The Madness of War, American-Style
Originally posted at TomDispatch.
The American invasion of Iraq began almost 18 years ago in mid-March 2003. By early April, that country’s capital, Baghdad, had fallen and before the month ended the war was considered over and won. On May 1st, President George W. Bush, in the co-pilot’s seat of a Navy fighter jet, landed on the aircraft carrier the USS
Abraham Lincoln and gave his “mission accomplished” speech. (“Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.”) By then,
NationofChange
The lessons of two failed wars.
In choosing a title for his final, posthumously published book, the prominent public intellectual Tony Judt turned to a poem by Oliver Goldsmith,
The Deserted Village, published in 1770. Judt found his book’s title in the first words of this couplet:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay
A poignant sentiment but let me acknowledge that I’m not a big Goldsmith fan. My own preferences in verse run more toward Merle Haggard, whose country music hits include the following lyric from his 1982 song “Are the Good Times Really Over?”: