Every now and then I’m reminded that the Iraq war started so long ago some of you were barely born when it started. So 18 years ago, …
Colin Powell and a bunch of people who people trusted because the US President/Sec.State should be trustworthy, lied about s3kr1t evidence Iraq posed an imminent threat. So they got people to allow them to invade, and a couple million Iraqis died (and thousands of US troops).
But Surprise! There were no weapons of mass destruction! It was all lies! Also lies: the promise that Iraq would not become chaotic and that there was a plan for the post-invasion reconstruction. There was no plan and no interest in planning.
The Heritage Foundation sent some interns to do things like design a new electrical grid or write new tax laws from scratch, and the VP’s old buddies got contracts to expropriate anything of value, and to be paid by the US with blank checks. Literal pallets of cash disappeared.
The amounts of money that simply vanished into thin air could be genuinely used to swim in, Scrooge McDuck style.
Also millions of Iraqis. Who we were allegedly “liberating.”
Anyway, back then a bunch of people bought the sales job about how there was an imminent threat and we’d be greeted with flowers and anyone who didn’t line up in favor of this little desert haunt was an America-hating loser. “Cheese-eating surrender monkey” was said unironically.
But a bunch of people looked at the notion of invading Iraq and said it was obvious bullshit. That there was no serious WMD program, that invading would lead to quagmire, and that the corrupt incompetents of the Bush administration would fuck it up even if it were a good idea.
In other words, the dirty hippies were 100% right a year before the war, and the warmongers were all 100% wrong.
The biggest error by the antiwar folks was conceding that there might possibly be a WMD program of some sort. There wasn’t.
The point is that everything we’re now hearing about Iran is like a dumber, less plausible version of the Iraq sales job.
