This is from Reason, a ‘libertarian’ publication. I disagree with libertarians on virtually everything except civil liberties (which on the whole most present day libertarians don’t seem to care about at all, but that’s another story.)
I still recall to this day in a congressional hearing Paul Wolfowitz’s complete disdain to one general’s assessment that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq (the original article is linked below and displays the full scale of the hubris that Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld had at the time and how completely and utterly wrong they were about literally everything.) I think the sad fact is the US hasn’t really learned anything from the Iraqi war and we still view the world largely through a lens of military ‘might’.
To understand war, your vision must focus on details more intimate and specific than geopolitical generalities and great-power prerogatives. This particular war began with human bodies split open with bombs from the air and shells from the ground and bullets from every direction. In some cities, more than half of the accomplishments that make us civilized—buildings and homes and the complicated machinery that brings us safe water to drink and electricity to light up the darkness and power machines—were damaged or destroyed.
Because of the “kinetic actions,” in bloodless militaryspeak, that the U.S. government initiated in March 2003, for many years Iraqis would view the common automobile—usually a symbol of industrialized society meeting basic human needs—as a potential harbinger of violent death. The vehicles would, with a frequency too horrible to accept, explode, shattering the glass that kept homes and stores secure from the elements and intruders; tearing the skin and arteries that kept human bodies alive; robbing children from parents and parents from children and breadwinners from families and merchants from the customers who relied on them; sending shockwaves of grief and rage that set up motive and opportunity for the next violent assault on life and on the orderly operation of bourgeois society that constitutes the good life.
The invasion eliminated a brutal dictator, something many Iraqis were grateful for in itself. But it also for years eliminated even the distant vision of that good life. As one Iraqi woman told journalist Nir Rosen for his 2010 book Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World, “My message to the American people after five years, they destroyed us and didn’t help us, they didn’t reconstruct the country, they even added more destruction to us. The days during Saddam were better. Now there is killing and nothing good. Before there was security and life was going on easily…now things are getting worse and worse, killing in the streets.” As late as 2016, 93 percent of polled young Iraqis considered Americans their enemies for a war that Bush and his team framed as their liberation.
