[camgunz]

I wanna try and weight my reply right. I like a lot of your posts and learn from you not infrequently. I also respect the way you think. Sometimes though, you toss out a very Fox News talking point, which confuses me! Before Trump's reelection I was fine letting this kind of thing stand, I mean who has the energy. But it's clearly gone too far. Here's another great example: "the intelligence community [is] just trying to get us into war with Russia." I mean, what a fuckin bonkers claim with no evidence. What are you doing?

[rayiner]

> Here's another great example: "the intelligence community [is] just trying to get us into war with Russia."

I mean this respectfully: how old are you? Because that isn’t a “Fox News” comment at all! Until five minutes ago, Democrats were the ones who criticized Bush-era republicans for their fixation on Russia and efforts to keep fighting the Cold War: https://youtu.be/T1409sXBleg?si=Pz2Yd_vY4ZARbcvs

And yes, the intelligence community has been trying to get us into a war with Russia or its proxies since the 1950s. The whole idea that Americans have “allies” or “interests” in Eastern Europe is a Reagan-era CIA psyop.

[camgunz]

Haha well, I think we're in the same cohort? I was a senior in HS when 9/11 happened. I've worked in Democratic politics in some capacity for over a decade, although I recently took a break to have kids. I know Russia's our enemy because I was working on the Hillary Clinton campaign when Trump asked them to hack into Hillary's emails and watched them actively trying to hack us; and they've since compromised a bunch of (dumb, like crunchyroll) accounts of mine.

I don't want to parse through everything here, and you definitely won't find me defending the intelligence establishment. All I'm saying is what tptacek said up there: stretching the Hunter Biden laptop letter signatories into "Democrats" stretches too far, and if that's the evidence you're bringing against the Iraq War and Valerie Plame you're coming up short. You have a big platform here; I think if you were a little more judicious about the claims you make you could do a lot of good, and I think we need that right now.

[rayiner]

We must be the exact same age. You saw what I saw. How could you trust Clinton on foreign policy after that? I don’t think she even regrets the Iraq War, and wishes we were still in Afghanistan. She sounded like the Weekly Standard the way she went after Tulsi Gabbard for trying to keep us out of a war in Syria.

I don’t know what’s in the inner minds of other democrats. But out of the two parties, they’re cuddling up to all the ones who have been wrong for the last 50 years about foreign policy.

[camgunz]

> We must be the exact same age.

See I knew there was something I liked about you haha.

Hopefully this doesn't come across as deflecting or whatever (HRC has a lot of takes I disagree with, I think she would have been a very good president, but I'm more of a Warren or Booker guy). I think being an effective leader in the US at the level HRC was for decades is a lot harder than people really know. I'm not talking about the mechanics (though those are also hard), rather I'm talking about the effect it has on you as a human. I think the act of building a mental model of public opinion is fundamentally corrupting, but if you don't do it, you'll almost certainly lose power to someone who does (or you could be in a super safe seat, but that's not an option for everyone). You probably also think a big part of your job is representing your constituents, so there's a huge amount of balancing divining and representing their positions vs. leading them to where they might not necessarily be. The stakes are also bananas: you're talking about the lives of tons and tons of people. This is all very hard; I can't really overstate how mindfucking it can be.

So to come back around to your point, let's take an incredibly cynical view and say HRC authorized the Iraq War because that was the obvious power politics move. It's not wrong to consider, "I'm pursuing values I think are important, I'm effective at it, the odds of someone doing better or being more principled than I am are very low--after all this game is by itself deeply corrupting to even the best of us, taking a stand here has almost no upside, I do want to be president one day, OK I vote yea". This all really reasonable, then you throw on the pile her changing her vote would've made absolutely no difference, and she's the junior Senator from New York where 9/11 happened, and at least I start having a lot of sympathy for her vote. I don't mean to diminish the full on tragedies Iraq and Afghanistan were, but these are the kinds of stakes and incentives we're working with here.

So I try to be pretty kind to electeds, even on both sides, because the incentives are truly nutso. Maybe you're Trey Gowdy and you don't love having 5,000 Benghazi hearings, but you've got this plum committee assignment you don't want to lose, so here we go. Maybe you're John Boehner and you don't love being asked vaguely racist questions about Obama's birth certificate constantly, but you're finally Speaker and this is the zeitgeist. Anyway, I earnestly think we urgently need some kind of deep governance reform or whatever. It's almost impossible for the system to produce good outcomes. I'm not saying get the torches; I am saying start putting it in party platforms and get candidates on record about it.

Finally, you ask how I could trust her after her Iraq war vote, but Democrats are pretty used to not having our policy preferences represented in office. Again while I think HRC would have been a very good president, there are other people I'd have preferred. But that's what primaries and party politics are for, and that process is... imperfect. I voted for Obama in the '08 Iowa caucus largely because of her Iraq War vote and--hilariously--I liked Obama saying you wouldn't need an individual health insurance mandate (oh to be young). But, to resume a partisan stance, I think the Republican party--and Trump in particular--is dangerous enough to merit fierce and vigorous opposition in a general election. It's hard for me to imagine a Democratic candidate that was so bad I'd stay home on eday.

> I don’t know what’s in the inner minds of other democrats. But out of the two parties, they’re cuddling up to all the ones who have been wrong for the last 50 years about foreign policy.

I'm bad at foreign policy and mostly stay out of it. But my uninformed opinion is that while Democrats haven't done a bang up job, Iraq and Afghanistan aren't on us, and Trump's banging on NATO and creating some kind of comic book villain council of strongmen seem like obvious bad ideas. Strong disagree that Dems are now taking direction from Iraq/Afghanistan architects; I just don't see any evidence of that at all. Biden withdrew from Afghanistan at great political cost, after all.

[rayiner]

So I guess it depends on why you think the Iraq War was bad. To me, the Iraq War was bad because, even if the intel had been correct, the notion that you could create a democracy in Iraq was fundamentally foolish, along with the idea that it was America’s job to do it.

To me, the Iraq War was a predictable disaster rooted not in bad intel, but the mistaken concept of liberal universalism (emphasis on universalism, not liberal). Clinton is a smart, probably well meaning person. But what she shares with George W. Bush is liberal universalism, and that’s a bad and dangerous idea. It’s been a bad and dangerous idea that’s gotten us involved in countless non-defensive wars over the last 50 years.

In that respect, the Democratic Party today is a lot closer to the bad old GOP than it was 20 years ago. Between Ukraine, helping overthrow Assad, what Blinken allegedly did in Pakistan, rabble-rousing about “human rights” in Bangladesh—the Democratic Party today is full of liberal universalists. They’re not literally the same people who got us into the Iraq War, but the ideology isn’t any less dumb today, and will result in similar disasters.

What Trump understands that democrats don’t is that non-Americans aren’t Americans. The conceit underlying the Iraq war is that Iraqis were Americans. If you overthrew the dictator keeping them down, they’d build a democracy. And it was a monumental error. And the same is true for Syria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, etc. This is a conceit that liberal universalists cannot let go of.

[542354234235]

“Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” George W Bush.

The Iraq war was not about bringing democracy to Iraq. It was bad intel about a nuclear weapons program in Iraq. The intel for a nuclear weapons program was weak and flimsy and the disagreement within the intel community was strong, but the White House pushed hard to support the pro-nuclear program viewpoint.

While I agree we should not have gone into Iraq, I disagree that it was an inevitable disaster. Iraq was a disaster because there was zero post invasion plan in place. The government was purged of “regime loyalists” which was basically everyone. This did two major things that shaped the country. First, it put thousands of police and soldiers out of work, giving the later insurgency a large employment pool of trained personnel that needed money and resented the US for destroying their lives. Second, it created a security vacuum directly after the invasion, creating crime waves throughout the country when it needed stability. Iraq was a primarily urban society used to central governance (unlike rural/tribal Afghanistan, for instance) and it is likely it could have transitioned to a new government.

While it is dangerous to think everyone can be like Americans, it is just as dangerous to think Iraq and Afghanistan are basically the same, or that all interventions and goals are the same (nation building in Afghanistan vs minimizing genocidal civil war in Syria).

[Joking_Phantom]

This is the only comment you made so far that made sense, with clear assertions and references. Everything else was unfounded or inflammatory without any concrete assertion, which is why it vibed like "Fox News talking points."

While I do think what you describe under the label of "liberal universalism" mostly makes sense, I do challenge it's consistency. By all measures, some countries are trending towards becoming liberal democracies. Why shouldn't we help them?

Ukraine being a viable liberal democracy, a useful geopolitical ally, and in opposition to a destabilizing and dehumanizing autocracy, makes for a perfect candidate for support beyond naive global liberalism. It is in our interests in many practical terms, separate from ideology.

[camgunz]

I 90% agree on the foreign policy stuff. I'd even go further and say advocates for invasion never considered Iraq was actually pretty good for a country in that region. Not only were they a key counterbalancing force to Iran, they were relatively religiously and culturally moderate (I'm sure there's a lot of nuance here; again I'm pretty ignorant). Advocates full on ignored or misrepresented intelligence about Iraq's WMD program though (I'm pretty sure even HRC ignored it or at least weighed it way too lightly).

I agree the Iraq War was premised on deeply faulty assumptions and complete naïveté about other cultures. Governments grow out of culture (a popular saying is "people tend to get the governments they deserve", which is maybe a little insensitive re: stuff like minority rights but not otherwise totally wrong); you can't really just poof a democracy into being; you can't just assume people will adopt your values. I do think we're way more circumspect on this now than you do though, I mean we haven't done another Iraq/Afghanistan. I'll also say that even though Republicans snicker at it, Jake Sullivan's foreign policy for the middle class is a pretty big departure for the establishment. That's a substantial positive change.

I also agree you can't 100% import "Americans". But, my worry with Trump's rhetoric here is that he ignores you can 99% import Americans, the children of the remaining 1% are fully assimilated, and that this has always been the case. There's so many ways we could make our immigration and asylum systems more humane and sustainable, but the GOP has ratfucked our immigration and asylum systems for decades to win elections (this is their move: break a part of government and then be like "look government is broken"... well yeah) so things will be trash for the foreseeable future.