Richard Cohen explains why he supported the war in Iraq back in ’03 (and the years after that) and why he does not do so any longer. Greg Mitchell responds to Cohen’s column.
From Mitchell:
This from the man who, on Feb. 6, 2003, after Secretary of State Colin Powell’s deeply-flawed testimony in New York, famously wrote: “The evidence he presented to the United Nations — some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail — had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool — or possibly a Frenchman — could conclude otherwise.”
Now consider his statement from today’s column on why he backed the Iraq invasion: “In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic.” Ponder that statement as you consider the tens of thousands of lives lost, on all sides, since then.
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Cohen reveals that he turned against Vietnam only after he joined the military and realized he didn’t particularly want to die in an “unwinnable” war. Jumping ahead, it was easier for him to support the Iraq invasion because those doing the fighting would be “after all, volunteers. This mattered to me.” In other words: It was okay if they died for a mistake — in a “therapeutic” cause — because they had signed up for the military, in peacetime.
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It gets worse. Referring to his willing “volunteers,” Cohen writes: “If they thought they were going to rid the region of weapons of mass destruction and sever the link between al-Qaeda and Hussein, they now are entitled to feel duped by Bush, Vice President Cheney and others.” I love that “others.” Who could those unnamed others be? Certain influential pundits who once declared that there was “no choice” but to invade Iraq?
Now about the volunteers, Cohen adds:
But these volunteers are now fighting a war few envisaged and no one wanted — not I (No. 4), for sure. If at one time my latter-day minutemen marched off thinking they were bringing democracy to Iraq and the greater Middle East, they now must know better. If they thought they were going to rid the region of weapons of mass destruction and sever the link between al-Qaeda and Hussein, they now are entitled to feel duped by Bush, Vice President Cheney and others. The exaggerations are particularly repellent. To fool someone into sacrificing his life to battle a chimera is a hideous abuse of the public trust.
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Where have we heard this sort of language before? It is the lingo of Vietnam. As with Vietnam, we are fighting now merely not to lose — to avoid a full-fledged civil war (it’s coming anyway) or to keep the country together, something like that. But not for victory. Not for democracy. All this talk of the Iraqis doing more on their own behalf is Vietnamization in the desert rather than the jungle. What remains the same is asking soldiers to die for a reason that the politicians in Washington can no longer explain. This, above all, is how Iraq is like Vietnam: older men asking younger men to die while they try to figure something out.
In other words, unlike Mitchell implies Cohen did not write that it is okay for volunteers to die in an useless war. It did however, play a role in his decision to support the war when it seemed winnable.
Regarding the rest of Cohen’s column, though, Mitchell analyzes it quite well. Some thought-processes in the column appear to be quite… strange. It seems to me that Cohen does not really know how to deal with the new situation: a war that is lost, which he supported from the get-go (as I did by the way), but cannot support any longer. He simply is unable to see, let alone admit his mistakes.
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