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Gosh, Iraq seems such a long time ago

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on Mon, 03/18/2013 - 9:58pm

Fought for lies, all about oil, supported by the entire political class*, an imperial Clusterfuck that broke the Army and normalized torture... Really, what else is there to say?

Well, granted, except for the millions of deaths, most of them civilian, but also including our own troops, many of whom committed suicide.

And everybody who was wrong is still in power, and everybody who was right is still a hippie. It's all so obvious I'm not even going to give links, and anyhow, I'm tired.

All this, so where's the victory parade?

NOTE * No, some fucking never-recorded speech of questionable date and provenance for no electoral stakes does not count. Obviously, given the track record.

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lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on

If I had the animal spirits to devote to it, I'd go through all the bloggers who were pro-Iraq -- Drum. Yglesias. Klein. And they all have jobs. They're all doing just fine. And the Chris Hedges and the Margaret Flowers of this world don't get squat, and that's before we get to all the unknown human faces occupying and so forth.

It also brings home to me that I started my first real run as a blogger playing whack-a-mole with the WMDs. It was just so obvious that the White House was full of shit. (I didn't know at the time that the moles weren't raising their little heads spontaneously; it was a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the administration via the White House Iraq Group.)

I don't want to say nothing has changed, because that would not be true. Much that is visible has changed for the worse (hat tip, Obama) but much that is not visible has (I am convinced) changed for the better. Most of those working on the better side were right about Iraq.

Cujo359's picture
Submitted by Cujo359 on

To be fair, Yglesias was 21 or so at the time, and Klein was younger. At that age, I wasn't terribly smart about politics. In fact, I think that if the Vietnam War and the draft had still been going on when I graduated from high school, I might very well have ended up there.

A good question in their case, at least, is why their opinions were so important back then. There were plenty of folks, like Steven Zune and Jeremy Scahill, who were making the case that there was no reason to be at war with Iraq back then, and it was a good case. What put these youngsters to the fore when there were plenty of adults who knew better?

I think I can deduce the answer to that question, but that's the sort of question that I think is important. We are

">still making the same wrong decisions as a country, and it's not for lack of counterexamples from our recent past. I suspect it's largely because we as a people are still fed the same sort of nonsense we were back in the 1960s, and we haven't demanded better.

EDIT: Sorry about the mess that Twitter link created. It really looks OK in raw HTML form...

Submitted by Hugh on

I too came to the blogosphere because of Iraq. One by one it destroyed all the beliefs I had grown up with about our government. I knew the WMD were bogus after the Colin Powell presentation at the UN. I had heard too that the invasion had originally been dubbed Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL). I hoped it would turn out as a humanitarian intervention. But it was like a nonstop horror show. Eventually, only the most cynical perspective could really do it justice. It was a watershed in my understanding of the ignorance, incompetence, dishonesty, greed, violence and outright evil not just of the neocons but of our elites generally.

Submitted by MontanaMaven on

I heard an Iraq war veteran, Koby Langley, talk about he believes the war was necessary on “Up” with Chris Hayes on Sunday. Callous or clueless I thought of him repeating how “distressing” it has been for him and other soldiers and for the American people to hear all this bad news. How “distressing ” it was for him to have to negotiate a $2500 settlement with an Iraqi uncle for the death of his nephew. Thank goodness that Hayes also had on Raed Jarrar whom I had the privilege of interviewing twice on my radio show. Raed is an Iraqi architect and critic of the war. He came down hard on this guy for his “distress”. What about Iraqi distress. "2500 for a person; $2000 for a car; $700 for a sofa". He also said that we should not be debating “how” differently we should have handled this invasion but “whether the US should be in the business of nation building at all." I have never seen a more clear example of American hubris and tunnel vision and downright narcissism as I did with this soldier. It more than "distressed" me. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/46979738/#51214795

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