Twenty years ago we invaded Iraq. The war killed many innocent Iraqis and Americans. It destroyed the oldest Christian populations in the world. It cost over $1 trillion, and turned Iraq into a satellite of Iran. It was an unforced disaster, and I pray that we learn its lessons.
As an 18-year-old kid, I supported the war. I enlisted in the Marines a month after we invaded, and left for bootcamp a few months after I graduated from high school. Even though I was just a kid, I still feel guilty for supporting the war.
I think often of what led me to go wrong in 2003, and more importantly, what led so many smart people to support a world-historic disaster. Very few of its cheerleaders show any remorse or willingness to rethink what made them so wrong.
There are many reasons I changed my mind on Donald Trump, but Iraq is perhaps the most important. Not that he was an early critic of the war, but that the people in the conservative movement who hated him most were the most wrong, and the most proud, about foreign policy in 2003
Bill Kristol, David Frum, and on an on. I once admired these men. Then I got to know them. And the more I knew them, the more I realized their hatred of Trump, like Pat Buchanan and others, was a form of projection.
We are still living in the ideological cage created by that projection. Our foreign policy is still held hostage by men so desperate to avoid looking in the mirror that they will support the next war, and then the next one, until their country is hollowed out.
I hope we do better in the future. And I know that we won't until the people who led us into Iraq are scorned and ignored across the spectrum. Iraq was a disaster, yes, but the best way to do justice to the honored dead is to learn the lessons purchased by their blood.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
