A while ago, I discussed the idea that the forthcoming US election would be a good one for the Democrats to lose, eventually reaching the conclusion that the damage that would be caused by four more years of Bush would offset any political benefits from finally discrediting the Republicans.

Now Niall Ferguson looks at the same question from the other side. Like me[1], he thinks this would be a good election for either party to lose. But, since he’s taking the Republican side of the debate, the damage that a second Bush term would cause is an argument in favor of his case. He concludes

moderate Republicans today may justly wonder if a second Bush term is really in their best interests. Might four years of Kerry not be preferable to eight or more years of really effective Democratic leadership?

fn1. Though not for exactly the same reasons. He puts more weight on criticisms of Kerry than I think can be justified, and less on the extent to which painful economic adjustments are already inevitable.

The meeting of the Iraqi National Conference has wound up in Baghdad, leaving, from the limited reports available, a very mixed record. Given the series of disasters we’ve seen in the last eighteen months or so, a mixed record is certainly better than the par outcome of total failure.

It was certainly good that the gathering was held at all, and appears to have encompassed a much broader and more representative sample of Iraqi opinion than anything of the kind held since the overthrow of Saddam (or, of course, while Saddam and his Baathist predecessors were in power). This report on the televised proceedings,at Healing Iraq gives an idea of what it was like.

On the other hand, the supposed purpose of the Conference, to elect an advisory council of 100 members to oversee the Allawi government, degenerated into farce. It appears that the Conference was presented with a slate of 81 members agreed by the big parties and a US-imposed decision that 19 members of the old IGC (originally 20, but Chalabhi was excluded after falling from grace). In the absence of any alternative, this slate was accepted by default.

But the biggest success (still not a sure thing, but promising) was the intervention of the Conference in the Najaf crisis, demanding that the assault by the US and the interim government cease and that Sadr withdraw from Najaf, disband his militia and enter the political process. Clearly, if it were not for the Conference, there would have been little chance of a peaceful outcome here, and the potential consequences were disastrous. Sadr has stated acceptance of the Conference’ demands, though it remains to be seen what that means.
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According to this AP report in the NY Times, Moqtada al-Sadr has been wounded by US shelling in Najaf. Sadr is an irresponsible demagogue, his political agenda is reactionary and authoritarian and his militia has been guilty of many acts of thuggery and violence. And we should all wish for his complete and speedy recovery from his wounds.

Update There is a ceasefire and negotiations have started for a truce. This is welcome news, and I hope the talks are successful. However, it only points up the fact that the bloody campaign to destroy Sadr was both morally indefensible (as well as being politically stupid). I restate the point I made when the fighting was at its peak.

Almost certainly, the current fighting will end in the same sort of messy compromise that prevailed before the first campaign started. Nothing will have been gained by either side. But 2000 or so people will still be dead. Sadr bears his share of the guilt for this crime. The US government is even more guilty.

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The Allawi government’s decision to ban Al-Jazeera has received a lot of attention. Rather less has been paid to a subsequent announcement of a wide range of rules to be applied by the new Higher Media Commission. Prominent among them is a prohibition of “unwarranted criticism” of Allawi himself. This was reported in Australia’s Financial Review and also in the Financial Times (both subscription only) and also in a number of Arab and antiwar papers, but not in any of the general mainstream press.

For those inclined to a “slippery slope” view of censorship, this is certainly a case study.

Here’s a protest letter from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

John Howard’s attack on General Peter Gration reproduces yet again one of the silliest argument made by supporters of the Iraq war. He points out that Gration, like many other opponents of the war , made statements in the course of 2002 accepting the presumption that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The same point has been made with respect to Bill Clinton and many others.

Those making this claim seem to have erased from their historical memory banks the period from December 2002 to March 2003. During this period, UN inspectors went all over Iraq, inspecting all the sites where Bush, Blair and Howard had claimed to have evidence of weapons programs. They found nothing[1], for the very good reason that there was nothing to find. They interviewed scientists, inside and outside Iraq and got the same (correct) story every time – the weapons programs had been abandoned years ago.

By the time the war broke out, it was clear to any reasonable observer that Saddam had no nuclear program, no large-scale programs for producing chemical and biological weapons, and, in all probability no biological weapons at all. More intensive searching would have been required to determine that there were no carefully hidden stockpiles of chemical weapons, and if Bush had not gone to war, followed by Blair and Howard, these searches would have taken place and (as we know now) found nothing.

This is glaringly obvious, and yet supporters of the war, almost without exception, keep parroting the same line, or some variant, such as the claim that, in the light of the evidence, the UNSC was unreasonable in not passing a second resolution favoring war.

Given the gross mismanagement of the situation in Iraq after the war, explicable only by a willingness to ignore obvious facts in favor of political fantasies, I lean more and more to the view that support for the war required a degree of detachment from reality that guaranteed subsequent failure.

fn1. More precisely, they found some missiles that had a range marginally longer than that permitted, and had begun their destruction when Bush declared war. They also found a handful of leftover chemical shells, of the kind that have turned up on a couple of occasions since.

It’s been argued at length whether the Iraq war as a whole was morally justified, given that many thousands of people died in the process of removing Saddam’s regime. I don’t think so, but if you suppose that Saddam would otherwise have stayed in power for decades, and make some optimistic assumptions about future prospects, it’s possible to come to the opposite conclusion. But what possible moral justification can there be for the two bloody campaigns against Moqtada al-Sadr? If the figures reported by the US military are true, nearly 2000 of Sadr’s supporters have been killed by US forces (1500 in the first campaign launched by Bremer just before his departure and another 300 in the last couple of days). This is comparable with plausible estimates of the number of people killed by Saddam’s police state annually in its final years.

These people weren’t Al Qaeda or Baathists, they were (apart from the inevitable innocent bystanders) young Iraqi men who objected to foreign occupation. Sadr’s militia is one of a dozen or so similar outfits in Iraq, and there are hundreds more around the world, quite a few of which have received US support despite having a worse record than Sadr’s. Moreover, there was no cause at stake that justified a war – the first started when Bremer shut down Sadr’s newspaper and the Sadrists retaliated by taking control of some police stations and mosques. The current outbreak seems to have had even more trivial causes. It’s the willingness of the US government to send in the Marines that’s turned what would normally be noisy disturbances into bloodbaths.

Almost certainly, the current fighting will end in the same sort of messy compromise that prevailed before the first campaign started. Nothing will have been gained by either side. But 2000 or so people will still be dead. Sadr bears his share of the guilt for this crime. The US government is even more guilty.

The NYT has a chart showing what the US and the world have foregone as a result of the money spent on the Iraq war. I had a go at the same topic last year.

Over at the Volokh conspiracy, Randy Barnett poses the question of what Libertarianism as a political philosophy tells us about foreign policy, and comes up with the conclusion “not much”, particularly in relation to war. He says his views are tentative and invites others to contribute to the debate. I’ll accept, partly because it’s intellectually interesting, partly because Jim Henley (who could, I think have done a much better job) has gone into hiatus, and partly because I think internationalism (at least my version of it) shares some points in common with libertarianism, while being opposed on others.
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Just a few links with useful info and argument on various aspects of the situation in the Middle East and the surrounding region (very broadly and loosely defined)

* An excellent piece by Stephen Kinzer on Turkey’s democratic Islamist government, and the prospects for admission to the EU

* Juan Cole points out that the case against Iran is every bit as problematic as the case against Iraq.

* Also via Juan Cole, two views on the Wall being built by the Sharon government

* A powerful piece by Nicholas Kristof on Rwanda and Darfur