Matt provides some useful quotes taking on Paul Berman's attempt to claim that he was contemporaneously against the Iraq War. Perhaps even more instructive is this one from another post in the Slate symposium. After conceding that mistakes were made by the leaders of the war, he turns to another enemy:
But some of the blame falls as well on the anti-Bush naifs who pretend not to hear when anyone speaks about the larger reasons and goals—the people who pretend that WMD and non-existent conspiracies were the only reasons for war and pretend that the only serious goals were the arrests of a couple of men, or the achieving of a magical utopia tomorrow, and pretend that if war has still not ended, we have gotten nowhere at all. It's all too true that better leaders could have made better plans, and the French and the Germans and the United Nations could help even now, if only they would. But it ought not to be so hard to see that, even so, the prospects of the totalitarian movement are looking a lot less healthy today than they did on Sept. 10, 2001 and the prospects of Muslim liberalism are looking up, somewhat.
So if I understand the argument here, Berman is saying that 1) the war has, on balance, been a good thing (the prospects of the totalitarian movement are looking a lot less healthy), 2) the administration did in some measure support Berman's strategic goals and anti-war liberals simply refuse to acknowledge this, and 3) to the extent that the war, while still good, has been less good than expected the fault lies largely with liberals who, unlike Berman, fail to see the value in the war. (As is often the case with Berman's arguments about Iraq, the causal chain here seems to be missing a few links; if more liberals had foolishly supported the Iraq war or at least attributed better motives to the Bush administration, this would have done what exactly to facilitate a stable liberal democracy in Iraq?) And then there's concluding sentence: "In Iraq as in Afghanistan, a liberal war is going on -- liberal in the philosophical sense, meaning liberty." If Berman was opposed to the war and thought it was going badly, this argument is...strange. Either Berman supported the war, or for a brief period in 2004 repudiated liberal interventionism.
The other thing to say is that I think it's entirely possible that many members of the Bush administration did in some measure share Berman's conviction that stateless Islamic terrorists, different Islamic dictatorships, and secular dictatorships were all part of a common "Islamic totalitarianism" that posed an existential threat comparable to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Since this underlying theory is both transparently erroneous and neither here nor there in terms of the Bush administration's ability to create a liberal state ex nihilo in Iraq, I don't find this terribly comforting.
--Scott Lemieux
