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Twenty years after the United States led a coalition to overthrow Saddam Hussein, the conventional wisdom is now that the postwar fiasco proved that the war was a mistake from its inception. The war, as it was executed, was indeed a disaster, but there was ample cause for launching it.

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I supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I have changed my mind about some things but not everything, and I hope you’ll bear with me in a somewhat longer edition of the Daily today for a personal exploration of the issue.

In retrospect, almost no American war except the great crusade against the Axis seems to have been necessary, especially for the people who have had to go and fight such conflicts. How could we have asked our military men and women to endure death and mutilation and horror in 1991 so that a bunch of rich Kuwaitis could return to their mansions, or in 2003 so that we could finally settle scores with a regional dictator? Yesterday, The Bulwark ran a searing, must-read reminiscence of the Iraq War written by a U.S. veteran that reminds us how high-flown ideas such as “national interest” or “international order” play little role on the actual battlefield.

And yet, there are just wars: conflicts that require the use of armed force on behalf of an ally or for the greater good of the international community. I was an advocate for deposing Saddam by the mid-1990s on such grounds. Here is what I wrote in the journal Ethics & International Affairs on the eve of the invasion in March 2003:

The record provides ample evidence of the justice of a war against Saddam Hussein’s regime. Iraq has shown itself to be a serial aggressor led by a dictator willing to run imprudent risks, including an attack on the civilians of a noncombatant nation during the Persian Gulf War; a supreme enemy of human rights that has already used weapons of mass destruction against civilians; a consistent violator of both UN resolutions and the terms of the 1991 cease-fire treaty, to say nothing of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions before and since the Persian Gulf War; a terrorist entity that has attempted to reach beyond its own borders to support and engage in illegal activities that have included the attempted assassination of a former U.S. president; and most important, a state that has relentlessly sought nuclear arms against all international demands that it cease such efforts.

Any one of these would be sufficient cause to remove Saddam and his regime(and wars have started over less), but taken together they are a brief for what can only be considered a just war.

Today, there is not a word of this I would take back as an indictment of Saddam Hussein or as justification for the use of force. But although I believed that the war could be justified on these multiple grounds, the George W. Bush administration chose a morally far weaker argument for a preventive war, ostensibly to counter a gathering threat of weapons of mass destruction. (Preemptive war, by the way, is a war to avert an imminent attack, and generally permissible in international law and custom. Preventive war is going to war on your own timetable to snuff out a possible future threat, a practice long rejected by the international community as immoral and illegal. The Israeli move at the opening of the Six-Day War, in 1967, was preemptive; the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, was preventive.

Of course, the Iraqi dictator was doing his damndest to convince the world that he had weapons of mass destruction, because he was terrified of admitting to his worst foe, Iran, that he no longer had them. (He sure convinced me.) But this was no evidence of an imminent threat requiring instant action, and the WMD charge was the shakiest of limbs in a tree full of much stronger branches.

Bush used the WMD rationale as just one in a kitchen sink of issues, likely because his advisers thought it was the case that would most resonate with the public after the September 11 terror attacks. For years, most Western governments saw terrorism, rogue states, and WMD as three separate problems, to be handled by different means. After 9/11, these three issues threaded together into one giant problem—a rogue state supporting terrorists who seek to do mass damage—and the tolerance for risk that protected the Iraqi tyrant for so many years evaporated.

In 2003, I was far too confident in the ability of my own government to run a war of regime change, which managed to turn a quick operational victory into one of the greatest geopolitical disasters in American history. Knowing what I now know, I would not have advocated for setting the wheels of war in motion. And although Bush bears the ultimate responsibility for this war, I could not have imagined how much Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s obsession with “transformation,” the idea that the U.S. military could do more with fewer troops and lighter forces, would undermine our ability to conduct a war against Iraq. As Eliot Cohen later said, “The thing I know now that I did not know then is just how incredibly incompetent we would be, which is the most sobering part of all this.”

My own unease about the war began when America’s de facto military governor, Paul Bremer, disbanded the Iraqi military and embarked on “de-Baathification,” taking as his historical analogy the “denazification” of Germany after World War II. This was bad history and bad policy, and it created a massive unemployment problem among people skilled in violence while punishing civilians whose only real association with Baathism was the party card required for them to get a good job.

And yet, for a few years more, I stayed the course. I believed that Iraqis, like anyone else, wanted to be free. They might not be Jeffersonian democrats, but they hated Saddam, and now they had a chance at something better. Like many of our leaders, I was still amazed at the collapse of the Soviet Union, appalled at Western inaction in places like Rwanda, and convinced (as I still am) that U.S. foreign policy should be premised on a kind of Spider-Man doctrine: With great power comes great responsibility.

Unfortunately, in my case, this turned into supporting what the late Charles Krauthammer in 1999 called “a blanket anti-son of a bitch policy,” which he described as “soothing, satisfying and empty. It is not a policy at all but righteous self-delusion.” Krauthammer was right, and people like me were too willing to argue for taking out bad guys merely because they were bad guys. But that word blanket was doing a lot of lifting in Krauthammer’s formulation; perhaps we cannot go after all of them, but some sons of bitches should be high on the list. For me, Saddam was one of them.

The question now was whether even Saddam Hussein was worth the cost. Twenty years ago, I would have said yes. Today, I would say no—but I must add the caveat that no one knew then, nor can anyone know now, how much more dangerous a world we might have faced with Saddam and his psychopathic sons still in power. (Is the world better off because we left Bashar al-Assad in power and allowed him to turn Syria into an abattoir?) Yes, some rulers are too dangerous to remove; Vladimir Putin, hiding in the Kremlin behind a wall of nuclear weapons, comes to mind. Some, however, are too dangerous to allow to remain in power, and in 2003, I included Saddam in that group.

In 2007, Vanity Fair interviewed a group of the war’s most well-known supporters. Even the ur-hawk Richard Perle (nicknamed in Washington the “Prince of Darkness” when he worked for Ronald Reagan) admitted that, if he had it to do over again, he might have argued for some path other than war. But the comment that sticks with me to this day, and the one that best represents my thinking, came from Ambassador Kenneth Adelman. In 2002, Adelman famously declared that the war would be “a cakewalk,” but five years later, he said:

The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless. I guess that’s what I would have said: that Bush’s arguments are absolutely right, but you know what? You just have to put them in the drawer marked CAN’T DO. And that’s very different from LET’S GO.

Twenty years later, that’s where I remain. The cause was just, but there are times when doing what’s right and just is not possible. For almost 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union and the first Allied victory over Iraq, the United States had the chance to deepen the importance of international institutions. We squandered that opportunity because of poor leadership, Pentagon fads (the “Office of Force Transformation” was disbanded in 2006, shortly before Bush finally removed Rumsfeld), and amateurish historical analogies.

Still, there’s too much revisionist history about the Iraq War. You’ll see arguments that experts supported it. (Most academics and many civilians in D.C. did not.) You’ll hear that it was a right-wing crusade backed only by a Republican minority. (Also wrong.) Had the war been executed differently, we might be having a different conversation today.

The fact remains that the United States is a great power protecting an international system it helped to create, and there will be times when military action is necessary. Fortunately, most Americans still seem to grasp this important reality.

Would I argue for another such operation today? If the question means “another massive preventive war far from home,” no. I have consistently opposed war with Iran and any direct U.S. involvement in Ukraine. I wrote a book in 2008 warning that we should strengthen the United Nations and other institutions to stop the growing acceptance around the world of preventive war as a normal tool of statecraft.

I also, however, supported the NATO operation in Libya, and I have called for using American airpower to blunt Assad’s mass murders in Syria. Iraq was a terrible mistake, but it would be another mistake to draw the single-minded conclusion (much as we did after Vietnam) that everything everywhere will forever be another Iraq. The world is too dangerous, and American leadership too necessary, for us to fall into such a facile and paralyzing trap.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Daniel Zender / The Atlantic; Getty

Please Get Me Out of Dead-Dog TikTok

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

A brown dog, muzzle gone gray—surely from a life well lived—tries to climb three steps but falters. Her legs give out, and she twists and falls. A Rottweiler limps around a kitchen. A golden retriever pants in a vet’s office, then he’s placed on a table, wrapped in medical tubes. “Bye, buddy,” a voice says off camera. Nearby, a hand picks up a syringe.

This is Dead-Dog TikTok. It is an algorithmic loop of pet death: of sick and senior dogs living their last day on Earth, of final hours spent clinging to one another in the veterinarian’s office, of the brutal grief that follows in the aftermath. One related trend invites owners to share the moment they knew it was time—time unspecified, but clear: Share the moment you decided to euthanize your dog.

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P. S.

No recommendations today, other than to thank our veterans for shouldering the burden of a war that we asked them to fight.

— Tom

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Fox News will likely never face any real consequences for the biggest scandal in the history of American media. But will Republican voters finally understand who really looks down on them?

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Loathing and Indifference

It’s time to talk about elitism.

Last month, I wrote that the revelations about Fox News in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit showed that Fox personalities, for all their populist bloviation, are actually titanic elitists. This is not the elitism of those who think they are smarter or more capable than others—I’ll get to that in a moment—but a new and gruesome elitism of the American right, a kind of hatred and disgust on the part of right-wing media and political leaders for the people they claim to love and defend. Greed and cynicism and moral poverty can explain only so much of what we’ve learned about Fox; what the Dominion filings show is a staggering, dehumanizing version of elitism among people who have made a living by presenting themselves as the only truth-tellers who can be trusted by ordinary Americans.

I am, to say the least, no stranger to the charge of elitism. When I wrote a book in 2018 titled The Death of Expertise, a study of how people have become so narcissistic and so addled by cable and the internet that they believe themselves to be smarter than doctors and diplomats, I was regularly tagged as an “elitist.” And the truth is: I am an elitist, insofar as I believe that some people are better at things than others.

But even beyond talent and ability, I do in fact firmly believe that some opinions, political views, personal actions, and life choices are better than others. As I wrote in my book at the time:

Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s. This is the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense. It is a flat assertion of actual equality that is always illogical, sometimes funny, and often dangerous.

If that makes me an elitist, so be it.

In this, elitism is the opposite of populism, whose adherents believe that virtue and competence reside in the common wisdom of a nebulous coalition called “the people.” This pernicious and romantic myth is often a danger to liberal democracies and constitutional orders that are founded, first and foremost, on the inherent rights of individuals rather than whatever raw majorities think is right at any given time.

The American right, however, now uses elitist to mean “people who think they’re better than me because they live and work and play differently than I do.” They rage that people—myself included—look down upon them. And again, truth be told, I do look down on Trump voters, not because I am an elitist but because I am an American citizen and I believe that they, as my fellow citizens, have made political choices that have inflicted the greatest harm on our system of government since the Civil War. I refuse to treat their views as just part of the normal left-right axis of American politics.

(As an aside, note that the insecure whining about being “looked down upon” is wildly asymmetrical: Trump voters have no trouble looking down on their opponents as traitors, perverts, and, as Donald Trump himself once put it, “human scum.” But they react to criticism with a kind of deep hurt, as if others must accommodate their emotional well-being. Many of these same people gleefully adopted “Fuck your feelings” as a rallying cry but never expected that it was a slogan that worked both ways.)

In 2016, I believed that good people were making a mistake. In 2023, I cannot dismiss their choices as mere mistakes. Instead, I accept and respect the human agency that has led Trump supporters to their current choices. Indeed, I insist on recognizing that agency: I have never agreed with the people who dismiss Trump voters as robotic simpletons who were mesmerized by Russian memes. I believe that today’s Trump supporters are people who are making a conscious, knowing, and morally flawed choice to continue supporting a sociopath and a party chock-full of seditionists.

I have argued with some of these people. Sometimes, I have mocked them. Mostly, I have refused to engage them. But whatever my feelings are about the abominable choices of Trump supporters, here is the one thing I have never done that Fox’s hosts did for years: I have never patronized any of the people I disagree with.

Unlike people such as Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, I have never told anyone—including you, readers of The Atlantic—anything I don’t believe. What we’re seeing at Fox, however, is lying on a grand scale, done with a snide loathing for the audience and a cool indifference to the damage being done to the nation. Fox, and the Republican Party it serves, for years has relentlessly patronized its audience, cooing to viewers about how right they are not to trust anyone else, banging the desk about the corruption of American institutions, and shouting into the camera about how the liars and betrayers must pay.

Fox’s stars did all of this while privately communicating with one another and rolling their eyes with contempt, admitting without a shred of shame that they were lying through their teeth. From Rupert Murdoch on down, top Fox personalities have admitted that they fed the rubes all of this red, rotting meat to keep them out of the way of the Fox limos headed to Long Island and Connecticut.

You can see this same kind of contemptuous elitism in Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Elise Stefanik. They couldn’t care less about the voters—those hoopleheads back home who have to be placated with idiotic speeches against trans people and “critical race theory.” These politicians were bred to be leaders, you see, and having to gouge some votes out of the hayseeds back home requires a bit of performance art now and then, a small price to pay so that the sons and daughters of Harvard and Yale, Princeton and Stanford, can live in the imperial capital and rule as is their due and their right.

Some years ago, I was at a meeting of one of the committees of the National Academy of Sciences. The conferees asked me how scientists—there were Nobel Laureates in the room—could defend the cause of knowledge. Stand your ground, I told them. Never hesitate to tell people they’re wrong. One panel member shook his head: “Tom, people don’t like to be condescended to.” I said, “I agree, but what they hate even more is to be patronized.”

I believed it then, but we’re now testing that hypothesis on a national scale. I hope I wasn’t wrong.

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Today’s News

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Daniel Zender / The Atlantic; Getty

We Programmed ChatGPT Into This Article

By Ian Bogost

ChatGPT, the internet-famous AI text generator, has taken on a new form. Once a website you could visit, it is now a service that you can integrate into software of all kinds, from spreadsheet programs to delivery apps to magazine websites such as this one. Snapchat added ChatGPT to its chat service (it suggested that users might type “Can you write me a haiku about my cheese-obsessed friend Lukas?”), and Instacart plans to add a recipe robot. Many more will follow.

They will be weirder than you might think. Instead of one big AI chat app that delivers knowledge or cheese poetry, the ChatGPT service (and others like it) will become an AI confetti bomb that sticks to everything. AI text in your grocery app. AI text in your workplace-compliance courseware. AI text in your HVAC how-to guide. AI text everywhere—even later in this article—thanks to an API.

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P.S.

If you’d like a more humorous defense of elitism—okay, an outright funny and entertaining one—check out Joel Stein’s 2019 book, In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You Are Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book. I’ll admit that I like it because I’m in it (Joel interviewed me, naturally, as a defender of elitism), but it’s also a sly exploration of the culture war that erupted after Trump redefined elite to mean anyone whom he doesn’t like, except for when he’s using the same word to refer to himself and anyone who likes him.

Stein talked with a lot of folks, including the Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, who had not yet lit the bonfire of his self-cancellation. (In Stein’s visit with him, however, you can see it coming.) Stein even gets a sit-down with—wait for it—Tucker Carlson. When Stein realizes that Carlson is slagging James Joyce’s classic Ulysses, he says, “It made me want to throw Tucker into the sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”

A writer who can make fun of Tucker Carlson while riffing on James Joyce is a writer you’ll want to read.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.