[donquixote99]

Originally Posted by Pukka Sahib

The only thing to be learnt from history is that nobody learns from history."
- William Golding, Close Quarters (1987)
. . .

It would take a very great philosopher to know all the causes of the Iraq war, suffice it to say that President George W. Bush accused Iraq of having weapons of mass destruction - some of which were sold to Iraq by George H.W. Bush when he was President - that Saddam Hussein denied having and the United Nations weapons inspectors could not find, but that President Bush insisted Iraq had, or was in the process of acquiring for imminent use against the United States; and that when this was shown to be based on false intelligence, the invasion and occupation was then justified as a war against terrorism, to liberate Iraq from a oppressive regime, and spread democracy throughout the Middle East; for which thousands of American soldiers were killed and wounded, and untold numbers of Iraqi citizens lost their lives, were maimed, imprisoned, tortured, humiliated, and made to be enemies of the United States and its allies, and fermenting civil war.

Now that we are out of it, we can look back upon the whole scene with historic smugness. What are the lessons learned? What, in the final analysis, was accomplished? Did we win the war? Or was it a phony victory to be whitewashed by politicians? "Peace with honor" was the best face that Kissinger and Nixon could put on our inglorious exit from the Vietnam quagmire. In The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli maintained that a state that is hard won in war is easily ruled as the enemy has been destroyed; whereas a state that easily won is not easily held because the enemy still remains all about the occupier. Machaivelli, Il Principe (1532). Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz - the architects of the war in Iraq - both profess to have studied Machiavelli. Apparently, they didn’t learn their lessons well; and President Bush would have done well to have had better advisors.

While I admire the sensitivity and tone and learned eloquence on display here, I fear you nonetheless sort of lost me at the first sentence. The why of the thing doesn't seem to me to present philosophical conundrums, and truly had nothing whatsoever to do with WMD. Some neocons heard we'd become the world's hyperpower, and thought if we just made an example of someone, everyone would start doing what we told them to.

It was one of the worst ideas since Athens invaded Sicily.