The American people were sold the Iraq war on two interlinked propositions: that Hussein and Bin Laden's Al Caida were inextricable linked (they hate each other), and that Hussein posed an imminent and dire threat to the safety of the United States of America because he possessed weapons of mass destruction. After September 11, 2001, the USA was only too ready to believe the worst about any penny-ante tyrant that could be plausibly painted up. But I kept waiting for the evidence. I remember being shown drawings of something that was touted as a mobile toxin factory. I waited for them to show me a real one -- not, perhaps, one of Hussein's, but something that had actually been used as one, or could plausibly be used as one. I'm not convinced by might-be, may be, could-have-been, we really think this is so wishful thinking. If this thing works, then give me more than a drawing. Give me a trail of evidence -- circumstantial will do -- that this is what you say it is. I got...an artist's rendering. A concept piece. A flappy scarecrow.
Oh, and there's this tubing over here that could possibly be used in a nuclear weapon. We have no other evidence, except for a vague report that an Iraqi official might have tried to obtain some weapons'-grade radioactive material, and some experts even dispute that this sort of tube would every be used in a nuclear weapon. Shorn of the political doublespeak and the theatrical buildup, this is all of the evidence I was ever presented with to convince me to go to war. Oh yes, and Hussein is a bad guy. He makes citizens disappear. His sons feed people into wood-chippers for amusement. This could be true (although the way this government treats things I'm not sure I'd believe them if they told me the sky was blue on their planet.) It still isn't enough to go to war with.
If I'm going to spend another person's life, I want to know the cause is worthwhile. If I'm going to be the one who must tell a family that they are now shattered beyond healing, that their loved one is never going to come home, I want the dubious comfort that those lives I've damaged and destroyed were spent on something that could have stood up to even the 9th circuit court of appeal's quixotic reasoning. My point is not that I have to see all of the evidence -- governments can't operate that way -- but I certainly have to see something convincing. I was never convinced. I wanted to scream in somebody's ear (precisely who is in charge, anyway?) that war is not playtime. It is not a sunny day at the beach where you pick up and come home when you start to get a bit sunburned. The world is irretrievably altered. Some people never come home. And sometimes home itself is remodeled in unsettling and unacceptable ways.
What was really unnerving about this war was the lack of planning for the aftermath. Yes, there is a day after victory is won -- and what are we going to do then? We were pretty much told that we would sweep up the little bit of litter that was left behind when the celebration ended, then hand the Iraqis the keys to their government building and come home. Perhaps the typical United States citizen will buy that; we've never seen civil disruption on a grand scale and we've certainly never been at ground zero for an invasion, even one purporting to be friendly. Our government and police force have never been dismantled to the point where any attempt to reassemble them has to start from a point too disorganized to be graced with the name of chaos. The average citizen of the United States had to endure an education here as well and may know history only as that class they spent an agonizing semester in back in high school. The average policymaker in position to take the country to war, however, should be a damned sight better versed in what war and its aftermath look like. They should plan for the worst-case scenario even if they're fully confident that it will never happen. They should have Sun-Tzu's Art of War tattooed on the back of their eyelids. Soldiers endure what the rest of us can only imagine, and what we can imagine is only the faintest ghost of the shadow of hard reality. They come home immutably changed from what they had to do, the lives they would still take and the ones that they wish they could bring back. Innocents get killed and atrocities happen. They cannot be avoided. They can only be minimized with proper planning -- you know, the planning that happens after you take the rosy sunglasses off.
I'm not a pacifist. Pacifism is for those souls lost in the thrall of idealism. It also helps to have a firm belief in a just god and a rosy afterlife. I, however, am a pragmatist: some times there is no other option but to take up arms and defend oneself, ones family, and those ideals which seem worth dying for. But because the lives we spend are so precious it pays to have a very clear idea of what we're doing and convincing proof that it needs to be done. I am way past the age where "Because I said so!" is enough.
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