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Bill Moyers: The Folly of Attacking Iraq

Should we really be listening to Washington’s “armchair warriors” who were wrong before, during and after the Iraq war – and never admitted their wrongdoing? Bill has some ideas.

Part of the Series

Should we really be listening to Washington’s “armchair warriors” who were wrong before, during and after the Iraq war — and never admitted their wrongdoing? Bill has some ideas.

Transcript:

“They said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could turn the smoking gun into a mushroom cloud, and they were wrong. They said Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda, and they were wrong. They said the war would be a cakewalk, and they were wrong.

Over and again they were wrong, yet 11 years, thousands of lives, millions of refugees, and trillions of dollars later, the very same armchair warriors in Washington who from the safety of their Beltway bunkers called for invading Baghdad, are demanding once again that America plunge into the sectarian wars of the Middle East.

A chorus of kindred voices fills the echo chamber: the same old faces, the same old arguments, never acknowledging the phony premises and fraudulent intelligence that led to disaster and chaos in the first place. A headline at the website ThinkProgress sums it up: “The People Who Broke Iraq Have A Lot of Ideas About Fixing It Now.”

Taken from Bill’s interview with historian Andrew Bacevich on the chaos in Iraq. Watch the entire show »