The fall of the Tory party

I’ve heard a couple of people who should know say we have trump because of Iraq. The thinking is that 9/11 undermined a sense of us supremacy, that afterwards the us sought out a fight with a relatively weak foreign power to reassert its dominance. It was said by the architects of the war that it would be over quickly and would be affordable. There was also a calculation made that the international community would uphold us decisiveness by essentially allowing all this to happen. None of this turned out to be true. The war dragged on and cost a fortune; in order to justify it the us had to blatantly lie to the un and the people of us and uk and faced the humiliation of being left alone especially with regard to fractured relationships with germany and france who called BS on the whole enterprise. This is not like the first iraq war at all, which the un backed. by the end of the war the us’s collective national ego was reeling. tea party nationalism, now trumpism reflects that hurt pride. What’s more in going through this totally unnecessary war and lying to its traditional allies the us has done untold damage to the moral high ground of the west and the legitimacy of international discourse. Now, i am not saying that the status quo which the us undermined with iraq represents anything especially worthy or good - you are right there is a longer history of those it represents being awful- but those few precious institutions and accords, tacit agreements about protocol and so on that created some opportunities for peace and justice were so badly damaged. It’s plays into, for example, how Obama didn’t feel like the us could do anything to prevent someone as psychotic as Asad raining death in his own people, breaking every convention under the sun; it has so much to do with the impunity with which Putin invaded Georgia. In Russia and elsewhere outside the west iraq is continuously trotted out as a reason why the us shouldn’t moralise. at home there’s a vacuum too, maga promises to ameliorate it but is obviously going to make everything worse. In short both iraq wars were bad but they occurred in diff circumstances and these meant the second was bad in ways that have more wide ranging consequences