Invasion's So Succexy

To me, by far the most frustrating thing about the retrospective debate over the Iraq War is that the press, along with the Republican Party, persist in ignoring the fact that the vote on the authorizing resolution took place on October 10-11, 2002 and the war did not begin until March 20, 2003. The president, at the time of the resolution, most emphatically did not portray voting for it as a vote for certain war, but rather as a vote to empower him to conduct some coercive diplomacy, which is exactly what took place over the next four months.

Thus two decisions were taken, one in October to abandon traditional diplomacy in favor of a robust coercive kind, and a second in March to abandon coercive diplomacy in favor of war. An awful lot changed during the period in question, notably the re-entry of the UN's weapons inspectors operating through UNSCOM and the IAEA. This, in and of itself, is important in assessing the wisdom of going to war as containment was working much better in March than in October. Perhaps more important, it ought to transform our understanding of the debate over pre-war intelligence.

Bush and his defenders like to point out that "everyone" thought Iraq had WMD stockpiles and more active nuclear and biological programs than he turned out to have. As of October that's not quite right, but it's an oversimplification rather than a lie. The conventional wisdom really was that stockpiles existed and that the nuclear and bioweapons programs were more advanced than they turned out to be. This defense overlooks various points at which the administration went well beyond the consensus view and the ways in which they shaped the consensus by pressuring the intelligence agencies, but still there's a basic kernel of truth here. A kernel, that is, as long as you're talking about October 2002, which isn't when the decision to go to war was made. By March we had additional information on the WMD question thanks to the inspectors. This information demonstrated definitively that there was something wrong with the intelligence Bush thought he had -- they weren't finding any weapons and they weren't being denied access to any sites. The War Party chose to construe this as evidence of corruption and/or ineptitude on the part of the inspectors, and they were wrong. But beyond Bush's actions at this point and his retrospective mendacy about them lies the interesting fact that in the media retelling of what went on before the war, none of this happened.

Tim Russert on Sunday kept asking John Edwards about his "vote for war" and other such things. Retrospective media accounts of the WMD story always focus on things that were said in 2002, never focusing on what was known -- or knowable -- in the actual run-up to the actual war. The media's erasure of this entire sequence of events is particularly noteworthy because in a lot of respects there was no erasure at all. The press simply spent very little time covering the new invasion-relevant information that became available in the run-up to the invasion. Instead, reporters were busy "embedding" themselves with military units while producers busied themselves drawing up those cool animated graphics that we were bombarded with during "major combat operations." An orgy of France-bashing played itself out in the rightwing press and was just sort of winked at amusedly by the mainstream media. Once the shooting started, everyone dropped into Patriot Mode and no one asked why, exactly, the decision had been made in light of the fact that, as far as anyone could tell, there weren't any WMD after all. It's a bit hard after all this time has passed to recall exactly how demented the media climate was at the time, but I was reminded of it by thinking about the lyrics to Metric's "Succexy" which rather brilliantly portrays the combination of brain-death and bloodlust from which the press seemed to be suffering at the time:

Lonesome for no one when
The room was empty and
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial

All we do is talk, sit, switch screens
As the homeland plans enemies

All we do is talk, static split screens
As the homeland plans enemies

Invasion's so succexxy

Let's drink to the military
The glass is empty
Faces to fill and cars to feed
Nothing could beat complete denial

All we do is talk, sit, switch screens
As the homeland plans enemies

All we do is talk, static split screens
As the homeland plans enemies

Invasion's so succexxy

Passive attraction, programmed reaction
Passive attraction, programmed reaction
Action distraction, more information
Flesh saturation, lips on a napkin
Ass ass ass

Where does the time go?
We're waking up so slowly
Days are horizontal lately
Out of body, watched from above
Out of body, watched from above

Passive attraction, programmed reaction
More information, cash masturbation
Follow the pattern- the hemlines, the headlines
Action distraction,faster than fashion
Faster than fashion,faster than fashion

Lonesome for no one when
The room was empty and
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat denial

I wonder, at times, whether the president even thought clearly about what he was doing. Some elements in his administration were clearly committed to war come what may from the beginning, but others, like Colin Powell, were not. As best I can understand it, Powell's decision to throw in with the invaders had more to do with a fit of pique at perceived mistreatment by Dominique de Villepin and Joschka Fischer than a genuine consideration of the issues. Tony Blair seems to have been simply overcommitted by all his previous statements about the vileness of Saddam and the need to stand "shoulder to shoulder" with the USA.