Asking Questions or Failing To

In the current NY Review of Books, Thomas Powers tries to answer a question posed by Bob Guldin: What were the real motives for the war in Iraq?

Powers discusses some of the possible motives. But he concludes with the following (of which I have taken excerpts) which reinforces my feelings that Bush is not solely responsible for our current nightmare.

Just as interesting as the Bush administration's motives for going to war is the evident wish of the Democratic majority not to know what they were.

American political leaders, Republicans as well as Democrats, did not ask hard questions before voting for war in 2002, they have not asked hard questions about the President's goals in the five years since, and they are not asking hard questions now about the true nature and prospects of the bold imperial adventure which the White House PR machine insists on calling a "war on terror."

Not knowing why we went in allowed us to go in; not knowing why we should get out will make it impossible to get out. None of the presidential candidates seems to know why we are failing, or to understand what is imperial about the way we deal with Iraq, or to sense that a bigger war is just another mistake away. I don't know what we can do about this.