What have I learned from my mistakes?

Denial skills that will last a lifetime!

Victor Varconi and Elinor Fair in Cecil B. De Mille's The Volga Boatman (1926). Via.

David Brooks writes:

Suppose you had a chance to take a time machine trip back to Iraq in 1968? You could smother the infant Rafid Ahmed Alwan in his cradle, so that he'd never grow up to be the informant Curveball who made up the story about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs (actually trailer units for pasteurizing milk and generating hydrogen), which didn't convince the German agents who interrogated him but did convince Tony Blair, who didn't.

Without Curveball there would have been no Iraq War, right, because nobody in the United States ever imagined invading Iraq to overthrow its government until then—not until the slam dunk evidence of Saddam Hussein's imaginary weapons of mass destruction assembled itself spontaneously in the corridors of Langley and Dick Cheney said to himself, "My God! Apparently this man is a threat!"

Because it's just like Hitler, really.

Sure, it sounds like a good idea to kill baby Hitler and skip World War II, the Holocaust, and the millions of deaths on the Western and Eastern Fronts, but are you sure? Without World War II Vietnam would still be a French colony, American women would have remained locked out of the cash economy and forced to lounge around the house all day, and the U.S. would never have had to impose a Pax Americana (or Pax-Americana as I prefer to style it) on France and Germany, since they'd have been at peace already.

Similarly, without the Iraq War John Kerry might have been elected president in 2004, and without my Weekly Standard columns urging the war on I might never have become famous enough to score the gig replacing William Safire as the official Times neocon op-ed warmonger. So who am I to say it was a bad thing?

Because in the end history is really complicated, and thus it is unfair to ask a presidential candidate to give a simple sound-bite answer to the question "If you knew it was a mistake, would you have made it?" How could they know whether they would or not?

It's unarguably true that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, though one made not only by George W. Bush but also 72% of the American people after we'd finished persuading them that it was Saddam Hussein who sent the planes flying into the World Trade Center and Condoleezza Rice's entirely objective and accurate summary of the intelligence findings ("smoking gun!!1!!!1! mushroom cloud!!!!111!"), and possibly me to some extent, though I wouldn't say I played a significant role. The important thing isn't arguing about whether you would make the same mistake or a different one, but the totally unrelated question whether you have learned from the mistakes. Liberal opinionists seem to think learning from your mistakes means learning not to make the same mistakes a second time, but this is a very unsophisticated view.

I'd say the first big thing to learn from Bush's mistake in 2003 is that you should be skeptical of intelligence. I mean, not too skeptical, like you shouldn't suspect them of making the case they think the vice president wants them to make, because the Robb-Silberman report said they didn't, and they, like, asked.* Just a little bit skeptical.

Second, you should be humble about your ability to change other countries. Not that such an idea played any role in the decision to go to war, which was, as I have explained, totally the fault of the intelligence agencies, but just in case. The Project for a New American Century founded by Richard Cheney, I. Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, and so many others demanding the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in January 1998 had nothing to do with the way some of these men managed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein during the Bush administration.**

In taking down Saddam Hussein, did we succeed in ending another evil empire, and gradually opening up human development in Iraq and the Arab world (a question which was, one more time, utterly unrelated to our reasons for going to war, which were about nothing but WMD, WMD, and WMD***)? Yes and no, but mostly no. Iraq teaches us to be suspicious of leaders who try to force revolutionary, transformational change. So vote for Rubio, because if you don't make a mistake you'll never know whether it was a mistake or not.

*Although not very hard, as the Commission's mandate specifically ordered it not to but suggested that they "ignore... policymakers’ actions on the intelligence and the interaction between policymakers and intelligence."

The commission concedes that “there is no doubt that analysts operated in an environment shaped by intense policymaker interest,” but this formulation seems to understate the problem. Analysts are rewarded for working well with customers and for focusing on policy-relevant work. The administration was highly confident in its own analysis, and government analysts were frequently challenged to demonstrate that they could hold their own or make useful contributions to the strong personalities in the president’s team, personalities who did not hesitate to express their disagreement if not disdain for views that did not conform to their own. So, it would seem a serious shortcoming on the commission’s part not to think beyond the narrow question, “Did you ever change any language because of pressure,” to imagine the highly charged and stressful environment in which the community’s Iraq experts were working. This is not to absolve analysts from responsibility, but to question whether the commission’s own fine work will be marked by this perceived politically correct conclusion. The commission could have been bolder and more strategic in its understanding of this critical issue, even within the constraints set by its mandate.

On a more technical point, the Bush administration made the US intelligence job impossible by forcing the UNMOVIC inspection teams to leave Iraq in February 2003, at a time when Saddam Hussein was giving them full cooperation.

**Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Bellorum, in a Haaretz interview back in the second week of the Iraq invasion, when he himself was still a pro-war voice:

“It’s the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. … I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened."

***No mention of WMD in Brooks's argument, December 27 2003, with dead Michael Oakeshott, who thinks the US shouldn't have invaded Iraq:

I concede that government should be limited, prudent and conservative, but only when there is something decent to conserve. Saddam sent Iraqi society spinning off so violently, prudence became imprudent. The Middle East could not continue down its former course.... we stink at social engineering. Our government couldn't even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq — thank goodness, too, because any "plan" hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality.

I tell Oakeshott that the Americans and Iraqis are now involved in an Oakeshottian enterprise. They are muddling through, devising shambolic, ad hoc solutions to fit the concrete realities, and that we'll learn through bumbling experience.

Instead, it's all about "sorry, Michael, but sometimes heedless arrogance is just the humble way to go."

Don't miss Lemieux, and a very fine piece by Simon Maloy at Salon. And Driftglass of course. Steve M notes it's only because Brooks is a conservative that he can get away alive with answering the time-machine Hitler-killing question the way he does. Though I would add that no true liberal over the age of 14 would try it (and gives a shout-out to this page—thanks, Steve!).