Skip to main content

The Iraq war

The bloggers I read most frequently are four: Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum, Andrew Sullivan, and Ezra Klein. Yesterday, I learned that all of them supported the Iraq War. (I already knew about the other three.) All of them have recanted their previous opinion, and probably learned a great deal from it. (Drum, most satisfyingly, said it was really fucking stupid of him.) Yglesias and Klein were pretty young at the time--they're only a couple years older than me. Still, that's a fairly devastating thing to be wrong about. When my convictions developed a little more, I thought--and still think--that the invasion was the most boneheaded major policy decision ever committed by the USA. Not the most horrible or devastating, but just the rawest, most undiluted dose of stupid ever. Way dumber than Vietnam.

It got me wondering though...what did I think back then? I was a junior in high school, so it's a bit fuzzy in my mind. I was against the war, that much I remember clearly. I was seventeen and loathed Bush, the usurping bastard, but didn't know a great deal about Iraq. My AP English teacher had us answering questions while we watched the morning news about the war, and I remember looking over the answers a few years back. They were astonishingly foresighted questions, things like, "How long do you think the occupation will last? How much will it cost?" As I recall most of my answers were pessimistic, but not nearly enough as things turned out.

The one clear opinion I can recall was that the rationale behind the whole thing seemed bizarre. Hussein had been a running joke in school for years, getting his clock cleaned by the US every ten years or so, no threat whatsoever. Suddenly it was terrifically important to take this guy out. I remember thinking, What changed? Hussein couldn't beat Wyoming in a fair fight, and if he releases some biotoxin shit, then by God we'll nuke Iraq into a sheet of glass. If he's insane enough to do that, why hasn't he done it before? Cheney would have said 9/11, but as it turns out Cheney is really fucking stupid.

UPDATE: You know who else supported the Iraq War? Dan Savage, in an utterly brain-dead article for The Stranger. It has to be read to be believed.

Comments

  1. shit. i was teaching college during 9/11 (my first year...) and getting my BA when war broke out in 2003. it's weird to be such a fucking old lady, but i think there's a real generational gap between those who were fully formed free thinking adults before 9/11 and those who were not. certainly i observed among my students them getting dumber, more passive, and more obedient and authority-respecting as time went by. at illinois they asked if they could go to the bathroom. i know here the "elders" like to get together and talk about all the apparent idiocy/incompetence of our higher-ups, which seems to offend many of the younger PCVs in my personal experience (of course non-PC South Africans seem to be free game...). obviously i don't see this as across the board. reed's looking better and better in this context! just imagining you in middle school and me fleeing the country to cambridge (not that england was so much better but at least they work at civilization there)! anyway, the whole thing really soured people on the whole democracy thing, as it started being naughty to be against authority and critical of the government, yada yada, which sure as hell was not inappropriate when clinton was prez. it was more like here, with two+ sides. i guess it'd be nice if there were more criticality toward obama but the whole thing is so transparently one sided. america has become so fascist! you know you used to just go up to airplanes even without a boarding pass or taking off your shoes or jacket. now it really has become a police state. well "this has been more 'back in nam' moments by guest old lady liz." :P

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks :)

    I don't think I would say fascist, rather I would say authoritarian.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that