In a potentially important conversation, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg brings together Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, and Fareed Zakaria, proposing they reappraise their support for the invasion of Iraq in light of the bankruptcy of the WMD argument and the morass of the occupation. The conversation promises to continue, but here are some tidbits from the first installment.

Weisberg:

“This was elective surgery, and we had a pretty good idea what the surgeon’s limitations were. The choice wasn’t between an invasion led by George W. Bush and an invasion led by a president who would make an eloquent case to the world and build a credible global coalition. The alternatives were Bush’s flawed war or no war. So, the question I’m asking myself now is whether the marvelous accomplishment of deposing and capturing Saddam justifies costs that I really ought to have expected.”

Pollack:

“I think the events of the last 12 months have also indicated that containment was doing both better than we believed, and worse. On the one hand, the combination of inspections and the pain inflicted by the sanctions had forced Saddam to effectively shelve his WMD ambitions, probably since around 1995-96. On the other hand, the behavior of the French, Russians, Germans, and many other members of the United Nations Security Council in the run-up to the war was final proof that they were never going to do what would have been necessary to revise and support containment so that it might have lasted for more than another year or two.”

[I think Pollack is right here that containment was working better than we believed, but his argument about the intransigence of the rest of the world “to do what would have been necessary” founders on the fact that their noncooperation was largely in response to Bush’s arrogant disdain for them.]

Pollack continues:

“If I had to write The Threatening Storm over again I certainly would not have been so unequivocal that war was going to be a necessity. However, I still would have pointed out that there was a strong case for removing Saddam’s regime…”

[The strong case is of course based on the humanitarian rationale, and the pat assertion that the Iraqis are ‘better off now’ is the fallback position of every hawk and erstwhile hawk. There are two problems with this. First, it leaves unexamined the legitimate question of whether the Iraqis are really going to be better off with the American oppressors who lack the political will, the moral committment or the financial resources to embark on the necessary nation-building efforts. Secondly, there is the hypocrisy of the continuing policeman-and-liberator-of-the-world noblesse oblige stance being imposed on the rest of the world unwillingly and selectively, only when it jibes with US strategic interests and empire-building aspirations. You cannot argue for the moral necessity of removing Saddam to respond to the suffering of the Iraqi people without a cogent explanation of why you feel no similar obligation to remove every other despicable despot, especially when you did not start making that argument until the Bush regime mobilized for the invasion.]

Thomas Friedman:

“The real reason for this war — which was never stated — was to burst what I would call the “terrorism bubble,” which had built up during the 1990s.

This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as “martyrs,” and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something — to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it’s not very diplomatic — it’s not in the rule book — but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable.”

[Paul Berman as well, whom I will not dignify by including a tidbit, spouts his usual venom about radical Islam being the newest face of the 20th-century problem of ‘mass totalitarian movements’, which justifies the WoT® in terms little more cogent than Dubya’s own in arguing that we must fight them because they ‘hate freedom.’ Berman concedes that, in this installment of the conversation, he has not tied that argument to the necesssity of the Iraqi invasion. Let us hope his argument is less fatuous as they continue…]

George Packer:

“Before the war, no one could know what kind of political psychology we would find once the seal of Saddam’s tyranny was broken. It turns out that Iraqis are a lot less grateful, a lot more suspicious and even conspiratorial, than the advocates of liberation predicted. The moral self-congratulation we saw in this country in early 2003 went a long way toward damaging the prospects of a decent postwar. Totalitarianism didn’t make Iraqis better people or readier to govern themselves democratically — exactly the opposite. The margin for error was almost zero: The American occupation had about two weeks to get things right after the fall of Baghdad in order to set in motion a process that had any near-term chance of success, and it got everything wrong.”