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Thought for the Day

by Scott H. Payne

To steal from and reformat Katrina vanden Heuvel on November 20’s On Point Week in the News segment: if there were as much passionate and vehement debate within mainstream political discourse on decisions to go to war as there has been on health care reform, something would have gone terribly right with our politics and the world would be a very different place.

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Tags | debate, Health Care Reform, Katrina vanden Heuvel, war

11 comments

1 Kyle { 11.26.09 at 8:36 pm }: I see your Iraq War, Ms. vanden Heuvel and raise you one War of 1812.

It’s entirely possible to have exhaustive debate and end up right where you began, or in this case, where we are now. Does that mean we debate is extraneous, no. Does that mean the rush to war would’ve been prevented by another Calhoun-Randolph debate, no.

Of course, I think the better question here is what happened to debate. We don’t do it anymore. What/when was the last persuasive argument anyone’s heard? Win did restatements of long-held positions become debate?

Cascadian
November 26th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
I read blogs so I don’t have to listen to talking heads… urgh. 1812 is a great example. You don’t need debate when you have a military that is most interested in defending their homes and not so interested in empire.
2 North { 11.26.09 at 9:13 pm }: Gonna have to disagree Kyle. In hindsight we know that the support for the Iraq war wasn’t much more concrete than some CIA imaginary WMD’s and a lot of “you’re either with us or with the terrorists” chatter. If the debate had been drawn out I think it’s very likely that something would have popped out of secrecy and popped the case for the invasion.

Now how things would have gone had we not invaded Iraq and only had Afghanistan to focus on? I don’t know. Things would be a lot different if Saddam were still sitting in the middle east thumbing his nose at us and the Iranians.

Kyle
November 26th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
The key though is hindsight which grants us the advantage of greater factual knowledge and emotional distance. I’m only saying Katrina vanden Heuvel is using a wishful counterfactual that is ultimately unprovable.

As someone who was solidly against the war back then, I’m remembering the emotion and shared trauma and still unclear that a longer, deeper debate would’ve changed things. Now that it’s super unpopular and President Bush has continued to own the war, a lot of people are let off the hook who weren’t exactly models of sense and sensibility 8 years ago.

I think to say we didn’t have debate because it was “unpatriotic” is to rewrite history and ignore all the people who didn’t participate in the debate because they felt somebody had to pay. Let’s face it, that’s not a particularly novel human reaction.

Maybe debate would’ve changed things. Maybe Hussein would’ve tripped, died, and left a succession crisis resulting in a democratic overthrow in 2003. Maybe he’d have declared war on Iran again and we’d be looking at full scale war in the gulf, the world will never know.

Generally, I don’t think much is to be gained by counterfactuals beyond feelings of smug enlightenment. I care much more about gleaning lessons from the past and working to apply them prospectively than I do trading stories about how much better off the world would be if people had done things ~~my way~~ differently.

KvH might as well have said, “well if Belichick had made another play, the Pats would’ve won.” Sure, but he might still have lost. Counterfactuals and monday morning quarterbacking make for conversational fodder but nothing useful. That’s all I’m saying.

Happy Thanksgiving, North!

Michael Drew
November 26th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
I don’t necessarily disagree that we may not have had in us a better, more extensive, more rational, substantive debate at that time in any case, but even if we had, it would have been equally squelched by those in power and their media enablers. And given the manifest intentions and indifference to popular dissent and to reason itself of the administration in question, none of it would have made any difference in any case.

North
November 27th, 2009 at 6:31 am
Good thoughts, frankly I don’t feel strongly about the question nor do I have any more insight to add so I’ll concede the field. Happy Thanksgiving to you too Kyle!
3 Jaybird { 11.27.09 at 10:53 am }: I think that 9/11 totally screwed up any potential for debate about Iraq. Without 9/11, I think we would have been able to pull a debate off that was at least as vigorous as the Global Warming debate.

Scott H. Payne
November 27th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Tongue, meet cheek.

JosephFM
November 28th, 2009 at 8:29 am
Well, exactly, we’d debate and debate and then…not do anything. Just like with global warming.

Jaybird
November 28th, 2009 at 10:24 am
In the case of Iraq, do you not see that as hella preferable?
4 Scott { 11.28.09 at 9:04 pm }: So Americans should have sat around and debated whether to retaliate after we were attacked? Sounds like something a Canadian would do.