Donald Trump Is The Iraq War

Hamilton Nolan
Today 1:26pm

History regularly offers up events that turn out to be litmus tests for political courage, wisdom, and judgment. The last one was the Iraq War. The new one is the candidacy of Donald Trump.

Think back, if you will, to the immediate post-9/11 era. Passions were high. The public was fearful and filled with an overriding directionless anger. A cabal of powerful political figures with few scruples seized this opportunity to launch a war of choice against Iraq, driven by ideology and papered over with a thin veneer of lies and propaganda. Their tactics were not particularly hard to spot. But they were able to tap into the public’s fear and anger to generate a powerful wave of popular support for their plan. And because of that, all of the people who were in positions to stop the tragic mistake from proceeding fell into line. The House and the Senate fell into line. Political pundits fell into line. The entire government fell into line. Even though the Iraq War was a folly—and even that folly could be seen clearly before it happened—falling into line was the easier path. It offered less friction. It required no courage, or foresight. It was an act of going along with the crowd for the sake of political expediency. And most of our leading lights went along like good little soldiers.

We now know that the Iraq War was one of the worst decisions in the history of the United States. It caused the death of hundreds of thousands of people; it destabilized an entire region of the world; and it wasted a pile of money that could have accomplished amazing things back home. It is now uncontroversial, even among Republicans, to acknowledge that the Iraq War was Not Good. And with the passage of time, the scope of its folly will become even more clear. When the history books are written, those who fell in line to support the Iraq War for the sake of political expediency will be remembered as cowards who failed their biggest moral test.

These sorts of political issues that act as tests of a generation of political leaders happen every so often. When we look back at the leaders of the 1960s, we ask: Did they support civil rights? Or did they snivel and shrink and acquiesce to the institutional racism that was politically popular at the time. When we look back 100 years earlier, we ask: Did they speak out against slavery? Or did they shrug and go on with other business for the sake of their careers? Many public figures who might have been able to slip quietly into the history books as solid, upright model citizens find themselves exposed as moral weaklings by the defining issue of their own era.

http://gawker.com/donald-trump-is-the-iraq-war-1766361908