[Note to readers: This post was originally called "Conservative vs. Liberal Journalists." I decided to change the title, since the old heading was pulling in people who were expecting something else, e.g., lists of conservative and liberal journalists.]
I've more or less stopped reading The National Review and The Weekly Standard. Months ago, as the situation in Iraq began to deteriorate, as the Bush tax cuts failed to create adequate job growth, and as the election campaign absorbed more press attention, many conservative journalists, for these two magazines and other publications as well, defaulted to full shill mode. There are some exceptions, of course, but not enough to make me a regular reader of the conservative media again anytime soon.
This is unfortunate. Although I'm a yellow dog Democrat, I've long been thoroughly unenthusiastic about the Democratic party. I keep voting for Democrats only because Republicans care even less about the things that most concern me. But I was willing to read as broadly as I could manage because conservative writers sometimes have more of interest to say on some of the things that concern me than do liberal writers. On military matters, for example, there tend to be many more useful conservative commentators than liberal ones.
I apologize for the simplifications of the conservative/liberal juxtaposition that I've just employed — and, unfortunately, will continue to employ, for lack of a better alternative — but it can't be helped. We need some sort of shorthand for these discussions, and the conservative/liberal dichotomy is the coin of the realm in these matters.
Even when conservative journalists try to address any of Bush's many failings as a President, taking the time to read their work is usually a waste of time.
Case in point: Jonah Goldberg recently published "Good Enough" — a column admitting, on the one hand, that Bush has made mistakes in Iraq, but asserting, on the other hand, that Iraq would have been a big mess even if Bush hadn't been the one making the mistakes. Thus, Goldberg concludes, as the title of his column indicates, that things are good enough in Iraq. That is, I guess, he means to say that things are as good as could have been expected.
Goldberg is certainly right in one respect. Iraq would have been some sort of mess at this point after an invasion intended to overthrow the Hussein regime. That was only to be expected. But Goldberg means to offer this easy insight as an excuse for Bush's mistakes. That is, Goldberg refuses to see Bush's mistakes for the failures that they are.
It's not the advantage of hindsight to say that it was wildly naïve to think that an ethnically and religiously divided society that had suffered decades of brutal, tyrannical government could suddenly, in a period of only a year and a half, become a functioning democracy.
Here's why anyone who was paying attention could have easily known that Iraq was likely to become a mess:
A cursory glance at any textbook history of Islam tells us the following: (1) Shiites and Sunnis have trouble getting along.
You and I don't have to understand the details of their disputes, which go back to the beginnings of Islam, to know that proposition (1) is true. We might not even begin to understand their many divisions, but we know that we should add their mutual enmity to our political calculations.
A cursory glance at Kurdish history tells us the following: (2) Kurds have routinely suffered at the hands of the non-Kurdish governments that have ruled over them.
Consequently, we understand Kurdish reluctance to submit to non-Kurdish authority, which is especially true in Iraq, seeing that the Kurds in northern Iraq have enjoyed self-rule for over a decade and begun to build a real democracy.
Finally, here's a rule of thumb about politics that even freshman students of political science know: (3) Unless non-homogeneous, non-democratic societies are ruled by a strong, centralized power of some sort, political vacuums, especially if they occur suddenly, tend to result in factional violence.
If we apply these three straightforward propositions to the post-invasion situation in Iraq, what do we get? Civil war. In short, it was reasonable to expect that civil war would be a likely outcome of the invasion of Iraq.
Was civil war inevitable? I can't say, but no one can. Certainly, however, the Bush administration failed to take the necessary steps to make civil war less likely. We never adequately filled the power vacuum that resulted after the Hussein regime was destroyed.
The invading powers — primarily, of course, the United States — failed to impose order and stability throughout Iraq. All of the consequences of that failure have encouraged the breakdown of security, the painfully slow process of reconstruction, and the increasing unpopularity of the interim Iraqi government.
Iraqi security forces, hastily trained and inadequately armed, have not performed with much distinction prior to or after the transfer of sovereignty nearly three months ago. Why? Well, at least for the following reason: People usually aren't willing to die for an unpopular government. Consequently, no one should be surprised that government security forces aren't winning the war against insurgents.
A people fractured along religious and ethnic lines will take sides in accordance with those divisions, when the alternative is siding with an unpopular, ineffective government. Civil war thus becomes more likely.
Can we re-take the initiative and secure the country? That is, can we, as it were, begin again? Let's leave aside whether or not the American people will tolerate the casualties required for this task. Renewed efforts to secure Iraq will obviously prolong our presence in the country.
But lengthy efforts to secure the country are likely to be counter-productive. Why? If we factor in the religious dimension of the occupation — non-Muslim powers occupying a Muslim country — that too many commentators, both conservative and liberal, wilfully ignore, we find ourselves facing an occupied people who are anxious about their faith and thus unlikely to tolerate occupation for very long. And they've no good reason to believe that this time around we'll get things right. Hence their already expressed desire for us to leave.
Why should we think that additional military operations, even if successful against the insurgents in the short run, will lead to greater stability in the long run? We'll have to kill many Iraqis to put down the insurgents, but doing so will surely increase hostility towards us and the interim Iraqi government, which will just give more Iraqis cause to fight as insurgents.
Now let's go back to Goldberg's column. Yes, Iraq is a mess. Goldberg is right about that. Even honest conservatives can admit this and preserve their self-respect. But look at some of Goldberg's individual claims:
"4. It was a miscalculation in retrospect not to keep the Iraqi army on the payroll and confine them to their barracks."
No, it was a predictable miscalculation. Everything was in place for this decision to lead to further violence and instability: The occupying powers hadn't secured the country, and there was no Iraqi force capable of replacing the Iraqi army and taking over the task of securing the country. Consequently, the resulting power vacuum was filled by violence. No one should have been surprised.
"5. Whatever the truth of the Chalabi weirdness, the notion that he would or could be the first president of a Democratic Iraq now appears naïve."
The belief that Chalabi could ever have been the elected president of Iraq was more than naïve. It was foolish to the point of being downright hallucinatory. From the very beginning of the whole Iraq enterprise, we knew that he had next to no supporters inside of the country.
How could Chalabi have had significant popular support? He was an exile propped up by the U.S. government. That's hardly the surest route to domestic popularity in an Islamic country. Nor could he have acquired significant support after the invasion. Anyone who bothered to pay attention knew, for example, that Sistani, the Shiite cleric, was vastly more popular than an exile like Chalabi, and would remain so. Chalabi never had a chance. He would have had to have been installed as president.
"6. Abu Ghraib was, at minimum, a preventable public-relations disaster."
We know that the Red Cross complained for months and months about the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Hit this link and scroll down to my early posts about Iraq. You'll see, among other things, that Colin Powell publically stated that he had relayed Red Cross complaints to President Bush, although not all of the details of those complaints. The President, as we know, isn't a detail man. But the big picture doesn't seem to have engaged him, either.
Anything that can be covered up is, at minimum, a preventable public-relations disaster. Watergate comes to mind. If that piece of tape hadn't been on that door, the security guard would never have called the police, and, ultimately, Nixon would never have had to resign. You and I would never have heard of Watergate. An important bit of moral odiousness would have gone undiscovered. That's a comforting thought, isn't it?
Plenty of Iraqis knew what was going on at Abu Ghraib, and more were certain to find out as their friends and relatives emerged with dark tales to tell. We can say, along with Goldberg, if only for the sake of argument, that we could have somehow prevented revelations of torture from reaching the American public and the world at large. That would have been a good thing? For whom? Such behavior is much less likely now on account of Goldberg's so-called public-relations disaster. That's a good thing.
"10. Bush has not done a very good job of communicating with the American people when it comes to the progress of the war."
Well, he's had trouble with this recently, hasn't he? Why? Because his campaign refuses to admit that things are going badly in Iraq. In that sense, I guess, you could say that he hasn't done a very good job communicating the progress of the war to the American war.
But even if Bush were running a truthful campaign, what recent progress could he report? None that comes to mind at the moment. That's why he has to evade the truth with high-sounding, empty talk about resolution, staying the course, and the like.
If Goldberg's is the sort of column that we can expect from a conservative journalist who is trying to do more than shill for Bush, then from now on you'll have to count me out when it comes to reading such stuff. The fiasco that Iraq is becoming was, as I showed above, perfectly predictable. We don't need the advantage of hindsight to know that the war in Iraq was likely to end in tears.
To be fair, however, I should add that I supported the decision to overthrow the Hussein regime, even though I believed that civil war was likely to be the eventual outcome. I hope that I'm wrong, but I came to the conclusion that the only way to let the Iraqi people out of their torture chamber was to invade the country and risk a likely civil war.
After some deliberation I concluded that the risk was worthwhile. I still think so. Iraq was never going to make any sort of political progress as long as the Hussein regime was in power. The price of progress was the potential for civil war. It's preferable to live in the fearful circumstances of civil war, which contain the possibility of a better future, than to live in terror of a knock on the door in the middle of an endless night.
Conservative journalists, for the most part, will never admit that they should have known that the invasion carried risks that neither they nor Bush ever explained to the American people. Perhaps some of them believed as I did, but if they did, they kept silent out of a misguided sense of loyalty to the President. But that's what happens when a concern for the truth isn't paramount.
I've slowly come to the following belief. I'll put it in the form of an exaggeration that I can never actually hope to prove, but which I think expresses a nugget of real truth: Conservative journalists are Republicans first, journalists second; liberal journalists are journalists first, Democrats second.
If a Democratic President had spent four years doing what Bush has done, conservative journalists would be tearing thick strips off his hide around the clock, as would liberal journalists, though to a slightly lesser extent and somewhat more politely. Clinton took his share of pounding from the liberal media, as did Gore in the 2000 campaign. That the conservative media are so soft on Bush, despite his glaring failures, indicates that, for them, loyalty to the Republican cause trumps everything else — even the good of the country.
