Ezra Klein
Vox : June 17, 2014

The news that the US and Iran might cooperate to save Iraq’s government is a measure of just how badly the Iraq war failed to achieve its aims.

“Unlike Saddam Hussein, we believe the Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty,” President George W. Bush said on March 17th, 2003. “And when the dictator has departed, they can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation.”

After 9/11, there was a struggle to define what the attacks actually were. There were some who saw them as a crime: a mass homicide, carried out in spectacular fashion. But there were others who saw them an inevitable collision between the values and the armies of the liberal, democratic west, and the autocratic, theocratic Islamic world. “A clash of civilizations.” They actually used that term.

This is crucial context for the Iraq War. The Bush administration didn’t just want to invade Iraq because of Saddam Hussein’s (nonexistent) stockpile of illegal weapons. They wanted to invade Iraq to create a liberal, democratic counterweight to radical Islam. They wanted to create a country that would, through its glittering example, erode the foundations of Iran’s theocratic regime and al Qaeda’s deadly ideology.

It was called the Democratic Domino Theory. First Iraq would become a beacon of political freedom and economic success. Then, one by one, the populations across the rest of the Middle East would rise up and force their countries to follow. The war on terror wouldn’t end with a fight. It would end with a vote.

A decade later Iraq is becoming the things it was meant to destroy. It could become a Shiite dominated state dependent on Iran for its security. It could become a weak or broken state that serves partly as a haven for the Sunni terror organization ISIS. It could end up as both.

The one thing it will not be is the liberal, democratic counterweight to radical Islam that the Bush administration sought. There is no one in the Middle East who looks to the Iraqi state and sees a better life for them and their children.

The totality of the Bush administration’s failure in Iraq is stunning. It is not simply that they failed to build the liberal democracy they wanted. It’s that they ended up strengthening theocracies they feared.

(read the full article at Vox)

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Dennis Kucinich
Huffington Post : June 16, 2014

As Iraq descends into chaos again, more than a decade after “Mission Accomplished,” media commentators and politicians have mostly agreed upon calling the war a “mistake.” But the “mistake” rhetoric is the language of denial, not contrition: it minimizes the Iraq War’s disastrous consequences, removes blame, and deprives Americans of any chance to learn from our generation’s foreign policy disaster. The Iraq War was not a “mistake” — it resulted from calculated deception. The painful, unvarnished fact is that we were lied to. Now is the time to have the willingness to say that.

In fact, the truth about Iraq was widely available, but it was ignored. There were no WMD. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The war wasn’t about liberating the Iraqi people. I said this in Congress in 2002. Millions of people who marched in America in protest of the war knew the truth, but were maligned by members of both parties for opposing the president in a time of war — and even leveled with the spurious charge of “not supporting the troops.”

I’ve written and spoken widely about this topic, so today I offer two ways we can begin to address our role:

1) President Obama must tell us the truth about Iraq and the false scenario that caused us to go to war.
When Obama took office in 2008, he announced that his administration would not investigate or prosecute the architects of the Iraq War. Essentially, he suspended public debate about the war. That may have felt good in the short term for those who wanted to move on, but when you’re talking about a war initiated through lies, bygones can’t be bygones.

The unwillingness to confront the truth about the Iraq War has induced a form of amnesia which is hazardous to our nation’s health. Willful forgetting doesn’t heal, it opens the door to more lying. As today’s debate ensues about new potential military “solutions” to stem violence in Iraq, let’s remember how and why we intervened in Iraq in 2003.

2) Journalists and media commentators should stop giving inordinate air and print time to people who were either utterly wrong in their support of the war or willful in their calculations to make war.
By and large, our Fourth Estate accepted uncritically the imperative for war described by top administration officials and congressional leaders. The media fanned the flames of war by not giving adequate coverage to the arguments against military intervention.

President Obama didn’t start the Iraq War, but he has the opportunity now to tell the truth. That we were wrong to go in. That the cause of war was unjust. That more problems were created by military intervention than solved. That the present violence and chaos in Iraq derives from the decision which took America to war in 2003. More than a decade later, it should not take courage to point out the Iraq war was based on lies.

(Source: Huffington Post)