Like many people who supported the Iraq War, Ezra Klein has written his apologia.
But he fails to identify—indeed, repeats—his biggest mistake in supporting the war: When thinking of the US government, he thinks “we.”
Iraq, [Kenneth Pollack] said, shouldn’t be America’s top priority. We should first focus on destroying al-Qaeda. We should then work on the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Only then should we turn to Hussein. Moreover, when and if we did invade Iraq, we should do so only as part of a coordinated, multilateral operation…
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After all, what other chance would we get to topple Hussein?
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It wasn’t worth doing precisely because the odds were high that we couldn’t do it “right.”
Klein doesn’t think a state invaded another state; he thinks “we” went to war. He identifies with the state. Whether he’s supporting or dissenting from a policy, he sees himself as part of it. He sees himself on the jeeps with the troops. That’s why his calls for skepticism, for not taking things on authority, ring so hollow. In the end, he’s on the team. Or the jeep.
Update (11:45 pm)
While we’re on the subject of the Iraq War, Yasha Levine tweeted this classic line from a Nicholas Kristof 2002 oped:
President Bush has convinced me that there is no philosophical reason we should not overthrow the Iraqi government.
Being convinced by Bush of anything seems challenge enough. But to be convinced by Bush on philosophical grounds? That’s something.
Not making excuses for Klein, but he was 20 at the time, right? In February 2003, I actually marched in a pro-war counter-rally to an anti-war protest. I did it mostly because I had a gigantic American flag hanging out in my room and I figured it might get me on TV. (I did, or at least the corner of my hand did.) I was also 15.
Point being, at what point of youth/inexperience do we draw the line? Sure, I was wrong. But I hardly think anyone was paying attention to me at the time either.
But this post focuses on an issue — his identification with the US government — that he still does today. As evidenced by this article.
True. I concede that point. I just think he should be judged solely on the basis of how he justifies it now (which, as you point out, is troubling), rather than in comparison to his ill-formed ideas at the age of 20.
Corey, based on what little of Klein’s that you quote, his use of “we” could be understood as just his way of taking partial responsibility for a mistake that was not his alone. It is possible that he does also identify with the US government, but we have not seen your argument for why you think that his use of “we” is an identification. Nor have you shown how such identifications caused such an enormous fiasco as was the Iraq war.
Bingo! “What do you mean, ‘we”, pale face?” In my high school, in the 60s, even the jocks were telling that joke after Eric Burdon came out with “Sky Pilot”.
They just don’t make young people like they used to! Get offa my lawn, Ezra!
If you related to reality instead of rightwing media fantasies, you knew there was a good chance the Bush regime and the US media was lying, or fantasing. Tens of millions of people around the world demonstrated in the streets against this war, and they got less media coverage than the liarsCheney and Bush and Ms C.Rice and General Powell.
Sorry but I don’t have that short a memory and all those people deserve public censure and or humiliation or criminal charges.
A large part of the US population knew what was going on and alleged journalists couldn’t figure it out?
Apologies don’t mean shit at this point. Because he lied, all those people died.
If an engineer fucks up a project, the engineer can get sued….and at the very least will lose a client…But when politicians and the media screw up there is no consequence….as long as they are licking the right boots. Janeane Garafaloand Phill Donahue should be giving us all our foreign policy commentary because they were right on.
President Bush convinced me there’s no philosophical reason to believe he’s not a poorly-designed automaton, of the sort one might encounter in a Philip K. Dick novel. So being convinced of philosophical points is not really the issue, I would say.
Here it is Spring of 2013, and liberals are still supporting military aggression. They’re less equivocal about it, perhaps, now that the table manners of the current Commander-in-Chief meet with their approval.
Maybe I’m too naive, but isn’t the problem that more people DON’T identify with the government? If we identify with the government, then its failings are our failings and there’s more motivation to change things because they’re being done in our names. If we don’t identify with it, then it’s just this abstract entity that we can have nothing to do with, which leads to the government abusing its power because none of us feel responsible for it.
I guess I don’t think it’s a problem that Klein is “on the team” – it’s that most of us aren’t on it and thus don’t have any say on what’s happening.
Though I fully admit that perhaps my problem in understanding is that I haven’t quite managed to abandon my sentimental attachment to democracy yet.
The comment that wins all recent C R threads is on CT from Phosphorius:
It’s a metaphysical oddity, one that would give Alexius Meinong a headache, that “real” conservatives don’t exist, while the conservatives that exist. . . why, they’re just not “real.”
Bush crystalized cypher-dom to a metaphysical degree.
The problem with all (partial) democracies is that, as long as you have not completely renounced and cut off all connection with “your” country (native, adopted, or whatever), you are willy-nilly a part of it, but in matters of war and peace, especially, you have very little power to take part in the decisions of the government. As long as we have not changed that situation, we can bemoan it as much as we want, but we are stuck in it.
I often say “we” when referring to the federal government.I do so because I do not identify with its policies, and wish to affirm my citizenship rights viz the reactionary clowns who would dismiss them because I do not identify with the policies of the federal government. I also wish to remind others that they bear a bit of responsibility for the bloodshed caused by the federal government. If common Americans fail to put down the American empire, who will?
Because he supported the stablishment position on Iraq, Ezra Klein was able to rise into the ranks of the establishment. Back in January 2007, Jebediah Reed of the now-defunct Radar Magazine took a look at some of the career trajectories of pundits who supported the war (Tom Friedman, Peter Beinart, Fareed Zakaria, Jeffrey Goldberg) and the subsequent careers of vocal opponents of the invasion (Robert Scheer, William. S. Lind, Jonathan Schell, Scott Ritter). If Klein had been against the war, he never would have been promoted from obscurity to the pages of the Washington Post.
On September 18, 2004, in an apolgia he wrote after support for the war had weakened considerably, Ezra Klein posted at Pandagon about his “path to hawkishness”. He reveals his distrust of “peaceniks” and animosity towards “dumbaѕѕ hippies” (from a Robert Farley quote he identifies with).
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Farley now writes for The American Prospect (where Klein wrote before moving to the Washington Post). Klein did not trust peaceniks and did not like hippies. If he was honest and genuinely self-reflective, he would laud his earlier pro-war position for paving the way for his successful career.
You are dead on as usual. One can see the same process playing out in our media’s responses to attempts to cut social security benefits and pension “reforms” being played out in various states. At no level, federal, state, or local, is dissent with official policies not marginalized. Elite official policy is always endorsed, and the reporters identify with the “very serious people” no matter how often they are wrong.
My problem with Klein’s “apology” is that he says he didn’t support the war that actually happened, he supported a “different” war, the one Kenneth Pollack talked about, the one where the difficulties and expense and the long-term nature were acknowledged in advance. But that didn’t happen, so “I turned on the war quickly when I saw how poorly and arrogantly it was being managed.”
In other words, if we’d had Kenneth Pollack’s war, if we’d done it “right,” well, that would have been okay.
Not much of an apology in my book.
“You go to war with the war you’ve got, not with the war you wished you had.”
Ezra Klein’s latest apologia sounds like he copped it from Josh Marshall.
Ezra Klein：“Rather than looking at the war that was actually being sold, I’d invented my own Iraq war to support — an Iraq war with different aims, promoted by different people, conceptualized in a different way and bearing little resemblance to the project proposed by the Bush administration.”
Josh Marshall：“Many people — and to my chagrin and regret I include myself partly in this number — were seduced into a sorta kinda support for a hypothetical Iraq war. Not the war George Bush would fight, certainly. But one that would be fought on liberal principles and with internationalist means, one about human rights and democratization, one about strengthening a concert of nations that would police malefactor states.”
I wonder how often pundits simply copy one another, trying out different talking points until they find ones that sound plausible and credible.
Copying others in the establishment seems a safe way to advance your career without ever accidentally saying something that threatens those in power.
Thank you for noticing this unfortunate lapse into “we” with relation to the U.S. government — and for letting other folks know.
Thanks for both noticing, and reporting on, Klein’s identification with the U.S. government.
Corey, it should (but won’t) foster discussion on the notion of self-identification with government, and how it is easily manipulated by those in power. “We” needed to invade Vietnam? “We” need to cut the shortterm deficit at the expense of jobs? And then there’s wWe” need to sacrifice, when that particular “we” means money out of the pockets of all but the wealthy and powerful. “We” would seem to be a method of disassociating responsibility. It’s not surprising Klein does this, as he’s tried so very hard to be part of the pundit crowd with top access to the powerful.
Not to say ‘we’ is to evade responsibility for common decisions. The fact that ‘we’ waged war (yes, it’s fair enough to point out that most of us didn’t actually go) is what makes many of ‘us’ most upset–it was done by ‘us’ whether we as individuals supported the decision or not. ‘We,’ all of us, bear the burden of this crime.