Israel and the Iraq-9/11 fallacy

 Consider the following admonition to Israel.  Beware of the risks of making foreign policy decisions in the heat of anger.  Recall the American response to September 11, and where we went wrong.  Remember Iraq.  The first sentence in this admonition is generally good advice anyway.  Decisions made in anger may coincide with correctness, but anger will bias your decision-making process.  Better to seek calm and reflectiveness.  Better to seek reason.  The admonition goes wrong in its specifics.  Leftists have a never-ending series of excuses to demand that Israel permit terrorists to attack without response.  Whether these excuses take the form of a demand for a "humanitarian cease-fire," unaccompanied by a demand for a humanitarian cease-rape, or any number of other rhetorical gimmicks, the end goal is the same.  Let Hamas win, and let them do it through rape, torture, kidnapping and the targeted murder of civilians.

Consider, though, this specific fallacy.  On September 11, 2001, nineteen members of al Qaeda hijacked four planes, flew them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and were overtaken on a fourth to crash over Pennsylvania.  Al Qaeda was being harbored by the Taliban, in Afghanistan, so in response, we invaded Afghanistan in order to kill off Al Qaeda.  That was the mission.  In the process, we toppled the Taliban, temporarily, trying with futility to set up a functioning government in a place as ungovernable as any on Earth, and stayed too long, but that latter part is not a heat of anger decision, so much as losing sight of the goal long after the heat of initial anger.

Yet what of Iraq?  In 2003, the George W. Bush administration decided it wanted to topple Saddam Hussein.  Hussein was among the worst human beings on the planet, and a case can be made that if Bush 41 was going to push him out of Kuwait, he should have finished the job.  He left a lot of people to be slaughtered.  Yet 41 did not finish the job.

What did Saddam Hussein have to do with 9/11?  Two things.  Jack, and shit.  As a Suni military dictator in a majority Shia country, he ran a secular Ba'athist government, and he was an ideological enemy of Osama bin Laden.  Hussein had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, or al Qaeda.  The Bush administration tried to scare the fuck out of everyone with the possibility of Hussein giving "weapons of mass destruction" to al Qaeda, conflating nukes with mustard gas, but he had no nukes, and he was playing a shell game with weapons inspectors on his chemical and biological weapons stores.  You need to maintain them, which is costly, or they degrade.  He wanted the Iraqi Shia and Iran, not to mention the Kurds, to think that he could gas them, to prevent a revolt, but he had nothin'.  So, he figured the shell game would convince his opponents in the Middle East that he had enough to scare them, without giving us enough justification for war.

He misread Bush, and Cheney.

Apologies for the pedantic history review, but that was necessary.  And there is one more necessary history observation.  This was 2003.  This was not a 9/11 rage.  Some-- indeed, many-- let themselves get duped and manipulated.  Given that both the Bush administration and Saddam Hussein wanted everyone on Earth to believe that Hussein was hiding weapons stockpiles, Occam's razor suggested that he still had the weapons that we knew he had in the past.  Yet it did not follow that America had any rational interest in attacking Iraq, or that it had any connection to 9/11, as plenty of critics said at the time.

In fact, you may recall that in 2008, the Democrats had a nomination contest, which came down to this question.  By 2003, Hillary Clinton was a Senator, with her eye on her own presidential ambitions, and she thought that voting to authorize the invasion of Iraq would look tough and centrist and all that.  So, she voted to authorize the war.  Yes, it was craven ambition.  There is a little more political science-y stuff I could add about how candidates' ideologies are perceived.  Women are perceived to be further left than they are, giving them incentives to tack to the right, and giving them greater advantages when they do so from the left, but blah-blah, that's not my point here.

Interestingly, there was a lowly State Senator in Illinois who gave some good speechifying, and opposed the war from the start.

By 2008, public opinion had turned against the Iraq War, and one can make the case that had Clinton voted against the war, Obama would not have had a chance against her.  These kinds of questions are always difficult to assess, but there is sense to the claim.  Yet Obama's primary policy argument against Clinton was that he had opposed the Iraq War from Day 1.

There were, in fact, politicians, observers and analysts who heard the proposal to invade Iraq in 2003 and said, "wait, what?!"  It did not logically follow, it was several steps removed, the country had nothing to do with the original mission, even beyond the US staying in Afghanistan past the original mission, and now consider.  Does Israel going into Gaza sound like (a) the US going into Afghanistan to wipe out al Qaeda in 2001, (b) the US staying in Afghanistan too long, or (c) the US going into Iraq in 2003?

The obvious answer is (a).  One can ask, quite reasonably, what the long-term plan should be.  You have almost certainly been told lies about Israel "occupying" Gaza, rather than the fact that Israel withdrew in 2005, but Israel does need a long-term plan.  Yet to introduce Iraq into the discussion is absurd.  If Israel said, oh, fuck it, let's launch some missiles into Yemen because they look kinda shifty, then you would have a comparison, but that is not what is happening.

This is both a false analogy, and a disingenuous one.  Whenever you see it made, understand that it means this:  Whatever you do, Israel, make sure that it is nothing.  Let Hamas continue to rape, torture and murder as many civilians as they like, but you don't get to respond.  That's what it means.  That is also what the calls for a "humanitarian cease-fire" mean, and every other admonition to Israel, the one country on Earth told never to defend itself.

Why?  If Israel has no right to exist, then it has no right to defend itself.  That follows logically.  Every other argument against Israel's right of self-defense from those who deny its right to exist is disingenuous.

Every.  Single.  One.

Malcolm Holcombe, "For The Mission Baby," performed live.  Title track.