Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Slate has a very good feature entitled “Why Did We Get It Wrong” in which three liberal hawks – Kenan Makiya, Fred Kaplanand Chris Hitchens- all appraise their stance on the war.  Kaplan, of course,  turned against the war before it even began and Makiya is still convinced that it was noble to “knock down the walls of the great concentration camp that was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq” but is now indecisive about whether the war itself was a good idea.  Both Kaplan and Makiya demonstrate admirable introspection about why they supported the war and how evidence accumulated to make them change their minds, or at least rethink.  And then there’s Hitchens.

Hitchens is, of course, unapologetic and thinks that he can separate his support for the war from the horrible execution of it, which he takes no responsibility for.  And here’s his conclusion:

And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it’s not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn’t count, and we are not involved. Nonetheless, the very thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadists), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?

The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur. Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say “attempt” rather than “do,” which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on “a war of choice.” But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited. We were already deeply involved in the life-and-death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we ever decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.

You’ll notice something interesting.  As far as Hitchens sees it, it’s not our responsibility to look at the consequences of advocating for an invasion.  Instead, all that matters is that we intervened on the “right side for the right reasons.”  The problem with looking at a decision this way is that it discourages the exact type of analysis that everyone admits needed to happen before Iraq.  Namely, what would the consequences of the invasion be besides removing Hussein from power? Kaplan says that part of the reason he turned against the war was that he determined that “in no shape—diplomatically, politically, or intellectually to wage [this war] or at least to settle its aftermath.”  Questions of whether of Hussein’s Iraq was “a concentration camp” or whether we were on the “right side” necessarily bracket off the types of considerations that even Hitchens and Makiya think that we ought to have made.  Hitchens is also being incredibly glib when he says that we intervened after an “open and public debate.”  Last time I checked, when advocates for a policy are presenting skewed intelligence in support of their war, no debate will be “open and public.” Also, constantly accusing ones opponents as being soft on genocide/fascism for opposing a preemptive war is hardly fulfilling the Habermasian ideal.

I’ll also note some noteworthy abscences – really just one – from the Slate symposium. Jeffrey Goldberg.