Reflections of a War Blogger
A supporter of the war repents:
War opponents said a lot of things that were stupid, cynical and deluded. Some war supporters find comfort in this, I don’t. The opponents were, on the whole, right. We were wrong, and people in Iraq will pay for this mistake for a long time.
Those of us who opposed the war from the beginning were called a lot of names. Back when I wrote about it over at Everything2 in the days leading up to the war, I received no small amount of personal messages “politely” disagreeing with my opinion. I new they were wrong then, and I’m glad to see that they’re starting to acknowledge it themselves.
Yes, some of the war’s opponents were knee-jerk, leftwing peaceniks. But a lot of us weren’t — some of us were people that knew a little about Middle Eastern culture and history, and simply did not believe in the grand goal of democratizing the region through military invasion. I never accepted the line that Saddam was an “imminent threat,” and I never bought into the idea that we should be engaging in social re-engineering in the Muslim world. Both rationales have been proven miserably wrong.
I take no comfort in America’s failures in Iraq, or that I was right about the outcome. The chaos we’ve unleashed there will have far-reaching global consequences. The administration likes to say that we’re there because of the chaos, but the reality is that the chaos is there because of us. I fear that anything we do now will likely fail. Leaving, staying, surging, whatever. There is a wave of sectarian conflict sweeping the Middle East, a tsunami unleashed by the earthquake of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
If only the administration and their supporters had listened to the critics, including some in their own party, not to mention the President’s own father, then things might have been handled differently. I think there’s no question that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney will be forever be remembered for their failure to win the war in Iraq. No amount of blaming the Democrats for lack of will can change that.
So yeah, I appreciate the introspection of some of those who banged the drum of war. I know that drum has a very nice sound, especially to a generation of men like myself who feel they missed out on history. We all want to be part of something grand — something like the liberation of Europe in World War II. But World War II is an anomaly — most wars in history have been more like Iraq. And that’s what really scares me.
(Hat tip: Kevin Drum)
