How to apologize for supporting the war on Iraq

With the five year anniversary of the war having recently taken place and no end to the occupation in sight, retrospectives are popping up all across the internet, explaining what people feel led them to mistakenly support a war that's gone so terribly wrong. Most of these retrospectives reek of lingering denial, claiming that support was in good faith and that but for one or two oversights, all might have gone well. John Cole, on the other hand, gets it exactly right:

Any "former" war supporter who can't bring himself to admit that he "was wrong about EVERY. GOD. DAMNED. THING," that he should have just "trust[ed] the dirty smelly hippies," and that "it is amazing [he] could tie [his] shoes" back in the days of support hasn't really learned his lesson yet: that "war should always be an absolute last resort, not just another option."

Wow.

I wonder what's going to be on his list for what he got wrong in 2008.

I still support it.

So screw you.

Explain.

I still support it too, at least in principle, but I'd like to know your reasoning.

Because I have family over there. Not too mention the fact that pulling out wouldn't fix anything either.

Make the war personal to some people around here, then see if they support it.

Pre-emptive warfare works if you're willing to work towards the goal, no matter the cost.

The American people, are not however.

I would think that because you have family over there, you wouldn't support it so that they could return home instead of getting blown to bits.

Not if the family I have over there WANTS to be there.

And if they didn't 'want' too.....they shouldn't have enlisted.

Having been to Fort Lewis many times, I have yet to encounter someone who wouldn't go to Iraq if sent.

Oooh. Using a blogger as a source to start a thread. A fucking blogger.

From this point on, Liet, I'd better not hear a God-damned word from you the next time someone uses Newsmax as a credible source. Not one God-damned word.

Preemptive war doesn't work; it is, in almost every case, going to involve being a long-term hostile occupying power and not having the motivation at home to support such action. Even being tempted to engage in preemptive war means your diplomatic apparatus was broken from the start. Preemptive strikes, on the other hand, can make sense.

Apparently you were unaware of how empires work.

Now if the Bush administration had just admitted that the goal was empire...

Tell us how they turned out.

Eh?

An apology is a sign of weakness.

Well, isn't that special.

I was going to say that still supporting the war makes a lot more sense than claiming to no longer support the war without having gone through an honest assessment of why your support isn't and wasn't merited, but after an argument like yours I'm not sure I can make that case any more.

Snide comment to a snide noncomment aside, I don't expect people who feel they were right to support the war to to a searching examination of why they were wrong to support the war, although I'd certainly dearly like to see such examination; I do expect people who say they were wrong to support the war to have thought long and hard about why they were wrong to do so. There are a lot of people out there who claim to believe they were wrong to support the war but who pussyfoot around taking responsibility for their decision to support the war.

People who insincerely claim to have learned a lesson are, generally speaking, much more problematic than people who claim sincerely that no lesson needs to be learned. The latter you can just disagree with; the former have to be repeatedly slapped until they cry. Of course, that's just "generally," and there's nothing general about Azure.

Did you see the Slate bit where they invited "liberal hawks" to write about their support of the war? True to form Christopher Hitchens claims he's been right all along.

Jeffrey Goldberg made a good point on the issue:

Instead we got almost the opposite. The Bush administration was more concerned with looking right than dealing with the reality on the ground. This has been their M.O. for quite a while and it was stupid for me not to realize this would create big problems.

Yes, it certainly is.

My reasons for STILL supporting the war, are valid.

Much more valid that your BS assessment of why I shouldn't be supporting it.

I find myself increasingly apathetic to the war.

I'm developing the same feeling I have about the US presence in South Korea.

If only there had been a D by the president's name who started this, then it would have been a holy and justified war.

A basically noble and very human psychological mechanism that is completely exploited by the "support the war to support the troops" crowd. It boils down to seeing your loved ones thrown in a meat grinder, and reacting with love for the meat grinder, because it would be too painful to think they risk their lives for a lie.

I basically agree, but I look at it a little differently. All people like to believe that they and the people they love are good people, and a lot of people are unable to reconcile "being a good person" with "doing a bad thing." People therefore conclude that since their loved ones are good people that what their loved ones are doing in Iraq must be good and righteous. I think the problem is significantly more general than wishing loved ones' risks to be for a good cause.

Of course that's not how the real world works. Even good people do bad and terrible things all the time. People don't have nearly the degree of freedom of action that would allow good people to always avoid doing bad things, and that goes many times moreso for people signed up for military service. It's not just unfortunate that good people do bad things in war; it's one of the inevitable costs of war. Of course there are some bad things in war, such as torture, to which good people never stoop, but the fact that our soldiers in Iraq have all played a role in a terrible tragedy that should never have happened, that they've all followed orders that should never have been given, in no way makes them bad people. It just makes them good people who've been forced to make bad choices by the folly of bad people who started a bad war.

Forget John Cole. Just look at all the "experts" on channels like FoxNews and how they were wrong about everything, yet FoxNews still has them on as experts.

Then look at all the people in the Bush administration who were wrong about everything, and how many of them are still calling the shots.

Incompetence is rewarded.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, March 27, 2003:

"It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine."

"We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

Rupert Murdoch, on invading Iraq, February 12, 2003:

"The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax cut in any country."

I disagree with the quote.. Hydrogen fuel cells would make running your car as cheap as filling it up with water, which is everywhere.

I'd rather support alternative fuel than continue in this war in the hopes of cheaper oil.

I would like to say, though (on a slightly different topic) that NPR has had reports of improvements in Iraq, of areas that have been made safer and conditions that have improved.
However, the country isn't improving as much as I'd like it to.
I certainly would love to see peace in the Middle East. But let's be realistic - we will never fix their problems. We can't kill every insurgent - as soon as you kill one, another one signs up. Then there's their neighbors - when was the last time we went a year without reports of violence from one ME country to another?
We can make things better for them, but ultimately, it has to be their job to improve themselves.
I support a plan to pull out in the next few years, slowly, watching how the country reacts as we pull out.
I can't see another way out of this.

As always, feel free to disagree. I like to be proven wrong.