In the lead commentary in this week's Talk of the Town, George Packer wallows in pity for his noble, lonely position on Iraq, comparing it implicitly with a critique of the New Realism that Election 2006 seems to have ushered in. I didn't even have to read the by-line at the end of the column to recognize the sad-sack tone that has settled onto Packer's voice since events in Iraq quickly proved how profoundly foolish it was to trust Bushists with an unprovoked and ill-thought-out military attack on a sovereign nation in a region Americans simply do not understand:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/061127ta_talk_packer
We are all realists now. Iraq has turned conservatives and liberals alike into cold-eyed believers in a foreign policy that narrowly calculates national interest without much concern for what goes on inside other countries. The Republicans had their neoconservative spree and emerged this month from its smoking wreckage, in Iraq and at the polls, with nothing to steady them except the hope that two aging condottieri from the first Bush Presidency, James A. Baker III and Robert Gates, can lead the way out. These are the same men who, fifteen years ago, abandoned Afghanistan to civil war and Al Qaeda, allowed Saddam to massacre his own people, and concluded that genocide in the Balkans was none of America’s business. They are not the guardians of all wisdom. At some point, events will remind Americans that currently discredited concepts such as humanitarian intervention and nation-building have a lot to do with national security—that they originated as necessary evils to prevent greater evils. But, for now, Kissingerism is king.
And the Democrats? Since winning the midterms, they have been talking about the endgame in Iraq with a strangely serene sang-froid. Last week in the Times, John M. Deutch, who was the director of Central Intelligence under President Clinton, praised the nomination of Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld, and added, “The consequences of withdrawal need not be catastrophic to American interests in the region.” Also last week, on National Public Radio, Representative John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who was an early supporter of withdrawal, casually offered that, if Iraq were to fall apart in the wake of an American departure, “I don’t think it’ll be any worse” than the partition of the Indian subcontinent. A million people are estimated to have died in 1947 during the movement of Muslims and Hindus across the newly drawn India-Pakistan border. Sixty years and several wars later, the two countries confront each other in a nuclear standoff, trade charges of subversion, and periodically exchange fire in the Kashmiri Himalayas.
...
The argument that Iraq would be better off on its own is a self-serving illusion that seems to offer Americans a win-win solution to a lose-lose problem. Like so much about this war, it has more to do with politics here than reality there. Such wishful thinking (reminiscent of the sweets-and-flowers variety that preceded the war) would have pernicious consequences, as the United States fails to anticipate one disaster after another in the wake of its departure: ethnic cleansing on a large scale, refugees pouring across Iraq’s borders, incursions by neighboring armies, and the slaughter of Iraqis who had joined the American project.
...If America is already heading for the exit, no one will want to have anything to do with Iraq except to pick at its carcass.
Packer does offer a view of What Is to Be Done in Iraq now that the Bushists have totally blown the beautiful plan Packer's liberal hawks were devising while agonizing over the moral implications of trusting utterly untrustworthy neocons. It boils down to "Go Long":
Though it may well be too late, politically a new Iraq policy is finally possible. It should use every ounce of America’s vanishing leverage to get the Iraqi factions, including insurgent and militia leaders and their foreign backers, to sit together in a room, with all the vexing issues of political power and economic resources before them. The U.S. government should announce that decisions about troop levels, including withdrawal, would depend on, not precede, the success or failure of the effort.
It never occurs to Packer, though it immediately occurs to me, to ask what moral right the US has to dictate any terms in Iraq in light of the hell it unleashed there for absolutely no good reason. Does Packer seriously believe insurgents will sit down at any table the US asks them to sit down at? Does he think the US has an ounce of credibility left, among any faction in Iraq, after these three and a half years of anarchy and occupation?
If you go back to the influential article Packer wrote for the New York Times Magazine in the late 2002--"The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq"--in which he outlined the agonies of his fellow liberal hawks, you will find where Packer roots the moral authority he wishes the US had: Bosnia 1992. (The article is available online through Times Select at
this link.) While utterly ignoring any differences between Bosnia then and Iraq ten years later, Packer claims that all liberal hawks lost their dovishness in the rubble of Sarajevo. His article then goes on to take the varying temperatures of Bosnia hawks like Michael Ignatieff, Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman and Leonard Weseltier for war in Iraq. Almost four years after first reading that article, I misremembered there being greater consensus for war. In fact, only Hitchens is hot for it. The rest express doubt about the Bushists' motives and competency to carry it out. (Even Berman can't support the war in the end, he says, "because I don't actually know -- I believe that no one actually knows -- what is the actual White House policy.")
But Packer's temperature, he makes clear only at the very end, was more in line with Hitchens all along:
One chilly evening in late November, a panel discussion on Iraq was convened at New York University. The participants were liberal intellectuals, and one by one they framed reasonable arguments against a war in Iraq: inspections need time to work; the Bush doctrine has a dangerous agenda; the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East is not encouraging. The audience of 150 New Yorkers seemed persuaded.
Then the last panelist spoke. He was an Iraqi dissident named Kanan Makiya, and he said, ''I'm afraid I'm going to strike a discordant note.'' He pointed out that Iraqis, who will pay the highest price in the event of an invasion, ''overwhelmingly want this war.'' He outlined a vision of postwar Iraq as a secular democracy with equal rights for all of its citizens. This vision would be new to the Arab world. ''It can be encouraged, or it can be crushed just like that. But think about what you're doing if you crush it.'' Makiya's voice rose as he came to an end. ''I rest my moral case on the following: if there's a sliver of a chance of it happening, a 5 to 10 percent chance, you have a moral obligation, I say, to do it.''
The effect was electrifying. The room, which just minutes earlier had settled into a sober and comfortable rejection of war, exploded in applause. The other panelists looked startled, and their reasonable arguments suddenly lay deflated on the table before them.
Michael Walzer, who was on the panel, smiled wanly. ''It's very hard to respond,'' he said.
It was hard, I thought, because Makiya had spoken the language beloved by liberal hawks. He had met their hope of avoiding a war with an even greater hope. He had given the people in the room an image of their own ideals.
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