Lessons from an Immoral War

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Marie Cocco: Lessons From an Immoral War

By Marie Cocco

WASHINGTON—The country has concluded that the Iraq war is a profound misadventure from which the United States must somehow extract itself. Details have been left to the foreign policy experts and political fixers of the Iraq Study Group, a sort of government-outside-the-government that is supposed to offer a path of wisdom to those inside the government who’ve not found one on their own.

The American people cannot untangle this dangerous web. But we can take stock of lessons learned.

What, at this bloody juncture, can we say about the role the people played in the blunder of Iraq?

The first is that we allowed the crudest sort of politics to form the basis of support for war. The Iraq invasion was a political choice, not a necessity of national security. If we were befuddled, or scared out of our wits by the Bush administration’s rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction and its false linkage of Iraq with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, our suspicions should have been aroused by White House hucksterism: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August,” White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said in explaining why the president waited until the fall of 2002—on the eve of the midterm congressional elections—to begin selling us the faulty Iraq product.

All wars require a dose of propaganda to rally the public, to boost the troops, to bind a nation together as it endures hardship. The trouble with the Iraq war is that it was all propaganda, all the time, all along. The president and much of the Republican Party kept up the advertising right up to this month’s election, when at last the people stopped buying.

The moment of rejection might have come sooner had we not made another crucial mistake, from which we must learn the most important lesson. Many Americans were all too willing to allow this war to fester so long as only those relatively few families with sons and daughters in the volunteer military were at risk—and so long as we were not asked to pay even a dollar in taxes to support it. .......

The rest is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061128_marie_cocco_lessons_from_an_immoral_war/