. . . . The real costs of nearly a decade of misrule by GWB and the GOP won’t be known until the last U.S. troops are brought home from Iraq. But the tab will probably exceed the $3 trillion estimated by Joseph Stiglitz, and the price paid in lives lost will in any case be incalculable. And for what? There were no WMDs. That reminder needs to be a part of any discussion of Iraq: the smoking gun was never going to be a mushroom cloud.And as you rightly point out, not a single senior figure from the Bush administration has apologized for inflicting that appalling, colossal waste of blood and treasure on the rest of us. And they are solely responsible it, the largest debacle in our history.
There have been much worse sins–slavery, the extermination of the Indians–but for sheer determined stupidity, this one takes the prize with disgusting ease.Although I think the Republicans should be permanently branded as the party of the Iraq War–imagine the elephant logo riding in an insufficiently armored Humvee over an IED–I don’t think there should be war-crime trials or that kind of retribution. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Polish journalist Adam Michnik was asked what should be done about all the Poles who had helped the Soviets oppress their own people. He replied, “Nothing destroys a human being so much as hatred and the need for vengeance . . . So I thought up the formula that one has to be for amnesty and against amnesia . . . You have to remember, but you have to be able to transcend the frontier of your own suffering.”
I think that’s essential: you have to remember. Our culture encourages, maybe even aspires to, amnesia. The echo chamber of 24-hour news contributes greatly to this–watching it feels like having your head inside a tin bucket that’s being beaten with a hammer–but the pitiful state of historical awareness in this country is systemic and, possibly, intentional.
Remember in school when history was relegated to being taught by unqualified coaches because, as a course, it was considered unimportant? Perhaps if anyone in the Bush administration had bothered to read up on the British Empire’s experience in Mesopotamia, we might not have gone into Iraq quite so quickly, or at all. So memory, accurate and unsparing, is key.
Too often, calls for forgiveness or magnanimity are really just pleas for amnesia, for forgetfulness. Please don’t listen to anyone who encourages you to take that path. And with memory comes the requirement to remind others of what happened, to discourage their own tendency toward amnesia. In the moral codes of the ancient Greeks and ancient Hebrews, memory was a precondition for justice–justice as opposed to vengeance. Insist that the gross misdeeds of Bush and his cronies never be forgotten; that is to take the first step in ensuring that they are never repeated and that justice, ultimately, will be done.
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