HAPPY TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY, IRAQ.

 

Tom the Dancing Bug of October 22, 2002

 

All these articles about the ten year anniversary of the United States invasion of Iraq are making me feel very bitter.  And I have to confess, I'm not just bitter about the horrific policy and humanitarian fiasco.  I'm also bitter on a personal level.

 

It's hard to remember what it was like in 2002 and 2003.  It felt to me like America had gone bat$#!% crazy.  Bush and his cohorts had transparently lied and bullied their way into their war of choice, and there was no meaningful resistance.  Mainstream liberals, both politicians and media players, lined up right behind him, and anyone who objected was considered a loony outsider.  In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the most prominent liberal columnist in the nation said the war was absolutely unquestionably worth it becasue SUCK ON THIS.

 

I didn't think much of this at the time, because the price being paid by the war's participants was (and still is) monstrous.  But ten years later, I'm surprised that I'm looking back in anger at how isolated and marginalized those of us who vehemently objected to the war found ourselves.  

 

It's unseemly to say "I told you so."  And it's crass to complain about losing newspaper clients and being called crazy, stupid and unpatriotic when a war has destroyed thousands upon thousands of lives.  But this week, as I watch the war's architects and cheerleaders attempt to justify and rehabilitate themselves, I feel bitterness that there is absolutely no reckoning for those who perpetrated this.  And that our country's institutions could be so blinded that they allowed themselves to be manipulated by despicable warmongers telling flimsy, ridiculous lies.

 

Of all the anti-war comics I did during the time, this one, from March 2003, best summarized why I was so certain that the war was going to be a horror:  The guy leading us into it was deeply and obviously untrustworthy, repeatedly showing horrible judgement at his best, and malicious deceit at his worst.

 

 

Happy Anniversary.

 

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