On “Dove Tale” by Jonathan Chait The New Republic September 12 2005-09-30

I subscribe to the dead tree New Republic even though I live in Rome. It arrives well after the official date and about 3 weeks after it was written. I actually enjoy this, since three weeks is usually long enough for the forecasts made with arrogant certainty to be proven wrong. However, it means I don’t blog about TNR, since it is usually out of date when I get it. Jonathan Chait wrote this article on an evergreen issue, was he wrong to advocate the invasion of Iraq. I actually think quite highly of Chait, probably because I usually agree with him, so I was shocked at the level of his argument.

I think part of the problem is that I spend much (too much) time reading Atrios, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, Brad DeLong, Matthew Yglesias, KOS, the poor man, Billmon etc etc etc and so hold paid journalists to the impossibly high standard of doing their job as well as people who make it a hobby. I also think that Chait is psychologically unwilling to admit that, knowing what was known March 2003, he was wrong. Thus he resorts to pathetically obvious rhetorical tricks in his effort to refute a statement of interest only to Jonathan Chait and me “Jonathan Chait screwed up”.

www.tnr.com requires subscription and I’m enough of a bozo not to know if my print subscription gives me the right to TNR online and, if so, how to exercise that right. I will quote sparingly.

The tone of the article is pleasant. Chait does criticize the Nation and un named moderate doves, but he frankly admits that he has a lot of explaining to do and doesn’t expect to be accepted as an unbiased arbiter of the question (sad to say this disclaimer is necessary given the current standards of arrogance of columnists and bloggers).

The outline of the argument is simple. The Iraq fiasco is, indeed, a fiasco. It might be the fault of Bush and Rumsfeld, since they sent too few troops. How could
Chait have guessed that they meant it when they said they were going to send few troops ? Well yes it was obvious that they were total bozos and so an invasion to democratize Iraq would likely be a disaster but …
Well that’s all besides the point because he supported the war because of the WMD that weren’t.

Thus Chait argues that Democritization might have worked out tolerably if enough troops had been sent. He admits that this is irrelevant to the question of whether he screwed up, since you go to war with the President you have. Others have noted that the irrelevant argument about what might have been is pretty feeble even if we had had President Chait. The US military is seriously strained by Iraq as it is. Saying send more troops makes no sense if you don’t have more troops to send. The examples of successful peace keeping are in countries much smaller than Iraq. In those cases peace keepers came in after a civil war when one side essentially conceded. Also what about Somalia not to mention Haiti isn’t doing so great either. Anyway, as Chait cheerfully concedes, since he has no excuse for not understanding what the Bush administration is what maybe might have been (or maybe couldn’t have been) doesn’t matter. This raises the question of whether anyone edits the New Republic. It seems to me that Chait was writing an argument about how Iraq might have been expected to turn out fine, realised that his argument was not good, admitted it and left it in because who cares about wasted words anyway. That’s certainly the way I write for this blog, but I don’t kill trees.

Chait’s second try. He supported the war because of WMD.
1) We now know there were no WMD,
2) but there was no way he could have known that,
3) an amount of WMD consistent with the evidence in March 2003 would have justified the invasion,
4) there was no alternative to invading to get rid of it.

1 is of course true. I personally can’t throw the first stone at claim 2. I too thought there were WMD in Iraq. I considered this (and consider this) to be an excellent reason to not invade. I reconsidered my opposition to the invasion when I discovered that there were no WMD.

Point 3 is not really stated that way in Chait’s essay. I think I am being very very charitable to Chait. In fact, Chait creates a false dichotomy WMD yes or no and thus assumes (without asserting) that one had to believe either that Iraq had no WMD at all or that if things were allowed to continue going the way they were going in February 2003 Saddam Hussein would eventually obtain an atomic bomb. This is, of course, nonsense. It was possible to believe (as I did) that Iraq had gas and biological weapons but did not have an active nuclear program. Chait pretends that there is no way one can claim that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons without also claiming that Iraq had an active nuclear program.

U.S intelligence agencies … believed that Iraq still harbored biological and chemical weapons and a nuclear program. Ted Kennedy believed it. (“The biological and chemical weapons Saddam has are not new. He has possessed them for more than a decade.”)

In the quoted passage “it” stands indifferently for “biological and chemical weapons and a nuclear program” and for “biological and chemical weapons.” I can’t believe that Chait can’t understand the difference. He must be trying to trick his readers (for some mysterious reason). This is important, because he does not consider the possibility that it would have been acceptable to let Saddam Hussein keep his WMD. I admit this view was so rare that he could easily overlook the possibility, but he considers the obvious point that it was unacceptable to let Saddam have the bomb to imply that it was unacceptable to leave things as they were. He does this by not acknowledging any difference between having chemical and biological weapons and eventually getting the bomb.

Now let’s imagine that Saddam Hussein had nerve gas say. I think this means we definitely should not have invaded, since by now Zarqawi would have gotten his hands on some and used it. In contrast, we would be much safer if we didn’t invade so long as Saddam believes we will invade if and only if nerve gas which can’t be proven to have come from some place other than Iraq is used by terrorists. Saddam was deterable, terrorists operating in Iraq now are not. To me it is obvious that stores of nerve gas were a compelling argument against invasion. I made just that argument. I have never heard or read a half way decent counter argument. Chait avoids the whole issue by conflating chemical and nuclear weapons. I don’t know if this is effective rhetoric but I personally find it pathetic. The importance of the distinction has been stressed dozens of times on high traffic blogs. How can Chait hope that readers won’t notice that he is assuming it away ?

This is also very relevant to Chait’s totally dishonest discussion of inspections. Here basically his strategy is to pretend that there was no change in the amount Iraq had been inspected between March 2002 and March 2003. There was a huge difference especially with regard to the Iraqi nuclear program. Following the most invasive inspections in its history the IAEA concluded that Iraq did not have an active nuclear program. Intelligence agencies may have disagreed, but they didn’t know as much and, importantly, had no information useful to the IAEA, which makes it pretty clear that they didn’t have solid evidence. All this was reported before the invasion. The two bits of pseudo evidence for a nuclear program had both been refuted. The forged Niger dossier was known to be an obvious forgery. The fact that the Bush administration had resisted admitting this showed how little evidence they had. The aluminum tubes were obviously not gas centrifuges. The CIA continued to argue but they obviously had no expertise (one semi expert who it later turned out made false claims about the thickness of tubes in a design of a centrifuge that is was not willing or able to read an engineering diagram). The view of the IAEA and the energy department were publicly known. By March 2003 a reasonable person might conclude that Iraq didn’t have an active nuclear program. Another reasonable person might conclude that more inspections were needed to be sure. No reasonable person could conclude that it was necessary to invade Iraq or else Saddam Hussein would get the bomb. Chait simply ignores all the evidence which was available before the invasion. This combines his two feeble tricks eliding the difference between chemical and nuclear and eliding the difference between 2002 and 2003.

On chemical and biological weapons, Chait attempts to convince us to ignore the point that things change.

As Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, reported in January 2003, "Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it.”

Subsequently, Iraq offered a greater degree of cooperation.

Subsequently Chait still advocated invading. Chaits attempt to enlist Blix in his defence is especially absurd. Note that “appears” is a rather weak word to let loose the dogs of war. More importantly, by March Blix was saying that he needed more time to complete his mission “months not weeks or years” (quoting from memory). Now how could Blix be confident that he could complete his mission ? He certainly couldn’t be confident that he would find WMD. He clearly said he was months away from declaring Iraq WMD free unless inspectors found WMD during those months. Chait can claim that he had no way of knowing that Blix knew what he was talking about, but he must have recognised that Blix knew more than Chait did. Blix’s willingness to speculate about Iraq’s apparent non acceptance, should have made it clear that Blix had not been determined to clear Iraq in January 2001, the fact that he asked for more time in March after accusing Iraq based on essentially nothing in January should have convinced Chait (and me).

Chait also tries to argue that Saddam didn’t “openly” disarm and that, therefore, he called the security councils bluff. This is little better than Bush claiming that he didn’t disarm. Since Iraq didn’t have banned weapons or weapons programs it did clearly disarm. Chait claims that Saddam Hussein is responsible for the war because, although he disarmed he didn’t do so “openly”. This claim too is absurd. Recall the inspections of Iraq were the most invasive arms inspections in world history. No one has disarmed more openly than Saddam Hussein. It is true that, before, 2003 he made Iraq suffer a lot in order to hide the fact that he had nothing to hide, but by March 2003 his behavior in the face of inspections had changed completely and the inspectors said so. Given what we know now, it is clear that Saddam Hussein was doing everything he could to convince the world that he had disarmed. Chait simply asserts otherwise essentially pretending that anything that was true in 2002 must also be true in 2003.

Chait's specific complaints about Iraq’s belated openness about its disarmament are also absurd. Iraq had to be invaded because they did not keep complete records (I sure hope the IRS never audits Chait)

A certain revisionism has taken root in the last couple of years as to just what those inspetions achieved. As most liberals now recall it, Saddam was cooperating with the inspectors, yet Bush short-circuited the process with a precipitous invasion. Nothing of the sort happened. Saddam failed to provide a complete accounting of what had happened to Iraq’s unconventional weapons, denied the inspectors private interviews with scientists and hid crucial documents in private homes.

This is a very short list of very minor misdeeds to be used to justify an invasion. Also, the Iraq Survey Group has not provided a complete accounting of what had happened to Iraq’s unconventional weapons. Such a complete accounting can not be provided since records have been destroyed. Saddam could not provide records to the inspectors if he didn’t have them. The demand for a complete accounting (just like the demand to surrender WMD) could not be satisfied even by a dictator terrified into every effort to comply. Chait insists on pretending that Saddam was willfully witholding information which we now know was not in Iraq. This is relatively trivial but just as irrational as Bush’s insistence months after the invasion that WMD must be in Iraq. Chait must have attempted to provide a complete accounting for something sometime ? He must know that it is possible to fail while making a good faith attempt to do so, and I’m pretty sure his expence account is small compared to Iraq’s WMD program.

I believe the second claim is simply false, or rather it refers to an initial Iraqi position which they abandoned before the invasion. The third claim seems exagerated to me, since I know only of the centrifuge design buried under a rose bush. That would be (broadly speaking) a private home not private homes. There is no way this action could have had any effect on Chait’s beliefs about Saddam Hussein nor did it have any effect on the public statements of the arms inspectors, thus it does not explain in anyway his stubborn refusal in 2003 to understand that he had based his argument for invasion on false beliefs about Iraqi WMD and WMD programs.

I’d say the problem is that, once Chait had argued for invasion and made assertions about WMD in that argument, he was psychologically unable to revise his beliefs in the light of new evidence. I think the rhetorical tricks about time and nuclear vs chemical reflect honest errors made in 2003. Unfortunately, the article proves that Chait still suffers from a pathological unwillingness to admit his mistakes and a need to ignore evidence if it proves that Jonathan Chait screwed up.

Of course this is par for the course among pundits. For some stupid reason I thought that Chait was different. I recognise my error.