{"id":444,"date":"2007-04-20T12:42:56","date_gmt":"2007-04-20T11:42:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=444"},"modified":"2007-04-20T12:42:56","modified_gmt":"2007-04-20T11:42:56","slug":"what-are-the-lessons-of-the-iraq-invasion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=444","title":{"rendered":"What are the lessons of the Iraq invasion?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My attention  has been drawn to a very long but very interesting and thoughtful <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/tish-durkin\/iraq-a-place-of-ambivale_b_45145.html\">piece on Iraq<\/a> posted on the Huffington Post blog just before I went off to Israel. The author is American journalist Tish Durkin and she concludes wisely:<br \/>\n&#8220;It&#8217;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&#8217;s still wrong.<br \/>\nIf none of this was ever hard &#8211; 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 &#8211; 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.<br \/>\nWe won&#8217;t have to think about what, if anything, a dictator can do to compromise his sovereignty in the eyes of the world. We won&#8217;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&#8217;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.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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: &#8220;It&#8217;s easy to rewrite a very complex story as a dark fairy tale that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}