Avedon Carol takes issue with:
Jonathan Chait's dopey article in which he again babbles about how the people who were right about the war were right for the wrong reasons, and that's why we should still listen to all the people who were wrong (for, I guess, the right reasons).
Chait imagines that those of us who opposed the invasion never gave the right reasons. This is an incredibly stupid thing to say, not least for the fact that he doesn't appear to have been paying attention to enough of the people who opposed the invasion to know what reasons we gave.
Which prompted me to look up my first post on the subject — back on the old Blogger site I used until Sept. 2003.
I started this blog in June of 2002 — long after the decision to invade Iraq had been settled behind the scenes, but before it had much entered the public discussion.
My first mention of a possible attack in Iraq, it turns out, was a joke. On July 19, 2002 — as the Enron scandal was dominating the headlines — I noted that Martha Stewart was, like George W. Bush, facing charges of corporate corruption. "How can she hope to regain her reputation and protect her good name?" I asked. "Maybe she should invade Iraq."
Initially, in other words, I could see no reason to take the idea seriously. After all, America was already at war, fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan. The idea that this war might be back-burnered to start a new, unrelated war somewhere else, while the perpetrators of 9/11 remained at large, seemed too absurd to be taken seriously.
But by August of that year, it had become clear that this unserious idea was being seriously pursued by the Bush administration. The White House would not begin its PR campaign for the war until September, but there were enough rumors floating around that it seemed this was something that needed to be addressed.
So on Aug. 8, 2002, I posted my first substantive discussion of the possibility of an invasion of Iraq — a post simply titled "Proportionality."
Following up on a post by Josh Marshall, I asked whether the idea met that particular criteria of the Just War tradition. Josh had asked, "Is it possible that regime change by force is the right thing to do, but that this administration is inclined to do it in such a reckless, ill-conceived and possibly disastrous manner that, under these circumstances, it is better not to do it at all?" I think my reaction stands up well:
Marshall is raising the question of proportionality, which is bound up with the question of likely outcomes. Such questions are, as he says, "devilishly difficult." Another way of putting these questions is this: Will this war likely make things better or worse?
Answering such a question involves more than merely applying abstract ethical principles. It involves weighing matters of fact and probability, prudence and judgement, learning from history to project our best guesses onto the future.
And my best guess is that Marshall is right: the "reckless, ill-conceived and possibly disastrous" manner in which the Bush administration is pursuing this effort seems likely to make things worse. That's not a just war.
Over the following months, I also discussed many of those "abstract ethical principles," arguing that this war would be unjust and unwise.
A few months later, Pope John Paul II — applying the same standards from the same moral tradition — reached the same conclusions I had: An American invasion of Iraq could not be justified and would therefore end badly (and vice versa). I don't expect Chait to have read or remembered my discussion of these matters on a lower-tier blog, but JP2 was generally regarded as a prominent public figure.
The pope wasn't a dirty hippy, and he wasn't "right for the wrong reasons," but for some reason Chait seems to have forgotten all about his principled opposition and his prescient warnings.
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