North Star Writers Group

This week marks the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Countless lost lives and countless wasted billions later, this nation is not any safer or more secure. Its global reputation is in shambles.

When will we ever learn?

There are spiritual lessons in the tragic fiasco known as Iraq. First and foremost is one that can be summed up as the burned hand teaches best about the dangers of fire. Most of us cannot learn by example or warning, alas. We insist on experience to teach us, and even then we often interpret what we have gone through in a too limited fashion for our understanding to be truly useful.

Only by invading Iraq and failing miserably could the neo-conservative push for an American empire based on active military muscle be exposed as the naked fantasy that it always was. Even so, many continue to argue that Iraq would have been a success were it not for the Bush administration’s mistakes and miscues in planning the invasion and handling its aftermath.

Such assertions miss the point. The United States failed in Iraq not simply due to sloppy execution, but because it had no moral right or self-defense justification to invade that country. None. Iraq has never been credibly linked to the 9/11 attacks, despite misleading claims to the contrary. And in attacking a country that did us no harm, we lost the rest of the world’s support, which we need now more than ever to help find a way to end the bloodshed.

Another spiritual lesson: When we refuse to learn from our experiences, we repeat those experiences in a much more painful way.

All the signs point now to the Bush administration preparing to bomb Iran on the pretext that Iranian agents are killing U.S. troops inside Iraq. Once again, the intelligence doesn’t support that assertion, but that little caveat doesn’t stop the Bush administration from making the claim or preparing to strike.

If the Iraq invasion was a fiasco, what might the bombing of Iran touch off? We’re staring down the barrel of regional or global war, along with severe oil supply shortages and the resulting economic chaos. The probabilities are nightmarish and only too plausible if the United States attacks yet another oil-laden Middle Eastern country.

The U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Geneva Conventions and midterm election losses for its own political party have not stopped the Bush administration from doing what it wants, so it’s not likely to shy away from moving against Iran. Thus many more of us simply need to suffer – as our troops and their families have done so now for four years – from our military fantasies in order to wake up and loudly demand a different way of approaching the world’s problems. A far wider cross-section of Americans is sure to feel the painful consequences of attacking Iran than did the Iraq invasion.

Right now, however, as a nation, we’re still focused on revenge, as exhibited by the stunning popularity of the television action series “24”. Each week, the protagonist pursues another group of (always Muslim) terrorists, whom he invariably tortures in some manner in order to obtain details of yet another deadly attack.

Never mind that all those who know anything about interrogation say that torture is counterproductive. Never mind that torture violates U.S. law, the Geneva Conventions and plain human decency. America has been wounded and embarrassed, and we desperately want someone to suffer for it, even if it’s only fictional catharsis.

A final spiritual lesson: We become whatever we give our energy and attention to. In always reaching for the sword to solve our problems, we are growing far too much like the torturers and killers we claim to oppose, and are in danger of perishing by the sword, too.

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This is Column #CT26. Request permission to publish here.