Jeb Bush and the amazing never-ending war machine

We're doomed

U.S. Military
(Image credit: (REUTERS))

In William Gibson's recent book The Peripheral, a near-future United States is portrayed as having decayed to the point of developing-country status, with crumbling communities forced into drug dealing to stave off starvation. One implied reason for the decline is an endless series of wars sapping the nation's strength. One character adds them to the traditional list of life's inevitabilities: "there's death and taxes and foreign wars."

For a few years in the mid-2000s, when the sheer monstrosity of Bush's Iraq War was a major story every day, I thought maybe this time we would finally learn our lesson about the limits of American power. Vietnam didn't do it, but maybe Iraq would. It was the most purely stupid action in U.S. foreign policy history, and one of our clearest, most abject, and most humiliating defeats. We started a war of aggression against a ratty tinpot dictatorship, spent 10 years bleeding away our flower of youth and trillions of dollars, and still lost.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.