I remember having very mixed feelings. I felt Afghanistan was in some sense justified, though perhaps a Very Bad Idea. (The whole, "Afghanistan breaks empires" history lesson.) For Iraq, I thought they probably did have a WMD program, but still thought it was a Very Bad Idea.
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I can't believe either of you could be so wrong about something that was so fundamentally obvious to me and everyone I knew. Nor can I come to grips with the way you discuss events led to over a million deaths as though you'd lost a bet on a football game.
I was 20, just out of college. I think I'm allowed to be wrong and admit it later. Better than not admitting it, eh? As for being dispassionate: we're not talking about the war itself, we're talking about our memory of their beginning, and how our wrongness shaped our views.
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You can be pissy and high and mighty (I'm sure you've always had a perfect track record on politics), or you can say, here's how a couple of young, fairly liberal, educated folks who later became academics had their views challenged by the Iraq War. Totally up to you!
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In any case: my take on both wars at the time was that they were bad ideas. Iraq seemed avoidable, even if they had WMDs (which would have surprised me less than them not). On Afghanistan, I was wary of war as the solution, but couldn't see great alternatives to Taliban/al-Qaeda.
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I did feel that the War on Terror was a terrible way to frame the conflicts, and could see (as did many) that doing it that way meant there would never be any kind of obvious end-point. But I figured they would have some plan to prop up Afgh/Iraq after the main battles were won.
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So I was indeed surprised to find that they had exactly no plan for stabilizing the region. And I am continually appalled that we have not found a way out of these conflicts. And yes, I think the overall bloodshed is disgusting, appalling, immoral. For what it is worth.
End of conversation
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(And just to clarify, because the age part here is poorly written, and I am bungling my own numbers: for the Afghan War, I was 20 in 10/2001. I graduated college in fall 2002, a little after I turned 21. When the Iraq War started, in 3/2003, I was still 21.)
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This isn't about you, and your right to be offended because I questioned the authenticity of your mea culpa. Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who lived through the grotesque nightmares we created. An Iraqi or an Afghan who read this thread would be physically ill.
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