23 Mar 2013 1:06 pm
The big lies of the Iraq war were not the faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction or the fabricated link between Saddam and 9/11. More serious were the infantile fantasies promoted by the Bush Administration and their supporters that the war would be a "cake walk." They argued that it would require less than 100,000 troops, take less than six days to win, cost at most one to two billion dollars (before Iraqi oil revenues kicked in to pick up the rest of the tab), and it would all be over in six months. It was a delusional apocalyptic vision -- projecting that out of the destruction of the old, a new order would rise. We were told that the dictator would fall and we would be greeted as liberators "with flowers in the street." Democracy would take hold and Iraq would become the "beacon of freedom for the Middle East." For good measure, they even predicted that regime change in Iraq would help solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ("the road to Jerusalem must pass through Baghdad"). Guided more by ideology than reality, the Bush Administration's veterans of the Project for a New American Century believed that a show of decisive force in Iraq would make us stronger, securing America's global hegemony for the next century. The tragic irony of this failed war, of course, is that it left our country less respected, compromised our values and our standing across the world, over-stretched our military resources, emboldened our enemies, created openings for other nations to exert their influence and, in the end, left America more vulnerable. James Zogby