John Ganz writes the substack Unpopular Front. His subjects are fascism, nationalism, history, and whatever catches his first-rate mind and heart.
His denunciation of the U.S. adventure in imperial war in Iraq is so searing that I'm moved to add some bits to the noise:
No one today can supply a simple reason for the invasion of Iraq that stands up to the slightest moral or factual scrutiny. Every attempt to provide a rationale for the war is patent sophistry or self-justification.
This groundlessness, this inability to situate the war in anything tangible or concrete, is simply because it was based on a lie. More than a single lie, it was based on thoroughgoing hostility towards reality itself. It was based on an absurdly oversimplified ideological picture of the world. It was based on the willful ignorance and manipulation of intelligence. It was based on the fictitious and fanciful idea that Saddam was somehow connected to Osama bin Laden, a falsehood that played on the fears and anger of a wounded and humiliated nation, ready to lash out. It was based on indifference to the actual history and culture of Iraq, as if we could just easily shape another nation to our will.
And, perhaps most disturbingly, it was based on the belief that projecting the image of power, of a tough and vengeful nation, was of paramount concern. The planners clearly thought about the war as it would play out on T.V.: in spectacular scenes that would impress audiences at home and abroad. “There are no good targets in Afghanistan; let's bomb Iraq,” Donald Rumsfeld remarked to Richard Clarke — There was just more to blow up.
... There is a tendency to try to portray the Iraq War as a “tragedy,” as a mistake, brought on by hubris or zeal. One should reject this framing, for the reason that it is intrinsically ennobling. Aristotle wrote that tragedy aims at making its subjects appear better than in actual life. Hegel thought tragedy did not result from the conflict of good and bad, but of two equally valid claims on conscience. The world of tragedy is a world of heroes, fate, ascents to towering heights and falls into the dark abyss; It is a world of high seriousness and profundity; of noble men with great flaws.
Do read it all.... All this is improper in the case of the war in Iraq. It is an attempt to use heady incense to cover up a noxious stench.
Before the U.S. invaded in 2023, millions of people around the world took to the streets to denounce the American intentions. We knew better. But we couldn't stop the determined mandarins and fools that Ganz denounces. The peace movement did chip away at the legitimacy of the Bush/GOPer project, making significant opinion inroads, though too slowly. And Obama's muted opposition to the Iraq war certainly helped his presidential campaign in 2008, if not his subsequent policy priorities once in power.
My generation lived and fostered two society-shaking peace movements -- against the horror that was Vietnam and against this second Iraq war; some of us also thought better of GHW Bush's Iraq-1, and even of Afghanistan, but never achieved much traction against those.
And some of us now support the Ukrainian national struggle for survival as I do. But war is always evil and full of bluster and lies.
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