Never Again
I realize that this is rather late, but I was just reading the issue of Time magazine and this column really struck me. Even a brief Googling of this article reveals extremely heated political discussion of this column, but to me, it should be beyond that. Yes, Joe Klein is definitely liberal, which conservatives obviously jump on quickly. But read his last paragraph. Klein admits that even he supported the war, if briefly, prior to the invasion. And 40% of Democrats in the House approved military action, along with almost 60% of Senate Democrats. What I remember of my own feelings prior to the conflict were that I figured it would be a short conflict at the least and could potentially lead to positive change in the Middle East.
It's dangerous to generalize too much, but I think we Americans became too assured of ourselves. Yes, we had gone through Vietnam - but then we cleaned up Iraq quickly and efficiently in the early 1990s, and that was a closer parallel than Vietnam, right? No. And so we forced ourselves to relearn the lesson, with catastrophic results for the Iraqi people and pretty bad ones for ourselves, too. Some conservative true believers and democratic sympathizers will argue that the surge "worked," and it didn't descend into "complete" hell like we thought it might. But they're missing the point.
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