Ten Years After

Can it be that it's been almost a decade since the first day of the Third Gulf War, the Cheneyan Mess-o-potamia?

Yep.



A good place to begin is here: with James Fallows. In it Fallows makes the point which I consider the most essential one that we as We the People should be contemplating:

"For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage. Robert McNamara did worthy penance at the World Bank. Rusk, Rostow, Westmoreland were not declaiming on what the U.S. should and should not do.

After Iraq, there has been a weird amnesty and amnesia about people's misjudgment on the most consequential decision of our times. Hillary Clinton lost the 2008 primary race largely because she had been "wrong" on Iraq and Barack Obama had been "right." But Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bremer, Rice, McCain, Abrams, and others including the pro-war press claque are still offering their judgments unfazed. In his post-presidential reticence George W. Bush has been an honorable exception.

I don't say these people should never again weigh in. But there should be an asterisk on their views, like the fine print about side effects in pharmaceutical ads."

I read the article Fallows refers to in the spring of 2003 and remember thinking "Yep. Yep. This is gonna suck." It prompted me to do something I'd promised myself I'd never do; march in a "peace protest". And, yes, it was as fucking worthless as the rest of them. All I got was the fucking T-shirt, and the caissons went rolling along.

But to me, the real damage we have done to ourselves over this has nothing to do with blood or treasure, but the formal codification of the Washington Rule that says you can harm your nation and your nation's People deliberately, intentionally, with greed and self-interest aforethought and pay no price - not a fucking penny or a moment of your liberty or even your social standing - for it.



We'll talk some more here about this when the anniversary arrives.