askchapo

• Over a million dead Iraqi civilians, so to our bloodthirsty warmongering government officials who can only get off if they're looking at pictures of dead people, it was a massive success.

• Lot of public money delivered to private corporations via the war and all it took was laundering that money through human blood, but they were just Middle Easterners and didn't count, so to the corrupt and venal fucks who started the war, yes, massive success.

• Destroyed a relatively stable country in the middle east, started ISIS, destabilized the entire region, weakened neighboring countries with that destabilization, so yes, it was a massive success.

I take issue with billing Iraq as the "dumb war" because it opens up the exact line of inquiry you are making, which misses the point. It opens the war up to questions or defense that it was "effective" at achieving its goals and then says "well, those dopey Americans are so incompetent that they failed to achieve their goals!" Not saying you'd do that, but libs and conservatives are eager to rehabilitate the war and downplay how bad it was. Better to call it a mistake, and then say "actually it worked out for our interests so it wasn't such a mistake", than to look at the actual problem with the war.

The problem with the war is not that it was a "failure". The problem is that it murdered a fuckton of people.. The Iraq War is the most dramatic crime against humanity the US had committed this century until it helped Israel massively accelerate and intensify the genocide in Palestine.

Many years ago I was friends with a conservative who told me she'd learned at school that I was right when I said the soldiers don't fight for our freedom. Her professors at her super rich elite private conservative college had explained to her that the army does not fight for our freedom, it fights for our way of life. Our way of life that requires economic power imbalances in our favor, which requires keeping other regions of the world destabilized, weak, and dependent on making favorable deals with the US.

The Iraq War did not achieve its maximalist goals of smoothly installing a puppet regime that would turn Iraq into a vassal state ripe for economic exploitation under the guise of "rebuilding" and "foreign development", but it did achieve its minimal goals of sowing chaos.