Liberals, Neocons, Zionists, Fascists, Anti-Fascists and the Rest

Thanks for all the comments. Hard to know where to begin. But I suppose the one thing that astonishes me above all is the apparent CERTAINTY of almost everyone about Iraq. Here’s a monster called Saddam Hussein (no “annoying thug” as L.K. Burnett suggests in comment 45), with a Stalinist personality cult, heading a Baath party that borrowed heavily from Nazi totalitarian organization, sitting for decades at the head of a country he’s turned into a nighmarish realm of terror, populated by a circles within circles of cowed informants who make the Stasi look like a plaything. My colleague Dexter Filkins described Saddam’s country in stark terms this weekend (see his brilliant profile of Kanan Makiya), writing of Saddam: “He murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead. His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis.”

In 2003, this mass murderer — responsible for millions of dead and some 25 million psychologically crippled Iraqis — is removed in a bungled American-led invasion, undertaken under false pretenses, beset from the beginning by incompetence and hubris on a massive scale, marked by miscalculation on everything from U.S. troop levels to the impact of an American-propelled social revolution that thrust the long suppressed Shia to power. It is certain that things could have been handled better. It is uncertain how much of this mayhem could have been avoided if better post-invasion decisions had been taken by a president less inclined to act on hunches and more inclined to look at facts. It is clear that perhaps 200,000 Iraqis are dead (let’s not argue too much on the numbers, but agree they are high), in addition to more than 3,700 young American soldiers.

When I weigh this picture — a middle Eastern Pol Pot (and who cares that the United States once supported him, it makes no difference to anything at this stage) on one side; more than four years of war and killing and Iraqi disintegration on the other — I agonize. Three visits to Baghdad since the invasion and countless meetings with people whose relatives were “disappeared” by Saddam only add to my questioning. Makiya, who wrote the devastating “Republic of Fear” in 1989 and was a strong supporter of the invasion, also agonizes in the above-mentioned Filkins piece. Why then is it so easy for people who know far less about Iraq than Makiya or deputy prime minister Barham Salih (a Kurd in a country where Saddam slaughtered about 180,000 Kurds) to be so certain about everything. The answer, I suspect, is that they — and particularly the liberals who are angriest about my column — think a lot more about Bush (who’s easy enough to dissect) than about Iraqis. Some suffer from what Charles Brink, in comment 64, calls “Bush derangement syndrome.”

The difference between the Iraqi hell of yesterday and the Iraqi hell of today is that the former was without hope (Saddam would have handed over to his even more sadistic sons) while the latter is characterized by flux that may, over a long period, produce some semblance of a decent society. I respect those who denounce the invasion and believe it has produced, and will produce, only disaster. On balance, however, I disagree. It would be nice to think, as Julien Vallee suggests, that Saddam’s removal could have been achieved through “soft power.” But cental Europe’s velvet revolutions notwithstanding, the lesson of history is generally that dictators like Saddam do not go gently.

What I find intolerable is the way a smug left personnified by Michael Tomasky (see his attempt at humor in God, what a bunch of whiners) can drone on about Iraq for 25 paragraphs or so without ever mentioning what Saddam’s murder-central was like. Perhaps Tomasky should think a little more about how the Soviet Gulag slipped out of the awareness of wide swathes of the European and American left, some of whom would not even see the horror for what it was when Solzhenitsyn finally rammed it down their throats. If he did search his untroubled conscience, Tomasky and others like him might be less inclined to reduce Saddam’s Gulag to a subordinate clause. You’ve heard the kinds of sentences they use. They tend to begin: Yes, I know Saddam’s regime was horrendous, but…..Or perhaps Tomasky, who is much given to hyperbole (he thinks I see his left as “a satanic sect!”), should read Charles Rogerson’s comment (number 12). In it he rightly calls me to task for not differentiating between classic Isaiah Berlin liberals and the liberals he knew when growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area. These were people who “were amazingly soft on the Soviet Union and China.” Rogerson adds: “You were mocked as some kind of right-wing yahoo MaCarthyite if you said anything critical about communism or the Soviet Union.”

True, Bush did not invade Iraq to get rid of a monstrous killer. He had other reasons and they proved empty. But the world is better for Saddam’s demise.

What else? Anyone who doubts that neocon is often shorthand for “neo-con Zionist conspiracy” should have his or her doubts laid to rest by reading the hundred of comments, some of them ugly.

I will set out the liberal hawk or liberal interventionist’s credo at a later date.

Thank you to Jane (comment 25) for her sanity in the midst of so much vitriol. She wrote: “Nice to see someone actually thinking rather than calling names. Neither side of the political spectrum has the exclusive on Truth. Fact is, labels end the “lively debate” that results in reasonable consensus. Without it, our country cannot move forward.”

Civilized disagreement is the mark of any healthy society.