I can't imagine what it's like to have lost someone in Iraq, then hear the second-guessing over the invasion as that topic became a campaign talking point.
GOP contender Jeb Bush said he would have invaded. His opponents for president pounced.
At least Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican who's not known for his suave approach, had the decency to acknowledge hurt this causes. "There's a lot of people who lost limbs and lives over there, OK?" he told the Columbus Dispatch last week. "But if the question is, if there were not weapons of mass destruction should we have gone, the answer would've been no."
Now, magnify such regrets by about a hundredfold and we might have some idea how the Iraqis feel. We've lost more than 4,000 troops. They've lost more than 130,000 civilians and had their country destroyed.
Now it's the Saturday before Memorial Day. In light of all this, there's something I'd like to say. I've said it before.
The troops did their jobs. In fact, I'd argue the armed forces were just about the only people in this whole mess who did exactly what they were supposed to do. They defeated the enemy's armed forces. They conquered the country. They dug the evil dictator out of his hidey hole. It was everything that happened before and after that that the rest of us messed up.
Our men and women in arms are like gold coins, as the apt description goes in "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara. They should only be spent when absolutely necessary. So the big lesson here is not who we should or should not vote for in yet another political race. The big lesson here is that we -- whomever we elect -- should highly resolve to treat our troops as the rare, irreplaceable treasures they are. We can't use them without putting them in danger, but we can put a heavier, more skeptical weight in the scale when we weigh risks.
The greatness of this country does not come from our wealth or our technology or our ideology. It springs from the willingness of people to sacrifice for it. If we don't deserve that, we'll lose it. If we lose that, we'll lose everything.
And while we're on the topic of knowing what we're doing, I'm going to say we have the best intelligence services in the world. They're so good, they can find the intelligence to reach any conclusion the leaders of this country want to arrive at, whether that's an invasion or a pullout.
So the non-elected members of our government -- the troops and the spies -- seem to know what they're doing. So while the Republicans and Democrats point fingers at each other, let's assign some blame to the people really responsible for this mess: the voters, all of us. Whether you believe as I do that the whole invasion was misguided from the start or if you think everything was hunky dory until President Obama pulled too many troops out, it was the people we elected who made whichever bad decision you blame.
And the press did a terrible job of questioning the assumptions being made, of asking tough, skeptical questions. Democrats -- including then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. -- failed to hold the president accountable. Even if you didn't believe the administration's "evidence" for invasion, you would have had to be either fearless or deaf, dumb and blind politically to vote against going to war. Anyone in Congress or any other public office knew he'd be risking his political career by opposing the invasion.
And the blame for that, folks, lies on us -- Republican, Democrat, independent, gay, straight, white, black, male, female or whatever. An otherwise healthy surge of patriotism after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 was poisoned by a mix of group-think, fear that amounted to cowardice, and anti-Muslim prejudice.
Saddam Hussein was Muslim and an enemy of ours. That was all the evidence of terrorism we really needed or wanted.
Never again. Never, never again. We may have to send our troops to war again, but only if and when we know what we're doing. They already do.
Commentary on 05/23/2015