As we get into the Presidential race, there’s a lot of hoo-hah about which candidates where Correct and which were Incorrect about the invasion. The top tier in my Party includes one candidate who was agin from the beginning, but who was so obscure at the time that his agin was ineffectual and unnoticed, one candidate who was pro for a few years and now says that his pro was a mistake, and one candidate who was pro at the time and deflects any questions about whether it was an error by pointing out the far greater error committed by Our Only President, who created and executed the thing.
It’s an interesting question of politics and rhetoric, which attitude will play best. I have no idea.
I find myself going back to my categorization of agins from almost four years ago, now. I settled on five categories: The Pacifists, the Chomsky-ites, the Bush-haters, the Where’s-the-Threatistas and the At-What-Costniks. I pointed out at the time, and would like to emphasize again, that few of the agins needed to articulate which camp they were in, and that most of them were in more than one camp at once. It’s not true that there was one single anti-war position, and that individuals adhered to that position over time. Similarly, there was not one single pro-war position adhered to over time by pro-war individuals. That would be a silly way to look at the world, but that does seem to be the background for much of the discussion: Were you Correct or Incorrect? If you were Incorrect, are you now Correct?
Leaving aside the pacifists, whose opposition to invasion is based on simple opposition to invasion, and the Chomsky-ites, who viewed the invasion as (primarily) an oil grab, unrelated to any stuff about death rays or terrorist, there are the Bush-haters, the Where’s the-Threatistas, and the At-What-Costniks. It seems perfectly reasonable to me for somebody to say “I had faith that Our Only President could lead us in a successful war, despite his obvious shortcomings, but time has proved him to be far worse than I could possibly have imagined.” That is, I was not enough of a Bush-hater to be an agin, but now I am. Further, it’s reasonable to say “I thought at the time that Saddam Hussein threatened the US, but it turns out that he was not.” That requires a bit more, to me. I’d need a statement of how the person gauged and gauges a threat. Was the person looking at faulty evidence, or was the weighing of that evidence done incorrectly? Was it bad judgment, or was the person duped? Then, there’s the person who might say “I was in favor of removing Saddam Hussein, but not at such a high cost.” I have a great deal of difficulty with that, myself, as the cost in blood is much less than a reasonable person would have set beforehand as a worst-case scenario, and the cost in diplomatic terms is also a lot lighter than it might have been (although, as with the blood and treasure, the diplomatic cost continues to grow). The money is appalling, particularly when you look at where it’s going (if you can find it), but again not unpredictably high. I suppose my feeling is that anybody that thought at the time that the invasion was going to be cheap, bloodless and short is not a person I want in the White House.
Now, no candidate is going to declare exactly which camp she is in, and that’s probably as it should be, because (as I keep saying) the camps are shifting and overlapping, and any such declaration would be as much misleading as clarifying. Still. When somebody says that the invasion was a mistake, I’d like to know what kind of mistake (or mistakes) that person diagnoses, before I vote for that person.
Gentle Readers may recall that I finally tipped me over into the Bush-hater camp, far too late, but before the invasion, and I’m still there. If there were a legitimate threat, if there were a just cause, if there were an invasion I would otherwise be agitating for, I would not want Our Only President and his cabal of incompetents and crooks to do it, and given Hobson’s Choice, I’ll walk. But I am not a candidate. It would be a trifle distressing to me to have as a President somebody who was in the Bush-Hater camp, because that President will (presumably) not hate and mistrust his own self and his own cabal of associates (not crooks and incompetents, we hope, but we don’t know, do we?), and could well engage in a Bad Idea, even if doing so with far greater competence and honesty.
In other words, I want to vote for somebody who was smarter than I was, in hopes that we will have a President who will continue to be smarter than I was. That doesn’t seem too much to ask for, does it?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.