septembriseur-deactivated202502:
I missed most of the Iraq war due to being a baby, but every time I read about it I start wondering why we aren’t all talking about it all of the time
it feels like the sort of unforced error that should be obsessively postmortemed for the next fifty years, a catastrophe that should utterly delegitimize the society that made it happen, but instead everybody’s like “oh yeah, that. lmao, that was crazy”
I have to add to this because I was teaching a text about this topic to a bunch of post-2003 undergraduates recently and each time I do so I experience the same sense of disorientation.
This is a war about which the accepted, mainstream consensus is that no one is able to explain the U.S. decision to invade Iraq. The people involved in that decision are unable, in retrospect, to explain or justify it. In almost every postmortem of this decision, you will find some reference to the fact that Richard Haass, who advised Colin Powell at the State Department in 2001-3, has said that he “will go to [his] grave not knowing” why the U.S. invaded Iraq. George Packer, in The Assassins’ Gate, describes the invasion as “something that some people wanted to do.”
This is a war that destroyed a country. It created ISIS. It destabilized the Middle East. It killed a minimum of c. 200,000 people. It displaced millions more. It resulted in devastating losses to the cultural heritage of Iraq. And twenty years on, no one is able to explain why it happened.
It seems to me that there are several important lessons here.