1 Boring Old Man

10 Years Later: Looking Back on the Iraq War So We Can Clearly Look Forward
Huffington Post
by Arianna Huffington
03/06/2013

^{"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." It’s one of Milan Kundera’s most famous lines, from his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It’s one worth keeping in mind as we approach March 20, the 10th anniversary of one of the biggest disasters in the history of the United States. That was the day George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and a team of others – along with much of Washington and a very complicit mainstream media — took the nation to war against Iraq. The devastating consequences of that war will continue for decades, but a full accounting has still yet to happen. And that in itself has consequences. Allowing the toxic mixture of lies, deception and rationalizations that led to that war to go unchallenged makes it more likely that we will make similar tragic mistakes in the future. So I hope we can use this moment to assess what really happened, to look back in order to look forward.}

^{At HuffPost, we’ll be doing what we can in that effort by using the anniversary to look at the war and what led up to it from all angles: Who got it right and who got it wrong? What was the role of the media? What are the ongoing consequences? We’ll be featuring analysis, blogs, video and more in an attempt to aid that struggle of memory against forgetting. Of course, the most glaring manifestation of our failure to have a collective accounting of this fiasco is that those who are most responsible for it still have loud voices in our foreign policy. "For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage," writes James Fallows. "Rusk, Rostow, Westmoreland were not declaiming on what the U.S. should and should not do."}

^{And yet, after what Fallows calls "the biggest strategic error by the United States since at least the end of World War II," that accounting has not happened:}

^{After Iraq, there has been a weird amnesty and amnesia about people’s misjudgment on the most consequential decision of our times … Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bremer, Rice, McCain, Abrams, and others including the pro-war press claque are still offering their judgments unfazed. He concludes: "I don’t say these people should never again weigh in. But there should be an asterisk on their views, like the fine print about side effects in pharmaceutical ads."}

^{Actually, the warning should be a lot bigger than fine print – it should be as big and glaring as their blunders and falsehoods. There is, of course, almost no end to the lies and deceptions that led to this calamity – we will be featuring many of them in our anniversary coverage and you can also revisit them in these timelines here and here…}

^{In December of 2011, as the last combat troops were being brought home from Iraq, President Obama stood at Fort Bragg and declared, "The war in Iraq will soon belong to history." That may be true, but it’s vital that our accounting of the failures that led to this tragedy not be relegated to the past. Does President Bush, while painting his pictures in Texas, ever look back and assess the worst decision of his presidency [and that’s a pretty high bar]? It seems doubtful, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t. No doubt there will someday, rightly, be a monument to those who bravely fought and died in Iraq. But for the 10th anniversary, let’s also build online monuments dedicated to those who planned and provoked and fomented the war, so we can join in the struggle of memory against forgetting.}