War on Iraq, 15 years on

In his magisterial survey of European history since 1945, the late historian Tony Judt observed that “Afghanistan, in short, was a catastrophe for the Soviet Union. Its traumatic impact upon a generation of conscripted soldiers would emerge only later...It says something about the underlying fragility of the Soviet Union that it was so vulnerable to the impact of one--albeit spectacularly unsuccessful--neo-colonial adventure” (Judt, Postwar 594).

For a slightly different set of reasons, and in a less immediate sense, the same could be said for the 2003 invasion of Iraq launched by the United States for our own country’s political, cultural, and economic future. Fifteen years ago today, bombs rained down in Baghdad in what was variously described as a campaign to “shock and awe,” to export democracy, to embrace American empire, to mark a new era of warmaking and foreign policy, and to add an exclamation point rather than a tame period to the end of history.

Fifteen years on, there has yet to be a serious political reckoning for a war that helped to empower a class of securocrats, proved a boon to toxic American exceptionalism, represented corporate command of foreign policy, has led to the implosion of multiple Middle Eastern states, generated the proliferation of international terror, weakened our country’s civil liberties, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrians, dismantled the Iraqi state and deeply compromised the integrity of the newly “liberated” country, killed thousands of American soldiers while leaving far greater numbers of others with visible and invisible wounds, and generated sufficient mistrust in our political institutions and the right wing of the Democratic Party to at least facilitate the rise of a fascist to the presidency.

For my generation the Iraq war was and remains particularly significant. Our high school history and government classes were dominated by debates about the war. In rural northern California some of us were force-fed FOX news in classes as its charlatans counted down breathlessly to the start of the war. One teacher screamed at a few of us dissenters that we were unpatriotic “commies” for questioning the march to war. Within two years, some of the people who sat in those or neighboring classrooms were dead. Some of them died dramatic deaths in the battles and offensives that for at least a couple of years dominated our news, while others expired more slowly upon their return to a largely indifferent nation that had apparently exhausted its patriotism through the mindless blood-lust with which it beat the war drums in rhythm with the lies spat out weekly by the Bush administration.

Members of that administration conspired to wage aggressive war, and yet did not face justice for their actions and the devastating consequences of those actions. Indeed, we are witnessing their return to respectability during the Trump administration as people look back to what they portray as the benign Bush years.

Time and decisions that Americans make in the coming few years will tell. But it is entirely possible that a few decades from now historians could tell a very similar story about the crumbling of our own state to the one that Judt offered about the relationship between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the unravelling of that empire’s power.

Our journalists and press were certainly proven to be craven, inept, and awed by the power of the imperial presidency and its capacity to rally the nation around the flag, turning a blind eye to mounting contradictions, fallacies, and transparent lies. The media’s ineptitude and concomitant public cynicism can be linked to its inability to cover the 2016 primaries in a serious fashion.

The Democratic Party, supposedly the home of liberal internationalism and those sceptical of empire-building and aggressive war, proved itself to be a pitiful, hypocritical shell, measured not only by the number of its leading representatives who not voted for a ill-conceived, probably illegal, and self-evidently self-destructive war and then doubled-down on that position. Two of those figures became leaders of the party and not coincidentally led it to defeats in 2004 and 2016 that in turn led to financial meltdowns and a flirtation with fascism that still has plenty of time to turn into a fatal embrace.

Far from stamping out terror, the war expanded and connected existing but isolated terror networks, something that British intelligence and Middle East experts warned about in the months leading up to the war. It also brought the methods of terror into regular practice by the U.S. military and its intelligence agencies, degrading our ethics and recruiting for Al Qaeda and its ilk. The “forever war” launched by Bush and continued writ large and small by Obama and Trump, has also empowered our security state.

Abuses meted out by securocrats, and the impunity they enjoyed in the face of tepid efforts by legislators to reign them in, reinforced public mistrust in institutions of governance. The power of those securocrats also led them to take an outsized role in our politics. We might now depend on the work of a former FBI director to investigate a corrupt fascist administration, but let’s not forget that it was a highly politicized FBI which chose to publicize the investigation into Clinton’s e-mails while keeping their investigation about a far more compromised Trump campaign secret. We can be sure that whether Trump wins another term or is impeached, the security state will emerge stronger than ever. And the power of the securocrats expands at the direct expense of our democracy.

The Bush administration also regenerated an imperial cult of exceptionalism around the war, and that cult has helped to impair our ability to develop a functional international policy to combat the combination of global inequality, climate change, and authoritarianism, the combination of which could very well lead to a nightmarish global future.

There are certainly many other causes behind our national decrepitude and the frightening state of the world, just as there were behind the fall of the Soviet Union. But thus far, the 2003 invasion of Iraq has revealed the institutional, cultural, moral, and intellectual fragility of our country.Our task is to do what we can to ensure that it does not become a moment associated with the national and global demise of democracy and the cynical recuperation of aggressive war, terror, and brute violence.

Trump's Reshuffle Takes the U.S. Deeper into the Dark Side

Thugs, criminals, and enablers. These are the people being promoted during Trump’s shake-up of his administration. After the “tough guy” president fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson via twitter, he indicated that his choice to replace Tillerson is Mike Pompeo, currently the director of the C.I.A. His nominee to replace Pompeo is the deputy director of the C.I.A., Gina Haspel.

These are two deeply troubling nominations on several fronts.

Tillerson was widely perceived as being an independent voice in the administration. It is true that his independence stemmed from and reinforced his utter marginalization. International policy, whether the proposed meeting with North Korea’s leadership or statements about NATO, was conducted based on Trump’s whims and what little information he could process that was fed to him by advisors who read and appeased his mood.

Tillerson was not any force for good in the administration, but his was a voice that at least appeared to respect the (broadly) liberal, norm-based international order that has served the American public and the world at large inadequately but far better than anything that has come before. He criticized Russia’s extrajudicial killings when the administration would not. He seemed to recognize that dangerous words can have dangerous consequences.

Pompeo is a different creature. While Tillerson provided some check, or the threat of a check should he have threatened to resign at an inopportune moment, Pompeo will be an enabler of Trump’s basest, most ignorant, and authoritarian instincts.

Pompeo was a key proponent of the endless and partisan investigations into the non-scandal that was Benghazi. There were serious flaws with the international policy of the Obama administration in particular and the U.S. more systematically, but Pompeo’s cynical hijacking of the tools of oversight for nakedly partisan purposes ensured that those flaws received no attention. Then, as since, he did the bidding of his party, evincing no sense for or interest in the public good.

Pompeo has a history as an Islamophobe, characterizing terrorism as a feature of Islam, and seeking to hold “moderate Muslims” responsible for violent members of their faith. His congressional campaigns drew on bigoted websites that characterized an Asian American rival for his seat as a “turban topper,” and he supported torture and the secret torture facilities designed by the Bush administration during its war of terror.

He is a defender of the offshore prison at Guantanamo, and therefore a critic of constitutional safeguards and the U.S. justice system more broadly, which he does not view as capable of handling accusations of terrorism.

He defended the illegal and unaccountable surveillance of the NSA, attempted to normalize and legalize its activities, and castigated whistleblowers with a vengeance that demonstrated extraordinary contempt for democratic norms and the right of the public to know what elected and and appointed officials do in their name.

In other words, Pompeo has been a defender of the overmighty and abusive security state about which Trump whinged endlessly during his campaign. That security state and its employees have abused the rights of Americans, sought to curb the ability of our legislators to offer oversight, pursued both deeply immoral and clearly self-destructive methods that have debased our national culture, diminished the standing of our national security institutions, made our public less safe, and claimed the lives and dignity of our fellow global citizens, all while dispensing with the norms of justice and decency that we like to pretend is our national signature.

There are few better embodiments of the rogue security state emboldened by Pompeo than his deputy and would-be replacement, Gina Haspel. Haspel is a long-time C.I.A. employee who helped to engineer what Dick Cheney called America’s shift to the “dark side.” Even as the Bush administration pledged to wage a war in defense of our freedoms and their global dissemination, it embraced the use of torture, aggressive war, secret prisons, and the shredding of safeguards both for those captured by our country and by extension American soldiers or civilians held prisoner abroad.

The deputy director of the C.I.A., an institution profoundly culpable in our country’s descent into terror and criminality, was a central player in this tragedy. The New York Times documented how Haspel “oversaw the torture” of suspects, and then worked to cover up evidence of her team’s brutality. She did so from one of the “black sites” in southeast Asia designed to outsource the methods of barbarism embraced by a cancerous agency which has long bridled at the notion of democratic accountability, and which has metastasized at the expense of our legislature’s power.

The C.I.A. entered into what amounted to a cold war with senators who sought to shed light on its criminal behavior. The cover-up, as much as the crime, was directed not just at the victims of waterboarding and other abuses, but also at the heart of American democracy. We now rely on spies and their shadowy maneuvers to investigate the president’s ties to global authoritarians and obstruction of justice, but the current of public mistrust and cynicism which led to Trump’s election was created in part by the abuse by the rogue security agencies of the public trust.

Some of the people tortured by Haspel remain in Guantanamo, denied their day in court. The American public has still not learned the full extent of the routinized savagery that Haspel and others unleashed, unknown, in our names, precisely because of directives like the one she signed to facilitate the destruction of records associated with torture sites.

Likely criminals in our security state like Haspel, aided by accomplices in government like Pompeo, have sought to simultaneously erase the details of our long and sinister flirtation with the “dark side,” and to draw on Americans’ fears and prejudices to prepare us for a return to those methods.

Haspel should be on trial for her brutality, and Pompeo should never have been re-elected to office once he lent his Congressional power in support of an abusive security state. Instead, Trump is proposing the promotion of a criminal and her thuggish enabler to still greater positions of power in our government, demonstrating that impunity is alive and well for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and abuses of our constitution.

Citizens should express their forceful outrage over this appointment, and our senators should refuse to confirm people who are a disgrace not just to their country, but to the notions of a shared humanity, democracy, and rule of law.