Robert Kagan, veteran warmonger extraordinaire, wants to know what the “utility” would be of admitting that the war on Iraq was “a mistake.” I’m glad he asked.
But, “mistake” is not exactly the word. This was a criminal action based on lies that killed over a million people, injured over 4 million people, made homeless over 4 million people, left behind permanent environmental devastation, shattered the rule of law, generated terrorism, impeded global collaboration on non-optional crises, diverted trillions of dollars away from desperate needs, shredded our civil liberties, fueled bigotry and xenophobia, militarized policing, and led in a fairly straight line to the catastrophe we’re in right now.
In an August 4 interview published by Responsible Statecraft, an interviewer asks veteran warmonger Robert Kagan to admit that attacking Iraq was a “mistake.” Right away we have to stop asking whether it was — as it obviously was — a crime, a mass-murder spree, a hugely destructive atrocity absolutely devastating the natural environment, international law, and so on. Instead, the question becomes whether it was an error of calculation. The same interviewer pushes Kagan toward celebrating “soft power” over “hard power” as a better tool of imperialism. With that accepted goal, was destroying Iraq a “mistake” or, as the interviewer also calls it, in perhaps the most extreme euphemism in history, “unnecessary”?
And what does Kagan answer? He replies:
“Well, I didn’t say I can’t admit that it was a mistake. I’m not sure what the utility of admitting that it was a mistake is. It’s not going to bring anybody back to life.”
A-ha, you say! He not only says that he didn’t say that he wouldn’t say it was a mistake, which is practically saying it was a mistake, but he admits that people somehow died, and he simply wants to know how admitting to a mistake would bring them back. What could be more reasonable? But back up one paragraph in the interview, and you’ll see that the interviewer and interviewee have grossly distorted the casualties to amount to 180,000 “civilians” (how many non-civilians, they don’t say) and “4,500 U.S. service members and 3,600 American contractors,” and Kagan excuses that by exclaiming: “In ten years! Over ten years.” In fairness, I guess that’s a reasonable rate of 18,810 a year, and if those took the form of videos of pretty U.S. children being beheaded, published once every half hour, every day, year after year, for 10 years, probably there wouldn’t even be any public reaction.
What would the utility be of admitting the reality of past wars? It would be resistance to future wars, of course! It is, after all, people seeking to facilitate future wars who invest the greatest efforts in going back and lying about past wars. So, it is interesting that Kagan blurts out the truth on a traditional past-wars lie, in this same interview, when he says:
“I never denied that blowback was a reality. In fact, my writing shows that when the United States is out there acting in the world, Americans tend to not even be aware of the effect of American power on other nations. And so they’re constantly shocked whenever the use of American power leads to a response. The best example is Japan and Pearl Harbor. Many Americans acted like it was out of the blue when Japan attacked us when, in fact, the U.S. pursued policies that were likely to lead to a Japanese attack. The same was true of 9/11 in the sense that it was at least in part a response to the American presence in the Middle East. The question is, do you act even though you know that there is going to be blowback because the stakes are worth it. So, I never doubted it and, as I say, recognizing the effect of American power on other nations is an important part of my history.”
It’s helpful, I suppose, for a notorious warmonger, even without a substantial argument (provided abundantly by others, after all) to admit to this bit of truth, when Congressional candidates are viciously criticized for the same. And this strikes me as the admission of wrongdoing disguised in another form. I don’t recall a single voice in the MICIMATT pitch for the war on Iraq that said “This will probably generate more anti-U.S. violence, just as did the U.S. actions that led up to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, but it’s going to be worth it anyway, because . . . .” And the reason I never heard such a voice is that there is nothing that could complete that sentence. So, Kagan may question whether he should admit to a “mistake,” but at the same time he is taking out of his propaganda arsenal the single biggest, most dominant tool. For a habitual liar, that may be as close to penance as you’re going to get.
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, August 4, 2026