Rebuttal, Concessions, and Thinking About Iraq

In an effort to keep this concise, I´m going to divide my response to MG between this post and comments. Anything I disagree with that´s not especially relevant to MG´s point appears in the comments section. The only thing that I will address here is his comments on Iraq and religion. I´ve tried to summarize his points for ease of reading; if I´ve misqoted or misrepresented, please let me know.

I´ve made a few concessions to MG in the comments section, most notably about Abu Ghraib, in which case I think he´s right.

Other than that, here´s the point I will be arguing, and how I think it pertains to MG:

It is important to be as accurate as possible when talking about something where the moral high ground is highly and vehemently disputed - i.e., the Iraq War. Any failure of research, foolish arguments, or blatant dishonesty that appears in discussions about the War, especially when used to prove a point, is wrong, and doubly so because it turns off those who might be convinced of the truth.

In short, I don´t have to agree with the War or think that the WMD´s existed to say that what MG is saying is wrong, utterly wrong, and in very poor judgement. I´m talking about this in particular:

Why can’t Bush be blamed for this? Should the rules of war somehow include something about laying down all arms if you are fighting against the United States? That “collateral damage” should be the fault of the people who are killed for not leaving their homes and becoming refugees in Syria? Bush invaded a country that didn’t attack us based on lies. Now a minimum of 100,000 innocent civilians are dead. If Bush hadn’t invaded, those people would be alive.

Your underlying point, if I'm interpreting you correctly, is this:

The deaths in the Iraq War, because they came as a response to Bush's invasion, are to be blamed on Bush.

This isn't what you said at first. Your original words were, and I quote, "Bush has killed more innocent civilians than bin Laden by more than a factor of 10" (from the comments on Ben's post). I'm glad to see you've at least changed your phrasing. So here's my question:

Of those 100,000 innocent civilian deaths, why is it that you have no problem absolving the Iraqis who are directly responsible, while placing all the blame on Bush, who is indirectly responsible?

I bother to ask because, though you may be right about Bush being to blame, if you make that argument by claiming that he is solely responsible for 100,000 deaths that would not have happened had he not invaded, you're going to be written off as an idiot. And justly so, because the argument is foolish. If it is acceptable to make the invader solely responsible for all subsequent deaths (since you have absolved the 'insurgents'), then the following people are responsible for the following atrocities:

1. The armies that came to liberate Jasenovac concentration camp in WWII are responsible for the subsequent slaughter of its inmates as the guards, eager to cover up evidence of war crimes, killed everyone left alive. If the army hadn't invaded, those people wouldn't have been killed.
2. The 9,000-15,000 dead during the Auschwitz Death March are to be blamed on the Red Army, because had the Red Army not tried to invade Auschwitz, the Nazis would have no need to evacuate everyone and destroy evidence of atrocities.

This is obviously not how it works. Now, as a disclaimer, I'm not suggesting that Iraq was anything near as bad as Auschwitz, or Jasenovac, or that we invaded because we knew of these kinds of atrocities (the comparison, quite frankly, is almost insulting to Holocaust survivors). The point is, however, that in an effort to denounce Bush and the Iraq War, you've made a serious lapse of judgement and logic: you've placed all the blame for a morally ambiguous war on one man, George Herbert Walker, and you've made a claim you cannot possibly back up:

Now a minimum of 100,000 innocent civilians are dead. If Bush hadn’t invaded, those people would be alive.

You don't know that. For all you know, they might have been dead in mass graves (or these ones, or these ones) or they might have been killed by Uday or executed on Qusay´s orders, or they might have performed poorly in a sporting event and suffered in Uday´s Iron Maiden.

These things are obviously lamentable, and I´m not claiming that they were the reason we went to Iraq. Because they´re not. But MG has either ignored them or not heard of them, and neither option is good for someone who is claiming that Bush is responsible for 100,000 deaths, deaths that would have been prevented had we not invaded. You don´t know that. The only reason you´ve stated it that way is to make your moral ground appear higher. You´ve phrased the situation, MG, so that it sounds like the US invaded a peaceful utopia. That´s not only wrong; it´s absurd to the point of blatant scholarly irresponsibility. Iraq was a brutal country, and we removed a brutal dictator. We can argue at a different point whether or not we did so based on lies, but to the average citizen that doesn´t have to live in fear, our false pretenses for war are probably irrelevant. And I say this knowing that, at the very least, not all the news from Iraq is bad.

What´s the point? Well, if you´re going to make an argument denouncing the Iraq War, you´d better be sure your moral outrage has good reason. And your moral outrage, MG, has made Bush responsible for these deaths. And these ones. And these ones. MG, this is absurd. You are blaming Bush for the deaths that Iraqis have inflicted on other Iraqi civilians. They car-bombed children, for crying out loud. Children.

(I realize you´ve claimed that a whole new set of photos are to be released that include the sexual abuse of children. If you´re right, I´ll be as pissed off as you are, but you´re going to need a helluva good citation to make me believe that. Please furnish one.)

Should the rules of war somehow include something about laying down all arms if you are fighting against the United States? That “collateral damage” should be the fault of the people who are killed for not leaving their homes and becoming refugees in Syria?

Rules of war...I don't care who you're fighting. Using civilians as human shields is always unacceptable. And the collateral damage is coming from both ends, MG - the US and the blunderbuss-hunter Iraqi resistance. You´ve completely absolved the Iraqi resistance of guilt, though perhaps not intentionally, when trying to make a case that, had you stuck to the facts, you could not make.

This kind of argument really, really tends to piss people off. Michael Moore is my favorite example - a man who could have made excellent attacks on George W. decided to bullshit his way through a movie that, if you do your research, is impossible to defend. In fact,

Open challenge: tell me one thing that Michael Moore got right in F9/11.

Now proving MM wrong doesn´t make George W. somehow a good guy. But, given human nature, when we hear something that is plainly wrong and a tad deceitful, we are inclined to go after it and correct. Sometimes to the detriment of the real issue at hand, which is the examination of the war, what we should do, and where we went wrong. In my humble opinion, MG, you´re hurting your own cause.

More to come, but this is long enough.