By Fester:
I did not expect my short post on the costs of the Iraq war to get widely picked up, and if it did, I thought the large chunk I ripped from Fabius Maximus would have been the talked about part, and not the conservative predictions portion. I threw that in as part of the public discourse policing functioning of imposing reputational costs for advocating a collassal cluster-fuck.
James Joyner would have made roughly the same range of casualty predictions (in this sense, I think we should read "fatality" for casualty) as the rest of the right wing bloggers were making. However he defends himself with the following line:
I wasn�t counting on a multi-year occupation during which we fought against multiple insurgent groups while trying to democratize Iraq. I presumed, as did Don Rumsfeld and others, that we would topple Saddam Hussein�s government, install an interim government, and elect a permanent government within some short period.
That�s the war I supported and still wish that�s what we�d done.
That was not the war we were going to get as it was fairly obvious by January 2003 that the national security case for war had fallen apart, and Bush was resorting to ideological democratization claims when he and his employees were not lying through their teeth or precisely parsing their words. It was obvious that the plan was to impose a bunch of exiles with no legitimate power base besides that supplied by the US 3rd Army.
It was obvious that the clean, quick victorious war with the end result of a liberterian utopia was not going to happen. This is just a modified incompetence dodge favored by liberal hawks --- "If I got the war I wanted and not the one that Bush wanted, things would be better." We had Bush and his coterie of advisors in power and they were going to do whatever they were doing to do irrespective of the pony plans many others either wanted or projected upon Bush.
I opposed the invasion of Iraq for a whole host of reasons.
ReplyDelete1. I thought the casualties would be higher than the war supporters did (although less than many war opponents did). My estimates were significantly more realistic than theirs and my prediction that the invasion proper would only account for a fraction of the casualties was on target as well.
2. I thought the political support for the invasion was too tepid to support the tactics that might lead to a shortened occupation.
3. I thought a lengthy occupation was not in our best interests.
4. I thought that Saddam Hussein could be contained more cheaply than he could be removed.
5. I was skeptical of the "longing for democracy" narrative.
I don't think that we should be under any illusions, however. We would have needed to continue the costly containment of Saddam Hussein with additional security measures piled on top and the political support for that was pretty tepid, too.