Here’s RedState (now a subsidiary of Eagle Publishing):
A Mistake Reconsidered
once i thought i made a mistake but i found out i was wrong
By streiffI’ve long found one of the most frustrating part of discussing the Iraq War to be the idea of mistakes. The issue is not whether or not mistakes were made, the issue is whether those mistakes could have been reasonably considered to be mistaken at the time or whether there was ever a set of correct decisions that could have been made.
I’ve often thought this point might never come, but here I am at last, reduced to staring like a clubbed trout. The issue is whether there was ever what, now? It wha…?!
We seem to have discovered a new stage in the traditional Kübler-Ross process:
1. Denial: “The media doesn’t show the good news in Iraq.”
2. Anger: “The treasonous far-left-liberals and their media lapdogs are making us lose in Iraq.”
3. Bargaining: “If we send x-thousand more troops to Iraq, victory will be ours.”
4. Depression: “Did you catch 300 yet? [munch-munch-burp] God, it made me hate liberals even more. [channels flipping] They wouldn’t last a day in ancient Sparta.”
5. Advanced Literary Theory: “The hegemonic binary of ’success’ and ‘failure’ traumatizes the (re)interpretive possibilities of an ethos of jouissance regarding the War in Iraq.”
Not to be phallogocentric here or anything, but we have to go with the non-fancy everyday definition of ‘mistake,’ meaning when you try to do something, like for instance apply aftershave to your face while your date waits in the hallway, but perform an action which thwarts your desired ends, like for instance mixing up your bottle of aftershave with the bottle of bobcat urine you bought to keep the deer out of the herb garden.
Maybe somebody could be all like, “But nobody knew it was bobcat urine, so how is that a mistake? How was it obvious that there was ever a correct set of decisions to be made, if nobody reasonably considered the chance of covering themselves with bobcat urine?
Dude smells of cat pee. That’s all I’m saying.
I’m a Clausewitzian by training and inclination.
Maybe a Santa-Clausewitzian.
I don’t buy 99% of the Fourth Generation Warfare or Network-centric Warfare theory bandied about. I don’t believe there was a correct set of solutions. Rather every decision, like a socio-political version of Newton’s Third Law, was bound to produce a negative outcome as well as a positive outcome.
Because abject and catastrophic failure is like the rocket exhaust that comes whooshing out of breathtaking success. It’s a yin-yang thing — perhaps the concept is too advanced for your Western hierarchical worldview.
I’ve explored what I think is the cruelest myth, that disbanding the Iraqi Army was a mistake, and others, smarter than I, have explored the potential outcomes of other decisions unmade.
We’d say that a heavy contender for ‘the cruelest myth’ about Iraq is the one about having to invade Iraq because Saddam wouldn’t surrender his WMDs. Another might be the greeted-with-flowers-and-candy thing. Another might be major-combat-operations-have-ended, and so forth, et cetera et cetera, and we’re still talking 2003 at this point. There have also been some pretty cruel myths since then, let me just say.
Disbanding the Iraqi Army, sending thousands upon thousands of trained fighters into the civilian population, and then creating a new army out of whatever new guys you can scrape up in order to fight an insurgency that has…somehow arisen. Brilliance.
Now another myth is being exploded: that de-Baathification is a bad idea.
Read the rest, by all means, but please take this tumbler of vodka with you. No, take more: I’ll open another bottle.