Did Israel Lead the US into the War on Iraq?

Point me to the part I’m missing. I thought “the path we’ve been taken on since 9/11 and what to do about it” was just what perplexes me and keeps pushing the conversation. Straighten me out, please.

Chris

Speaking of bookends, this interview for me is a “bookend” to the Kanan Makiya interview with regard to our invasion of Iraq. In this interview Juan Cole talks in heartbreaking detail of the terrible tragedy visited upon the Iraqi people and he compares that to the brutality of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. At bottom Cole blames the US invasion for all the horrors in Iraq.

Kanan Makiya does not speak much or at all of the human tragedy in the interviews I have heard. But I feel the weight of it from him. Perhaps this is because he is on the defensive. But also he does not blame the invasion even though he speaks of the mistakes made. At least in part if not mostly, he blames Iraqi’s themselves; he is terribly disappointed that given their chance, with the lifting of the tyranny, Iraq fell apart as it did. It was for Makiya, in his telling, a revelation after the invasion that Iraqi society prior was already too weakened, on it’s way to breaking apart already because of the UN sanctions and the subsequent loss of the middle class and the weakening of institutions. Add as well the floodtide of emotions, the need for retribution, pent up from the years of tyranny, oppression, and the sudden turnaround in power after the invasion with the Shias becoming the lords.

Isn’t this as different altogether from Napoleon in Egypt as the similarities?

One way or another the tyranny had to end in Iraq, “somehow”. Juan Cole says nothing in the interview about that inevitability and the inevitable repercussions- with or without US invasion. As an historian he does not need to. But if he is making judgments he should take this into account. I have not read the book- perhaps he does.

So Juan Cole does not address or mention the humanitarian reason for this endeavor in the interview except to say in passing that is was part of the propaganda in both cases. I differ- I think it had more weight in the case of Iraq and certainly it was everything for Makiya. There is a real difference between Napoleon’s use of the liberation rationale as mostly propaganda to invade Egypt for the sake of empire and the feelings that were arising in the international community as a whole with regard to the reign of terror of Saddam for a number of years.

As Cole says rightly, the age of empire is over. Attempts are doomed to failure. We are more and more a global world society.

Cole’s other points of why we invaded were, I agree, more primary. No question that the humanitarian issue was added on by Bush, used to sell the war to bring at least some on board. But it was a full fledged issue. I was having trouble myself on this as I say on the Makiya thread. I did end up being firmly against the war before it happened and shocked and appalled after and since. And also it’s true, as Cole says, that 9/11 and the fears that it produced that were promoted and then mined had it’s effect.

On the campaign trail-especially on the Republican side, in the media, there is not much of this; it’s about “winning the war”-whatever that means. Cole’s point about the price that the Iraqi people have paid should be part of a larger conversation that Chris is missing that would have us reflecting on the path we have been taken on since 9/11 and what to do about it ( if I have that right).

Lancet surveys of casualties of the Iraq War

A personal favorite fictional character of this period is from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen Quotes What will future Terry Gilliam(s), or Mark Twain(s), Joseph Heller(s), Voltaire(s) for that matter, make out of U.S./Iraq conflict? The satirists, if not having the last word and laugh on such weighty matters, tend to have some instructive thoughts and insights on these matters of great emotional intensity; humor, when handled well, can heal and bridge the intractable questions, as well as, illuminate both our coarser and sweeter angels with subtle efficacy. Enmity’s roots struggle in grounds fertilized with the equilibrium of conviviality … and so I suspect, this war ,and it’s polarized denizens too, shall crawl through the gauntlet of the satirist spanking machine in the future.

Beyond that I heartened by Professor Cole’s refuting of the “age old hatred” meme that has taken root in the American consciousness. People who really should know better have parroted that line for far too long as the idea of (soft/hard) partition has bloomed in American political thinking. “Thinkers” in the United States do not favor partition because it is best for the people of Iraq, or because they think it will produce long term stability–they favor it because it is the least complicated and easy solution from an American perspective to get us the hell out. This war has never been about the interests of the “liberated” Iraqi people and our exit will be no different.

Raed Jarrar has been telling anyone who is willing to listen that the conflict is much more about power than faith. It is a conflict of nationalists versus sectarians. Sunni Nationalists desiring to return to a strong central government with them in the position of leadership fighting against Shiite Sectarians in the south. The media’s choice to use the nomenclature of religion over those of ideology is indicative of their desire to move papers over their desire to inform.

Mr. Cole’s