I picked up “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq” by Robert Draper after noticing the relentless pro-war news media coverage of the war in Ukraine. (Recently Congress found another several billion dollars with no better use than to throw away in this eastern European conflict.)

The author is a frequent New York Times contributor and I got the book after reading a good analysis by him of the MAGA craziness that’s going on among Arizona Republicans.

Iraq war II is long past. There is new bad stuff going on in the world that I could be reading about instead. However, I wanted to understand this major fuckup and how I, as a liberal teenager, got duped into basic lukewarm support of the invasion along the way.

Paul Wolfowitz: the architect of a fiasco

The book opens on Paul Wolfowitz, who was a perpetually wrong administration figure with a fantasy of invading Iraq at zero cost in lives or money. His ideas around liberating the country were fixed in his mind for decades and based partly on thoroughly refuted theories promulgated by Laurie Mylroie.

Ahmad Chalabi, an ex-Iraqi with charisma and connections; and other fabricators who essentially wandered into CIA buildings off the street also provided the foundation for an invasion plan. Donald Rumsfeld is described as a toxic boss and classic bully who thrived in an atmosphere of chaos and intimidation. George Tenet is depicted as a well-liked CIA leader who provided a soft pretext for war in the absence of actual evidence. He sucks, for this pretext and for his tenure of torture, but there is so much more blame to go around. There was a continual ratcheting up, where a set of shoddy ideas got repeated and amplified and then become the basis for action.

Among the other killer clowns who look bad in the book are Doug Feith, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and various administration and CIA officials who simply crafted and carried out a grand debacle.

Other influential pro war celebrities

I was disappointed to see that a celebrity atheist I looked up to when I was a young adult became a pro Iraq war talking head: Christopher Hitchens “and other liberal writers exerted, above all, a moral justification for invading Iraq. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent liberation of Eastern Europe stirred the conscience of liberals who had spilled more ink decrying Reagan than Soviet totalitarianism. The swiftness of operation Desert Storm had demonstrated to them that all wars need not be Vietnam. At the same time, that war’s unhappy aftermath, with the elder Bush consigning the Marsh Arabs to massacre, along with Clinton’s paralysis during the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda three years later, horrified intellectuals of the left for whom ‘Never again’ was civilization’s blood oath.”

I think in Hitchens’ case, the stridency of New Atheism, (a movement I got caught up in and respect to this day) led to disdain for the tribal/religious violence and stupidity that was suddenly so apparent in the world, and this led to an eagerness to see something, anything, be done about it. I have noticed a troubling similarity with Sam Harris’ views on Islam. I figure that sure, Islam sucks, but so does every other religion. And one thing that makes secular humanism better than religionism is refraining from violence and abuse of power.

Colin Powell’s capitulation

Powell soured a glittering career with a moment of capitulation and bending of the truth when he went before the United Nations to make the case for war in front of the world. This part of the book struck me as especially sad. Powell was a decorated general, yet he capped his public life with a moment of cowardice that is hard to understand.

Pro-war people I knew

My British literature teacher in sophomore year of high school, Mr Seeberg (with three e’s, as he would remind us) made a dead serious speech to us impressionable 16 year olds. He brought up the Iraq invasion debate in late 2002. In a somber tone, he looked around the room and said that there are evil terrorists out there who, if they could, would press a button and kill you, me and all of us. He let his words sink in and then continued with class.

Mr Seeberg, you were wrong.

Most other people I knew were vaguely against the war but also thought that we must be going to war for a reason. There must be something the government and military know that we do not. It turns out they were wrong, too.

Antiwar voices and protestors

In my city of Minneapolis pink shirted protesters gathered every week for years on the Lake Street bridge. They were drowned out by people who were pro war or mostly indifferent. Ten years later, they were still there protesting. They were right.

The book depicts some administration officials and CIA/military people as decent and competent and unwilling to bend the truth or offer fake “alternative analyses.” However, these people were too few and too quiet to prevent the drumbeats of war.

Watching the invasion as infotainment

I recall the excitement of the Iraq invasion in 2003: I would get high and watch Dan Rather and other CNN journalists pick apart the invasion with dynamic maps and graphics. I followed excellent coverage from the New York Times for years. Embedded journalists also made the coverage more exciting, even as they highlighted the enmeshment of the US military and the journalists who were supposed to be providing objective reporting and analysis.

When US soldiers and intelligence agents turned out to be torturing, raping, killing and humiliating Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib, I looked at all the awful photos. One of the soldiers featured most luridly in the photos argued for a lenient sentence because she was mentally handicapped. And these are the people we sent to “liberate” a distant country.

Years after that, I watched the hanging of Saddam Hussein. Instead of a prison term, the US-backed Iraqi government gave him a brutal public execution. It turned out that in his final years, he was not coordinating with terrorists to wipe out Washington, but rather writing his fourth novel while other officials carried out government administration.

Bottom line: Saddam had no link to al Qaeda and no WMDs

The book’s epigraph is fitting:

“A man is not deceived by others; he deceives himself.”

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Those soldiers came home and influenced US culture for the worse

Some US soldiers, like an acquaintance of mine, simply played Xbox video games and ate fast food on a secure base for several months and then flew home. Many others sustained permanent brain injuries, disfigurement, and psychiatric conditions. Many died. They all came home and influenced the culture, in ways vividly illustrated in the comic About Face. When I breathe toxic diesel exhaust from a lifted pickup truck, I often blame one of these assholes.

These people are not, I think, as dangerous as portrayed in the comic. They have lots of guns, but mostly use the guns to kill themselves alone in deliberate suicide. And when they break into the capitol, they simply take selfies and look like an easily prosecuted jackass.

The war killed a lot of people and brought chaos to the region and disunity to the coalition

The war set the scene for Islamic State and the war in Syria. Most 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, and the Iraq war did nothing that would harm our buddy-buddy relationship with that country.

Oh, and 100 000 to 1 000 000 people were killed.

The ultimate responsibility is with George W. Bush

“But the architecture of his errors now loomed over Bush’s presidency. It was he who had selected Donald Rumsfeld, who had been out of government for a quarter of a century. It was he who had been insufficiently attentive to the threat posed by Osama bin Laden. It was he who internalized the evidence-free claims by Paul Wolfowitz and others that Saddam likely had a hand in the 9/11 attacks. And then it was he, above all others, who promoted the spectacle of the Iraqi dictator handing over his imaginary weapons to a group of terrorists so as to fulfill the imaginary ambition of destroying America. It was the president’s imagination that had run fatally wild.

It was Bush, the commander in chief, who saw no need for rigorous debate among his war council. Not on the advisability and necessity of invading Iraq. Not on the composition of the invasion force. Not on what would follow the invasion.

Bush, more than anyone else in the administration – more even than Wolfowitz – lived by the unassailable credo that all humans deserved to be free. Proceeding from that belief were several unfortunate leaps of logic. Iraqis yearned for freedom above all else. All sectarian grievances would give way to the desire to preserve a free Iraq. The Middle East would take note of this new blossoming; its deserts would erupt in a flowering of freedom. And along the way, to any tactical question, freedom served as the strategic answer.”

Bush II, in my view, was way worse than Trump. People who say otherwise have lost perspective and are just as caught up in social media as Trump is.

The present day

Finally we have left Afghanistan after 20 years. Yet we are pouring billions of dollars into yet another war in Eastern Europe that does not affect us directly. We are using the same “domino” argument as in Vietnam, that Ukraine must be defended, otherwise Russia and totalitarian rule will expand. We are blind to how NATO continued to expand after the end of the Cold War but Russia was subjected to containment and isolation. We are still a warmongering country, nostalgic for WWII, eager to bomb and invade and meddle. Lately the adversary (Putin) does actually have WMD. The news media is full of uncritical pro-war coverage. I don’t know what will happen next in Ukraine, but it might involve nuclear weapons. And twenty years on, I might be reading another analysis just like this.

About the photo

This aggressive red eyed drooling seagull in Olympic Sculpture Park looked like it would unleash world-ending WMD’s to get ONE of my hot chips. Saddam would not.