David Sirota: 1 Million Civilians Dead, 37,000 American Soldiers

Dead or Injured, and we've Learned Nothing from the Iraq Debacle. After 10 years, $2 trillion spent, an estimated 1 million civilian casualties, and almost 37,000 US troops deceased or injured, one of the biggest enduring stories of the Iraq War has to be, how little the debacle changed anything in the United States or, arguably, in Iraq. Today, on the 10 year anniversary of the Iraq invasion, America still has a massive, fiscally unsustainable defense budget. Congress still teems with lawmakers, who fervently supported the Iraq War, and who never admitted their mistake in promoting the WMD lies. The foreign policy establishment is still dominated by Iraq War proponents, who never acknowledged their misjudgments, and or their willingness to suppress inconvenient information. The Washington Press corps is still populated with reporters, who failed to ask serious questions about the case for war, and the opinion news sphere is still promoting those who got the Iraq War flat wrong. And while there are some vague rumblings about the possibility of changed foreign policy outlooks, the fact remains, that the Afghanistan War escalation, the intensifying drone war, and the unauthorized Libya War suggest, that the Iraq conflict's lesson about the perils of "nation building," "preemptive war", and blow back are still largely ignored. To appreciate how little political fallout the Iraq War generated, consider how different the reaction was to American history's most recent antecedent to the Iraq conflict. A political backlash, that a president was forced to opt against running for reelection, a slate of anti war legislators was swept into Congress, and pro Vietnam War Senator Thomas Dodd, and Gulf of Tonkin Resolution architect Senator William Fulbright, were voted out of office. At the same time, the leading voice of the establishment media, dared to adversarially report fundamental flaws in the pro war argument, to the point where it has become a mark of shame, to admit you publicly backed the conflict. To be sure, the reaction gap between Vietnam and Iraq can be explained, in part, by the fact that the former invasion generated more casualties, ad by the fact that the former also involved mass conscription. That particular method of raising a fighting force, tends to spread a war's blood and guts consequence more widely through the population, and therefore creates the potential for a bigger political backlash, than a fighting force that is all volunteer.