What are the lessons of the Iraq invasion?
My attention has been drawn to a very long but very interesting and thoughtful piece on Iraq posted on the Huffington Post blog just before I went off to Israel. The author is American journalist Tish Durkin and she concludes wisely:
“It’s easy to rewrite a very complex story as a dark fairy tale that begins and ends with the evil of Bush and Cheney. This, presumably, is why so many people are doing it. But it’s still wrong.
If none of this was ever hard – if the consensus is simply that this whole invasion was always a stupid idea and there was never, ever any reason why any good or intelligent person would have considered it – then all we have to do is elect someone nice and smart, and ignore whatever legitimate factors there may have been to mitigate our certitude.
We won’t have to think about what, if anything, a dictator can do to compromise his sovereignty in the eyes of the world. We won’t have to think about what, if anything, should be done to enforce peace agreements that have been shredded, or international sanctions that have been ignored. We don’t have to worry about where, if anywhere, we draw the line between allowing international bodies, such as the U.N., to prevent war, and allowing them to perpetuate, if only indirectly, very serious violence of other kinds.”
April 20th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
Hello! I’m from Oklahoma City (we had our sad bombing anniversary yesterday). Anyway! I have a myspace friend who is French and lives in France and I wanted to surprise him by leaving a comment saying “Good Morning!” in his language. So I googled “How to say good morning in french” and I found your page, and, you called yourself an internationalist, and you speak so many languages and are apparently a wordsmith, so….I just wanted to join your page. Yes, and about lessons of the iraq invasion. It’s a snarled mess. Now what do we do?
April 20th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Roger
You may want to check this web site out. It is very good on Iraq.
http://threescoreyearsandten.blogspot.com/
April 20th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
Thanks (a) for providing the link to Tish Durkin’s article and (b) the plug. I don’t know what tarama will feel when the first article of mine to be found seems to be plug for the Iraqi Communist Party!