Massage Not Lest Ye Be

Massage Not Lest Ye Be Massaged - The story from the left is this: The Bush Administration made up a bunch of things about Iraq, and will keep looking until it finds proof to match its preconceptions.

To reach this conclusion, Josh Marshall - the current darling of the blogging left - is...er, looking until he finds proof to match his conclusions.

This is one hell of a story in Sunday's Washington Post. The outlines of the tale are ones we've known for a while now: Iraq had little or nothing to do with al Qaida before the war. But the war itself -- the supposed remedy for the tie between Iraq and al Qaida -- ended up making the Iraq/al Qaida mumbo-jumbo into a reality.

In this paragraph, Marshall leads his little Republican Democrat Guard of strawmen into battle:

• The war was never a "supposed remedy for the tie" between Hussein and Bin Laden, but rather addressed quite a number of issues (WMDs, links to terror, human rights abuses, disobedience of UN resolutions).
• The piece to which Marshall links - which is indeed interesting, even if it's the usual "unnamed sources" providing the beef - doesn't come anywhere close to proving there was no Al-Quaeda connection with Iraq before 9/11 - and let's leave aside for a moment the fact that focusing on Al-Quaeda is itself myopic, in a world in which terror groups are amorphous and interrelated.

No, the piece shows merely that Al-Quaeda-affiliated guerrillas are flocking to Iraq. Which, if I recall correctly, was not only something we conservatives were predicting, but in fact hoping for ("Bring 'em on").

We return to Marshall:

You knew that in general terms. But here are the particulars. One confluence of events seems key. By the middle of 2002 al Qaida was seriously damaged, its infrastructure disrupted, many of its soldiers and key leaders dead. The mix of damage to the organization and increased security in the United States made new mass-casualty terrorism in America all but impossible. The organization had to fall back on smaller-scale attacks mainly in Muslim countries, carried out by local affiliated groups.

But the Iraq war -- and the onset of the occupation -- provided the organization (or its remnants) with a new opportunity. It was both a new vehicle to galvanize followers and operating there meant fewer logistical difficulties since it was close by. Even just before the war, in February of this year, key al Qaida operatives started planning the move toward Iraq as the new front.

Again, ask yourself (or better yet, Marshall) how this proves what Marshall "already knew" - that there was no pre-9/11 connection?

Marshall's not dishonest; he just works context like an old-world craftsman. It doesn't always work. Marshall says:

Also key is the role of Iran, which, according to the Post article, provided key members of the damaged al Qaida organization with a safe-haven during the period between their expulsion from Afghanistan and the opening of their new front in Iraq.

...which he notes in his next post, is a squishy theory.

Marshall continues:

A story like this, culled together from different sources, many of whom are no doubt interested parties, is only a first run at the truth. Points will be refined; major elements of the story may change. But I think this story and those that will follow it will be a major point of discussion for some time to come.

Note the careful double-standard; the left's anti-war cant is allowed to evolve into, apparently, the "final draft" truth over time; the case for war was allowed no revision or room for adaptation.

While I've been tempted to read exhaustively through Marshall's archives to figure out the gestalt of his Iraq coverage, others have done it before. Hugh Hewitt writes in the current edition of his blog:

Joshua Micah Marshall was on the program yesterday, and we mixed it up over Joshua's refusal to articulate any short-term standard against which the occupation of Iraq can be judged. Marshall's entry today is another amusing brew of unattributed insider knowledge, rim-shots off of newspaper stories, and wild rumors: "What changed, apparently, was that the Joint Chiefs went over too Powell's side." Ah, Seven Days in May must be on Josh's bedside. How breathless. How dramatic. How completely absurd: "Colin, this is Dick Myers. I've got Peter Pace with me here, and we want to come over to your side."

Marshall's article points to something I've noticed in the left's entire case against the war Administration, all along. It's led me to a realization, that I think I can postulate in the form of a pseudo-scientific hypothesis I will henceforth call Berg's Law. To wit:

In attacking the reasons for war, no liberal commentator is capable of addressing more than one of the justifications at a time; to do so would introduce a context in which their argument can not survive.

Think about it; when was the last time you saw a left-of-center commentator note the UN resolutions when jawing about the disappearing WMDs? Can you show me a liberal blogger who's talked about WMDs and still noted the UN resolutions that Iraq flaunted? Has anyone on the left spoken of the technicalities of the resolution-enforcement process while noting the WMD allegations and the pre-war evidence of terrorist (not just Al-Quaeda) connections?

Ask around. I'd love an answer to this.

Posted by Mitch at September 7, 2003 12:35 PM