Carpe Datum

Amen brotha!

I've been thinking about the mighty morphin' reasons for going to Iraq in the first place, and it's just mind boggling how many times the story has changed.

1. Saddam is on the verge of launching WMD (oops... wrong! so sorry, but....)

2. Saddam has "programs" to develop WMD (ok... we knew that 10 years ago when Bush the senior didn't finish the job and he left the mess for the Clinton admin to deal with. So what's the big rush to war if 10 years later the "programs" are basically inept or defunct? We must find a new reason....)

3. Saddam is a bad, bad man who has "contacts" with Al Qaeda. He must be stopped by any means possible before he gives them the WMD (that he didn't really have), and if the UN doesn't support us, too bad! (Again, we knew he was a bad guy 10 years ago, and the ties to Al Qaeda are a little shaky, at best... soooo...)

4. We had to take the "War on Terror"™ to the terrorists! (forget the fact that the process has probably inspired lots of new recruits and may likely cause MORE terrorist attacks on US targets in and out of the states.)

November can't come soon enough. Please, please let John Kerry pick a decent running mate with some appeal. PLEASE!!!

Careful about that interpretation of Keegan. He's a European war historian and a damned good one. And he's right... If you scream about concerns and events prove that those concerns were not valid you become a forgotten footnote.

You can dislike his politics all you like but what Keegan has done is correctly document the history of the situation... The anti-war movement warned of things, the neo-cons ignored them and failed to consider, plan or enact proper steps and now we're in a mess. You may disagree with his notions of why the neo-cons did what they did (I never was impressed with his ability to determine motive) but his statements from a historical perspective are dead on.

Don't get me wrong, I think you have nailed the Conservative War Supporter dead on with your rant here but I don't know that I can see Keegan's exerpt here as being particularly indicative of the mindless supporter nor do I think that Dunlop's interpretation is particularly accurate with respect to Keegan.

I think the point Dunlop is trying to make here is the Keegan is trying to shrug off blame. He's trying to say that the war was a good idea, and that anti-war folks are stupid for saying that it wasn't, even though it turns out the anti-war folks were right. Sorry, as a "mea culpa", that doesn't cut it. He needs to just come out and say, you know what, people like me blew it on this one and we should've known better.

He's accurate in saying the anti-war voices would've fallen by the wayside had they been wrong, and you are right, he is a good judge of history (I have read many of his military history books during my college career, and I really liked "The Face of Battle"). What would be more accurate for him to say is that history is usually a good judge of who was right or wrong at the time, and this time, he was wrong. Instead he says that history would've judged anti-war people harshly had he been right, but he leaves out that part about the consequences of him being wrong.

Ok, I think I see the crux of our disagreement then. Keegan's article states quite bluntly that he believes that the US administration was acting in good faith when they claimed that there were weapons of mass destruction. If you are waiting for him and millions of other conservatives to apologize for trusting the government then you will be waiting a long time. (For the same reason that most liberals think that Clinton did nothing wrong.)

Although you and I have dealt with enough college students to have an inherent distrust of anyone, much less a politician, most of humanity either has not or cannot conceive of such intentional maliciousness. It doesn't help that it took the press four years to start reporting anything about the corruption and lies in this administration and even now conservative editors and producers are hindering the process.

In short, you are waiting for essentially uninformed masses to wake up and think for themselves? How many informed students from your classes fail to think for themselves? How many people your age in the world have the time (or the energy or the responsibility) to go out and seek out the information that they need to be well informed? How many actually realize that what they see on the nightly news qualifies as disinformation?

It is easier to accept the party line (what the press print or the politicians say or...) than it is to think for yourself and as mush as you and I may despise them for the inability or failure to think we cannot reasonably hope for more. I just don't think that it's common in human nature and hoping for or expecting more of the general populace is nothing more than a good way of providing your local gastroenterologist with a fixed source of income.

Keegan's excuse that he naively trusted the government doesn't wash (I might understand it in a student, but not someone like Keegan). It is profoundly dishonest. That's because Keegan positions himself as someone who doesn't just take the government's word for it. He is someone who is supposedly thoughtful, knowledgeable, experienced. He expects to be treated as an authority on the subject of foreign policy, the Iraq war in particular.

If that's the case, then he can't pretend that his head was in the sand when this whole thing started. If someone like *me* could dig up a skeptical argument about the war (and the WMD claims) before it started (see my archives), then Keegan is not allowed to cop a plea of "I couldn't have known!"

Yes, actually, you could have known, Mr. Keegan. The evidence and the arguments against the war were right there, easy to find, and people like Keegan chose to discount and (in many cases) ridicule them. For them to come back now and pretend anti-war liberals were the problem takes incredible gall. But then that's what this whole administration is about. Brazening their way through everything with dishonesty, spin and dirty tricks.

And the media is going along with it, which is why false claims of media bias drive me bananas. You are right that a lot of people just trust what they are told, assume the government is acting in good faith, etc. People who falsely claim liberal media bias every time some bad news about Bush or Iraq is reported (by the same paper that repeated Chalabi's lies about WMD to build support for the war, no less) are just trying to "work the refs" so that their side gets a very sympathetic portrayal.

That way, they can say 2+1 = 4, and the media reports "some people say 2+1 = 3, but there is a lot of disagreement on this one," and the Moron American is left dealing with the mess. The media is simply not doing its job.

I'll agree wholeheartedly with the final conclusion about the failure of the media and if the initial post had gone after Keegan as an agent of the media for perpetuating the myth that the administration was in good faith in spite of numerous incidents that indicate otherwise then I'd have been a whole lot more on-board with the argument.

To be honest, I thought that Keegan did a pretty fair job with his article barring the one paragraph that called the war justified in the first place an his conclusion. The rest of it was a pretty honest assessment of the stupidity that has gone on since the beginning of the war followed by a truly stupid suggestion that maybe a Baathist Iraq was a better idea. Well, given the way this administration bollocksed the planning of *course* a Baathist Iraq was preferable.

The truth, however, is that many liberals were not against the war, they were against the stupidity. Take for example Molly Ivans who was outraged because a) we never once mentioned intervening for humanitarian reasons in spite of the fact that that had been warranted for 10 years, b) now that we wanted to intervene we were lying to the American public and the world in an attempt to justify it without being held accountable for the humanitarian record of the last 10+ years and c) we were doing such an abyssmal job of planning that it was clear to nine out of ten dyslexic monkeys that there was no possibility of our winning the peace.

The key difference between Keegan and others is that Keegan is at least admitting that we're not winning the peace which is something that is still not widely accepted.