***Dave Does the Blog

Another in the long list of “Folks who believe its points already will be convinced, and those that don’t won’t” articles (this one by Mark Steyn) about the rules of engagement and the astonishingly low body count in Iraq.

A lot of analysts over here are disturbed by this excessive deference to non-military considerations, especially with rumours that the Baathists in their death throes are planning to go chemical. But it’s working out swell for the Iraqis. On the first night of ‘Shock and Awe’ in Baghdad, the TV boys’ preferred line was ‘it looks like Dresden’. The next day, the Iraqi foreign minister announced a civilian death toll of …four. Four? You mean, four thousand? But no. Single figures. Not exactly Dresdenesque, and a long way from the anti-war movement’s thoughtful projections.

[…] But if this undue solicitousness has put our troops in more peril, it’s not that much more peril. In the first five days, ten US servicemen died in combat, enough to put the quagmire crowd back in business with headlines like ‘Bloody Firefights As Troops Push North’. Even as we honour their sacrifice, there’s something faintly ludicrous about the way the media are running around squawking ‘Bloody Death Toll Now Into Double Figures’. That’s an extraordinarily low figure for the amount of men and machinery running around firing on stuff. Just to put it in perspective, on Sunday a bunch of Islamists killed 24 civilians in a run-of-the-mill low-tech terrorist operation in Kashmir.

[…] Then came ‘Shock and Awe’, which was shocking in its firepower but aweing in its precision, in its ability to obliterate presidential palaces but leave the daycare centre next door unscathed, with the lights on and the telephones working. In the first Gulf war, enough ‘smart bombs’ went astray for the term to be adopted by the Not In Our Name types. ‘Smart Bombs Are Dumb’, as a popular slogan of the NIONists has it. ‘Smart bombs have their place,’ conceded Eurobigwig Chris Patten last year, ‘but smart development assistance seems to me even more significant.’
So far, the smart bombs in ‘Shock and Awe’ have been pretty smart. If they’d killed large numbers or taken out baby-milk factories, Tariq Aziz would have let us know about it. Indeed, given the way Mr Patten’s ‘smart development assistance’ to Yasser Arafat appears to have wound up funding the intifada, America’s smart bombs now cause fewer deaths than the EU development budget.

[…] Jonathan Mirsky in last week’s Spectator referred to a Telegraph column of mine headlined ‘How I Long For The Bombs To Start Falling’, and suggested I might feel differently if I were in Iraq and forced to see the consequences of those bombs. ‘I don’t know whether the Telegraph or The Spectator will be sending Steyn to Iraq,’ he writes, ‘but this is what he may find.’ There followed a couple of examples from a book on the last Gulf war — dead bodies with the boots ‘cooked to their feet’.
Sorry, Jonathan. Doesn’t bother me, I’m afraid. To be sure, war is hell. But in Iraq life is hell, and there are hundreds of tales to trump Mirsky’s — see Ann Clwyd on those dispatched feet-first into the human shredder, etc. With Saddam’s prison state, to choose war is to choose potential temporary hell over certain ongoing hell. I happen to believe that’s the moral position. But Mirsky’s ‘chickenhawk’ sneer is surely sauce for the dove, too. He thinks I’m in favour of war only because I don’t have to live with the consequences of my warmongering, as ordinary Iraqis do; but he’s only opposed to war because he doesn’t have to live with the consequences of his moral posturing, as ordinary Iraqis do.

Etc. Good stuff.

(via Volokh)

Eugene Volokh takes on the “Only in Self-Defense” argument regarding war. I’ve made the same observation previously, but it’s nice to see a Real Internet Player (and sharp mind) confirm it.

And if one does accept this argument, then I think the conclusion is that the U.S. should have fought it out with Japan (though only until Japan promised not to touch Hawaii or the Philippines again) but have promptly concluded a separate peace with Germany. If one accepts that conclusion, then that’s fine; but those who don’t accept it must therefore reject the pure self-defense-only view.

Then read this story about the destruction of a country — the dismantling and long-term demolition of Zimbabe by its presdient, Robert Mugabe.

It’ll make you cry.

Some observations regarding anti-war protests and the excuse that it’s US unilateralism that gives the Iraqi War its illegitimacy:

But do you imagine for a single second that the professional “anti-war” scribblers would have changed their tune in the case of a united diplomatic front? In the case of Afghanistan, the vote at the UN was as near-unanimous as such a thing can be.
Yet still the streets filled with the same dreary chant of “Stop the War”(as if it hadn’t already started – on September 11, 2001 to be precise). There were Syrian and Egyptian troops fighting in the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, which had a full UN mandate, but the same demonstrators showed up with much the same placards.

Interesting reading.

(via Ghost of a Flea, who has some fine obseravtions, too)

I’ve seen this particular quotation floating around a lot over the past several weeks, for obvious reasons. It’s from an interview with Herman Goering during the Nuremberg Trials:

Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.

The quote is cited frequently by the anti-war crowd — which seems a bit incongruous, perhaps, but, see, Goering here is supposed to of a kind with all those Evil US/UK Conspirators who, naturally, are “dragging the people along” into a war.

Eugene Volokh has some interesting commentary on this quote, which he (wisely) verified first as real via Snopes, where the full quote (with the interviewer’s questions) is given.

This broader passage, I think, provides some important context, though one can see it in the original version, too: Goering is trying to justify what happened — what the regime he ran did — by suggesting that all the regimes are the same. England, America, Russia, Germany; democracy, Parliament, fascism, communism; it’s all the same; all war is just regimes manipulation their foolish citizens. The German decision to start World War II, by this logic, is the same as the British and American decisions to resist the Germans.

So that, I think, is the problem facing those who use the quote: Their proposed moral equivalence between Goering’s Nazi Germany and America only works if they are also willing to accept Goering’s moral equivalence of Nazi Germany and Roosevelt’s America and Churchill’s England. And if they are, like I am, repelled by the latter moral equivalence — if they think that Americans really did deliberately endorse a war against Germany, or that, even if they were influenced by their elected representatives, their elected representatives were properly doing their job by exercising such leadership — then what’s the point of citing as authority a man (a monster) who was asserting it?

There’s a reason I’ve bumped Volokh up into my Gotta list.

There’s a good reason why I try to avoid reporting on hard news events in the Iraq War — the normal fog of war is both eased and exacerbated by instant communications from the field, and via the Internet.

… when people think the term “paramilitary” sounds too nice to describe you.

“Hey, Poppy.”

“Well, hello, Junior.”

“Poppy, I’ve asked you not to call me that.”

“Sorry. Carried away. Won’t happen again. What’s up?”

“Well, you know how cool it was that you got an international airport named after you down there in Houston?”

“Very honored. Don’t deserve it. Wish they’d change the luggage tags to GHB instead of IAH.”

“Well, guess what? I have one named after me now, too.”

“Your mother will be very proud of you, son.”

“Jeb doesn’t have one, yet, does he?”

“Don’t think so. Never mentioned it. Wouldn’t push it.”

“Ha, ha, ha. I got me my own international airport.”

“Just one thing, Junior.”

“Poppy!”

“Mine’s an Intercontinental airport. Just remember that.”

*click*

“Damn. Somebody get me General Franks …”

There’s another little mini-brouhaha blowing through about whether there was a decision to go to war with Iraq all the way back a year ago.

I really don’t get it.

1. A military solution to the ongoing Iraq problem has been bubbling in the US foreign policy pot since we held off in 1991. Clinton toyed with the idea on a number of occasions, but was hamstrung enough in his own domestic problems that he had to settle for bombing and cruise missiles.
2. It’s clear that 9/11/2001 was a wake-up for the Bush administration. And if attention was focused back on problems in the Middle East by that attack, Iraq regime and its WMD programs (distinctly linked with 9/11 or not) was an obvious front-runner for dealing with.

3. Tommy Franks has indicated that they’ve had a year of “what-if” planning to prepare for the Iraq campaign. Well, jeez, I’ll bet we were running simulations and planning for a war with the USSR for decades after WWII, without actually attacking. That’s what we pay the military to do when they’re not actually fighting. We aren’t paying the Pentagon staff so that when the President suddenly wakes up and says, “We need to go to war with Iraq,” they scratch their heads and say, “Let us get back to you on that after we find it on a map.”

4. Bush has been making noise about regime change with Iraq for, yeah, at least a year. That’s not just semi-privately with senators and his staff, but in public. We’ve been actually moving troops into the area since, when, the fall?

   I mean … would we feel better if the President only last week had sat down to ponder, Hey, I guess, all things considered, which way should I choose?

But wait, you say. What about all that “The president has not decided on war” stuff we were hearing from his advisors until the final 48-hour ultimatum was issued?

What about it?

Bush made it clear some time ago what he considered to be the conditions necessary to avoid war: verifiable and complete strategic disarmament of Iraq in accordance with previous UN resolutions. Planning for a regime change is disingenuous only to the extent that it wasn’t obvious to some people from Day One that the Iraqi regime — i.e., Saddam Hussein — wasn’t going to comply.

The decision hadn’t been made yet, insofar as (a) we weren’t ready to go in yet, but (b) when the military and diplomatic moment was right, if Iraq had not complied, we were going in. If, in the meantime, the conditions were met, then all’s fine, and we don’t need a war. That was obvious to me, at least.

But what about the UN resolution stuff?

What about it?

Well, it sounds like that was all a fake.

Bush went to the UN both because the US wasn’t ready to attack yet (so no harm no foul), and because he felt it was diplomatically necessary. And, in fact, he got unanimous agreement to Resolution 1441 out of it.

But if he was going to attack regardless of the UN, isn’t that deceptive?

No. He made it pretty clear from the get-go that what he wanted was UN approval, not permission. He wanted the the UNSC members to be convinced of the case, and provide military and financial backing for the course of action he’d decided. (He may also have done it to give Tony Blair some domestic cover.) He didn’t go to the UN, though, to consult, or to get sage counsel as to whether this was the right thing to do — he went to try to get multilateral support of US actions.

Did anyone really think that the US would not go ahead with this course of action, if the UN didn’t offer its approval?

I really don’t see the foofoorah here.

In response to suggestions that the UN inspectors botched their jobs, given the mounting (indirect) evidence of Iraqi chemical weapons programs, Hans Blix has pointed out that’s only to be expected:

“The Americans have one advantage over UNMOVIC, in discovering things and that is as they go around the country and more areas are under their control it seems likely that people scientists engineers military will be more ready to speak to the Americans, than they were to us because when we were there they still had the formidable police apparatus that would scare them from saying the truth, if the truth was any different from what the government said.”

I … think that was the point of the invasion, Hans.

(via Command Post)

According to this AP News Alert:

U.S. ambassador walks out of U.N. debate after Iraqi ambassador accuses United States of trying to exterminate Iraqi people.

I suppose that’s because clocking the bastard would have been unseemly.

(via Command Post)