Continuing with Memorial Day, harsh reality edition.
From AFNS, March 21, 2023:
On the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it’s important for us as a nation to reflect on that conflict and its consequences. As the vice president of the United States in 2003, I was one of the architects of the project to go after Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Today, I believe it’s important to offer an honest assessment of my role in the Iraq War. Looking back on it now, I have to say that, wow, I mostly got it right.
Seriously, the Iraq War went basically as well as I could have hoped.
We in the Bush administration justified the war on the basis of destroying Saddam’s WMDs and bringing democracy to the Iraqi people. Twenty years later, we know that Saddam didn’t have any WMDs, and that the United States left Iraq in the throes of poverty and violence. Critics then and now have suggested that we deliberately misrepresented intelligence, and that spreading democracy was merely a fig leaf for our true goal of maintaining U.S. political and economic dominance over the world.
To that, I say, no shit. Duh. Of course we were lying. Of course we only went in to maintain American hegemony. That was the whole plan all along.
Christ, what country do you think we are?
In hindsight, it’s stunning to see how right I was about the long-term impacts of invading Iraq....
....MUCH MORE
Later this week, how the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg and David Frum lied us into the war.