Iraq...Twenty Years Ago

This month marked 20 years since the start of the Iraq War and while the major newspapers all had articles on the subject, I noticed the nightly television news skipped coverage of this grim anniversary.

At the start of 2003, the American people were still living in the shadow of September 11th terrorist attacks.  Our sadness was unimaginable, our anger was raw and our fear of another attack was palatable.  We turned to our country's leaders for comfort and we were in no mood to hear duplicitous talk from the Middle East.  This climate of emotional vulnerability often gets overlooked when discussing Iraq, but in my humble opinion, it made the path to war much easier.

Iraqi dissident Ahmed Chalabi made the rounds in the media to say the United States would be welcomed as liberators but he along with the information he provided on a supposed link Saddam Hussein had to Al-Qaeda would later be discredited.

Then were were the faulty reports that United Nations sanctions were killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.  This erroneous information was used by Osama Bin Laden to justify terrorism against America.  Liberals used it to criticize government policy and conservatives used it to stoke the fires of war.

To be clear, George W. Bush never blamed Iraq for the 9-11 attacks BUT he was no longer going to wait for potential threats to become real.  From the way the government described Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program in the months leading up to the invasion, the threat from Iraq was becoming all too real.  In February of 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who many saw as a voice of reason, justified a possible invasion in front of the United Nations Security Council by giving testimony on Iraq's WMD program.  (The year before, he had actually cautioned the President on an invasion saying, "If you break it, you own it.")

Many of us were fooled because we wanted to believe our leaders were honest and competent.  Even the late night comedians jumped on the WMD bandwagon with jokes about Iraq.  I won't soon forget a skit from Conan O'Brien that featured Saddam Hussein disguising three missiles as his children.

When French and German leaders announced their opposition to the war, The New York Post ran an infamous “Axis of Weasels” headline.  After France threatened to veto any resolution that mandated an invasion, a backlash against the French emerged with some restaurants renaming French Fries “Freedom Fries.”  The only place in my travels that I actually saw do this was The Clam Box of Ipswich, MA.

Despite the drumbeat of war, many people weren't fooled and protests erupted throughout the country and the world.  From around this time, I vaguely remember hearing a liberal guest host filling in on the usually conservative WRKO talk radio and for one broadcast, she brought with her actress Janeane Garofalo.  They laid out good reasons why an invasion of Iraq would be disastrous and much of what they said turned out to be true but at the time, the audience wasn't having any of it.  A divisiveness erupted in society and the good will President Bush enjoyed after 9-11 seemed to quickly disappear.

Operation Iraqi Freedom began with “shock and awe” style decapitation airstrikes that sometimes claimed the lives of innocent people.  I am haunted by an image that appeared in the local newspaper just before the war began of a father enjoying pizza with his family at a restaurant in Baghdad called Pizza Hot.  Did they survive such bombings?
 
When the ground war started, it just felt wrong to me on a visceral level and despite all the rhetoric and bluster, I couldn't believe it was actually happening.  I recall how embedded reporter David Bloom gave some of the first reports from the battlefield but spending many hours in cramped armored vehicles with the hot sun caused a blood clot that claimed his life at the age of 39.

We soon heard heroic stories of Private First Class Jessica Lynch who had been captured when her convoy was ambushed but as with many aspects of the Iraq War, the tales of how she single-handedly fought off the enemy turned out to be grossly exaggerated.

In May of 2003, President Bush announced an end to major combat operations in Iraq while a banner hung in the background that said: Mission Accomplished.  This would come back to haunt him because an insurgency caused many more causalities and dragged the war on for another 8 years.  Things hit home for us when Swampscott native Jennifer Harris was killed when her helicopter crashed with all those on board lost.  The military tried blaming it on a mechanical failure until a video surfaced of her aircraft being shot down.  The American public saw a lot of gore in the news during those bloody years and some of the war's biggest supporters were starting to wonder if it was worth such a staggering toll.

Conservative talk show host Glenn Beck would admit in 2014 that the liberals got it right when they opposed the war in Iraq...but apologies don't bring back the dead.  I lost all respect for President Bush years before that when he joked about not finding WMDs at a fancy press corps banquet.  Early support for the war likely cost Hillary Clinton the presidency because a weary public turned to the candidate who had opposed the invasion from the get go, Barack Obama.

The invasion of Iraq not only distracted from the war effort in Afghanistan, it made terrorists smarter and more effective as the lessons learned in one battlefield were brought over to another.  We eventually saw the emergence of ISIS and with it, more death and destruction on a scale we had never seen before.  In 2003, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had warned the invasion of Iraq would create 100 Bin Ladens.

To this day I still hear some people say the war was all about getting revenge on Saddam Hussein for the 1993 attempted assassination of George H. W. Bush.  Whatever the major goals for the Iraq War were, it's safe to say that few of them were met outside of "regime change." The United States also lost some of its credibility as a result of this conflict especially when trying to take the moral high ground regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

It's unfortunate the nightly news networks punted on covering the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War because there are hard lessons to be learned from it....lessons that can't be properly explored in our current culture of soundbites.

Another Valentine's Day Come and Gone

Aside from weddings, baby showers or kids' birthday parties, no other occasion brings more unwanted attention to my singlehood than Valentine's Day.  With so many outward expressions of romantic love to be had, the holiday is made to stir up feelings of loneliness in those of us who are unattached.

When I had my own college radio show several years ago, I'd “celebrate” February 14th by playing songs about breakups and heartache.  It was a lot of fun and going against the grain like that made Valentine's Day bearable.  Without an outlet to mock the holiday and vent my frustrations, Valentine's Day has become as annoying as ever.

This February 14th, I found myself taking my mother to the eye doctor for her routine check up.  Despite Covid restrictions that limited the number of patients that could be seen at one time, the waiting room was packed...with old people.  It was clear to me that the doctors violated their own policies in order to squeeze everyone in.  So instead of maintaining social distancing, I was seated right next to a few old ladies.  One was an immigrant from Israel and she decided to strike up a conversation by asking about the origins of Valentine's Day.  When I told her about it, others joined in the discussion.  Just my luck there were never any women my age to talk to!  After waiting two hours in a cramped corner, the doctor finally saw my mother.  Since I had just come off a third-shift job, I was exhausted.  This was not how I wanted to spend the holiday.

When I started dating a woman from Catholic Match in late 2022, I thought that maybe...just maybe I would finally have a girlfriend by the time February 14th rolled around.  I even briefly imagined how we would spend the day.  A local thrift store had an attractive three pane picture frame for sale so I decided to buy it hoping to place three different photos of her inside of it.  Well, I suspected dating this woman was too good to be true and she dumped me before I could even take three photos of her.  Now the picture frame sits empty on my bedroom floor and with nothing to show, it's symbolic of my many years as a dateless wonder.

When discussing Valentine's Day with one of my married friends, he takes a more intellectual approach by saying that the date of February 14th really means nothing to him or his wife and they tend to focus more on their wedding anniversary as the big day to express romance.  By doing so, he avoids those special Valentine's Day menus at restaurants which tend to be overrated and not worth the extra money.  In fact, he has an acquaintance who celebrates Valentine's Day either the day before or after the 14th just to avoid being price-gouged.  He must have a very understanding wife because many spouses wouldn't appreciate that kind of frugality.

At one time, the holiday was actually called Saint Valentine's Day but as we have seen with Christmas and Easter, capitalism tends to downplay the religious roots of such days to make the pursuit of the almighty dollar easier and more acceptable.  At work, I stumbled across a memo from our regional manager and he described the holiday as an opportunity for record breaking sales adding, “Go Big! Win the day!  All profit here!”  This is the same person who routinely cancels employee raises that our store manager submits for approval.
 
I don't receive the Catholic television station EWTN at home but I recently had the chance to check it out in the waiting room of yet another doctor's office.  A talk show whose name escapes me was discussing how unrealistic people's expectations were for Valentine's Day.  The female host admitted a lot of women have fantastically high expectations for romance and love that few men can live up to.  She cautioned the audience against seeing love through the eyes of Hollywood movies because real relationships had their fair share of ebbs and flows.

I always thought Valentine's Day was a good barometer for a couple in love.  Are you comfortable enough with each other to get a little sappy on one particular day out of the year?  Would your significant other be too demanding of gifts and dinner or would they appreciate your romantic gestures even if they fell a little short?  Are you too jaded to express signs of affection?  The holiday's true meaning might be corrupted but that doesn't mean we have to buy into capitalism's exploitation of it.  Perhaps a quiet dinner at home or at a restaurant that doesn't make a big deal of the holiday.  Maybe get your partner a homemade gift or something nice that didn't break the bank?  Unfortunately, the chance to test these theories slipped by me once again since I spent my 49th year on this earth never knowing what it would be like to have someone to love on Valentine's Day.