Discussion for article #237025
Beautifully written article. The political debate about who to blame or armchair quarterbacking the decision-making process should only inform our perspective of history and how to avoid any of those same mistakes in the future. Like it or not, the country as a whole was in a fugue that allowed the vast majority of our country to support the invasion of Iraq, which is historical fact. How we move forward, or if we should move forward in the Middle East, is the decision we need to make now. Like it or not, the US has been part of the cycle and history of Middle Eastern violence, and the cycle will keep spinning round.
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Debating the rights or wrongs of the war happens to be probably the most important thing about it, primarily because we either do it again because it represented sound policy or realize that it should not have been done. Personally, the war was both a big mistake brought on by perfidy and also the post-war a poorly run enterprise once it was undertaken (which is what you would expect from deceivers and con artists). Powerful forces in this country believe otherwise and want to repeat the policy. Yes, no doubt it is very upsetting to those who trusted leadership and sacrificed for the cause of the war to hear this debate, but there can be no more important question than making sure such sacrifice is warranted. The only thing that will prevent a horrible repeat of such bad policy is that debate.
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War has always been political. When Lincoln was a member of the House of Representatives he requested that Democratic President Polk provide evidence to support his assertion that Mexico had invaded US territory. Lincoln was making a constitutional argument, “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to make war at pleasure.” Lincoln’s fellow Whigs turned on him. When a reporter asked Justin Butterfield, a prominent Whig politician from Chicago, if he would condemn the Mexican War as he had denounced the War of 1812, Butterfield replied “No Indeed! I opposed one war and it ruined me. From now on I’m for war, pestilence and famine.”
I’m currently reading Rick Perlstein’s “The Invisible Bridge.” Nixon and Reagan shamelessly politicized the Vietnam war. I saw Stan McCrystal on The Daily Show last night and I want to read his new book.
The blame game is a waste of time but it would definitely be a worthy effort to draw a timeline of US involvement in the Middle East and North Africa going back 20 years and plot the decision points. Many people have pointed out that question should not be “knowing what you know now, would you do it again” but rather “what have you learned?”
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Its not a matter of who to blame its a matter of understanding what went wrong and trying ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Unfortunately in framing it as a blame game the writer is falling into the same media trap that lead us into the war in the first place. Look to the media, don’t take what they are saying at face value. Question, research and make your own choices. In the lead up to the war “some people” were more than “outright deceitful” they lied and they lied with an agenda. That agenda had nothing to do with winning hearts and minds and had everything to do with starting a War. We were LIED TO. And people, thousands upon thousands of people, died for it. Its not called blaming, its called accountability. The best way to ensure that this doesn’t happen again is to hold those who LIED us into war, accountable for their actions, that will deter others from doing the same. Was Nuremberg about placing blame? No, it was about holding those who did horrible things accountable. It worked quite well until some of those “deceitful” folks revived some of the techniques prosecuted at Nuremberg and re-branded them Enhanced interrogation methods.
Yes we are polarized and there is one side causing the bulk of it. Again its not a blame game, its called dealing with reality. As long as we refuse to do that, those down right deceitful types will keep doing as they please and young men and women will continue to die.
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“Twelve years later, politicians and pundits still use the war…”
12 years? We did not leave Iraq until 2011. That was FOUR years ago (and we still have personnel there.)
It STARTED 12 years ago.
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Yeah, I don’t understand the “let’s stop blaming one side or the other and just discuss the war level-headedly” syndrome the article desires. Those who opposed the war have been trying to have a discussion like that since 2002 and it’s always shut down by the war boosters first by being accused of disloyalty in the run up and now with “let bygones be bygones”. Any rational discussion of the war is going to point to the fact that the Neocons used the country’s fear to gin up war fever and allow for the invasion to proceed and that they have not been held accountable for that dishonesty. Just because it hurts their feelings is no reason to stop or tiptoe around the subject and the men and women who sacrificed their lives in this misbegotten war are the ones who deserve the discussion most.
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I remember staring at him thinking, what’s the 82nd Airborne Division?
I kind of lost interest in anything this young woman wrote after reading this.
While it may be an historical fact (as opposed to an ahistorical fact?), it wasn’t that large of an majority and if Colin Powell had refused to do his shameful dog and pony show at the UN and if the major papers had done their job, I’m sure it would have been the minority position. The Bush administration lied through their teeth. So dismissing the idea of blame as “armchair quarterbacking” is obscene considering the number of Iraqis who were murdered in our names and the trillion dollars the mess cost us.
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Jasmine El-Gamal, kudos!!!
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it is one thing to discuss how to deal with the current situation and quite another to try to find someone to blame for it. It is incumbent on us as Americans to learn the lessons of the Iraq war and demand that our politicians put in place processes to prevent this kind of knee-jerk reaction to an attack on American soil from happening again… I want to hear how this round of presidential candidates will ensure that the appropriate checks and balances continue to be bolstered so that no one can (mis)lead us into another war.
With all due respect, isn’t this placing blame?
Part of the problem here is that the majority of candidates from at least one of the parties will not admit that there was any knee jerk reaction at issue in deciding to go to war with Iraq or that we were in any way “mislead” into going to war. And with that being the case, how can we have a discussion on checks and balances to prevent this from happening again? As I see it, the blame game is an attempt to establish the behaviors that should not be replicated. Admitting we were mislead by the Bush administration, for example, is the starting point for determining how we will not be mislead into going to war by another Presidential administration again. On the other hand, placing the blame for the current situation in Iraq on President Obama is essentially a claim that going to war was proper and the right thing to do but handled poorly by Bush’s successor. In other words, as I see it the blame game has everything to do with the discussion of not letting this happen again because it establishes what exactly we are trying to avoid in the future.
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First, had people really listened to candidate W. Bush while he was running for the GOP nomination it would be obvious that war with Iraq was in his platform.
Second, Saddam Hussein was effectively contained after the first Gulf War.
Third, there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11.
Forth, there were no islamic terror organizations in Iraq prior to W’s invasion.
Fifth, this entire fiasco will be our undoing unless we colonize Iraq with an iron fist (which is how Saddam Hussein kept the lid on the tribal factions). A truly unfortunate nation building exercise. All because GOPers were jealous of Bill Clinton’s BJ and got the SCOTUS to appoint a dimwit with an oedipus complex as decider of the free world.
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The one side or the other argument is usually made by those who supported the wrong side. Keeping that in mind will make some things easier to understand.
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History is knocking on the door in the form of the 2016 election. There are key Republican candidates, like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and Rand Paul whose advisors include many of the Bush administration neocons who are directly responsible for the mess in that region of the world.
They didn’t just go away.
To stop talking about who is to blame is to ignore that those who are to blame are jockeying for positions of power…where we can only presume they’d do it all over again.
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Myself.
Jeffrey, you have an awfully condescending attitude towards the author of the article. Maybe you were in Iraq, but she definitely was. She went in as a translator, not a combat soldier. That passage indicated that she was very green going in. It doesn’t mean she stayed green.
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Many people have pointed out that question should not be “knowing what you know now, would you do it again” but rather “what have you learned?”
Given that Bush & co. still haven’t learned the lessons of Vietnam (recall that he said he thought the main takeaway from it was “we’ll win unless we quit”), it’s far too much to expect today’s conservatives to learn any real lesson from a more recent war that they were directly responsible for.
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The lesson of the Iraq war for me is one of democracy, and its loss. The contested “election” of 2000 was the explosive end of democracy in the US, which had been under assault for a while. That election was stolen by the bold assault of the Republicans, and the weak kneed, shocked lack of readiness to have to defend democracy itself, of the Democrats. The Dems thought they were fighting an election, not a revolution. By the time they got the email it was too late.
The result was an illegal administration, pushing its own insane agenda rather than that of the country, and we and the Iraqis, the people of the Middle East, and the world are still living with the consequences.
The lesson to democratic countries is vigilance, to guard democracy with everything they have. As for Americans, we have to try to regain it. Easier said than done.
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There was no “knee-jerk reaction” in the decision to invade Iraq. It was long-standing, stated neocon policy.
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The “blame Game” is one way of phrasing it. Bringing mass war criminals to justice might be another.
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That vast majority of support for the war, 72% at the time of the invasion, is a tribute to the Bush administration and Republican propaganda machine, including Fox and hate radio, and absolute lockstep unity of the Repubs behind the lie. That machine is the most effective in history, and still pumping out lies that will destroy us.
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