Sixteen years ago, the US committed one of the worst foreign policy blunders in the history of our country by attacking Iraq. That war was sold to the American people based on a series of lies about weapons of mass destruction. One of the leading advocates for that war was John Bolton, who served as a member of the Bush administration and is now Donald Trump’s national security adviser. Incredibly, even today, Bolton is one of the few remaining people in the world who continues to believe that the Iraq war was a good idea.
That war led to the deaths of more than 4,400 American troops, with tens of thousands of American soldiers wounded, many severely, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed. It unleashed a wave of radicalism and destabilization across the region that we will be dealing with for many years to come. It was the biggest foreign policy disaster in American history.
I find Sanders‘ language here telling for several reasons. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq was certainly a disaster for the US as well as for Iraq, and it speaks worlds of the US that Bolton holds a cabinet position, George W. Bush and advisors like Stephen Hadley are interviewed as voices of reason.
Sanders writes of more than 4,400 American military deaths, American military wounded, and then throws in „hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed.“ This echoes American tellings of Vietnam: 58,000 American military dead, 2 to 4 million Southeast Asian civilians murdered. America suffered.
Sanders describes the invasion of Iraq as a „blunder“, as a „disaster“. I clearly remember twenty years ago hearing David Harris read from his book Our War on calling Vietnam „a mistake“:
While it may be an accurate conclusion, calling the war a mistake is the functional equivalent of calling water wet or dirt dirty. … In this particular „mistake,“ at least 3 million people died, only 58,000 of whom were Americans. These 3 million people died crushed in the mud, riddled with shrapnel, hurled out of helicopters, impaled on sharpened bamboo, obliterated in carpets of explosives dropped from bombers flying so high they could only be heard and never seen (talk about cowards!) they died reduced to chunks by one or more land mines, finished off by a round through the temple or a bayonet in the throat, consumed by sizzling phorphorous, burned alive with jellied gasoline, strung up by their thumbs, starved in cages, executed after watching their babies die, trapped on the barbed wire calling for their mothers. They died while trying to kill, they died while trying to kill no one, they died heroes, they died villains, they died at random, they died most often when someone who had no idea who they were killed them under the orders of someone who had even less idea than that. … All 3 million died in pain, often so intense that death was a relief. This war was about us. We made it happen. It was ours. And, even at this late date, any genuine reckoning on our part must include assuming the full responsibility of that ownership. Nothing less will do.
Americans take no ownership of Vietnam, of Iraq. They plan the bombing of Iran, or „oppose“ the bombing with impotent plaintive wailing for charity from a merciless state, with very little knowledge of Iran or the history of American relations with Iran. The most radical public voices advocate for the avoidance of costly (to Americans) mistakes.