I was always against invading. It's easy and universally fashionable to say so now, but not entirely uncommon back in 2003 here in Britain either. My opposition was not the typical pacifist stuff; I thought my objection to be far more objective. Naturally. Giving a vile and obdurate dictator a kicking sounds good on paper, but right at the heart of the Middle East? Clearly, this was to be no Falklands. It was the political equivalent of sinking Italian leather shoes into a doorstep gift of flaming excrement. To be blind to this fact beforehand was the worst excess of hubris. That we made an almighty balls up of the occupation thereafter is the very opposite of a surprise.
It'd be good to think that such a woeful mistake will serve a good lesson for the future. That is not however clear. Even if my favoured Obama takes the White House, the long term reaction to this mid-sized cataclysm of an unforced error may well be out of rational control. Vietnam – a war and a failure so very different from Iraq that it's surprising their political overlap seems as substantial as it is – underlay the zero response to the Rwandan cut-throat genocide two decades later, and the humiliating withdrawal from Somalia after some Black Hawks did indeed go down and it was thought better to quit entirely. Somalia today is a much more hateful mess than Lebanon, or even perhaps Iraq … but fortunately for us we just choose not to care, for no discernibly logical reason.
In politics so much can be overreaction to fingers burned in the almost forgotten past. A little moustachioed central European fellow won his rise to the very worst excess of power because of that. Who would war with an irascible but not necessarily unreasonable dictator while the world still mourned its lost sons of 1914? As it turned out: everyone. Just a little too late.
I'm not trying to make any point here about specific conflicts on the horizon, as those we scarcely ever know. I'm certain that the world is a better place today than it was while the Soviet Union existed. But there'll be folly, madness and ludicrous hubris forever more so long as we are alive! There's no such thing as an end to history. Well, that any human will live to glimpse.
