New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Recalling a war we’d rather forget
What’s the first historical event you remember living through?
It’s a question that gets asked online from time to time as a sort of “remember when” exercise. For some people it was the Kennedy assassination. Younger people might say 9/11.
For me, it was the Challenger explosion. I was old enough in third grade to know something serious had happened, but it wasn’t until I got home from school and saw my family sitting somberly in front of the television that I knew how terrible it was.
A separate but related question goes like this: What’s the historical event you lived through that changed how you see the world? For instance, the fall of the Berlin Wall gave millions of people hope for the future, the same way Watergate made many people more cynical. Maybe you thought the best of people before Bill Clinton’s impeachment changed your outlook.
For me, nothing has been quite as jarring in my nearly 45 years as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 20 years ago next spring. Like millions of people around the world, I watched it happen — the buildup, the inevitability, the Shock and Awe — but I couldn’t quite believe it was real. It’s still hard to understand.
Why did the United States invade Iraq? There’s no good answer for that. Certainly, this country was traumatized by 9/11, but connecting one event to the other was fraudulent even then, and nothing we’ve learned in the meantime makes the connection any less nonsensical. We started a war in Iraq because we could, apparently, and thought it would be easy. If that seems like an unsatisfactory reason to destroy a country, nothing else anyone has come up with makes any more sense.
Why does this matter now? Much of the world is rightly horrified by what’s been happening in Ukraine for the past monthplus. There’s no basis for what Russia has done, other than its leader wanted to do it and appeared to believe he could. Razed cities, bodies in the streets and refugees at the border apparently don’t matter to the aggressors, who have waged a senseless war without a hint of justification. Like the war in Iraq, every reason that’s been offered up falls apart on the slightest scrutiny.
And yet as we join the world in condemning one senseless war, we continue to plead ignorance about a separate one this country waged not all that long ago. Some of the people who made it happen still count themselves as leaders, and a few have strong Connecticut ties.
It’s true that poll numbers have shifted. In 2003, a Gallup poll found that 79 percent of Americans thought the Iraq war was justified; by 2018, more Americans believed the war had been a bad idea than not.
But shifting public opinion hasn’t affected the people who made it happen. George W. Bush was last seen in public with Bill Clinton visiting a Ukrainian church, continuing his transformation into some kind of preTrump symbol of a lost national unity. Dick Cheney made news recently earning plaudits from Democrats based on his daughter’s decision to stand up to Trump-related election 2020 delusions.
It wasn’t just Republicans who made Iraq happen. Joe Biden supported the war, and his career was hurt so much that he’s now president. Hillary Clinton may be the only politician to have faced real consequences for her Iraq war support, as she may well have been the 2008 Democratic nominee had she chosen a different path. But memories being what they are, she was quickly welcomed back into respectable company.
Connecticut politicians, too, played a major role in the debacle. Joe Lieberman was maybe the biggest Iraq war cheerleader outside the Bush administration. It likely cost him the Democratic nomination for his Senate seat in 2006, though he won the November election anyway. He was then allowed to retire on his own terms six years later, and now exists as some sort of respected elder statesman.
Chris Shays, too, was a vocal war supporter, which contrasted with his well-earned reputation for decency. He actually did lose his seat, though given how Fairfield County’s politics have changed, Iraq likely had little to do with it. Today, far from being a pariah, he, too, is viewed with nostalgia as a remnant of a forgotten time when national unity took precedence over personal pique. He occasionally will weigh in with disgust at Trump, as if anything the 45th president ever did could compare to the war that Shays supported so thoroughly.
Reports of atrocities in Ukraine make clear there are dramatic differences between then and now. The U.S. military is not the same as Russia’s. It remains true that because of a war ordered by American politicians, hundreds of thousands of people died who otherwise would not have. They were people exactly like those we see on the news in Ukraine.
We can and should condemn what we see happening in Eastern Europe. We also shouldn’t forget that it wasn’t so long ago something similar unfolded with our own country as the aggressor.
As we make demands of other countries, we would do well to demand better from ourselves.