Telling the Truth: Will the GOP Admit That The Iraq War Was Wrong From the Start?

Photo: The remains of three US servicemen, their equipment, and a Humvee lay scattered on a dirt road after a massive IED vaporized their vehicle on August 4, 2007 in Hawr Rajab, Iraq. By Benjamin Lowy/Getty Images

CAUTION: The image above is graphic.  

Regardless of what happens to Chris Christie as Bridgegate continues to spiral out of control, a larger issue facing the GOP in the context of the 2016 presidential election is whether or not the presidential candidates and the party as a whole will concede that the Iraq War was a disaster and that the rush to war was an unmitigated mistake.  To a lesser extent, the question will also haunt Democrat candidate(s) who voted for the war.  Why is the issue important?  Because (i) if the error cannot be recognized, the danger is greater that a similar fool's errand may happen in the future, and (ii) because more and more Americans, including veterans who fought and/or were grievously wounded in Iraq, are coming to the conclusion that they fought and friends died for nothing.  Andrew Sullivan has two posts that look at the two pieces of the issue.  Here are highlights from the first:

Jeremy Lott hopes GOP presidential hopefuls will face reality:

Any Republican seeking nomination for the 2016 presidential election should at a minimum be willing to admit Iraq was a mistake.  It was an error that cost us upwards of $1.5 trillion, thousands of U.S. lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, while seriously hindering our efforts to track down the real culprits of September 11. (The war, incidentally, helped pave the way for a Nancy Pelosi-controlled House and a Barack Obama-controlled White House, as well.)

Larison sees this as improbable:

There are some obstacles to what Lott proposes. Chief among them is the difficulty that many hawks in the party still truly don’t accept that the Iraq war was a mistake. Despite the fact that by virtually any measurable standard the Iraq war was a senseless waste of lives and resources, they don’t consider this to be the truth, so they won’t greet it with relief. At best, many hawks will agree that the there were flaws in the execution, but they remain convinced that the original idea was sound.

Readers know how terrible a mistake this was and is, in my judgment. Listening to what passes for “debate” about the continued sectarian warfare in Iraq – which never ended, and was never resolved by the surge, and is the core reason why Iraq as a country remains a democratic impossibility – has been a sobering moment. Men like John McCain have obviously not internalized for a millisecond the awful error they made. Their response has been either utter denialism or silence – which was roughly their position throughout the entire, horrifying experience.

And here are highlights from the second post:

William McNulty blames the high suicide rate among young veterans on the “amorphous nature” of the wars they fought in:

No amount of counseling can dispel the gnawing sense that one sacrificed for a bogus cause. From this stems despair — from a sense that so much of one’s life was given for so little purpose. Today’s vets do not see themselves as saviors, they cannot identify whom they defeated, they are not certain that they truly liberated anyone, and they fought, at best, a holding action against an ill-defined threat. Progress has been absent.

Joe Klein seconds McNulty:

McNulty makes an important distinction: between depression and despair. Depression is one of the prevalent symptoms of post-traumatic stress. It is a natural reaction to the unimaginable terror that comes with combat, the survivor’s guilt that comes with the loss of friends, the frustration that comes with the loss of a limb or a traumatic brain injury. Despair is more profound: it comes when you’ve experienced any or all of those things–and you come to the conclusion that it was all in vain, that there was no earthly reason to have invaded Iraq in the first place or extended the war in Afghanistan beyond the counter-terrorist effort to snuff out Al Qaeda.

 We owe it to those who died or returned maimed for life to make sure that such a disastrous debale never, ever happens again.  As noted before, one way to insure this is to put George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others on trial for war crimes.  So far, no one has been held accountable.

DISCLOSURE: One of my daughters' husband was badly wounded by an IED.  Fortunately, he has largely recovered and is posed to leave the military in a few months.  A number of his friends were not so lucky.  We do not discuss the event and aftermath, but it was grueling for both him and my daughter.  Yet, ultimately, they were the lucky ones.  Thousands of young Americans were not so lucky.  A true patriot cannot silently let those responsible get away with no accounting for their misdeeds in sending America to war, not to mention authorizing the commission of war crimes as well.