tbentley.com

America’s unlearned lesson: the forgotten truth about why we invaded Iraq

by Max Fisher on February 16, 2016

“The war would still have cost some 4,500 American lives and well over 100,000 Iraqi lives. It would still have destabilized Iraq, opened up the country for violent extremism, and contributed directly to the rise of ISIS. And it would still have been launched in pursuit of an ideological mission that turned out to be dangerously misguided….

Abstract and radical neoconservative ideas that had developed during the Clinton years, bouncing around a tiny echo chamber of like-minded idealists who had little desire to challenge one another, had suddenly and with no real public debate become the basis of a war that would quickly cost many thousands of lives.

But those ideas are still very much a part of America’s foreign policy discourse, and some day, even as soon as this January, their adherents could return to the White House.”