10 years after: Did we learn from Iraq?

March 19 was the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War.

You don’t hear or read much about it. Not surprising when you consider that our news media were uncritical cheerleaders of our invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. The media doesn’t want to remind you of that fact. I remember watching the start of the war — the night bombing of Baghdad — “shock and awe”, in the military’s parlance — and the newsmen were on the tube applauding like it was a Fourth of July fireworks display. Except innocent human beings on the ground were dying.

Those of us who publicly opposed the war were vilified on the opinion pages of this newspaper — called unpatriotic or even traitors. Many Flathead citizens were indeed intimidated into silence by the collective groupthink and war frenzy. I had many folks call or tell me that they too were against the war, but were afraid to say so or write publicly. 

Retired generals chimed in with their “expertise,” implying that ordinary citizens didn’t know enough to have an intelligent opinion on war and should simply shut up. It was as if America had become a totalitarian state, and citizens who disagreed with the official line were “anti-American.” But it was clear to many of us in the run-up to war that the rationale for it was based on doctored intelligence and lies, and these facts are now universally acknowledged.

Almost 50 years ago, the U.S. began to escalate another even more tragic war in terms of lives lost: Vietnam. Similar to the war in Iraq, it was based on false assumptions (the “domino theory” of a Communist takeover of Indochina) and, in the case of Vietnam a mostly fabricated incident (the Gulf of Tonkin).

I was in college then and, like many fellow students and citizens, demonstrated against the war. We were also vilified by the pro-war mobs: pelted with tomatoes, eggs, and verbal epithets. This by people who, I’m sure, would claim to support the First Amendment’s right to freedom of speech — except speech that they found objectionable.  Like the war in Iraq, the war in Vietnam dragged on for years. But when middle-class kids started coming home in body bags, Americans finally decided they had had enough killing.

Sadly, in half a century, it is apparent that little has changed. Today our society continues to grow increasingly militaristic. We spend $700 billion a year on defense, more than the next 17 nations combined. In today’s America, to be pro-war equals patriotism, to be antiwar equals unpatriotic. Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a “free press” essential to the survival of a democracy seems like a distant dream in today’s world of a media controlled by large corporations, who often have a vested interest in war.

 And the perpetrators of evil continue to go unpunished. The post- WWII Nuremberg Tribunal held that waging aggressive war against another nation (e.g. as in Iraq) is the supreme international crime. The penalty for that crime against humanity is death. If there were any justice in this world, Cheney and Bush would have been tried and sentenced appropriately. But their evil deeds are largely forgotten, swept into the memory hole, and there is little deterrent to commit future war crimes.

Referring to history, Gore Vidal once said that “Americans learn nothing because they remember nothing.” I hope he’s wrong. I hope we remember enough to stay out of Syria and Iran. I hope that maybe, this time, we have learned something. Although, if I were a betting person, I wouldn’t place a lot of money on it.

George McLean is a resident of Kalispell.