Analysis: 20 years later, U.S. invasion of Iraq hangs over war in Ukraine
“What unfortunately that misadventure did do … was leave the U.S. too shellshocked to act decisively against other aggressors elsewhere — and to inspire in potential aggressors a new confidence that America was too divided and weak to stop them,” Frum wrote.The uncomfortable reality is that the Iraq War emerged in large part out of the nationalistic fervor and desire for retribution that gripped the United States in the wake of the epochal shock of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
U.S. policy elites weren’t exactly appealing to the rules-based order, then, either. Two months after the invasion, liberal New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman went on television and cheered the war, describing it as a blunt statement of force to Islamist extremists everywhere: “Well, suck on this,”on “The Charlie Rose Show,” in what was his rendition of the message delivered by U.S. troops on the ground. “That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia.
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a criminal act of great recklessness. So too was the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003,”, chairman of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, this week. “Biden appears to believe that the Ukraine war provides a venue whereby the United States can overcome the legacy of Iraq, enabling him to make good on his repeated assertion that ‘America is back.’”
Bacevich, though, is skeptical about the redemptive power of war, the implicit belief in Washington that the American defense of Ukraine can, in a certain sense, heal “the wounds that afflict our nation.” Twenty years later, we are still picking at the scabs.
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