Bacevich is right that the Iraq war was "More like a crime, compounded by the stupefying incompetence of those who embarked upon a patently illegal preventive war out of a sense of panic induced by the events of 9/11," and it was a crime committed for the worst reasons rather than the best motives.
The goal of the war was to crush an adversary in order to send a message to the rest of the world about American dominance and our government's willingness to use force to achieve its ends, but a war waged for a "Demonstration effect" ended up sending a very different message to the world.
Waging an illegal preventive war cannot be noble and cannot be done with "Good intentions." To embark on an unnecessary war in violation of another state's sovereignty and international law because you claim to be afraid of what they might do to you at some point in the future is nothing other than aggression covered up by a weak excuse.
Calling the Iraq war a "Tragedy" implies that the U.S. had a legitimate reason to go to war against Iraq in 2003, but there was no legitimate reason and anyone who thought things through could see that at the time.
The war was inherently unjust, as all preventive wars always are, and it makes no difference whether some ideologues claimed to have high-minded reasons for committing a grave injustice against tens of millions of people.
There are a lot of foreign policy professionals in the U.S. that very much want to believe that the U.S. commits crimes like the Iraq war out of the best of intentions.
Any account of the war that fails to grasp that has missed an essential truth.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-iraq-war-was-a-crime-not-a-tragedy/
The goal of the war was to crush an adversary in order to send a message to the rest of the world about American dominance and our government's willingness to use force to achieve its ends, but a war waged for a "Demonstration effect" ended up sending a very different message to the world.
Waging an illegal preventive war cannot be noble and cannot be done with "Good intentions." To embark on an unnecessary war in violation of another state's sovereignty and international law because you claim to be afraid of what they might do to you at some point in the future is nothing other than aggression covered up by a weak excuse.
Calling the Iraq war a "Tragedy" implies that the U.S. had a legitimate reason to go to war against Iraq in 2003, but there was no legitimate reason and anyone who thought things through could see that at the time.
The war was inherently unjust, as all preventive wars always are, and it makes no difference whether some ideologues claimed to have high-minded reasons for committing a grave injustice against tens of millions of people.
There are a lot of foreign policy professionals in the U.S. that very much want to believe that the U.S. commits crimes like the Iraq war out of the best of intentions.
Any account of the war that fails to grasp that has missed an essential truth.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-iraq-war-was-a-crime-not-a-tragedy/
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