Ross Douthat: 'At the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, we stand in the same position relative to the initial invasion as America stood in 1985 relative to the 1965 arrival of our first combat troops in Vietnam.'
The Vietnam effect was more of a fever, whereas the Iraq effect seems like a wasting or relapsing disease.At the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, we stand in the same position relative to the initial invasion as America stood in 1985 relative to the 1965 arrival of our first combat troops in Vietnam.
At various times, then — at the 10th anniversary of the war, maybe even at the 15th — it was possible to imagine a long-term future where Iraq was ultimately remembered more like our bloody counterinsurgency in the Philippines at the dawn of the 20th century than like the trauma of Vietnam — as a bad war, but not an era-defining one; as a squandering of blood and treasure and moral credibility, but one whose overarching strategic costs were not so great.
And there is a special irony that even with the intellectual ferment on the Trump-era right, the attempts to forge a “national conservatism” or a socially conservative populism sometimes look like efforts to grope backward to George W. Bush’s platform in 2000, before he traded his humble foreign policy for a grand crusade.
And while the effects of the Iraq War on the developing world’s attitudes toward the United States can be overstated, our initial invasion clearly made us seem like a less trustworthy hegemon — reckless and revisionist rather than steady and reliable. Then the way the war contributed to our internal divisions and derangements also made American culture seem less admirable and the broader liberal-democratic project seem less inevitable.
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