for a long time, and the above social factors probably have something to do with that. The sectarianism might have been melting away, but it’s obviously back with a vengeance now.
Much of American success attributed (simplistically) to the Surge is better attributed to having restored some elements of Saddamist polity, which exploited divisions and identity confusion among Iraqis in a way that was almost artful.
Saddam bought of the Sunni tribes in much the same way that the U.S. managed the Anbar Awakening.
In planning Surge operations for Baghdad, U.S. military strategists reportedly pumped former regime security people for how Saddam had managed to survive for so long, and used the nested-security-rings approach that Saddam had developed for Baghdad.
Finally, though it’s not talked about very often, much of Saddam’s supposed “repression” of the Kurds mostly amounted to weighing in one one side or another of Kurdish civil wars within Iraq. He didn’t brook much Kurdish factional involvement in attempts by other powers (the U.S. or Iran) to meddle in or destabilize his regime. Of any less notoriously vicious tyrant, we’d naturally be asking what was so bad about such a policy anyway. Whenever the Kurds were unified and posing little threat to his regime, he was apparently happy enough to grant them a fair amount of autonomy, even if outright secession was a bridge too far. And (surprise, surprise) that’s pretty much the U.S. position with the Kurds: “don’t rock the boat, don’t reach for sovereignty, and we’ll support your desire to run things your way, in what WE recognize as your territory.” Kurdish regional government ambitions to formally rule Kirkuk (and own its surrounding oil), and its de-Arabization moves in Mosul and elsewhere, are starting to rock the boat, so the Kurds can hardly be counted out of any major conflict that might emerge.
Even some of the “non-kinetic” aid has its parallels: Saddam’s palaces were a notorious extravagance, perhaps, but they were also a jobs program, and there’s no question that, in building up the state enterprises and infrastructure with oil revenues, the Ba’athists provided more than a semblance of modernity. One American executive who restarted some of the Iraqi state enterprises got called a “Stalinist” by some BushCo ideological groupie, but there’s really not much choice if you want to employ Iraqis.
To keep Iraq stable, the U.S. has to approach Iraq much as Saddam did. (Which itself might echo ways that the British and the Ottomans controlled the region.)
I hate this. Believe me, the whole job of handing off the stabilization of Iraq is one that can’t happen fast enough for me. But it also has to work, otherwise it’s just fumbling a live grenade. Finger by replaced finger, control must be maintained — but who’s even extending a hand, at this point?
December 11, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Charlieford
“Inveterate,” not incurable. My point was they tend to think things can be made to work (not that just anyone can, or that they always will). So a changing of the guards leads them to think, “well, maybe this guy can do it.” As for, “I still haven’t heard a solid argument that such a civil war can be avoided if we withdraw on a fixed and compressed timetable.” True enough. There is none (how can you argue something won’t happen?) But, gioven the nature of Iraq and the Middle East, how many here think we’ll ever be at a point when a civil war is out of the question whenever it is we depart? Economics will dictate this one, if nothing else.
December 11, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Michael Turner
OK, “inveterate.”
. . . how can you argue something won’t happen
Look, nobody sits around gnawing their fingernails about civil war in, say, Switzerland, despite all their decades of civil war in times past. I still haven’t heard a solid argument that such a civil war can be avoided, but I don’t have to, and it never occurred to me to ask, in the case of Switzerland — the possibility seems extremely remote, and for good reason. By “solid” I don’t mean “unassailable.” Now, I could say that Switzerland is a banking country, the banking systems of entire countries are being torn asunder by the financial crisis, Switzerland’s system might be similarly torn asunder (or differently, somehow, by global effects on it), and that might somehow open latent rifts in polyglot Switzerland that woudn’t stop widening. You have to admit, that’s not exactly a solid argument.
Economics will dictate this one, if nothing else.
Yes. For all we know, this period of relatively low (but still high) violence in Iraq owes something to a willingness among the contestants to position themselves cooperatively for the sake of high oil revenues. Now that oil seems headed back down to $40/bbl (he resists the temptation to check the price just in case it’s actually lower today), war might flare again. With even more resentment, if anything, since footdragging on negotiations might have meant Iraqis missed out on a revenue opportunity that won’t repeat any time soon, and if so, they’ll tend to blame the intransigence of other Iraqis.
December 12, 2008 at 7:19 am
Charlieford
Michael, I’m not at all discounting the possibility of a resumed civil war in Iraq if and when we leave. (This war’s version of “If we leave Vietnam, there’ll be a bloodbath!” To which the retort back in the day was, “What’s it now? A snowstorm?”) My point is that we aren’t going to get to a place, within any likely politically viable time-frame, where we won’t be justified in saying that. What realistically imaginable conditions can you aspire to that would lead you to say, “Ah, all’s calm now, finally, we can leave?” It’s not just the ethno-religious realities on the ground; not just the inherent weakness of any national government we can conscientiously support; it’s not just the legacy of violence and revenge unleashed since 2003. It’s also the long and porous borders of the nation in a region not exactly famed for its tranquility. On top of that, we aren’t as clear as we would like to be about the variables that have led to the reduction in violence since 2007. In other words, we can’t be certain what the effect will be of any actions we take, and there’s no strong reason to believe our certainty will be enhanced merely by staying longer. What that all means is that we’re in the middle of a process of “mission-creep”: from “ensure there’s no WMD” and “depose Saddam,” to “stand-up an Iraqi constitution and government,” to “create the security space where the Iraqi government can resolve its disagreements,” to what you’re arguing now, “stay untill we feel reasonably certain the violence of 2005-2007 won’t resume.” But what specifically and concretely, is needed before we can achieve that certainty? How are we going to get there? There’s no good answers to those questions, which is why we hear the fall-back argument you’re offering so often, “Prove there won’t be a civil war if we do leave?” That’s a clear indication that we’re out of good ideas in Iraq. No shame in that, frankly. But, my contention is that such an aspiration, in this country, in that region, fits the definition of utopian. We’ve been known to indulge utopian aspirations periodically, true enough. But I don’t think the next half-decade will be one of those moments.