\nSo if we’re all doing our retrospective takes on the Iraq War, mine was\u2026 it wasn’t that big a deal? In scale, direction, and costs borne and imposed it was basically well within norms for what the country might get distracted with over a two-decade period.
Already within my lifetime the specter of the Vietnam War, once much more significant in national affairs, looms not nearly as large as I remember it doing in the ‘80s (indeed, the easy victories of the “Desert Shield/Storm” Iraq excursion of the early '90s were specifically hailed for dispelling this “Vietnam Syndrome”), as colorful but not particularly important chapter of 20th Century American history.
While the action did not serve to renew America’s post-Cold War unipolar “hyperpower” moment, I honestly don’t think it accelerated its end any, which looks to be more a product of the development of China and reassertion of Russia than any “Clash of Civilizations”.
…the Iraq War – the (cultivated) reaction to it, and then the backlash to that reaction, and then the fallout from the actual war being such a huge debacle – ended the decade-and-a-half End of History.
Even if it had no lasting geopolitical impact whatsoever (which seems like a stretch), its impact on the American psyche was quite enough to be a History-Defining Big Deal all by itself.
Which seems like it would be your jam.
I mean that was the way it happened, but if not for that then\u2026?
Like, if it didn’t have military commitments at the time the US might’ve engaged harder in the Crimea crisis, and the Syrian civil war would have been obviated and the big refugee flow to the EU preempted. That’s the two things I can see going differently.
When you follow all the subplots through the real winner of the Iraq War might’ve been Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan
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