Arlington Cemetery began as a place to bury some of the 625,000 dead from the Civil War.
Memorial Day is the day the United States sets aside to remember those who died in wars–a legacy of our Civil War, which killed 625,000 people out of a nation of some 35 million.
But to hear some conservative pundits tell it, there’s something wrong about being asked to reflect on war–and questioning whether we could have avoided it a metaphysical impossibility.
“History is an infinitely complex web of causations,” argues New York Times columnist David Brooks (5/19/15):
To erase mistakes from the past is to obliterate your world now. You can’t go back and know then what you know now. You can’t step in the same river twice.
Therefore, he says, “The question, would you go back and undo your errors is unanswerable.” The subtext, of course, is that Jeb Bush’s difficulty in answering the question of whether he would have invaded Iraq is completely understandable.
What we should learn from Iraq, Brooks says, is “the need for epistemological modesty”: “We don’t know much about the world, and much of our information is wrong.” But he does know that the idea that “the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war,” is a “fable.”
Conservative columnist S.E. Cupp (Daily News, 5/19/15) likewise wrote a column about the “uselessness” of “ask[ing] a candidate to Monday-morning quarterback” the Iraq War. “Giving them a time machine isn’t telling us anything,” she insisted.
“It’s hard to understand how this became a thing,” she wrote, noting that “the Iraq War is not a topline issue for most Americans.”
And Jeff Jacoby (Boston Globe, 5/20/15) took issue with the “field day” journalists and politicians were having with Bush’s trouble with the Iraq invasion question: “Obviously there will be no do-over of the Iraq war authorization; the next president can’t hop a time machine back to 2003.”
“History is always messy, especially the history of wars and their aftermath,” declares Jacoby. “Rarely does the decision to fight proceed as expected. The same is true of the decision not to fight.”
With all this talk about epistemology and the messiness of history, it’s easy to forget that what Bush was being asked to do was not travel through time but to say whether or not he agreed with a decision, made by the last president from his party (who also happens to be his brother), that was based on lies and resulted in the deaths of half a million people. Would his brother have made that same choice? It’s an important question whose answer is obviously not obvious.
Since Iraq’s population is 33 million, it’s roughly the scale of devastation inflicted on the United States by the Civil War. When that happened to us, it left a wound that we’re still commemorating 150 years later. When our country does it to another, 12 years later it’s seen as distant history whose dredging up provokes head-scratching on the part of right-wing columnists.
Forget the past
We’ve got a future to fuck
But of course we must look again every single day at Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi, despite what various investigations have found subsequently which found no intentional wrong-doing. But of course we can’t put that behind us.
Brooks claims the notion that we were lied into the war in Iraq is a “fable.” He will say anything to justify the GOP, and It is depressing to see his unique combination of nonsense, gibberish, and outright lies printed in the New York Times twice a week.
George Santayana never read David Brooks, S.E. Cupp or Jeff Jacoby. Those three appear to have returned the complement, and have ignored his work, as well.
I think that the wether George Bush, Jeb Bush or any body for that matter would have gone or not to war back in 2003 if he had know what we all know today is irrelevant. I assert this because the facts illustrate clearly that president Bush and GOP members among others wanted to invade Irak long before September 11. I submit the infamous Downing street memo to elucidate my point that military action had been considered before the 2003 Irak invasion.I will quote directly from the memo itself: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” After reading this, I concluded that Bush & company would have invaded Irak regardless any intelligence. Furthermore, according to a new book by former CIA director George J. Tenet: “The decision to invade Irak was already made by White House and Pentagon officials, and particularly Vice President Cheney, who were determined to attack Iraq from the first days of the Bush administration, long before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and repeatedly stretched available intelligence to build support for the war” More to the point: “Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda”. They wanted to invade Irak knowing full well that the latter had no WMD, was connected to 9/11 attacks, or had any links to Al-qaeda. That is why lies had to be concocted to justify their criminal invasion. When reporter David Brooks talks about “the need for epistemological modesty” what he is really doing is trying to exculpate Jeb Bush or any GOP member from answering the above question honestly, I think.
Jim Naureckas deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for this piece alone. Well done!!
You are so correct, Doug.
They didn’t want us to know about it then, and they don’t want us digging anything up. I mean, who knows what else we might uncover in the process?
Bobo used to be a milksop conservative clown. Somehow, the little wimp has fangs.
It’s not helping his case. The more the RWNJs are protecting all their mistakes, the more obvious they become. Their desperation is showing.
They’re running a scam and a shakedown operation, and they think we are too stupid to notice. And we shouldn’t be looking .
Full bucking sht
But… IF we did due-diligence/post-mortem examination on these wars, and, as a result, didn’t have militarism and repeated, imperialistic wars (‘military actions’), how are the conservatives going to keep the masses distracted, and keep them mollified with things like $2-3/gallon gas for their SUVs?