Why We're Mad. And Sad.

Those are my two tall girlfriends, with me at the left, shortly after an anti-war march in Santa Barbara back in 2002. We were smiling because we felt good about having exercised our right to peaceful assembly and free speech. We were vehemently opposed to the invasion of Iraq but we still thought sanity would prevail.You remember those days. Instead of a sustained effort to help stabilize Afghanistan (or even find bin Laden) after that invasion, the Bush administration had abruptly shifted to a bizarre obsession with Iraq, linking it somehow to September 11 and alleging that it possessed weapons of mass destruction (never found) and posed a threat to the world. This was all being fiercely debated at the time when the picture above was taken.

So why were we smiling? We were smiling because we had truth and reason on our side, and we felt hopeful, and we thought that taking a stand as citizens along with untold thousands of others all over the country might make a difference. And we smiled because we simply did not believe our nation would actually invade Iraq on the basis of questionable pretense and lies, and with no clear strategy or goal in sight, ignoring history, the complex sectarian dynamics of the region, and the warnings of wise and knowledgable analysts and scholars. (Didn't even Colin Powell at one point say, "You break it, you fix it"?)

We stopped smiling soon. After the bombing of Baghdad on March 19, 2003, hyped as "shock and awe", I wrote the following editorial for a local newspaper:

Shock and awe? When did insanity take over? Was there a certain moment? I am shocked, yes. But awe? Awe I shall reserve for the wonders of the universe and the kindness and hope that lives in the hearts of some even after lifetimes of hardship. I thought the lesson of terror might have been grief and revulsion so profound we would wish never to become its perpetrators. With intelligent leadership it might have bred a new kind of resolve that would manifest itself in restraint, diplomacy, and compassion. Will we forge a world order based on fear and brute force? Then I am sorry for our sons and daughters whose aspirations are so earnest and touching, and for all the world's children, especially the ones who have learned to hate us. How do we turn this around? There is a long painful process ahead, even after the shock show concludes.

I vividly recall a note I received in response, telling me I was a naive idiot who should go have tea with Osama bin Laden. Yes, that's the way it was.

Anyway, "long painful process" was certainly an understatement.

And now, as New Yorker writer John Cassidy puts it: "We have reached the moment that skeptics of the 2003 Iraq invasion warned about all along." Here's his article summarizing the mess, and it has only gotten worse in the days since that appeared.

For Bill Moyers' insightful assessment, go here.

In the meantime, we have the likes of Dick Cheney (and the other neocon war mongers) blaming Obama for the current unraveling.

Seriously?