Posted on 05/15/2021 5:22:12 AM PDT by Kaslin
Although it may seem unbelievable today, the Iraq War was initially very popular. In March of 2003, on the eve of the invasion, as many as 76 percent of Americans supported the war, and the tide of public opinion did not turn against it for several years.
Those of us old enough to remember that period can attest to the pervasive atmosphere of groupthink. Americans had been deeply shaken by the 9/11 attacks a year and a half earlier, and the national spirit was hawkish. Dissenters risked being called unpatriotic, even treasonous – as the band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks can attest.
Now that the Iraq War has become unpopular, the tendency is to shift responsibility onto President Bush and his neocon advisers, along with some others. However, the simple truth is that the war would not have happened if the American people had not wanted it. The 2002 war powers authorization, which paved the way for the invasion, would not have passed overwhelmingly in both houses of Congress if politicians had been deluged with angry calls and letters demanding that they vote no.
No war in our nation’s history has occurred without (initial) broad public support, which is why the 2013 resolution to use military force in Syria, supported by President Obama, failed in the face of widespread opposition. Iraq is no exception to this rule. The Iraq War was our collective error as Americans, one we have never fully reckoned with.
We should not write off our 2003 selves as stupid. We were not. We did, however, succumb to groupthink, and to recognize this entails facing the uncomfortable fact that, if we were so foolish once, we might be so foolish again.
It is not like the dangers of invading Iraq were unforeseeable. French President Jacques Chirac refused to get involved. Michael Moore and Bernie Sanders denounced the war from the start. Anyone who claims to have been misled in 2003 is under pressure to explain why they were less discerning than those two.
Instead, the Iraq War was most fervently supported by a Republican base which enthusiastically reelected President Bush in 2004, and by the major conservative pundits of the day – Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter.
To be against the Iraq War in 2021, or at any time in the past decade, is like being a member of the French Resistance in 1945. The true test back then was what one was doing in 1941, just as the true test of our time is how one felt about the Iraq War in 2003. Americans, and particularly American conservatives, must stop trying to pass the culpability onto others and begin to come to terms with our collective wrongness.
Why is it important to relitigate past history? Because it is only by recognizing the depth of our foolishness that we can hope to avoid future episodes of it – and while the pendulum in the United States has swung very anti-war in the years since Iraq, there are many other ways to be wrong.
Indeed, we have just lived through another such episode.
As with the Iraq War, government lockdowns to stop the coronavirus were initially supported by the vast majority of Americans. As with the Iraq War, dissenters (such as Bethany Mandel) who raised concerns about civil liberties, or economic and human well-being, were attacked in the harshest of terms, accused of everything up to and including murder, treason, selfishness, and lack of patriotism. Many of these same epithets were flung at early Iraq skeptics.
Now, we were misinformed about the severity of the virus, just as we were misinformed about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – the World Health Organization told us originally that COVID-19 had a 3.4 percent death rate, which we now know to be far lower. This did not, however, absolve us of our responsibility to think critically and consider the bigger picture, even in a time of crisis and widespread fear.
The invasion of Iraq cost America thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Lockdowns, in the long run, will likely end up costing us even more. History will probably recognize them as a second Iraq War of sorts, and the politicians and media figures who foisted them on the public will bear a long-lasting and well-deserved badge of shame.
But it is not enough to blame our leaders. Lockdowns could not have been implemented without broad public support, and so we, as a general public, must reckon with our own complicity and susceptibility to groupthink. Next time our nation is caught up in such a panic, let us value dissenting voices rather than maligning them. If we cannot do this in the wake of March 2003 and March 2020, then the costs of our next bout of groupthink will likely be even greater.
Wars are usually very popular, and actually quite fun - before the shooting starts.
As long as the military industrial complex gets fed, no need to learn ‘lessons’.... /s
It is not like the dangers of invading Iraq were unforeseeable. French President Jacques Chirac refused to get involved. Michael Moore and Bernie Sanders denounced the war from the start. Anyone who claims to have been misled in 2003 is under pressure to explain why they were less discerning than those two.
This dope must be joking. Nobody with half a brain would take Michael Moore and Bernie Sanders seriously about anything -- even when they're right. And I suspect most Americans don't pay attention to foreign leaders when it comes to evaluating our own interests.
The nation has a hard time with lessons while the corrupt news media is a propaganda tool of the paid off politicians and the deep state. The poppy fields grew by 10 times and the army guarded the heron. Arms dealers on both sides got richer while a decided country sent young kids to the slaughter.
Wars are usually very popular, and actually quite fun - before the shooting starts.
.........................................................
Very true and even tag line worthy.
Ron Paul’s specific objections to the wars as documented in the speeches he made on the House floor in 2003 were remarkably prescient and on point. Ron Paul is an American Cassandra. There were many conservatives, many right here on FR, who opposed the American interventions in the Mideast caldron.
Sorry but there is a concerted effort to absolve GW Bush and his allies from responsibility for this fiasco. Yet in retrospect Bush was aware that it was primarily Saudis that planned and executed 9/11. What is more, American intellegence later learned that Saudi intelligence was aware of the plot, knew it was financed from wealthy Saudis.They never stopped it or informed the Americans. Bush, who’s family became incredibly wealthy in oil dealings with those same Saudis, instead of holding the corrupt, vile Saudis accountable, decided instead to invade Iraq. Iraq was the prime enemy and threat to the Saudis. The pretext was “weapons of mass destruction” that were not found to exist. The result was over 6,000 brave young Americans dead, tens of thousands more physically and psychologically maimed, $3 trillion squandered, a severe American financial crisis and recession that paved the way for the catostrophic Obama administration.
History is a harsh judge and no amount of revisionism will change it.
“The Iraq War was our collective error as Americans, one we have never fully reckoned with.”
This is the same thought process as when allies were allowing Hitler to conquer country after country in Europe. Jason Garshfield has no idea what happened in Iraq except what a liberal media attacking Bush created in public opinion based upon entries for their agenda. He’s not a lot different than they are spreading his opinion without knowing what he is saying is not rhetoric as language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content. I’m not questioning his sincerity, just his actions to spread something he doesn’t know. That’s just a failure of the mis-information he chooses to use.
wy69
Yes, your revisionist attempt is futile exercise in balderdacious historical fantasy
The author seems to be engaging in propaganda. Aided in some ways by 20/20 hindsight, but propaganda nonetheless. Probably trying to use Gulf War II as a wedge issue for some reason.
A sizable contingent of Iraq War critics was found here on FR at the time. Most of them were banned or self-exiled. I’m one of the few “survivors.” In retrospect, I’d say the conservative critics of the Iraq War were the same people who never bought into the Branch Covidian hysteria over the last year. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I’d say we have three characteristics that make us immune to that sort of silly propaganda:
1. We are reasonably intelligent.
2. We operate under a set of principles instead of politics, and don’t deviate from those principles lightly.
3. We never accept what people in positions of authority tell us at face value. For an increasing number of people in government and the media today, we don’t listen to them at all.
I was against the Iraq war.
W wanted to get back at Saddam for trying to kill his father. W put family business ahead of what was good for the country. He turned the entire Middle East (and North Africa) into the hell hole it is now. How did that “They’ll throw rose pellets at out feet” plan work out? W, the worst republic president ever, is an arrogant idiot.
As far as I am concern George W Bush is a traitor and should be hung.
Having dementia prevents you from cognitive thought.
Very cogent analysis by you. Garshfield seems to have taken a little bit of history, lots of opinions, thrown in notions of conspiratorial behaviours, and tried to construct a clear view of events past. An unconvincing effort.
“Michael Moore and Bernie Sanders denounced the war from the start. Anyone who claims to have been misled in 2003 is under pressure to explain why they were less discerning than those two.”
Oh, please. Those two were against it because they thought it help “shrub” get reelected. Period. Know how I can tell it was 100% political? Because they have not supported peace since then. The “peace movement” and the political figures who identified with it were always fake.
The reason for going into Iraq is debatable.
The reason for the regime change war in Syria was never offered.
In Benghazi Libya the attack on the annex is mentioned over and over.
But our government using that annex to ship munitions to the rebels in Syria is never mentioned.
Why the blackout?
Why were the democrats allowed to deny Tulsi Gabbard the second debate after
She exposed the regime change wars?
“We Haven’t Learned the Lessons of Iraq”
The author has not either.
The author attempts, arrogantly, to determine beforehand what those lessons ought tp have been, then tell the history in a way that satisfies that intent.
I think there are many lessons to be taken from the Iraq war. Most of them have to with what we did do and what we did not do militarily. That the essential aim of removing Saddam when he would not permit a transparent determination of his WMD abilities, was not in and of itself an ignoble error. But, too many surrounding aspects within that aim (Iran, for one) were ignored, neglected, overlooked and seldom dealt with in a true “we are at war” manner.
Often the public loss of approval of a war comes from the conduct of the war more than anything else. By pretending the actual civil war in Iraq -
(yes, post Saddam WAS a civil war with the U.S. both in the middle (attacked from both sides) and trying to quell the opposing sides) -
was a mere internal affair, the outside parties (Iran on one side and the Middle East Sunni Arabs on the other side) were allowed to continually feed the conflict with little interference from the U.S. (we fought with one hand tied behind our back).
We paid for it in additional American lives lost and fighting that could have been brought to an end sooner.
THAT and nothing else in politics (right war, wrong war, ect) made the war unpopular.
Thanks, but this theory of mistakes is one used by socialists by historically using spin or just plain changing history that has become a canker to the population that lives and breathes for the 6 o’clock news. One which time an again gives as little information for their synopsis as they can get away with. Sells papers and can be retracted on page 102.
wy69
Some say that invading Iraq was retaliation for Saddam's attempt to assassinate GHW Bush. There was substantial evidence that Iraq was involved in the OKC bombing in 1993. That evidence was suppressed by the Clinton administration and the media but may have influenced the decision to take out Saddam in 2003.
Many, many lives could have been saved if we had not allowed Iraq to keep its helicopters after the first Gulf War.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.