Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite: The Iraq War -- How Our Nation Lost Its Soul
Former president of Chicago Theological Seminary (1998-2008), Thistlethwaite is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
The Iraq war was not a Just War. It has been a moral, fiscal and geopolitical disaster for the United States. Ten years after the attack on Iraq, it is critical to understand all that we have lost in engaging in this war. The true legacy of the Iraq war is a loss of our moral compass on engaging in war.
The Iraq war has first of all been a moral disaster because we broke the rules of war by ignoring them or so completely “re-defining” them that they lost their meaning.
Nothing so typifies this moral breakdown as much as the attempt to redefine torture as “enhanced interrogation,” and claim, despite the evidence of the horrible photos and videos of the systematic abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, for example, that such torture is not torture.
This is how we as a nation really started to “lose our soul.” In May of 2004, when this evidence of torture first appeared, I asked, “Can a Nation Lose Its Soul?” and I answered “yes.”...