All Apologies

I've enjoyed reading Andrew Sullivan through the years. He was an old-school conservative who didn't embrace the neocon ideology. I don't always agree with his conclusions, but I always enjoy his thoughtful reasoning.

Unlike other conservative writers, he posted an essay today on his blog fessing up to his own inadequacies concerning the Iraq War. What I Got Wrong About Iraq. He wrote it for Slate, the online magazine.
He writes that he committed four cardinal sins: Historical Narcissism, Narrow Moralism, Unconservatism, and Misreading Bush.

Historical Narcissism: Listening to criticism from the Left, he says that he filtered it through his Reaganite/Thatcherite historical filter and focused on the ideological arguments to the detriment of clear analysis of the true situation.

"I allowed myself to be distracted by an ideological battle when what was required was clear-eyed prudence."

Narrow Moralism: Having weighed the pros and cons of the Iraq War before it began, he felt that no matter what happened, it couldn't be wrong to remove an evil dictator from power.

"I became enamored of my own morality and this single moral act. And he was a monster, as we discovered. But what I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster, and that unless one weighs all the possibly evil consequences of an abstractly moral act, one hasn't really engaged in anything much but self-righteousness."

Unconservatism: Knowing the historical problems that the British had in running Iraq and of the Sunni-Shiite division, he dismissed history and his own conservative ideology. He bought the Administration story that Iraq was more secular and modern than most Middle Eastern countries.

"I greatly under-estimated them - and as someone who liked to think of myself as a conservative, I pathetically failed to appreciate how those divides never truly go away and certainly cannot be abolished by a Western magic wand. In that sense I was not conservative enough."

Misreading Bush: Although the Administration's execution of the war was fraught with incompetence, he believes war is often paired with incompetence. Instead, he feels it was misreading Bush's personal morality that was the most pertinent misread he made.

"I had no idea he was so complacent - even glib - about the evil that men with good intentions can enable. I truly did not believe that Bush would use 9/11 to tear up the Geneva Conventions. When I first heard of abuses at Gitmo, I dismissed them as enemy propaganda. I certainly never believed that a conservative would embrace torture as the central thrust of an anti-terror strategy, and lie about it, and scapegoat underlings for it...

"I certainly never believed that a war I supported for the sake of freedom would actually use as its central weapon the deepest antithesis of freedom - the destruction of human autonomy and dignity and will that is torture.

"To distort this by shredding the English language, by engaging in newspeak that I had long associated with totalitarian regimes, was a further insult. And for me, [it was] an epiphany about what American conservatism had come to mean."


I had a different experience from Mr. Sullivan in the early days of the war.

I remember a business dinner just after the war began, where someone asked me what I thought about the situation.

I thought about it and said, "As an American Indian, the Administration's rationale sounds uncomfortably like Manifest Destiny."

I was uncomfortable with the ideological rationale being forced down the country's throat at the expense of rational analysis. Inherent in the idea of Manifest Destiny was the superiority of Christianity and Western political philosophy as compared to the perceived inferiority of American Indians, their religions and governments.

The American people by and large, were convinced of their superiority due to their Christianity and sought to stamp out what they felt were inferior peoples with inferior religions. Indians were denied religious freedom despite the U.S. protection of religion in its constitution.

We were being asked to trust the Administration without asking bothersome questions. No where in history can I recall a situation where people were told to blindly trust their leaders when it when it turned out well.

As Sullivan points out, the Administration's use of totalitarian tactics and rhetoric were very troubling to me, as well. Of course, totalitarian tactics were closely tied to the implementation of Manifest Destiny. People tend to skim over those moral issues where Indians are concerned. But we remember.

Had Sullivan recalled the worst of American military and civil atrocities against Indians, he might have been more troubled by the Administration earlier.

The failure of the President was due to his fundamentalist religious views. He feels that the end justifies the means in Iraq because he sees himself as a Christian and Iraq's religion and culture as inferior.

In his mind, God has sent American to save the Iraqi people. He just substituted "democracy" for "Christianity". It is the same hubris that was used to execute Manifest Destiny.

Bush failed to grasp the importance of the religious divides in Iraq because from the start, he didn't think Islam is a religion on par with his own. It was unimportant to him and to his administration's analysis.

It is the same religious certitude that goes with any fundamentalist religion, be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim or even atheism. Once convinced of divine right, otherwise good people will engage in no end of atrocities to further their ideology at the expense of their humanity.

It is ironic that fundamentalist religious zealots on both sides of the war have diminished both countries. It is an irony I'd prefer to do without, but here we are.