Last Tuesday Glenn Greenwald was right to call out the Washington media on the stupidity of excusing their cheerleading for the War on Iraq seven years ago with the idea that “nobody knew” it would be like this:
I could literally spend the rest of the day quoting those who were issuing similar or even more strident warnings. Anyone who claims they didn’t realize that an attack on Iraq could spawn mammoth civilian casualties, pervasive displacement, endless occupation and intense anti-American hatred is indicting themselves more powerfully than it’s possible for anyone else to do. And anyone who claims, as Burns did, that they “could not know then” that these things might very well happen is simply not telling the truth. They could have known. And should have known. They chose not to.
While Avedon Carol is also right to notice that he had missed one particular high profile politician who had been arguing against the invasion from the start, somebody who should have been taken serious but wasn’t, because, well:
Oddly, Glennzilla does not mention in his list of people who predicted disaster if we invaded Iraq one of the foremost voices who was inexplicably dismissed and derided by the entire press corps, presumably because the man we had elected to be President of the United States is fat.
What both miss however is something much more important: “nobody knew” inside the Washington Beltway what a disaster the War on Iraq would become, but outside it, “nobodies knew” it was a bad idea from the start. At least fifteen million people worldwide demonstrated against the war back on the 15 Februari 2003, with the largest demonstration ever held taking place in London that day and huge demonstrations all over America and Europe, smaller ones in Africa and Asia and South America and Australia and even one in Antarctica (!)
All us little people outside of the loop and not professionally blind to the idea that invading a country on spurious grounds is in itself a bad idea were perfectly aware the War on Iraq was going to be a disaster. We knew that the best we could hope for was a repeat of the first American-Iraqi Gulf War, a US blitzkrieg that would once again kill thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians and deliver the final blow to an infrastructure that was never allowed to recover from the first war. Literally no one I spoke to during the runup to the war — family, friends, coworkers, passing strangers — no matter their political allegiance thought it was a good idea. And while the serious people would later grudgingly accept that we were right, they’ve never given us credit for it, prefering to think our opposition was just an emotional reflex rather than a reasoned position…