Marshall favored this war, or so I seem to recall. If I’m wrong about this, I hope someone will set me straight, and if I’m not wrong, then I wish Marshall make his own case (because posting like-minded folks just doesn’t do the job). More specifically, I wish he’d track the links, if any, between his position of 2003 and his position of 2006. Has he, for example, come to believe that his premises of 2003 were neither noble, enlightened, nor helpful in any way? And if not, why not?
Cards on the table here: I continue to think we should get the hell out of Iraq as soon as possible, and let the Iraqis work out the future for themselves. If we don’t go willingly, then I hope the Iraqis will do whatever it takes to hasten us on our way. When the time comes, we might start to do something helpful. As we’ve started to do, I suppose, in Viet Nam.

Posted by: alabama | Oct 10 2006 19:57 utc | 4

Very strange concept and quite revolting for straight-forward Germans.
You’re joking, right? Germans? The same country that meticulously declared its Jewish citizens to be stateless persons before deporting and murdering them — so that technically speaking they would not be entitled to the protection of German law?

Posted by: Anonymous | Oct 10 2006 20:36 utc | 6

I agree with alabama and would go one step further and require the US to pay reparations. That would be the proper thing to do. Reconstruction as it is intended by the group of thugs in power now simply means stealing more money from the Iraqis and the US taxpayers.
What we spend in one year of destruction (let’s say 50 billion dollars) could be put into a fund administered by the UN and be used solely for repairing and rebuilding.
slothrop, now you are the one talking out your ass. you can do better than make non sequiturs like that.

Posted by: dan of steele | Oct 10 2006 21:35 utc | 8

dan
you mean to say the international community should not intervene to liberate whole populations from tyrany and slaughter? the rwandans were “solving” their own problems?

Posted by: slothrop | Oct 10 2006 21:49 utc | 10

international institutions–like a reformed u.n.–should intervene in conflicts threatening civilians. I’d think that here at moa this would be uncontroversial.
the removal of the taliban is justified as moral war, it seems to me, just as the defense of western sudanese by international troops is justified.

Posted by: slothrop | Oct 10 2006 22:12 utc | 12

the “arbiter” is international consensus.

Posted by: slothrop | Oct 10 2006 22:59 utc | 14

@dan I suspect the T reneged on a deal with the Boss — the Unocal pipeline — and had to be made an example of.
as to international intervention: if we admit that most communities need some kind of policing, i.e. that it is OK for the police to come to the door and intervene when a child is being abused or a woman battered or an old person maltreated by caretakers or whatever… then we admit tacitly that the world, as a community, needs some kind of policing too. any family (town, city, nation) can get dysfunctional enough to commit (and try to cover up) atrocities, cruelties, crimes of all kinds. and then we need police and due process and intervention.
but that is not the same as one powerful family (the US) intervening selectively, only when its business interests are served, turning a blind eye to the crimes of friends and relatives but viciously overreacting when dealing with “the wrong sort of people,” etc. that’s the equivalent of deeply corrupt (Touch of Evil?) pseudopolicing, the archetypical small-town nightmare, the Turkish Jail nightmare (though these days US Jail might be more appropriate). what we have now is an international policing structure (UN) run like a corrupt little town in the old South, complete with lynchings and election fixing, cop riots, nepotism, etc.
it’s arguable that people suffering under that kind of regime would be better off with simple anarchy.
getting rid of the SC veto power would be one step towards democratising the UN, I guess… total transparency of UN policing ops would be another (investigative journos encouraged rather than repressed, full doco and open accounting in all ops).
when policing is done right it works for a variety of reasons that I don’t fully understand, like the right mix of enforcement personnel from inside and outside the community, the right mix of armed and unarmed response, the availability and skill level of negotiators and mediators, the degree to which the community wants to preserve the peace, the quality of citizen oversight, the wage structure for the cops (too much and they become swaggering elites, too little and they go on the take)… it’s a subtle recipe. there are almost certainly ways to do it right internationally and they almost certainly are inherently incompatible with profiteering. so back to root causes: how to stop US and transnational elites from profiteering in conflict zones, which only exacerbates conflict and interferes with relief efforts?

Posted by: DeAnander | Oct 10 2006 23:18 utc | 16

I wonder how the Sunni minority ruled Iraq as long as it did and not just obliterate the Shias? Or how many of the Native American tribes managed to genocide each other into oblivian? The way the mercantile-imperialists worked was to create strife and then step into protect party A from B or human rights or bring democracy or whatever. But if human rights or democracy didn’t work in their favor they just used one of the parties to create another mayhem and then stepped back into protect human rights or democracy or whatever ….. You know, rinse and repeate.
But the thing is that Billmon is absolutely right, once you have destroyed functioning institutions its your responsibility to build new ones. At this these current nincompoops absolutely suck.
Max

Posted by: Max Andersen | Oct 11 2006 0:05 utc | 18

#19: Well, that didn’t help at all. But whatever…

Posted by: Max Andersen | Oct 11 2006 0:32 utc | 20

…the United States had both a moral and a LEGAL responsibility to provide security, protect and if necessary rebuild the public infrastructure and abide by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of the civilian population.
Well… “provide security” is what they claim they’re doing right now. Same with “protect”.
“Rebuild the public infrastructure” would be interpreted as turn Bechtel and Halliburton loose and send the bill to the Iraqis.
All of that stuff is true in principle… but in reality it would just be more of the same.
I agree with Bernhard. Let the Iraqis put the pieces back together and then sue for reparations.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Oct 11 2006 1:07 utc | 22

Re. Posturing is all well and good, but Chandrasekaran is right: Even if the original invasion was illegal, as the occupying power the United States had both a moral and a LEGAL responsibility to provide security, protect and if necessary rebuild the public infrastructure and abide by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of the civilian population.
From day 1 of the invasion, it was clear that the US was not going to abide by Common Article 3. The rebuilding effort was focused on dismantling the civic and military infrastructure of Iraq. Everyone of good faith, like billmon, who insist on any “obligation” should recognize that the obligation is to Iraq, and not to the invading country. As soon as it was clear that the US presence hurts the Iraqi people (July 2003?), we should have been forced out and made to pay reparitions for our war crimes.
For those who insist on a need for providing security, when will it be clear that the US is the main cause of insecurity?

Posted by: Anonymous | Oct 11 2006 1:34 utc | 24

that is not the same as one powerful family (the US) intervening selectively, only when its business interests are served, turning a blind eye to the crimes of friends and relatives but viciously overreacting when dealing with “the wrong sort of people,” etc.
i don’t think our MO was to overthrow sadam and then make everything nice again. everything had to be made nice, our way, for our interests. i also think ‘turning a blind eye’ is somewhat of a fallacy when we are the ones supporting selected militias. i read somewhere recently about the media ignoring the badr brigade/militia in their coverage of the conflict.arguably the most powerful militia in iraq. media framing the sunni/shite problem as mostly mahdi army (thugs, poor)and sunni insurgents.
i noticed the next day the earliest reports of the assassination of vice president Tariq al-Hashimi’s brother, from rueters and abc mentioned the presents of the cars similar to those used by Interior Ministry special forces yet the report that came out later from AP
reported @ wapo completely ignored this detail. in fact, it was almost strange the way the article was framed to lead one to associate w/mahdi.

assassinated Monday by gunmen who broke into his home, the third of the politician’s four siblings to be slain this year. Sunnis blamed Shiite militias and demanded a crackdown to stop the capital’s raging sectarian violence.

3 paragraphs about the mess hall poisoning.
1 blaming sunni insurgents for car bomb killing at least 10 people and wounding 23 in a shite district
1 mentioning Mahdi Army Gunmen also kidnapped 11 policemen in a brazen assault on their checkpoint in Sadr City, a Baghdad neighborhood dominated by the Mahdi Army, the country’s most powerful Shiite militia.
1 more blaming sunni insurgents re three Marines dying
only then ,finally, back to the vp’s brother. The death of the brother of Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi _ the country’s most prominent Sunni Arab politician _ alarmed Sunnis and fueled their demands that the government crack down on Shiite militias.
Critics of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki accuse the Shiite leader of hesitating on reining in the militias because many of them _ like the Mahdi Army _ belong to parties in his government.
my point? why didn’t the article even mention badr brigades and that they are the militia of maliki and the ones most likely responsible for the majority of the orgnized death squads? why is this framed as just a bunch of shites and sunni’s going at it. why is there no mention of the MOI, or connection to it via steel and maliki’s connection to it? out goal was not to put iraq back together again like humpty dumpty. our goal was to divide iraqi’s. someone floated the idea today that we were going to need a shields between us and the shites when we attack iran. everything seems to be merging, many conservatives calling to deploy. we are giving up on democracy and maybe a good ol dictatorship is in order. oil men all ready to go. the only obligation we are fullfilling in iraq is our own. we are pulling strings there backing sciri or the most vicious of militias, or at least avoiding confrontations w/them. had we any interest in a united iraq we would never have promoted provisions in the new constitution to allow new mini-states to establish militia groups.
some guy rapes your daughter and then tells you he has an obligation to stick around pay the hospital bill but first he has to marry her so she can get the health insurance yet while they’re married he keeps screwing her all the while telling you he’s going to leave as soon as she’s better.in fact he’s never planning on leaving, going to keep screwing her until he knows she’s carrying his child.
see where this is going. obligation my foot.

Posted by: annie | Oct 11 2006 1:46 utc | 26

yes annie, turning a blind eye is not nearly sufficient to describe aiding and abetting (something that corrupt cops also do).

Posted by: DeAnander | Oct 11 2006 1:50 utc | 28

@slothrop – darfour
is a conflict between nomad tribes and settlers because desertifaction has deminished the liveable area. (At the same time, note that there is quite a bunch of oil under that desert.)
Now you want to send tanks and helos to solve that “problem”? How do tanks create arable land? That is “liberal bellingerance” of the worst kind to me.

Posted by: b | Oct 11 2006 2:55 utc | 30

As far as paying reperations to Iraq…. aint gonna happen.

Posted by: anna missed | Oct 11 2006 3:10 utc | 32

b
this is the problem, of course, of proving negatives. but, reading kant, universal peace finds its illumination in global consensus. is this possible? ask citizen k and he will say no, and indeed the historical record confirms his negative lassitude. but consensus is all we have.

Posted by: slothrop | Oct 11 2006 3:41 utc | 34

b real posted this keith harmon snow link on darfur. the panel on darfur at smith college was an eye opener:

Five different perspectives on the ongoing crisis in the Darfur region explore the ethical and political questions behind popular calls for humanitarian intervention and regime change in Sudan. Panelists include Co-Director of the IAC in New York, Sara Flounders; Professor of Anthropology, Dr. Elliot Fratkin; investigative journalist, Keith Harmon Snow; researcher on war crimes, Dimitri Oram; and Associate Professor of Anthropology, Enoch Page; and concludes with a panel discussion. This event on the crisis in Darfur was held on July 6, 2006 at Smith College in Massachusetts.

guaranteed to change your mind if you believe we or the u.n. should intervene.

Posted by: conchita | Oct 11 2006 4:07 utc | 36

When, as the Bloomberg School’s epidemiological report gives us to understand, the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. has been the direct cause of 600,000 civilian deaths–not, let’s notice, the risibly low figure of 50,000 purveyed by the American government, and gladly adopted up til now by every known medium for the dissemination of “news”–then you really do begin to wonder what on earth the Iraqi people could gain by the continued presence of American troops on their soil. 600,000 more deaths, I suppose? We’re long past the numbers of Biafra at this point, and our contribution here is direct, not one of indirection by refraining to intervene.
OUT, SAY I, OUT, AND OUT NOW. I SAY THIS TO BILLMON, TO JOSH MARSHALL–THAT DEDICATED NEO-CON OF A PASTEL HUE–AND TO ANY OTHER HUMANITARIAN OF A SIMILAR PERSUASION.
(Because we’re on a killing spree ten times greater than the one we’ve allowed ourselves to imagine.)

Posted by: alabama | Oct 11 2006 6:05 utc | 38

Let me recommend the link conchita and b real put up on Darfur:
Here is the direct link to the panel on darfur at smith college.

Posted by: b | Oct 11 2006 7:30 utc | 40

@Rowan – good question. I don´t have a answer I feel really good about, but I have an answer:
Parts of Europe payed a up to a third of their population to find this answer.

The Treaty of Westphalia incorporated four basic principles:
* The principle of the sovereignty of nation-states and the fundamental right of political self determination
* The principle of (legal) equality between nation-states
* The principle of internationally binding treaties between states
* The principle of non-intervention of one state in the internal affairs of another state

wikipedia
Accepting derivations from these pinciples allows inevitably (and immediately invites) manipulation of the “public” to the end of intervention for nefarious aims.
(Show me the “massgraves” in Kososvo, or the “WMD” in Iraq)

Posted by: b | Oct 11 2006 10:25 utc | 42

Colman, that fits under appropriate. If military intervention is ineffective, then it’s certainly not moral.
b, yeah, I wish I had an answer too. I don’t want to say no, but I don’t want to say yes, either. This might be why I’m not in politics.

Posted by: Rowan | Oct 11 2006 10:57 utc | 44

I don’t know about that Rowan, some people would argue you should try to do something to help even if it won’t work.

Posted by: Colman | Oct 11 2006 11:20 utc | 46

Out. Americans out, that is. The people of Iraq have been living and dying together for at least 10,000 years. We Puritanical Americans and our various slave populations have been living and dying together for 400 years. Not a lot of experience on this end, would you say? So no more “help” from Americans. If the Iraqis want help rebuilding their “infrastructure,” well, they have at least 6 billion other people on the face of the earth to call on. Like the Chinese, or the Indians, or the Swedes… But not the British, not just now. The French, maybe…
If we want to do something constructive, let’s send Wolfowitz and his friends to a summer camp in the Adirondacks, complete with saunas, trainers, sailing instructors, masseurs and masseuses, tennis teachers…. A maximum security summer camp with a dome (for year-round protection from the weather), and with no PC’s (no internet).
To be funded, of course, by money transferred from the VA’s budget.
link to NYTimes

Posted by: alabama | Oct 11 2006 14:14 utc | 48

‘Huge rise’ in Iraqi death tolls

An estimated 655,000 Iraqis have died since 2003 who might still be alive but for the US-led invasion, according to a survey by a US university.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Oct 11 2006 15:39 utc | 50

Help! Capable and effective police, in the best of conditions, speak the tongues of the folks they police. And since Americans don’t speak Arabic, how could they possibly police the people of Iraq? Iraqis, on the other hand, really do speak Arabic, and have had considerable success, over the past ten or so millenia, in the business of policing their own –as have, it is true, some other folks who earned that language as well, such as the Ottoman.
Shall we take, then, a hint from the Ottoman, and spend a century or so working out a complex system of interactions with our client states, based on our learning the tongues of the places we occupy? It would at least increase our own linguistic proficiency–an excellent thing in itself. Of course it would also doom our empire–the Ottoman Empire collapsed, you may recall, from the growing costs of its upkeep–but then the learning of foreign tongues was always a major investment.
(Ah, now I get it. You thought they all spoke English, didn’t you? Just as you thought the Bible was written in English….Or else you just assumed the Iraqis would learn English, if only to survive the rigors of our occupation, as did the American Indians in their own time and place. This is a premise to study, if only to shed some light on our ways with those Indians.)

Posted by: alabama | Oct 11 2006 17:47 utc | 52

Yes, DeAnander, that’s the very English our Indians were meant to understand.
Billmon’s on a role, thank God, because my own wit, such as it was, has taken a holiday from my thoughts. And I think I know why. It seems that not many folks in this country know, or care to know, that we’re in the process of killing a million people in a place that did us no harm. Someday they’ll learn that we’re doing this. My children and grandchildren will have to process this problem, and everyone around them will have their own excuses: 9/11, Hussein, finishing Desert Storm, making democracy safe for oil, sticking it to the “enemies” of Israel, “axis of evil,” “if only we’d known then what we know now,” “nobody’s perfect,” etc. etc. etc. Defenses on the left and the right, which have been fully in flower for more than the past three years.
I’m going to insist that my children and grandchildren read, learn, mark and inwardly digest the writings of Machiavelli, that great and moral thinker so often denounced at this site by people who haven’t read him (and probably never will, because they can’t be bothered to take the time, or don’t wish to learn what he teaches). And not just “The Prince,” by the way. No, I’ll press them to read the “Discourses on Livy,” “The Art of War,” the poetry, the histories, the “Exhortation to Penance,” and last but not least the plays (“The Mandragola” first and foremost). His lucid, clear and unfailingly honest words are the one and only spar to grab in the midst of a shipwreck like this. Consoling, and maybe a lifesaver.

Posted by: alabama | Oct 12 2006 3:00 utc | 54

@alabama, #54:

I think you are making an unwarranted assumption that the people on this site would stop denouncing old nasty-nails if they read him. Machiavelli’s morality takes on far too practical of a cast for this site. If I recall correctly, one of the recurring ideas in The Prince is that a good (in both senses) ruler should, if an evil/objectionable action genuinely needs to be done, get it over with as quickly as possible in order to be good/unobjectionable as much of the time as possible. (The slash is because, once again if I recall correctly, the argument is made from both the moral and the practical standpoint.)

It’s a very difficult position to argue against, and every administration of the last 20 years fails to meet his moral standards, but there are some people on this board who are unwilling to admit that a moral ruler would ever need to do anything evil. I sometimes wonder, in fact, whether this site is somehow a gateway to a nicer dimension somewhere. (If so, I envy you people.)

Just as an aside, apparently the inventor of the neutron bomb was Machiavellian in this sense. The reasoning, according to an article I read somewhere, probably Salon.com although I can’t find it now, went something like this: Nuclear weapons exist. There is no way to make them cease existing as long as people who can make them want them; this may eventually be accomplished, but is unlikely to occur any time soon. It is much more likely that some nitwit is going to try to use nuclear weapons tactically (Bush is a throwback to that era), and there will be horrible consequences. Aside from the literal and metaphorical fallout, the victims will be in desperate need of aid which will not be available in the aftermath of the explosion(s) (magnetic pulse knocks out communications, while shockwave knocks down buildings), which means that there will be much more pain and suffering than what is explicitly mentioned. Compared with this, it would be much better if there was a weapon with equal or greater tactical capability which (1) either killed people outright or left them in a state where they could recover and (2) did not knock out emergency services. (To simplify, although killing people is wrong, it is more wrong to kill more people, so it is a positive step to exchange a tool which kills lots of extra people for a tool which kills relatively few extra people.)

I don’t want to debate the morality of this particular line of reasoning — the point is that it was rejected by both the left and the right. On the left, of course, there was the reaction — which I’m sure we will see repeated in a reply to this post, if anyone replies — that any weapon at all is evil so we should simply work to eliminate them all, combined with a popular inversion of the initial reasoning (i.e. that the neutron bomb is even sicker than a regular nuclear weapon because it leaves property intact, signalling greater respect for property than people). The right, on the other hand, likewise rejected it for two reasons. First because many on the right can’t imagine a situation where it might be preferable to kill fewer people than possible, and also because neutron bombs, being more compact, don’t require as much defense spending. That last one is, naturally, what really killed the idea in the end. And that’s why, if Bush drops a nuclear bomb on Iran, it won’t be a neutron bomb, and there’ll be fallout and shockwaves and so on.

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | Oct 12 2006 5:11 utc | 56

Tantalus, you’re right. First we made our peace with the “Trail of Tears,” and then, sixty years later, we cheered on Teddy Roosevelt and his friends as they went around saving Indian artifacts, hunting grounds, and colorful mountain habitats (whence The Natural History Museum in New York, and the National Park system everywhere). The Indians themselves were left to die on their reservations–unless, of course, oil was found on their land, and other things started to happen.
And so it’s absolutely crucial that the Iraqis chew us up into tiny little pieces and spit them out on the deserts of Saudia Arabia. Because if they don’t do it to us, then we we’ll simply do it to them. I particularly welcome the thought–in my pettier moments, it’s true–that the insurgents will start blowing up the planes, helicopters and safe houses bearing and sheltering the highest levels of our command. I’d like to see them penetrate the Green Zone and turn it into a Black Zone. I wouldn’t be so churlish as to hope that Condi Rice were caught in the crossfire–I’d settle for Karen Hughes or General Pate.

Posted by: alabama | Oct 12 2006 5:17 utc | 58

i think the grand machiavel can be good nightime reading in our era
tantulus, i think ther is no shame left
dea, you forget of course; go go go now wnow go now goo go go – it is a form i believe of googoo that comes out of infants mouths
& with the researches of dear uncle, i wake up with a sobering thought each morning

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Oct 12 2006 12:27 utc | 60

remeberinggiap, here in Canada I just saw a teaser for a television program about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, our scarlet-jacketed, Smokey-the-Bear-hat-wearing symbol of calm, strength and restraint.
The program focuses on “new training” for the national police.
The fast-paced video shows black-clad figures rappelling into farm buildings on a training mission, charging forward with futuristic automatic weapons at the ready.
The soundtrack, of course, was, “Go, go! Go go go go go!”

Posted by: jonku | Oct 12 2006 15:45 utc | 62