@Jerusalem Demsas, RE the media “manufacturing consent” for Iraq, Matt’s not really well serving you because of his own blinders from the time.
I was on the pro-war side, and not for a remote SECOND did I ever believe that Saddam had the slightest thing to do with 9/11. I didn’t put it past him to have cheered it on from the sidelines, but I was in the THICK of the conservative propaganda apparatus, and didn’t once imagine that it mattered whether he’d been involved in 9/11.
Matt is relaying to you a semi-slander that liberals came up with afterwards. Yes, some of the dumbest propaganda DID slightly imply that Saddam did 9/11, but that wasn’t what swayed the media and political elites into supporting the war.
What actually sold the war was (1) the botched intelligence, and (2) the circumstantial evidence of Saddam’s actions.
You see, RE the latter, Saddam was playing a particularly dangerous game at the time, where he wanted to make the West think he had WMDs even if he didn’t have them. He thought it was a bargaining chip and also a deterrent against his blood enemies next door in Iran.
You know how we often observe, “If Trump WAS a Russian agent, would he be doing anything different?”. Well, it was the same with Saddam.
Matt, like many libs at the time, wasn’t convinced — and good on him for not falling for the botched intelligence case like I and many others did (!) — but then they backfilled the whole thing into an overly-pat story they told themselves about how “Bush Lied, Kids Died”, when the reality was much more complex.
Do you think the difference between Vietnam (which very much stayed salient for ~decades) and 9/11 (which is clearly massively losing salience) the fact that - national inflection aside - the level of actual direct participation was magnitudinally higher?
My coherent view of US military intervention abroad is basically down two tracks. The obvious one is if we are attacked, we have the absolute right and responsibility to track down the perpetrators and kill or capture them.
The other is if people in a country desperately want US intervention, we should evaluate whether to do so based on these criteria:
1. Is anything other than military force going to work? If diplomacy will work, I don't want to drop bombs.
2. Do our allies agree with our assessment of the situation? The fact that France and Germany were opposed to the Iraq war should've caused us to slow our roll much more thoroughly.
3. What is our objective, and do our allies in the region think we're likely to succeed? Is the objective something we're willing to see through even if our assumptions are catastrophically optimistic and everything goes wrong?
My main thought is that a bad military intervention is usually worse than doing nothing; it causes death and destruction, ill will toward the US, and a waste of military readiness. Some objectives are worth pursuing even if they go badly at first, but it really matters whether the American people have enough willpower for setbacks or not.
In all the discussion around the 25th anniversary of 9/11, there has been no attempt to grapple with who in the US government was responsible for allowing the terrorist attack to occur. A review of what we knew before the event can lead to only two possible conclusions: either the Bush administration was criminally incompetent or it willfully ignored the warnings.
Who could have knowed Al Qeada was such a threat? Richard Clarke, the antiterrorist holdover from the Clinton administration warned in a memo on Jan 25, 2001 to Condoleezza Rice, the incoming National Security Adviser asking for an urgent high level meeting on the threat. The NYT reported:
"We urgently need such a Principals level review on the al Qida network." The word "urgently" was italicized and underscored; the "al Qida" spelling was used in both documents.
"We would make a major error if we underestimated the challenge al Qida poses," the memorandum said.”
The principals' meeting on Al Qaeda took place, but not until Sept. 4, 2001, a week before the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
A common excuse for 9/11 was that “who could have anticipated Al Qaeda flying airplanes into buildings”. However just that scenario was anticipated for the G8 conference in Pisa, Italy in July 2001, just 2 months before 9/11. The Italians took it seriously enough to instal anti-aircraft missile batteries and creating a no-fly zone around the conference.
Business Insider reported
In the spring and summer of 2001, [CIA Director George]Tenet had warned Bush no fewer than 40 separate times that a major attack by Al Qaeda was on the horizon. Analysts called the flood of warnings a "threat spike" and the "summer of threat."
When the 9/11 Commission looked into how Administration had responded to increasing levels of threat, the Guardian reported:
"Secretary [Norman] Mineta, the secretary of transportation, had no idea of the threat. The administrator of the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration], responsible for security on our airlines, had no idea. Yes, the attorney general was briefed, but there was no evidence of any activity by him about this," Jamie Gorelick, a Democratic commissioner, told Ms Rice.
"You indicate in your [Condoleezza Rice] statement that the FBI tasked its field offices to find out what was going on out there. We have no record of that. The Washington field office international terrorism people say they never heard about the threat, they never heard about the warnings, they were not asked to come to the table and shake those trees. SACs, special agents in charge, around the country - Miami in particular - had no knowledge of this."
Finally there was the Aug 6,2001 Presidential Daily Briefing entitled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” which discussed Al Qaeda possibly hijacking planes.
Were all these warnings missed or willfully ignored? Given the subsequent deceptions used by the Bush Administration regarding Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” and ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, I lean towards thinking it was intentional connivance so that Bush could run for re-election as a “wartime president’.
"Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen" are not a natural grouping of conflicts instigated by American in response to 9/11, and this just stacks the deck against intervention. Iraq was bad enough that you don't need to also blame W for the Syrian civil war or persistent violence in Pakistan, which has always teetered on the edge of failure. Yemen is the Saudis.
I've enjoyed the conversations in which Jerusalem comes with less of the baggage of having lived through an event (the discussion of Bowling Alone is another one), but sometimes there's so much framing of a historical period that isn't sufficiently covered to get to the heart of the matter. It's absolutely right that the mentality of "We are going to bring democracy to this country by bombing the shit out of them" is dehumanizing, but I think Jerusalem needed some pushback from Matt in her conclusion that the United States would only have done this with a brown country. The United States kinda did "bomb a country for democracy" in the Balkans in the 1990s (in a white country) and that successful military campaign was held up as a model by liberals of how to approach foreign policy in this uni-polar period. (Another example of the relative ease of a foreign intervention later being used to justify a bad one, like how Venezuela recently seems to have helped make the case for War with Iran). And there was a lot of hand wringing by by liberals after the fact that the campaign was successful in the Balkans but nothing was done in Rwanda. I think that because modern foreign policy debates so heavily focus on Israel-Palestine that it's forgotten just how influential the Responsibility to Protect movement was among liberal internationalists in the 1990s and into the 2000s.
@Jerusalem Demsas, RE the media “manufacturing consent” for Iraq, Matt’s not really well serving you because of his own blinders from the time.
I was on the pro-war side, and not for a remote SECOND did I ever believe that Saddam had the slightest thing to do with 9/11. I didn’t put it past him to have cheered it on from the sidelines, but I was in the THICK of the conservative propaganda apparatus, and didn’t once imagine that it mattered whether he’d been involved in 9/11.
Matt is relaying to you a semi-slander that liberals came up with afterwards. Yes, some of the dumbest propaganda DID slightly imply that Saddam did 9/11, but that wasn’t what swayed the media and political elites into supporting the war.
What actually sold the war was (1) the botched intelligence, and (2) the circumstantial evidence of Saddam’s actions.
You see, RE the latter, Saddam was playing a particularly dangerous game at the time, where he wanted to make the West think he had WMDs even if he didn’t have them. He thought it was a bargaining chip and also a deterrent against his blood enemies next door in Iran.
You know how we often observe, “If Trump WAS a Russian agent, would he be doing anything different?”. Well, it was the same with Saddam.
Matt, like many libs at the time, wasn’t convinced — and good on him for not falling for the botched intelligence case like I and many others did (!) — but then they backfilled the whole thing into an overly-pat story they told themselves about how “Bush Lied, Kids Died”, when the reality was much more complex.
Do you think the difference between Vietnam (which very much stayed salient for ~decades) and 9/11 (which is clearly massively losing salience) the fact that - national inflection aside - the level of actual direct participation was magnitudinally higher?
My coherent view of US military intervention abroad is basically down two tracks. The obvious one is if we are attacked, we have the absolute right and responsibility to track down the perpetrators and kill or capture them.
The other is if people in a country desperately want US intervention, we should evaluate whether to do so based on these criteria:
1. Is anything other than military force going to work? If diplomacy will work, I don't want to drop bombs.
2. Do our allies agree with our assessment of the situation? The fact that France and Germany were opposed to the Iraq war should've caused us to slow our roll much more thoroughly.
3. What is our objective, and do our allies in the region think we're likely to succeed? Is the objective something we're willing to see through even if our assumptions are catastrophically optimistic and everything goes wrong?
My main thought is that a bad military intervention is usually worse than doing nothing; it causes death and destruction, ill will toward the US, and a waste of military readiness. Some objectives are worth pursuing even if they go badly at first, but it really matters whether the American people have enough willpower for setbacks or not.
9/11: Who could have knowed?
In all the discussion around the 25th anniversary of 9/11, there has been no attempt to grapple with who in the US government was responsible for allowing the terrorist attack to occur. A review of what we knew before the event can lead to only two possible conclusions: either the Bush administration was criminally incompetent or it willfully ignored the warnings.
Who could have knowed Al Qeada was such a threat? Richard Clarke, the antiterrorist holdover from the Clinton administration warned in a memo on Jan 25, 2001 to Condoleezza Rice, the incoming National Security Adviser asking for an urgent high level meeting on the threat. The NYT reported:
"We urgently need such a Principals level review on the al Qida network." The word "urgently" was italicized and underscored; the "al Qida" spelling was used in both documents.
"We would make a major error if we underestimated the challenge al Qida poses," the memorandum said.”
The principals' meeting on Al Qaeda took place, but not until Sept. 4, 2001, a week before the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
A common excuse for 9/11 was that “who could have anticipated Al Qaeda flying airplanes into buildings”. However just that scenario was anticipated for the G8 conference in Pisa, Italy in July 2001, just 2 months before 9/11. The Italians took it seriously enough to instal anti-aircraft missile batteries and creating a no-fly zone around the conference.
Business Insider reported
In the spring and summer of 2001, [CIA Director George]Tenet had warned Bush no fewer than 40 separate times that a major attack by Al Qaeda was on the horizon. Analysts called the flood of warnings a "threat spike" and the "summer of threat."
When the 9/11 Commission looked into how Administration had responded to increasing levels of threat, the Guardian reported:
"Secretary [Norman] Mineta, the secretary of transportation, had no idea of the threat. The administrator of the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration], responsible for security on our airlines, had no idea. Yes, the attorney general was briefed, but there was no evidence of any activity by him about this," Jamie Gorelick, a Democratic commissioner, told Ms Rice.
"You indicate in your [Condoleezza Rice] statement that the FBI tasked its field offices to find out what was going on out there. We have no record of that. The Washington field office international terrorism people say they never heard about the threat, they never heard about the warnings, they were not asked to come to the table and shake those trees. SACs, special agents in charge, around the country - Miami in particular - had no knowledge of this."
Finally there was the Aug 6,2001 Presidential Daily Briefing entitled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” which discussed Al Qaeda possibly hijacking planes.
Were all these warnings missed or willfully ignored? Given the subsequent deceptions used by the Bush Administration regarding Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” and ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, I lean towards thinking it was intentional connivance so that Bush could run for re-election as a “wartime president’.
"Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen" are not a natural grouping of conflicts instigated by American in response to 9/11, and this just stacks the deck against intervention. Iraq was bad enough that you don't need to also blame W for the Syrian civil war or persistent violence in Pakistan, which has always teetered on the edge of failure. Yemen is the Saudis.
Black Hawk Down is a good movie but an even better book!
I've enjoyed the conversations in which Jerusalem comes with less of the baggage of having lived through an event (the discussion of Bowling Alone is another one), but sometimes there's so much framing of a historical period that isn't sufficiently covered to get to the heart of the matter. It's absolutely right that the mentality of "We are going to bring democracy to this country by bombing the shit out of them" is dehumanizing, but I think Jerusalem needed some pushback from Matt in her conclusion that the United States would only have done this with a brown country. The United States kinda did "bomb a country for democracy" in the Balkans in the 1990s (in a white country) and that successful military campaign was held up as a model by liberals of how to approach foreign policy in this uni-polar period. (Another example of the relative ease of a foreign intervention later being used to justify a bad one, like how Venezuela recently seems to have helped make the case for War with Iran). And there was a lot of hand wringing by by liberals after the fact that the campaign was successful in the Balkans but nothing was done in Rwanda. I think that because modern foreign policy debates so heavily focus on Israel-Palestine that it's forgotten just how influential the Responsibility to Protect movement was among liberal internationalists in the 1990s and into the 2000s.
Suggestion for your next peer review paper! It’s a study reviewing the effects of californias 22-23 law to push back school start times for middle and high schools. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35184/w35184.pdf