In his role as a monthly columnist for the Washington Post, neoconservative Robert Kagan has written a curious little piece. In its title he poses “Whether this war was worth it,” and he bookends that ponderable with, “the effort to change the direction of the region was surely worth paying some price.”
Now it is not curious that an organizing member of Bush’s neocon support group would arrive at that conclusion. After all, this was, and is, their ill-gotten war. Since things didn’t turn out as they repeatedly assured us, they now subject us to repeated assurances of what a worthy struggle it is. Midstream justification-jumping is a cinch for these perfect-ten, ideological gymnasts. It is, however, the method Kagan chooses to justify his conclusion that is curious. Or, put more bluntly, his method is a neon-flashing sign of downright desperation.
In the absence of any noticeable evidence that the Iraq war is indeed worth it, he opts for the popular parlor game of “What if?” history. A central player in this fanciful abstraction is the equally popular bugaboo of appeasement at Munich -- a bit of rhetorical artillery rolled out every time some armchair warrior wishes to cast extreme dubiousness as profundity.
“What if we had not gone to war in Europe in 1917, Korea in 1950, or even Vietnam in the 1960s? Would we have rued those decisions not to act as much as we now rue the decision not to drive Hitler out of the Rhineland in 1936?… We know what happened as a result of not going to war in 1936. We know, in particular, that British efforts to avoid war in 1936 and then in 1938 at Munich did not prevent war at all but only delayed it.”
One aside should be made first, one that Munich-bashers never acknowledge. It could be argued in this “what-if” fog of possibilities that not going to war earlier may have actually saved Britain; it was so unprepared for hostilities it very well could have gone down like Tyson against McBride. But of course that’s the overarching problem with all what-if history. Anything goes, since nothing can be proved or disproved -- making Munich’s relevance, especially to Iraq’s unique dynamics, pretty much irrelevant.
Yet it’s the quite specific way in which Mr. Kagan muddies the already murky waters of “what-if” theory that makes one retch. Consider these (deliberately?) disjointed lines: “We never know what [bad things] didn’t happen” as a result of controversial wars we did fight; and his later assertion that today’s antiwar advocates “have to address the question of what the alternative to war really would have meant.”
Follow that? Somewhere, somehow in all this what-if business, we shifted from the pesky unknowable to the comfort of certainty. Once a safe distance from the absolutely true proposition that we can “never know what [bad stuff] didn’t happen” because of wars fought, Kagan then proposes to tell us “what the alternative to war [in Iraq] really would have meant.” As it turns out, he can divine the unknowable after all.
Naturally, out came familiar campfire ghost stories -- principally, Spook Hussein doggedly held to WMD fetishes and was determined to haunt us forever. Kagan glosses over so much factual history, such as the massive goose eggs uncovered peaceably by U.N. weapons inspectors and Bush’s splenetic anxiety to end that approach, that his grasping is -- there’s just no better way to put it -- pathetic.
Nor is he bothered by the unAmericanism of unprovoked warfare, the international community’s condemnation of it, or the mounting evidence of how cynically and illegally trumped up the entire escapade was from the beginning. Oh well.
Furthermore, knowing you might not care to take his discredited neoconservative word for it, he chooses as supporting oracles a couple of Clinton administration officials, Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger. Albright had once compared Saddam to Hitler and Berger once questioned whether the tyrant was containable. There -- that should do it for you. Never mind that neocons once insisted that the Albrights and Bergers of this world were irresponsible children who never, ever got anything right, while the Bushies were the adults who always knew better. Never mind, anyway, as long as there’s some subtle blame-laying to be done. Again, rather pathetic.
Overall, however, Kagan’s piece comes down to this, which is, really, what most neoconning comes down to: Trust us. Even though we guessed everything wrong, trust us. Even though we’ve proven ourselves the world’s bloodiest screw ups, trust us. Even though the evidence of our bamboozling and distorting and conspiring is crushing, trust us. And since we can’t offer one solid reason for you to trust us, we’ll spook you instead with tales from unverifiable “what-if” history -- and sell it as intellectualism.
Boo!