Although it may seem unbelievable today, the Iraq War was initially very popular. In March of 2003, on the eve of the invasion, as many as 76 percent of Americans supported the war, and the tide of public opinion did not turn against it for several years.
Those of us old enough to remember that period can attest to the pervasive atmosphere of groupthink. Americans had been deeply shaken by the 9/11 attacks a year and a half earlier, and the national spirit was hawkish. Dissenters risked being called unpatriotic, even treasonous – as the band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks can attest.
Now that the Iraq War has become unpopular, the tendency is to shift responsibility onto President Bush and his neocon advisers, along with some others. However, the simple truth is that the war would not have happened if the American people had not wanted it. The 2002 war powers authorization, which paved the way for the invasion, would not have passed overwhelmingly in both houses of Congress if politicians had been deluged with angry calls and letters demanding that they vote no.
No war in our nation’s history has occurred without (initial) broad public support, which is why the 2013 resolution to use military force in Syria, supported by President Obama, failed in the face of widespread opposition. Iraq is no exception to this rule. The Iraq War was our collective error as Americans, one we have never fully reckoned with.
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We should not write off our 2003 selves as stupid. We were not. We did, however, succumb to groupthink, and to recognize this entails facing the uncomfortable fact that, if we were so foolish once, we might be so foolish again.
It is not like the dangers of invading Iraq were unforeseeable. French President Jacques Chirac refused to get involved. Michael Moore and Bernie Sanders denounced the war from the start. Anyone who claims to have been misled in 2003 is under pressure to explain why they were less discerning than those two.
Instead, the Iraq War was most fervently supported by a Republican base which enthusiastically reelected President Bush in 2004, and by the major conservative pundits of the day – Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter.
To be against the Iraq War in 2021, or at any time in the past decade, is like being a member of the French Resistance in 1945. The true test back then was what one was doing in 1941, just as the true test of our time is how one felt about the Iraq War in 2003. Americans, and particularly American conservatives, must stop trying to pass the culpability onto others and begin to come to terms with our collective wrongness.
Why is it important to relitigate past history? Because it is only by recognizing the depth of our foolishness that we can hope to avoid future episodes of it – and while the pendulum in the United States has swung very anti-war in the years since Iraq, there are many other ways to be wrong.
Indeed, we have just lived through another such episode.
As with the Iraq War, government lockdowns to stop the coronavirus were initially supported by the vast majority of Americans. As with the Iraq War, dissenters (such as Bethany Mandel) who raised concerns about civil liberties, or economic and human well-being, were attacked in the harshest of terms, accused of everything up to and including murder, treason, selfishness, and lack of patriotism. Many of these same epithets were flung at early Iraq skeptics.
Now, we were misinformed about the severity of the virus, just as we were misinformed about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – the World Health Organization told us originally that COVID-19 had a 3.4 percent death rate, which we now know to be far lower. This did not, however, absolve us of our responsibility to think critically and consider the bigger picture, even in a time of crisis and widespread fear.
The invasion of Iraq cost America thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. Lockdowns, in the long run, will likely end up costing us even more. History will probably recognize them as a second Iraq War of sorts, and the politicians and media figures who foisted them on the public will bear a long-lasting and well-deserved badge of shame.
But it is not enough to blame our leaders. Lockdowns could not have been implemented without broad public support, and so we, as a general public, must reckon with our own complicity and susceptibility to groupthink. Next time our nation is caught up in such a panic, let us value dissenting voices rather than maligning them. If we cannot do this in the wake of March 2003 and March 2020, then the costs of our next bout of groupthink will likely be even greater.
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