A reader recalls his moment of clarity:
Although, like you and like many others, my own personal descent from the bus was gradual over the course of 2003, I can remember with perfect clarity the moment my feet hit the ground for good: the Abu Ghraib scandal. When I saw those photos, the moral center of the war completely collapsed for me. My support for the war was grounded in my pride as an American, in my belief that America’s only source of strength was its ideals and that these ideals were available to all. Abu Ghraib and the administration’s shameful response to it made clear that, whatever other justification it might have, the Iraq War was not a war for American ideals. Though up until then I felt a great deal of despair and anger at the Bush administration over their execution of this war (and still do, of course), Abu Ghraib left me with the principal emotion I will feel whenever, for the rest of my life, I think back on this war: shame.
Yes, Abu Ghraib was my epiphany too. I knew immediately that the deeper war – for democracy and decency – had been lost at that moment. The enemy didn’t win. Through the torture policies he enacted, Bush surrendered. The other night, I watched an astonishing British documentary set in Iraq in the days after the invasion for the following year or so. It followed the life of a man who called himself "The Liberace of Baghdad." He was a piano player in a hotel, a Christian, a womanizer, and a chain-smoker. The documentary managed to convey more graphically than anything I have ever seen the chilling terror of a slowly collapsing social order, enabled and made possible by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.
We saw it through a sane, civilzed Iraqi’s eyes – and witnessed the pain he felt at seeing what was left of his country torn to pieces by preventable anarchy. But what struck me most was how I had almost forgotten the idealism that once surrounded this war, the hope that it could lead to a better world, the knowledge that a terrible evil, Saddam, had been removed, the chance for progress in the heart of the Middle East. Time plays tricks on our minds; and I had forgotten the great optimism I had only recently felt. My response to the documentary? Renewed, indelible shame that I had supported an administration so manifestly unwilling or unable to do the right thing. I should have known better. I was far too naive, and caught up in the desire to fight back against Islamist evil to recognize the callower, casual evil I was enabling in the Bush administration. When I hear of the thousands of innocents who have been killed, tortured and maimed in the Rumsfeld-created vortex, my rage at what this president did is overwhelemed by my shame at having done whatever I did to enable and even cheerlead it, before the blinders were ripped from my eyes. This war has destroyed the political integrity of Iraq. But it has also done profound damage to the moral integrity of America.
The Dish 