idiot on the internet @idiotontheinternet - Tumblr Blog

What a time to be alive.

Happy Black History Month to all and to all a good night ❤️🖤💚

I missed most of the Iraq war due to being a baby, but every time I read about it I start wondering why we aren’t all talking about it all of the time

caesarsaladinn

it feels like the sort of unforced error that should be obsessively postmortemed for the next fifty years, a catastrophe that should utterly delegitimize the society that made it happen, but instead everybody’s like “oh yeah, that. lmao, that was crazy”

septembriseur-deactivated202502

I have to add to this because I was teaching a text about this topic to a bunch of post-2003 undergraduates recently and each time I do so I experience the same sense of disorientation.

This is a war about which the accepted, mainstream consensus is that no one is able to explain the U.S. decision to invade Iraq. The people involved in that decision are unable, in retrospect, to explain or justify it. In almost every postmortem of this decision, you will find some reference to the fact that Richard Haass, who advised Colin Powell at the State Department in 2001-3, has said that he “will go to [his] grave not knowing” why the U.S. invaded Iraq. George Packer, in The Assassins’ Gate, describes the invasion as “something that some people wanted to do.”

This is a war that destroyed a country. It created ISIS. It destabilized the Middle East. It killed a minimum of c. 200,000 people. It displaced millions more. It resulted in devastating losses to the cultural heritage of Iraq. And twenty years on, no one is able to explain why it happened.

It seems to me that there are several important lessons here.

nothing-wrong-with-me

Oil

alcibiades-hacks-it

That's the thing. It didn't really have much of anything to do with oil. It was mostly Bush's grudge against Sadam for surviving the gulf war against his dad, with enough public sentiment against Sadam for being a brutal dictator with access to chemical weapons (that's what the WMDs were, it was never really claimed to be nukes).

So Bush was able to leverage legitimate hate for Sadam in order to avenge his father's failure, and a whole lotta people died for his vendetta.

nothing-wrong-with-me

That's worse, that's like negative benefits

straightboyfriend

i was worried my cat is dehydrated because i never see him drink water so i’ve started leaving a cup of water that’s “mine” (aka he sees me drink out of it once before he does) in my room so he thinks he is being a rebellious naughty by drinking out of it but rlly he is just following my plan & being hydrated .