Along with the rest of the neocon crew, Andrew Bolt is blaming the collapse of the Iraqi state on Obama’s withdrawal of US troops in 2011. Exactly how Obama was supposed to repudiate an agreement signed by Bush, and maintain an occupation force against the wishes of the Iraqi government (he tried, but failed to negotiate an extension) is not explained. But, no matter.
At least Bolt and the rest warned us that Iraq was still too fragile to be left on its own, and that an indefinite occupation was needed. Well not exactly. Here he is in 2009, gloating over the fact that Obama was going slow on withdrawal and thereby disappointing his supporters. That could be read either way, I guess, but there’s no warning that Bush’s timetable needed changing.
More striking is this piece from 2007, claiming that “the war has been won“. Here’s what he has to say about future prospects
Violence is falling fast. Al Qaida has been crippled.
The Shiites, Kurds and Marsh Arabs no longer face genocide.
What’s more, the country has stayed unified. The majority now rules.
Despite that, minority Sunni leaders are co-operating in government with Shiite ones.
There is no civil war. The Kurds have not broken away. Iran has not turned Iraq into its puppet.
And the country’s institutions are getting stronger. The Iraqi army is now at full strength, at least in numbers.
The country has a vigorous media. A democratic constitution has been adopted and backed by a popular vote.
Election after election has Iraqis turning up in their millions.
Add it all up. Iraq not only remains a democracy, but shows no sign of collapse.
If I were an American reading that, I would have said it was time to bring the boys and girls home, as Bush agreed to do in October 2008.
John Quiggin 
Its just a question of who you dislike most amongst all the people who said silly things, or at least more than the could possibly know (even if they had been right) on the Iraq war. Start with Kevin Rudd and Richard Butler on WMDs!
Bolt probably went to hear General Jim Molan [?m] (who seems to have done an excellent job keeping the peace – appointed by the US C-in-C during the first elections).
He would have given a very upbeat account of American staff planning and forces like the Rangers. And given the success, for a while, of getting Sunnis to resist the insurgents, and the first glimmerings of conventional coalition building in politics there was something for outside optimists who felt compelled to express opinions to go on.
But I side entirely with the realists. If the US and the egregious Tony Blair had, in some way out hypothetical, known what they were about and, contrary to fact, had the economic and military strength and political stamina [I’m plagiarising here a shrewdly dispassionate Australian politician at the time] the enterprise might have been supportable. Similar realism saw that the one person who really needed EVERYONE to believe in the WMDs was Saddam Hussein! (OK not Hans Blix).
Howard’s crime was not to really support the American ally as he needed to in order to impress. We lost one soldier in Iraq. He shot himself in his bunk room.
As one of the 200,000 people who marched in Melbourne in 2003 against this war, what can I say? It was a crap idea then, it still is.
War is a crap idea, but this one was a particularly crap idea. What do we have an international criminal court for, if not the Saddam Husseins of this world?
Please, no links to News Ltd. Ever.
It lends undeserved credibility (and lucrative ‘clicks’), even when being used to criticise or illustrate their – ubiquitous – lies, distortions and fabrications.
Linking to other websites is an accepted courtesy amongst civilised people, but one that News Ltd doesn’t deserve – being neither civilised nor extending that courtesy unless they wish to send flying attack monkeys who might lose their way if forced to use a search engine.
Didn’t JQ have such a policy position once?
Someone I knew used to say a quote which went something like “it gives me sharp, but sweet delight/to think how often I was right/ how often, and alas, how long/ the world persists in being wrong”
I can’t find it anywhere! Does anyone know it? It sounds like Ogden Nash maybe.
A line from Hunter at Daily Kos is the best summary I’ve read so far of the right’s reaction to this:
You can’t even mock that—the smugness, the self-satisfaction, the absolute assurance that blowing the holy hell out of a country entirely unrelated to 9/11 because Suck On This was a genius plan that would never, ever go wrong or have longer-term consequences.
Humans have been going to war longer than we’ve been eating food, and yet the entirely predictable outcome of terrible warfare decisions always comes as a surprise to those who made them.
@Megan
I don’t link to current News Corp publications, but if I’m making an archival point like this, I think it’s necessary to document the quote and show it’s not out of context
@Midrash
No, your initial statement is incorrect: it is not just a question of who you dislike most amongst all the people who said silly things.
one outcome of this is that the obama administration will almost certainly approve the keystone pipeline in the name of energy security. -a.v.
@J-D
So what is your criterion for choosing for ridicule a selection of a person’s erroneous statements about the Iraq war rather than any of the many other erroneous utterances or writings of thousands of people, many much weightier than Bolt, and politically right across the conventional left-right spectrum?
@John Quiggin
I respectfully disagree and restate my original point.
If there was ever an accusation or argument presented about accuracy or context, that could be dealt with on its own merits.
News Ltd has quite an acuity with its memory hole when it likes, anyway. So a simple “cut’n’paste” into a document kept safely with a copy of the original link would be even better protection in case of dispute.
@Val
Thanks for the nice quote. Strange that none of the combination of words I’ve tried in Google discovers a source. Please let us know if you find where it’s from. Likewise the origins of this which you might enjoy:
Oh what a tangle web we weave
When once we practise to deceive [traditional from somewhere]
But you can handle it with ease
When you have practised it for years
..tangled web….
Midrash is rehearsing an argument that’s going to become annoyingly common, which is, “Hey, this lefty and this lefty and this lefty also supported the invasion, so it was bad judgement and bad luck all round. Let’s stop trying to place blame”.
It’s convenient, because by shouting about Kevin Rudd and Christopher Hitchens non-stop, you can try to obscure the fact that almost the entire progressive movement accurately predicted this outcome, while almost the entire conservative movement went in without a second thought.
While not knowing much about Iraq, it does seem that allowing the Syrian conflict to fester has had a role in the rise of ISIS.
have you guys read the guardian. iran has sent troops in to fight isis with apparent usa support. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/14/iran-iraq-isis-fight-militants-nouri-maliki -a.v.
Sure the war could have been “won” but the invasion opened the Pandora’s Box of sectarian strife. There are people whose insight on Mid East policy dictates that they are a “must read” but Bolt isn’t one of them.
@John Quiggin
Perhaps you could consider what I’ve encouraged other commentators do, which is to use archive.today or Webcite to archive the pages. It’s useful for when tracks are later attemtped to be hidden, as well as preventing unnecessary counts being handed over to undesirable sites.
Rupert Murdoch is, arguably, directly responsible for the deaths of about 1 million Iraqis under the US/UK/Aus illegal invasion.
Without his propaganda it probably wouldn’t have happened.
Without his near monopoly control of our news media, it almost certainly wouldn’t have happened.
This is not just Bush/Blair/Howard’s war, but far more importantly Rupert Murdoch’s.
The Nazi propagandists were also tried at Nuremburg. Bolt and Murdoch should remember that.
Further to Megan’s and Bernard J’s comments, which I support, I don’t think the ‘do not link’ site has been mentioned?
It allows you to cite internet locations without increasing ‘clicks’ for them.
http://Www.donotlink.com
@Midrash
I don’t know the reason John Quiggin chose Andrew Bolt’s statements over others as the target of his ridicule. Maybe it is just because he dislikes Andrew Bolt more. Is that a bad reason? It seems like an adequate reason to me. I can’t think of any reason why John Quiggin should not dislike Andrew Bolt.
If you were choosing somebody’s statements about the Iraq war as a target for ridicule, what would be your criterion of choice?
@Midrash
‘Oh what a tangled web we weave
‘When first we practise to deceive’
is not a traditional anonymous quotation, but comes from Walter Scott’s Marmion.
Your second couplet I do not recognise, but JR Pope wrote in A Word Of Encouragement
‘But when we’ve practised quite a while
‘How vastly we improve our style’
@Megan
More precisely, Hans Fritzsche, head of the radio division of the Propaganda Ministry, was a defendant at the trial of major German war criminals, but was acquitted, He was regarded by commentators as the least important of the defendants and there was speculation that the only reason he had been included in the indictment was because the head of the Ministry as a whole (Joseph Goebbels) was already dead. However, if Goebbels had still been alive, it is hard to see how he could have escaped indictment, conviction, and execution.
Two points:
First, a question: where did Andrew Bolt stand on the Iraqi Surge/”Sunni Awakening” strategy? It has entered mythology as a magnificent success, building David Petraeus’ reputation as the military genius man-on-a-horse problem solver that he’s been dining out on for the last eight years. And yet, in large part, that strategy is responsible for the effectiveness of the recent Sunni offensive. When you bribe people not to shoot you, they will perhaps start against once you stop paying them, particularly if you’re bribing them with firearms.
Secondly: I would like to see the two major strategic minds of our generation, Bob Brown and Andrew Bartlett, on the Sunday shows to discuss these new developments. This might seem like a strange choice, but it isn’t if we accept that a Strategic Mind must 1) have parliamentary experience and 2) not be a complete moron. Literally everyone else, it seems to me, totally whiffed Iraq 2, invalidating their views on the Middle East forever. Throw Andrew Wilkie in for fun. Why talk to anyone else?
The publisher of Der Sturmer, Julius Streicher, was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Sorry. Of course you’re right about that.
I thought of Fritzsche first because he did hold an official post at the Propaganda Ministry during the war, whereas Streicher held no official post during the war.
I could say a good deal more about Streicher’s status, but it doesn’t seem worth it (although I am intrigued by having just read on Wikipedia that Fritzsche’s case was helped at Nuremberg by evidence of his having twice tried to stop publication of Streicher’s newspaper).
I will, however, point out that even if we describe Streicher as ‘a Nazi propagandist’, we can’t describe him as ‘the Nazi propagandists’.
@Lt. Fred
Only people with parliamentary experience qualify for consideration as ‘strategic minds’?
So not John Monash, for example? (I hesitate to nominate a contemporary equivalent.)
@J-D
If I said: “today is Sunday” I fully expect that you would point out that, at this very moment, it is Saturday in certain places.
I neither know nor care what makes you this way.
In 1921 Streicher joined the Nazi party. He was one of Hitler’s closest confidantes and held several high offices. In 1940, under pressure from other sections of the Nazi organisation (over his excesses) he was stripped of office but remained close to Hitler.
He was one of “the Nazi propagandists”.
Why should JQ deal with Bolt’s record rather than anyone else’s?
Well, Bolt is one of the loudest mouths for the proposition that, somehow, Obama is responsible for current events in Iraq. He isn’t the only one: but he is one of the most favoured by our current Commonwealth government.
And as JQ shows his past claims about Iraq are comprehensively inconsistent with saying, now, that Obama was wrong to implement his predecessor’s withdrawal strategy.
If Abbott commits Australian troops to renewed intervention in Iraq he will do so with Bolt’s cover: and of course with Murdoch’s. Now is a good time to remind people of how threadbare that cover is.
@Midrash
Always thought the tangled web aphorism was Walter Scott.
So it was …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmion_(poem)
@Megan
I don’t know what makes you the way you are either, so we’re even there. There is a distinction, though, in that I am curious about what makes you the way you are. There are plenty of things I am much more curious about, though.
Bolt the Dolt! It is amazing he can be so wrong and yet feel no shame. Right from the start of GW2 I said the WMD accusation was trumped up and that the invasion would be a costly failure. Right on both counts! Actually, one did not have to be particularly clever or prescient to make such predictions. It was all very obvious (the propaganda and the coming debacle) from day 1.
If otherwise intelligent people (not Dolt tho as Dolt is not intelligent) could not see the obvious it must have been ideology blinding them.
Is a midrash where I think it is?
War criminal Tony Blair is on script:
He is still dangerous and deluded.
I guess you might include a general on the panel, @J-D though our only notable one is currently obliged not to give his opinion on things. Jim Molan is disqualified under section B.
@J-D
@Fran Barlow
Thanks to both for reminding me of Scott. I just tossed in “traditional” when I sensed that someone might come back and point out unnecessarily that the first two lines didn’t need my question.
And thank you for a better pair of additional lines. The false rhyme of “ease” and “years” has always grated. (I’m told BTW that they
are known as “the Vice-Chancellor’s corollary”.
@Sancho
As I didn’t support the Bush-Blair folly (but quite admired Howard for getting only one soldier killed – and him by his own hand) I accept that many people got all sorts of things wrong and your “progressives” were not necessarily on the right side for reasons that could be regarded as well-informed rather than based on an ideology which gets things right sometimes – like the clock that is stopped at 2300 hours. As to the “conservative movement” if you just mean the neo-cons there is no argument, but you would have to argue the case for tarring all articulate people of conservative disposition with that brush. Consider in America for example the founders of The American Conservative and in Australia the editor of The Spectator (Australia) Tom Switzer.
‘Midrash’ means a traditional Jewish story expanding on something from the (Jewish) Bible, or a compilation of such stories.
@Ikonoclast
It’s a question I’ve certainly wondered about: I knew plenty of very intelligent people who bought Iraq 2, and yeah I think worldview is definitely a part, although the same people (and one in particular) are also intelligent enough to think outside their worldview in very surprising and encouraging ways.
And so I point the finger squarely at the media. And at the media habits of otherwise intelligent people. If you have to make a judgment about an important issue such as a war being drummed up, you will fare very poorly if your only source of “evidence” informing that judgment is the corporate media (especially the Murdoch media in Australia obviously). Doesn’t matter how smart you are, your best chance at a good judgment is dumb luck with such a terrible base of information. Same goes for Climate Change matters – the very same people I have in mind are wont to cite detailed analysis they read in The Australian to argue sea levels rising are no danger – and when I ask “OK but what did the scientists involved have to say in response to those points” a sudden embarrassed silence ensues. The fact is I think it’s probably very hard work to stay abreast of things and your favourite periodical probably provides a nice way to stop thinking so hard and just believe something comfortable.
@Tim Niven
I stopped buying newspapers years ago. I watch a bit of TV news but I am highly sceptical of everything I hear on the TV news. I read several alternative news sources and comment sources on the internet. It really isn’t that hard to escape the MSM and get other news.
Whenever a politician, of any stripe, talks on any news, I ignore him/her. I simply assume they are ALWAYS lying or spouting utter unfounded nonsense . I would say that 99% of the time this turns out to be correct.
@J-D
I think this was an attempt at humour, quite a successful one if you ask me.
@Ikonoclast
I’m glad you don’t support the Murdochracy. Certainly scepticism is a good starting point – as for wars, it’s worth bearing in mind the typical chasm between the reasons told to the public and the real reasons. Still, I think sometimes in the corporate media in the straight news sections there is important information worth catching. But the commentary is truly bizarre, a genuine cultural curiosity – but still worth taking in their point of view if only to know what it is. As John Mill said, if you only know your side of the argument you don’t know much of that.
Sadly the fact is many people still do get their infotainment diet from the corporate media. Which is of course one good reason for John to be targeting Blot (as someone already mentioned). And I think if people of a less warm and fuzzy “we’re the good guys” worldview can be cajoling and provide some cognitive dissonance to the kinds of intelligent and well-meaning people who don’t try so hard to inform themselves about these matters, then we can have an impact on them, slowly and gradually however. So thanks again, John.
“it does seem that allowing the Syrian conflict to fester has had a role in the rise of ISIS”
This is the kind of profound observation that has become pervasive on anti-Obama websites. The unspoken premise is that Obama could somehow have ended “the Syrian conflict” (perhaps by using some of his Kenyan witch-doctoring skills); being a slackarse he “allowed the conflict to fester” (i.e. he didn’t wave a magic wand to end a civil war on the other side of the world) and thus he is responsible for … well everything bad, basically.
The amazing thing is that conservatives themselves have no shared ideas about foreign policy. None. They flatly contradict each other constantly. For example the Syrian civil war that Brookes refers to has generated conservative demands for everything from “keep a balance of power so the savages all kill each other” to “support the good rebels but not the bad ones” to “will nobody think of the Christians?” (whose only protector in Syria happens to be Assad). Yet remarkably, they don’t seem to feel that this is a problem. Total policy incoherence on their own part does not, apparently, detract from from the point that whatever Obama did, is doing or might possibly do at some time in the future, it’s wrong wrong wrong.
href=”#comment-236029″>@John Brookes
That ‘s some algorithm that catches us out before JQ releases our precious prose on the wider world. I have a post awaiting moderation which starts off with @ J-D and @ Fran Barlow and expresses thanks for the literary heads-up. Then @ Sancho in the same post I refer to the Bush-Blair folly. Oh dear!
@Midrash
For a genius, you’re pretty slow on the uptake.
Don’t put any links in your comment and never try to reply to more than one comment at a time.
And don’t forget to wipe.
@Megan
I’m not sure if he’s still dangerous but Tony Blair sounded very deluded this morning as I listened to him on CBC radio this morning.
In contrast there was an interview on CBC radio some time this week with two retired US Army officers (One a Lt. General who, it sounded like, commanded the US pull-out from Iraq in 2011 and a Colonel who was David Pretarous’ (sp?) Operations officer.
In the final roundup the Colonel described the original Iraqi invasion as a strategic disaster and the 2011 pull-out as a strategic disaster. hummn.
As Megan pointed out in earlier threads, the US ran arms to the Syrian rebels. Now they are surprised when insurgents bristling with arms invade north Iraq? The bottom line here is that Iraq’s borders were imposed by Britain, France and Italy in 1920 via the League of Nations when the Ottoman Empire was divided by the Treaty of Sèvres. Like most of the rest of the Middle East borders, these borders are an artifact of colonial history.
These countries are not stable or coalesced countries in the sense of being coherent polities united by history, language, common ties and common purpose. Of course, it is difficult to define what a “natural” country is. But the proof is in the pudding. If you can hold it together peacefully for a long time, say a century, without outside interference, even after a civil war, then it probably is a country.
The West should stop interfering in the Middle East and stop running guns there. Of course, it won’t. There are two issues which guarantee the West will keep interfering, oil and Israel. One wonders what happens when the oil substantially runs out. Most liekely the Middle East will become a forgotten backwater. If fundamentalist religion (anti-education and anti-science) takes hold this will accelerate the decline of the Middle East back to medieval conditions.
> And at the media habits of otherwise intelligent people.
Proof of the pudding here is in making the right decisions given the information to hand. The key facts — the ever-shifting reasons, the understaffing of the invasion, the poor post-invasion planning, blix’s inability to find any hint of wmds, etc — were not unreported.
At the end of the day, if you need the important facts pointed out to you explicitly it’s not you doing the thinking, really. Join-the-dots isn’t drawing.
@jrkrideau
The latter was probably Scowcroft.
@Collin Street
A very good point, thanks.
Although the media still have ways of presenting the facts in a biased way – which seem to exploit our inherent cognitive deficiencies when we’re being lazy – which it seems we often are.
I’ve been caught out before reading stuff I’m inclined to agree with and not being switched on enough. And I hate that experience and try to do better. And so I find the best cure is a broad range of info for a rich source of competing claims. But I feat I may be unusual.
Excuse diversion but Prof Q if you are reading this I wonder if we could have another Monday message board? I have just become aware of a previous comment by Midrash (held up in moderation, on a thread now closed), to which I’d like to respond, not to get into a stoush with Midrash, but because it raises some interesting questions.
Basically Midrash accused me and some others of being lonely souls who just like to go on the internet to express our inferior opinions. However I think there are much more complex and interesting issues behind this, some of which were recently discussed in a post on Crooked Timber http://crookedtimber.org/2014/06/14/my-dirty-little-secret-i-ride-the-rails-to-read/
The question discussed there, of whether participating on the net conflicts with or reduces our capacity for sustained solitary pursuits like reading (or writing), is very interesting I think, and I wondered if others here also had thoughts on it. (I’m aware in suggesting this that’s it’s also another opportunity for me to divert myself from my thesis, so maybe it’s better for me if Prof Q doesn’t see this! Only I was hoping it might be therapeutic to discuss the problem with others.)