Tenth anniversary of tragic stupidity

I let the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq go unremarked upon. Finally a brutal photograph has nudged me out of my silence.

It was either a war to protect us from nonexistent weapons of mass destruction or a war to let neocons like Vice President Cheney overcome their feelings of impotence at having failed to remove Saddam Hussein in a previous war.

Iraq cost us something like a trillion dollars. It led to the actual death of over a hundred thousand Iraqis or the speculative death of over half a million of them. The neocons vociferously decry the larger estimate.

I’ll confess that in its early stages I was sympathetic to the call to arms and what persuaded me was the high flying notion that we could save the Iraquis from their own small potatoes Joseph Stalinesque dictator. I did disapprove of the Republicans who intimidated war skeptics in the Democratic party with allegations of being appeasers or unpatriotic or indifferent to the pain of the persecuted in Iraq but otherwise I thought our intervention was an acceptable risk. We were all assured that was going to be easy peasy.

I should have paid more attention to Senator Wellstone who unfortunately died and could no longer raise his voice and doubts against the war.

I should have thought of the million Vietnamese who are said to have died after the dim witted US intervention of South Vietnam.

I should thought of my non-interventionist Grandfather George Robb who told me the worst mistake he ever made was to vote for Woodrow Wilson because he promised to keep America out of war.

Americans were largely too preoccupied with their own busy lives to pay much attention to the travails of the Iraqi’s were were rescuing.

A very few images of the horror of that war managed to sneak into the US for the few who were paying attention to gawk at. WARNING this photo is one of them and it should make you cringe especially if your family has small children. It was taken by a photographer who paid for his intrepidity by getting killed in another war this time in Libya.

I only recommend it be viewed by unapologetic neocons.

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