Iraq - Ten Years After

"WAR!"

So I wrote ten years ago tonight when George Walker Bush gave the U.S. military and its international partners in crime the go-ahead to bomb Iraq and invade it to throw Saddam Hussein out of power and get control of its oil under the guise of bringing "democracy" to a part of the world with scant experience with it and stopping a dictator from obtaining "weapons of mass destruction." Even though major combat officially ended in May 2003, American servicemen continued to fight a pair of causes that had long ago been proven as fraudulent.

"If you don’t get angry about this war," said Paul Fussell at point during the Iraq conflict, "you don’t deserve to be alive." Many people did, in the beginning - liberal activists campaigned vigorously against it in the days leading up to it, and I wrote many a entry on this then-nascent blog urging whoever was out there reading it to try to stop it before it started. But no one would listen. A fellow member of my writers' group of the time angrily told me I was un-American for opposing it. That's partly why that writers' group disbanded and I joined another writers' group - but not for telling this other writer, who was a devout Catholic, that I never accused her of heresy for supporting the war when Pope John Paul II opposed it.

By the time people got the message after a couple of years and got angry about the Iraq War, it was too late. We were in too deep to just pull out.  By the time we did in December 2011, we lost 4,475 service personnel, and there were hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. The war may be over, but the aftermath has only just begun; attacks in Baghdad today killed 65 people, and many people in the country live without much in the way of electricity or sewage. What stability and progress there are is confined to the northern and southern regions of the country, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has grown more authoritarian as the country remains in a state of chaos.

But, apart from folks like Michael Moore, no one questioned the wisdom of going to war when we had the chance to pull back from the abyss. The press didn't report the facts and the holes in Bush's case. Opposition to the Bush policy, as noted was dismissed as treasonous; French then-president Jacques Chirac's opposition to the Iraq invasion led to Francophobia in the U.S. So many columnists were discouraged from questioning the administration's wisdom (or lack thereof) while Bush relentless sold the idea of a war to deal with Saddam Hussein like a product, with cherry-picked evidence and faulty rationalization.

I didn't buy any of it. I was one of those shouting out my opposition. I'm not going to gloat; I'm too angry about what happened to do that. And as Paul Fussell said . . .

Let's get out of Afghnaistan as soon as possible.