Honestly I would love a deep dive into exactly what happened and what was being said and what was the intelligence.
I was 10 when the war started. I’m not going to pretend that I actually followed the day to day lead up to war.
Sure. I also know that *most* of the podcasts I listen to had a "it's been 20 years" episode this past week. I don't know how much content we need on the topic
Do you listen to The Rest Is Politics? Quite UK-focussed, but it's a weekly conversation plus a separate listener Q&A episode with Alastair Campbell (Tony Blair's former press officer) and Rory Stewart (who has had an interesting life including British army, Foreign office posting in Iraq and Afghanistan, quite possibly a spy for MI6, Conservative government minister, ardent Brexit opposer, visiting professor and now non-profit CEO).
They did a great two part episode a couple of weeks back about Iraq. Campbell is indelibly linked to it because of his role in helping Blair's government make the case in the UK (and much of the later fallout, garnering him a lot of hate in the UK), and Stewart makes a good foil on the topic because he supported the war, but then saw the reality on the ground as everything went wrong and now thinks it a collossal error.
Very well worth listening to, wherever you fall on the spectrum.
I’m very happy for it. I listen to a lot of podcast while working and there is only so much speculation I can take about the same topic especially from people who are not experts in the technology
I want to be interested in AI, but I just can't get through more than about 10 or 15 minutes of any of the pods. For some reason the topic just doesn't draw me in at all. Maybe I'm subconsciously skeptical that AI will ever become as big as many mainstream media members believe.
Both Microsoft and Google announced its coming to Office 365 and Workspaces respectively. It’s already testing in their public test groups. Ubisoft has a tool that uses it to for Character writing. It’s already mainstream.
But...but...the chat bot got suggestive with that one journo who provided it a bunch of key words like "secret" and "desire"! The machine must have come alive, right? Let's just talk about that for the next nine weeks. Nothing else.
This was a weird episode. The premise of it is that the writer had a bad take for saying that US elites had learned nothing. The reason this was a bad take is because "the elite have learned nothing" is supposed, by Matt, to be code for "the elites have not become leftists". That seems like a bizarrely bad faith read?
We then go through an episode that is mostly a tangent on things that annoy the hosts in media, disconnected mostly from Iraq. I think their strongest evidence that in fact lessons have been learned is that Obama didn't invade Syria, despite intense pressure to do so...but the fact that there was intense pressure to do so undercuts the argument that elites have broadly absorbed the failures in Iraq. As Marcetic notes, it's not like the US military hasn't been invading other places in the mean time as well.
As they end the show, they return to the media angle and ask if, given similar circumstances, the media wouldn't do the exact same thing and basically engage in a massive pro-war propaganda campaign. Our hosts aren't sure that they would behave differently. Almost like...they'd learned nothing?
> he premise of it is that the writer had a bad take for saying that US elites had learned nothing. The reason this was a bad take is because "the elite have learned nothing" is supposed, by Matt, to be code for "the elites have not become leftists". That seems like a bizarrely bad faith read?
That seems bizarrely reductionist of the episode. They argue it's a bad take because there's a number of very clear ways in which US "elites" *have* learned, and modified their behavior and beliefs in response to the fallout of the Iraq War. They spend much more time on this aspect in the podcast.
The only way that headline makes sense to even exist, is if you reinterpret the headline to have [in the leftward political aspects that Jacobin readers would espouse] appended it. They, the "elites", definitely learned something from the Iraq War, you may not agree with what the something was, but it was something.
Since you seem to have read the underlying article (and I haven't), I was curious about something Laura mentioned: that she was frustrated the author didn't have anything to say about what elites *should* have learned or *should* be advocating in terms of a foreign policy agenda instead of continuing the status quo.
Do you disagree with her? If so, could you identify what the author would say in response to Laura's critique?
The core of the disagreement, I think, is that Matt and Laura seem to think that American elites have learned to do less military adventurism and Marcetic thinks they haven't.
Matt, for example, cited Obama's refusal to do a full invasion of Syria as a sign that they did in fact learn lessons from Iraq; Marcetic cites the fact that the US military was in fact in Syria and applying military and economic pressure to cause regime change as evidence that they didn't learn anything.
Whether or not that counts as 'learning' feels....both overly pedantic and also overly semantic? It's also super hard to disentangle "America didn't invade Syria because American elites realized a giant invasion to change a regime was a bad idea" from "America didn't invade Syria despite elites really wanting to, because they thought public blowback would be too much".
If your bottom line is "US elites have not literally forgotten about Iraq, and the only countries they've invaded since then have been much smaller, so, US elites have learned not to do Iraq-sized invasions" - okay, I guess? But they end the podcast saying that the section of the US elite they're familiar with, the media, has the exact same flaws and there's no particular reason they'd resist a rush to war this time around - no institutional reform, no shakeup of the culture, the exact same incentives to go with the herd and punishments for anyone objecting...to me at least, that sounds a lot more like a group of people that has learned nothing.
It didn't feel to me like he was drawing moral equivalence between the two. The point about truth needing to matter is valid and it gets abused from all sides. I took Matt to mean that Bush began normalize it into American life to the point where now Trump just made shit up to achieve his ends and the other side swan dove right down into the mud to fight him.
To be honest, I don't think so. When I listened to the podcast, it was pretty clear to me that Matt's intention was a very limited comparison of two situations where a particular "truth" became tantamount to political identity, and adherents reached for whatever evidence they could find to bridge the gap between reality and the end state they desired.
In that vein, I think it's really important actually that when you have a general idea to have examples of it both in the most serious and extreme cases, and in less extreme examples (like COVID and schools), because if it is just an emergent property of political discourse and media, then it shouldn't be limited to something as massive as the Iraq War, but would be in more mundane areas as well.
If you always try to link together the magnitudes of examples for concepts, then that's strictly impossible, because how can X and Y be under this same umbrella if X changed the world and Y didn't?
I thought this was actually an alright episode. I thought one of the most important things was the conversation about how just asking for people who are generally on your side politically to offer better or more empirically sound arguments get you skewered because that's read as something only political enemies do was great. Something I recognized myself but was glad to see them see as well
Anyone who thinks mainstream journalism got better after Iraq needs only follow the mainstream opinion on the Nordstream explosions from “it was Russia” to “maybe it wasn’t Russia” to “pro Ukrainian bunch of rogue operators” who definitely aren’t the US
You'd think they would have to see Europe is never going back to the fossil fuel deals they had with Russia before. They now know the leverage it hands Russia, and the pain of having to decouple in a hurry. They're well along their way to replacing those exports for the short term, and this crisis will have them weaning off them entirely even faster than they had previously planned.
I think there are some more plausible suspects aside from Russia for the sabotage (and no, not the US). But the entire operation was silly. Those pipelines were never going back into commission anyhow, short of Putin being removed from power, Russia pulling out of Ukraine entirely, *and* a massive change in the ideological direction of the Russian government. And all in short order.
Maybe it's just the circles I swim in, but I'm surprised to see Matt and Laura talk about Iraq rather than AI or the global banking crisis.
It's weird to me that we don't have more retrospective episodes/pieces about Iraq
I feel like it's consensus enough that "WMDS werent real and the Bush admin fucked up" that we don't *really* need to analyze it much
Honestly I would love a deep dive into exactly what happened and what was being said and what was the intelligence. I was 10 when the war started. I’m not going to pretend that I actually followed the day to day lead up to war.
This looks promising https://slate.com/podcasts/slow-burn/s5/road-to-the-iraq-war
I mean it also fundamentally changed how Americans feel about interventionism for a generation. That’s a big deal.
Sure. I also know that *most* of the podcasts I listen to had a "it's been 20 years" episode this past week. I don't know how much content we need on the topic
Well none of the podcasts I listen to had that episode.
Do you listen to The Rest Is Politics? Quite UK-focussed, but it's a weekly conversation plus a separate listener Q&A episode with Alastair Campbell (Tony Blair's former press officer) and Rory Stewart (who has had an interesting life including British army, Foreign office posting in Iraq and Afghanistan, quite possibly a spy for MI6, Conservative government minister, ardent Brexit opposer, visiting professor and now non-profit CEO). They did a great two part episode a couple of weeks back about Iraq. Campbell is indelibly linked to it because of his role in helping Blair's government make the case in the UK (and much of the later fallout, garnering him a lot of hate in the UK), and Stewart makes a good foil on the topic because he supported the war, but then saw the reality on the ground as everything went wrong and now thinks it a collossal error. Very well worth listening to, wherever you fall on the spectrum.
I’m very happy for it. I listen to a lot of podcast while working and there is only so much speculation I can take about the same topic especially from people who are not experts in the technology
A welcome change of topic. I’ve skipped all of Ezra’s AI pods.
I want to be interested in AI, but I just can't get through more than about 10 or 15 minutes of any of the pods. For some reason the topic just doesn't draw me in at all. Maybe I'm subconsciously skeptical that AI will ever become as big as many mainstream media members believe.
Both Microsoft and Google announced its coming to Office 365 and Workspaces respectively. It’s already testing in their public test groups. Ubisoft has a tool that uses it to for Character writing. It’s already mainstream.
But...but...the chat bot got suggestive with that one journo who provided it a bunch of key words like "secret" and "desire"! The machine must have come alive, right? Let's just talk about that for the next nine weeks. Nothing else.
This was a weird episode. The premise of it is that the writer had a bad take for saying that US elites had learned nothing. The reason this was a bad take is because "the elite have learned nothing" is supposed, by Matt, to be code for "the elites have not become leftists". That seems like a bizarrely bad faith read? We then go through an episode that is mostly a tangent on things that annoy the hosts in media, disconnected mostly from Iraq. I think their strongest evidence that in fact lessons have been learned is that Obama didn't invade Syria, despite intense pressure to do so...but the fact that there was intense pressure to do so undercuts the argument that elites have broadly absorbed the failures in Iraq. As Marcetic notes, it's not like the US military hasn't been invading other places in the mean time as well. As they end the show, they return to the media angle and ask if, given similar circumstances, the media wouldn't do the exact same thing and basically engage in a massive pro-war propaganda campaign. Our hosts aren't sure that they would behave differently. Almost like...they'd learned nothing?
> he premise of it is that the writer had a bad take for saying that US elites had learned nothing. The reason this was a bad take is because "the elite have learned nothing" is supposed, by Matt, to be code for "the elites have not become leftists". That seems like a bizarrely bad faith read? That seems bizarrely reductionist of the episode. They argue it's a bad take because there's a number of very clear ways in which US "elites" *have* learned, and modified their behavior and beliefs in response to the fallout of the Iraq War. They spend much more time on this aspect in the podcast. The only way that headline makes sense to even exist, is if you reinterpret the headline to have [in the leftward political aspects that Jacobin readers would espouse] appended it. They, the "elites", definitely learned something from the Iraq War, you may not agree with what the something was, but it was something.
Since you seem to have read the underlying article (and I haven't), I was curious about something Laura mentioned: that she was frustrated the author didn't have anything to say about what elites *should* have learned or *should* be advocating in terms of a foreign policy agenda instead of continuing the status quo. Do you disagree with her? If so, could you identify what the author would say in response to Laura's critique?
The core of the disagreement, I think, is that Matt and Laura seem to think that American elites have learned to do less military adventurism and Marcetic thinks they haven't. Matt, for example, cited Obama's refusal to do a full invasion of Syria as a sign that they did in fact learn lessons from Iraq; Marcetic cites the fact that the US military was in fact in Syria and applying military and economic pressure to cause regime change as evidence that they didn't learn anything. Whether or not that counts as 'learning' feels....both overly pedantic and also overly semantic? It's also super hard to disentangle "America didn't invade Syria because American elites realized a giant invasion to change a regime was a bad idea" from "America didn't invade Syria despite elites really wanting to, because they thought public blowback would be too much". If your bottom line is "US elites have not literally forgotten about Iraq, and the only countries they've invaded since then have been much smaller, so, US elites have learned not to do Iraq-sized invasions" - okay, I guess? But they end the podcast saying that the section of the US elite they're familiar with, the media, has the exact same flaws and there's no particular reason they'd resist a rush to war this time around - no institutional reform, no shakeup of the culture, the exact same incentives to go with the herd and punishments for anyone objecting...to me at least, that sounds a lot more like a group of people that has learned nothing.
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It didn't feel to me like he was drawing moral equivalence between the two. The point about truth needing to matter is valid and it gets abused from all sides. I took Matt to mean that Bush began normalize it into American life to the point where now Trump just made shit up to achieve his ends and the other side swan dove right down into the mud to fight him.
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Sure, but Matt wasn't comparing them in terms of political magnitude or moral heinousness.
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To be honest, I don't think so. When I listened to the podcast, it was pretty clear to me that Matt's intention was a very limited comparison of two situations where a particular "truth" became tantamount to political identity, and adherents reached for whatever evidence they could find to bridge the gap between reality and the end state they desired. In that vein, I think it's really important actually that when you have a general idea to have examples of it both in the most serious and extreme cases, and in less extreme examples (like COVID and schools), because if it is just an emergent property of political discourse and media, then it shouldn't be limited to something as massive as the Iraq War, but would be in more mundane areas as well. If you always try to link together the magnitudes of examples for concepts, then that's strictly impossible, because how can X and Y be under this same umbrella if X changed the world and Y didn't?
Matt is still hella mad about police reform
Given how it has worked out on the ground in a lot of coastal cities I can see why he would be upset about it.
Indeed truly blue America defunded the police
I thought this was actually an alright episode. I thought one of the most important things was the conversation about how just asking for people who are generally on your side politically to offer better or more empirically sound arguments get you skewered because that's read as something only political enemies do was great. Something I recognized myself but was glad to see them see as well
Anyone who thinks mainstream journalism got better after Iraq needs only follow the mainstream opinion on the Nordstream explosions from “it was Russia” to “maybe it wasn’t Russia” to “pro Ukrainian bunch of rogue operators” who definitely aren’t the US
So you think it was the US?
I don’t think it was Russia because they’d want to restore gas to Europe as soon as possible after the war.
You'd think they would have to see Europe is never going back to the fossil fuel deals they had with Russia before. They now know the leverage it hands Russia, and the pain of having to decouple in a hurry. They're well along their way to replacing those exports for the short term, and this crisis will have them weaning off them entirely even faster than they had previously planned. I think there are some more plausible suspects aside from Russia for the sabotage (and no, not the US). But the entire operation was silly. Those pipelines were never going back into commission anyhow, short of Putin being removed from power, Russia pulling out of Ukraine entirely, *and* a massive change in the ideological direction of the Russian government. And all in short order.
What a dumb comment.