The risk of a post-post-Iraq foreign policy
Plus: Father Brown, a new case for consuming less news, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
The risk of a post-post-Iraq foreign policy
Monday marks 20 years since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and anniversary retrospectives are already appearing. Two in particular have drawn wide attention, and I want to respond to those and also consider a troubling prospect: the shape of a post-post-Iraq foreign policy in America.
In one article, at The Atlantic, former George W. Bush administration speechwriter David Frum concedes that the invasion was “a grave and costly error.” Its advocates were wrong about weapons of mass destruction, he admits. We failed to propagate a durable, competent democracy in Baghdad and destabilized an entire region. The cost in blood and treasure is horrible to consider—hundreds of thousands dead, and for what?
And yet, and yet … it’s a grave and costly error Frum seems to want us to remain open to repeating.
Some of his case is a counterfactual scenario in which “[m]ass violence” was inevitable in Iraq, so it’s just as well America lit the tinders. But, crucially, Frum says the “most important lessons” of this war “regard government decision making, offering a warning against groupthink and self-deception,” and he appears to be most gravely disappointed in Americans’ post-Iraq skepticism of our government’s capacity (let alone prerogative) to police the world and remake it in our image.
If the folks in Washington can just diversify their newsfeeds, Frum all but concludes, we can trust them to get right back out there, bombing and occupying and maybe even nation building once more. That’s not to underplay the problem of self-deception, but suffice it to say, this is not the post-Iraq lesson I think we should learn.
The second essay, penned by early Iraq War booster Max Boot for Foreign Affairs, is the better of the two. “In retrospect, I was wildly overoptimistic about the prospects of exporting democracy by force, underestimating both the difficulties and the costs of such a massive undertaking,” he writes. “Today, I am much more cognizant than I once was of the limitations of American power and hence much more skeptical of calls to promote democracy in China, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Venezuela, and—fill in the blank. […] I have even become skeptical of trying to foment regime change by covert action or strict sanctions.”
Boot has hardly become a noninterventionist. If I had to give him an ornithological classification, I’d still go with “hawk.” He opposed the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan and stands by that call, and he approves of keeping the c. 2,500 U.S. troops we still have in Iraq there indefinitely, despite the danger of re-escalation their presence incurs.
Yet it seems safe to say Boot has absorbed a broader and better post-Iraq lesson than Frum’s takeaway. Frum repudiates this specific war, mostly. Boot is ready to foreswear a whole class of wars, even if it’s not quite as expansive a class as it could be.
What I find potentially more worrisome than a Frum-style lesson, though, is how a post-post-Iraq politics could work. What happens when we have a new generation of politicians who weren’t in the public eye in 2003 and thus have no invasion opinion on record? Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, as I wrote in my New York Times piece on his foreign policy record, is perhaps the first serious presidential candidate to fit that description:
Perhaps Mr. DeSantis’s thin and even ambiguous record [on the post-9/11 wars] is the new norm for a Gen X candidate whose political career began well after the 2001 and 2003 invasions and whose presidential run would begin well after the wars’ ends. But it raises the troubling possibility that Mr. DeSantis lacks wariness of military intervention and nation-building projects, which U.S. failures in Afghanistan and especially Iraq normalized even among Republicans in recent years. Determining that those generational wars weren’t worth fighting was a formative political experience for many Americans, ordinary voters and politicians alike. Did Mr. DeSantis share in that lesson?
And beyond the politicians, what happens when the bulk of the voting public is too young to have had that formative experience? What happens when candidates’ lack of a substantive answer on this topic doesn’t matter because no one is bothering to ask?
As Janan Ganesh details at Financial Times, the cultural footprint of Iraq is smaller than most reasonable observers would’ve predicted 20 years ago:
Iraq was easily the most controversial war fought by a western state in the past half-century. … Those who lived through it might have assumed it would mark our culture for a generation: that pro and antiwar would become signifiers of one’s wider worldview, even one’s tastes, as Leave and Remain now are in the U.K. Instead, it is often an ordeal to persuade the young what a saga it all was.
In politics, too, he writes, the change is less than we might have guessed:
Vast troop deployments are harder to imagine, true. But the idea isn’t unspeakable in the public square. Joe Biden suggests, again and again, that America would defend Taiwan, which it doesn’t recognise as a state and isn’t formally obliged to protect.
This absence of effect is the danger of a post-post-Iraq foreign policy. It ought to be the case that Iraq (and Afghanistan, and Yemen, and … ) put a strong constraint on the American public’s thinking about matters of war and peace—that its cultural effects would be as significant as Vietnam’s, that it would narrow the Overton Window sufficiently to put many potential future misadventures out of bounds.
But I don’t think that has happened. The post-Iraq reckoning didn’t mature. And in a post-post-Iraq era, as memories of 2003 further fade, even Frum’s lesson may be more than most have learned. “Countries have memories,” yes, but ours is often bad.
2. What I'm reading this week
The Complete Father Brown Stories, by G.K. Chesterton
More like “what I’m reading this half-year,” but close enough. I prefer full-length novels to short stories, especially for mysteries, where the plot work is the main thing. But Chesterton’s Father Brown tales, each of which can be finished in about 20 minutes, are great as pre-bed reading which doesn’t tempt you to stay up all night.
Here’s how one begins:
It is to be feared that about a hundred detective stories have begun with the discovery that an American millionaire has been murdered; an event which is, for some reason, treated as a sort of calamity. This story, I am happy to say, has to begin with a murdered millionaire; in one sense, indeed, it has to begin with three murdered millionaires, which some may regard as an embarras de richesses. But it was chiefly this coincidence or continuity of criminal policy that took the whole affair out of the ordinary run of criminal cases and made it the extraordinary problem that it was.
You can read that whole story here—it’s a good one—but it’ll be better on paper.
3. A recommendation
Mary Carroll Ceramics. Her mugs are very expensive (currently $60ish) and very hard to get (she does a batch drop every other month or so, and it sells out literally in 60 seconds). But also … look at them:
I love them.
4. Recent work
These states are devouring widows’ houses | Christianity Today
Between deterrence and escalation | The Critic
Old-school censorship only makes the ‘misinformation crisis’ worse | The Daily Beast
What does a Ron DeSantis foreign policy look like? | The Scott Horton Show (podcast)
The Saudi-Iran deal is good, actually | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
5. Miscellaneous
“You’re better off not knowing,” by
at The Atlantic, a good piece along the lines of my recommendation in Untrustworthy that you only closely follow a few big stories in which you can develop real expertise and then, most of the time, ignore the rest of the news.Sometimes, as in preparation for voting, you might need to consume news more broadly, but skimming daily headlines is not a worthwhile activity for most people and won’t make you “well-informed.” C.S. Lewis said the same thing eight decades ago, and Hamid’s piece has a lot of recent research data to back up the claim.