I let the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq go unremarked upon. Finally a brutal photograph has nudged me out of my silence.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Iraq cost us something like a trillion dollars. It led to the actual death of over a hundred thousand Iraqis or<\/a> the speculative death of over half a million of them. The neocons vociferously decry the larger estimate.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n I should have paid more attention to Senator Wellstone<\/a> who unfortunately died and could no longer raise his voice and doubts against the war. <\/p>\n