There is no honest assessment of Iraq and no honoring the dead without admitting it was based on lies

August 31, 2010 by Peter · Leave a Comment

When President Obama speaks to the nation about the end of combat operations in Iraq, he will avoid the elephant in the room: that America was deceived into war.

Whatever the ultimate outcome, and we won’t know it for years, an undeniable legacy of the Iraq war is that Bush and Cheney squandered America’s moral authority with the invasion and we’re still paying the price in blood and treasure.

So much ink was spilled over this topic that I won’t replay the debate in full. But here’s an excerpt of something I wrote in response to Karl Rove’s recent crowing about “success” in Iraq:

Saddam Hussein was a murderous dictator, one of several across the globe. Seeing him brought to justice was an exceptional thing. We don’t focus enough attention on human rights violations across the globe – specifically the wholesale oppression of girls and women – and I wish Saddam’s fate on every other human being who brutalizes and slaughters innocent people.

However, the Bush administration did not put forth human rights as the primary rationale or justification for war. Instead, they lied, claiming at the time of the invasion that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed an imminent, grave, growing threat to the United States. Countless articles, editorials, blog posts and reports have enumerated those falsehoods and exaggerations and I direct Mr. Rove to “the Google” to peruse them.

No amount of revisionist history will undo the immense and unfathomable death, pain, suffering, blood, gore, and torture unleashed by our ‘preemptive’ invasion, the shattered families, the psychological damage, among our veterans and the Iraqi people. The moral damage to America is deep. The resources spent in Iraq could have been allocated to millions of teachers, cops, firefighters, nurses, to education and medical research, to health care — saving thousands if not millions of lives rather than killing hundreds of thousands.

Nearly 400 Iraqis died in violence last month. The U.S. still maintains a massive troop presence there. Stability in Iraq is tenuous at best. By all measures in the preceding paragraphs, the Iraq fiasco was, is and always will be a failure. Perhaps less of an unmitigated failure than it could have been, but a failure nonetheless.

We all know why Obama can’t talk about Iraq as a failure. It’s because we can’t tell the families of the dead that their loved ones died in vain.

But we don’t have to. They didn’t die in vain. Not if we’re honest with ourselves. It’s when we avoid the bitter and hard truths that we undermine their noble sacrifice.

Let’s pay tribute to the beautiful souls lost in Iraq by being brutally honest and by demanding the truth. Let’s learn from our terrible mistake. We owe it to the memory of those who gave their lives.

UPDATE: Katrina vanden Heuvel sums it up on Twitter: