MC

Yeah, I think it speaks to the moment we are living in. The professionalization of the military since Vietnam and the technological advancements of imperial management that reduce the need for mass participation in war means that war is different today. But in terms of its impact on the world, and in terms of the bloodshed that it is unleashed and will continue to unleash, Iraq is absolutely on par with Vietnam.

But it’s been siloed off by history. The effects of it in America are limited to a relatively small number of volunteer soldiers who fought in it. So, it loses that kind of cultural centrality that the Vietnam War had.

But I think Iraq will continue to undermine, on all sides of the political spectrum, support for institutions: the press, the Congress, the presidency, the intelligence community. That’s really understated. Wills is right that there is this insidious creep that is expressed in the big stuff, like mobilization for new wars. But also, in smaller moments.

Like when Trump condemned Jeb Bush during the 2016 debates by saying his brother created this disaster in Iraq. Everyone was like, “Well, that’s the end of Trump.” Obviously, the Republican Party loves the war on Iraq. Turns out, no, they really don’t at this point.

A lot of that is opportunistic. You don’t wanna be associated with a huge disaster. But I remember reading about how Trump and before him, Ron Paul, were popular with a lot of veterans, because those veterans felt that the candidates’ isolationism spoke to their bitterness at being misused in the war. You also see it with people accepting the narrative of the deep state against Trump. The idea is like, “Yeah, why would you trust the CIA? They talked us into Iraq.”

It really does seem like the only people who haven’t learned that lesson are the liberals who insist on resurrecting the legitimacy of these institutions at every moment, saying, “Of course the intelligence community is virtuous. Of course the press is a bastion of truth seeking.”

And so that’s another reason that Democrats steadily lose these debates, lose these races, lose the ears of those who should be their voters — because they have not learned the lesson that these institutions were fatally compromised during that war.

You might not think about it all the time. It might not be expressed to the culture all around you. But you know what happened. And when the media or the intelligence community is brought up as this bastion of virtue, it’s hard not to have the thought, just for a second, of, “Oh yeah. They did that thing where they killed a million people for no reason and destroyed an entire country.”