ON THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE INVASION OF IRAQ

How will history judge us, I wondered while listening to Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Bush administration, as he looked back on the 20^th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq?

 

Wolfowitz had learned few lessons; in his closeted view, Saddam Hussein was a dangerous man, and the universe was better off without him.

 

At best you could say Wolfowitz, a noted American political scientist and diplomat, was guilty of only viewing the world through a prism of his own choosing.

 

We continue to be haunted by his ilk, those who seek to foist their own particular reality upon the rest of us. Our guilt is that we allow them to do so.

 

Why do I single out Wolfowitz from the other three architects of America’s greatest foreign policy debacle? Well, I have little doubt that Donald Rumsfeld is still arguing his case with St. Peter at the gates of heaven, having departed this mortal coil back in 2021.

 

Can you ever forget his smarmy self-satisfaction as he guided us through nights of “shock and awe,” exulting over the precision bombing of Baghdad – never mentioning that innocent civilians were dying in this obscene, videogame-like barrage.

 

Not a word did we hear from Vice-President Richard Cheney, the main architect of this “war on terror.” 

 

Unlike Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney always knew when to duck back into the shadows and let retired military experts whitewash the carnage.

 

As for President Bush, nowadays he paints pictures down in Texas and apparently sleeps like a log at night, no second thoughts needed.

 

After all, barely 4500 American service people died in this useless war, roughly 10% of those who perished in that other noble overseas crusade, Vietnam.

 

There have been many public mea culpas since the end of the Vietnam disaster, but on the 20^th anniversary of the Iraq invasion not a word of apology was to be heard, though the official cause of the war - Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction - has long ago been disproved.

 

Needless to say there was little mention of the estimated 400,000 Iraqis killed, and the many millions displaced.

 

What of the damage done to our own people who served over there? Well, hey thanks for your service, guys, and what a shame those ungrateful Iraqis never appreciated all you went through on their behalf! 

 

But it’s way deeper than that. Our institutions have suffered, there’s now a general mistrust of government, we loathe our politicians, and much of it dates back to our Iraqi misadventure.

 

This, by the way, is not a partisan screed. President Biden and Senator Clinton both voted to authorize the invasion. In fact, I believe Mrs. Clinton would have been president by now if she’d made a stand against the invasion. 

 

I have little doubt either that Donald Trump would still be a reality TV star had we allowed United Nations sanctions to successfully continue restraining Saddam Hussein.

 

Contrary to his usual revisionism, Mr. Trump did not immediately come out against the war; still he was yards ahead of Mr. Biden and Mrs. Clinton.

 

But talk about foisting his unique reality upon us, President Trump has since unleashed a base of distorted prism gazers to whom even he must serve. Uncharacteristically, the man rarely demands credit for his greatest achievement, Operation Warp Speed that facilitated the creation of the Covid-19 vaccine. 

 

Why ever won’t you take a bow, Mr. President, afraid it might rattle your base?

 

Unfortunately, the furor over Mr. Trump’s NYC arraignment may allow Jerome Powell and the other Federal Reserve commissioners to turn a booming economy, with historically low unemployment rates, into a recession.

 

This unelected body of patrician bankers and academics refuses to even consider other methods of taming inflation except by upping interest rates.

 

Temporary wage/price controls, sales and income tax increases, and other economic restraints are not even given an airing.

 

Accordingly, your job – but not theirs – may soon be on the line, for you have had the temerity to gain wage increases that impinge upon corporate profits, the sole barometer of wellbeing in this economy.

 

A bleak view of the world, perhaps, but it’s never too late to apologize for a gross military misadventure 20 years ago, or to prevent an undemocratic stampede into an unnecessary recession.