Quote of the Day
In the final accounting, literally every premise was a lie. There were no weapons of mass destruction. The war cost trillions, is ongoing after five years, and has not endeared us to the Iraqi people. There has been no wave of democratization. And our “humanitarian mission” took a relatively stable, though unquestionably repressive, society and killed between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. No one would have taken this deal. But it was never offered. Rather, the Bush administration, with the enthusiastic aid of the media, did a remarkable job hiding the costs and making this an issue of moral blackmail, rather than cost-benefit calculations. They never had to answer the question of how much they were willing to spend on this war, and how many lives they were willing to lose over it. And without answering those questions, there were never really benchmarks for success or for failure, and the American people never had anything realistic to use in their estimates.
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