{"id":20926,"date":"2023-03-20T12:42:01","date_gmt":"2023-03-20T17:42:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20926"},"modified":"2023-03-20T12:42:01","modified_gmt":"2023-03-20T17:42:01","slug":"twenty-years-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2023\/03\/20\/twenty-years-on\/","title":{"rendered":"Twenty Years On"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I have been reading over some of the things I wrote about the 2003 invasion of Iraq, back when it was all happening, twenty years ago. My main point, before the invasion, was (in my words of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2003\/02\/23\/no-good-choices\/\">February 23<\/a>): \u201cI support enforcement of the UN mandate, but the first step must be to win the support of the international community in the UN security council, and if President Bush can\u2019t do that, how can we expect him not to cock up the war and the reconstruction?\u201d\r\n<p>Seven weeks later, in a note with a shockingly terrible title of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2003\/04\/11\/war-is-over-if-you-want-it\/\">War is over (if you want it)<\/a>, I wrote: \r\n<blockquote><p>Finally, now that we\u2019re wearing the mantle, for crying out loud, let\u2019s live up to it. Let\u2019s give Iraq a damned good infrastructure\u2014all of it\u2014roads, schools, water, libraries, broadband, pony carts and mag-lev. Let the UN (or somebody) keep the books, and let\u2019s show that we\u2019re not draining their resources. In fact, let\u2019s show that we\u2019re draining <i>our<\/i> resources and handing \u2019em over. Let\u2019s have a damn Marshall Plan. We\u2019re that rich, and that smart, and that resourceful, and it wouldn\u2019t do us any harm, either. It\u2019s opportunity time, everybody.<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>By June, I was signing off every post with the tagline <i>Redintegro Iraq<\/i>\u2014which was a bitter amusement for myself, but did no good. In April of 2004, I wrote:\r\n<p><blockquote>It seems Your Humble Blogger will need a new tag line. [\u2026] I think we did have a chance to redeem the invasion by building a paradise in Iraq. I think we could have taken a bad situation and used American wealth, American enterprise, American knowhow, and American manpower to make the world a better place. We didn\u2019t. We used American guns, and American warplanes, and, it seems, foreign mercenaries, to destroy the possibility of good faith.<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>I left my tag blank for quite a long time after that.\r\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I><br>-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger was profoundly wrong about a lot of stuff, but also correct about some things, alas.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20926"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20928,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20926\/revisions\/20928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}