Neoconservatives, the Iraq Debate and Ad Hominem Attacks

Neoconservatives, the Iraq Debate and Ad Hominem Attacks

06/27/14

James Joyner

Domestic Politics, Security, United States, Iraq

While those who advocated for the Iraq War were wrong, ad hominem attacks make for poor debate.

The stunning success of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham has renewed American interest in a country where we fought almost continuously for over two decades before pulling the plug in December 2011. Suddenly, old debates have begun again and new ones have arisen as to "who lost Iraq" and what, if anything, the United States should do about it.

On our television screens and op-ed pages, some familiar faces and names have again been talking about Iraq, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and former Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority administrator Paul Bremer, along with various neocon pols and pundits who never went away. Some are now arguing that, having gotten Iraq so spectacularly wrong the last time, these people should not be listened to now. That idea is both misguided and dangerous.

In full disclosure, while I had an infinitesimal fraction of the impact on the public debate as those in question, I was among those who got Iraq wrong in 2003. I was the reverse John Kerry, in that I was opposed to the war before supporting it. The early arguments made by Wolfowitz and company, focusing on Saddam's evil character and his long past use of chemical weapons against his own people, struck me as a poor justification for war. Despite having opposed virtually every significant U.S. military intervention of the past quarter century, though, I was eventually persuaded that regime change in Iraq was necessary. In the wake of North Korea joining the nuclear club and the sudden dwindling of American options on the Peninsula, I believed a nuclear-empowered Saddam was an unacceptable risk.

While I've long since acknowledged that the war was a mistake and eschewed the nation-building campaign almost from its outset, it took me longer than most who write under the TNI masthead to advocate withdrawal, for a variety of reasons too complicated and tangential to this column to go into here.

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