For a war which was not against ‘Iraq itself’, it certainly killed a bunch of Iraqis.

The Hurt Locker Oscar last night, in my opinion, was a sop thrown to the military as a belated apology to the men and women who lost their lives and limbs in that hellhole (and are still losing lives in Afghanistan), which, unfortunately, ignores the fault of those immoral and defective leaders who launched this gargantuan lie and imposed lethal force against a broken country.

History professor Dr. Newt Gingrich no doubt would disagree with Mr. Larison. Maybe a collective case of public amnesia isn’t so bad after all. Iraq? Oh yeah, that’s where the Bush “surge worked” and we won, right?

The fact that America started this war is undeniable. The assertion that the horrendous destruction unleashed within that country is solely America’s responsibility is a little harder to support.

The sectarian carnage that followed the war was severe and claimed thousands of lives. If America was responsible for unleashing the sectarian bloodbath than Bush’s father is a great humanitarian for leaving Saddam Hussein in power after Desert Storm.

Assume for a moment that, following Desert Storm, we continued sanctions against Iraq which ultimately resulted in the downfall of Saddam’s regime. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where a similar bloodbath would not have occurred. Would we be responsible then for the lives that were claimed?

Don’t get me wrong here… I’m against preemptive warfare. I still believe that the proponents of the war justify the cost under the specious pretense that displaying America’s military might preserves Paux Americana and that the ends justify the means.

Unfortunately with the advent of precision weaponry, we are able to wage war more effectively “under the radar”. These weapons keep civilian casualties “lower” which prevents mass uprisings and mass revulsion back at home.

More important is that more Iraqis now live free from oppression and terror, free to voice opinions, free to slander their government and politicians, free from a knock on the door in the middle of the night that means a father or son is disappeared, property stolen and family made destitute. (If you haven’t lived in that atmosphere, its hard to understand how dehumanizing it is and how crazy it is to emerge from it). The anecdotes and allegations in the Economist report is horrifying when compared to Switzerland, but nothing when compared to Saddam’s butcher bill.

[Again, whether the coalition profited is not the point I'm making]

Remember, to the right, the Iraqi casualties are as nothing; they no more care about those than I think about the horrors of a slaughterhouse while enjoying a steak (rare, with A-1 sauce, maybe some red wine). They might use the odd, highly selected Iraqi deaths and suffering for propaganda, but in the end, the only objection they’d have to a pile of skulls is the possible PR problems.

As for American casualties, we saw in the last 30-odd years how little the right cares for them, as they neglected the VA, and gleefully back-stabbed any Democratic vietnam veteran who became inconvenient, including besmirching their courage, despite combat wounds. They don’t

As for money, well, it was a profitable for war the contractors and mega-corps who supplied it – note, it was far, far more profitable than a short, highly successful war would have been.

For a persuasive conservative argument against the whole concept of “war of aggression” – another bad 20th-century innovation in public law – see Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth. The concept is a lot slippier than it seems at first glance, for several reasons. In practice, it’s one of the main conceptual weapons in the arsenal of these bloody 20th-century humanitarian crusades, which are almost invariably waged against “aggressors”.

You can attack a regime as opposed to civilians. Tyrannicide, for instance. There will usually be collateral damage, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that the existence of collateral damage erases the moral distinction between attacking a regime and attacking a people. No matter how awful things turned out in Iraq, the distinction remains.

This was international corporate gangsterism, pure and simple. The US was a vehicle for the multinationals that ran it.

My impression is that Iraq will have another round of civil war when the American ground troops leave next year. There’s just too much unsettled business left among Iraqi groups. Mostly between Shiites, I think, though picking on the now rather weak Sunnis is what they do to pass the time.

Why did we think we understood the place? How was our national interest involved?

If Obama gets us out with relatively little additional damage and something less than total disaster as a result, he will deserve a bit of credit, not in the victory sense, but for competent extrication, which is what he advocated.

It’s too much to ask, of course, for an actual strategic analysis of why this adventure was so wrong, and applying the lessons to our policy stance overall. Then we’d have to question NATO, troops in East Asia, “peacekeeping” operations and the rest.

The threat of national bankruptcy drove Anthony Eden out of Egypt in 1956. It’s probably too much to hope that our fiscal mess will motivate a bit of foreign disentanglement.