From the Salmon

So it’s been five years.

Five years of the biggest failure of leadership in my lifetime.

Five years of clueless, careless strategy heaped on a premise that was faulty to begin with.

The costs are staggering: unknown hundreds of thousands of lives lost, five hundred billion dollars spent (roughly $200,000 a minute!), with the eventual cost an order of magnitude higher than that. The opportunity costs are colossal.

Honestly, I still don’t know why. It wasn’t that we needed to. Instead, half of our politicians really, really wanted to. And the other half cravenly decided it was in their own best interest to let it happen.

And don’t get me started on the 87 percent of white evangelical Christians who thought it was the right thing to do.

What should we have learned from the last five years? Hilzoy’s suggestions are worth listening to:

1. “Each war is itself, and not another war.”

2. “War sucks. It is horrendously destructive to everyone it touches. It can shatter entire societies. Sometimes it’s necessary, just as sometimes it’s necessary to amputate all your limbs, but that doesn’t make it any less awful.”

3. “There should never be a rush to war, any more than there should be a rush to an outbreak of plague, or having your city hit by an asteroid, or any other utter catastrophe. Any time people seem to be rushing to war, that is a time to stop short, catch your breath, and think things through as carefully as you possibly can. Because if people are rushing to war, they have probably gone collectively insane, and it is imperative not to join them.”

4. “If the case for war is not clear, it is probably wrong. [...] If the case for war rests on magical thinking, it is certainly wrong. And if it relies on the idea that a country can be reconstructed essentially from scratch without enormous effort and commitment and skill and luck, then it rests on magical thinking.”

5. ” ‘Why not?’ is never, ever a good enough reason for a war.”

The other day my friend asked me, based on my past life as a student of foreign affairs, what I thought we should do now in Iraq. I didn’t have an answer for him, because the truth is: there are only bad answers to that question.

But any answer should really begin with something else Hilzoy wrote in that piece:

“I can only hope that somehow, some way, we can begin to redeem our honor. The only way I can think of is by doing an awful lot of good in the world, living by the principles we claim to espouse, and resolving never, ever to do anything as pointlessly destructive as this again.”

That would certainly be a start.