Why All the Recent Unpleasantness In Iraq Is Actually A Good Thing For America

The current state of affairs in Iraq is very troubling, no doubt about it. I'm concerned the whole mess over there will lead to one big regional religious war.

Of course, nothing gives me more pleasure than the possibility of a bunch of religious extremists killing each other, but a lot of non-extremists would unfortunately suffer in the process.

But no matter how shitty things get over there, the recent upheaval in Iraq is a good thing for the U.S. because it is forcing Americans to take another look at why we got in there in the first place.  And in that regard, I couldn't agree more with this piece from Daily Kos:

Calling the invasion and slaughter that followed a mistake papers over the lies that took us to Iraq. This assessment of the war as mistake is coming mostly from well-intentioned people, some of whom spoke out against the war before it began and every year it dragged on. It may seem like a proper retort to critics of Obama (who inherited that war rather than started it). But it feeds a dangerous myth.

A mistake is not putting enough garlic in the minestrone, taking the wrong exit, typing the wrong key, falling prey to an accident.

Invading Iraq was not a friggin' mistake. Not an accident. Not some foreign policy mishap.

The guys in charge carried out a coldly though ineptly calculated act. An act made with the intention of privatizing Iraq and using that country as a springboard to other Middle Eastern targets, most especially Iran. They led a murderous, perfidious end run around international law founded on a dubious "preventive" military doctrine piggybacked on the nation's rage over the 9/11 attacks. An imperial, morally corrupt war. They ramrodded it past the objections of those in and out of Congress who challenged the fabricated claims of administration advisers who had been looking for an excuse to take out Saddam Hussein years before the U.S. Supreme Court plunked George W. Bush into the Oval Office.

These are all very good points, and the passage of time causes us to forget about a lot of this. In fact, reading the Kos piece reminded me of something I had forgotten, namely, Bush and Cheney's refusal to allow the UN weapons inspectors to complete their search for weapons of mass destruction prior to the U.S. invasion.  I remember thinking at the time that if the presence of WMD was the real reason the Bush Regime had its panties in a bunch over Iraq, then why not let the UN inspectors finish their job?

The answer to that question, of course, is that the Bush people knew there were no WMD in Iraq.  Indeed, I have no doubt that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the rest of the (neo) cons knew during the run-up to their Iraq Clusterfuck that they had absolutely no justification to invade for any reason.  Paul Wolfowitz famously admitted that was the case when he stated shortly after the invasion that BushCo settled on WMD as the rationale for invasion because "it was the one reason everyone could agree on."

They just all assumed the war would be over very quickly and cheaply and that once the war ended and Iraq became a democracy, people wouldn't care why we went in there in the first place.  And if people did complain about the rationale for invasion, such folks could simply be branded as traitors and haters of America and its troops. Cheney certainly felt the war would end quickly, even stating at one point that he believed the war would last weeks instead of months and that we'd be greeted as liberators.

I've been pleased of late from all the media pushback on folks like Cheney who think that leaving Iraq was a mistake and that we should go back in there.  Even Fox News got into the act last week. But the author of the above-quoted Kos piece is absolutely right -- calling the Iraq Invasion a "mistake" distorts history because it projects an "innocent" quality to the run-up to that war, and there was nothing innocent about it.