Even conservatives agree - Iraq war has failed

The main thing the Iraq war has done is to demonstrate that war is no longer a successful way to get what a nation wants - if it ever was.

From Deepak Chopra:

This war will not end as Vietnam did, with a large section of the public believing that the U.S. could not tolerate defeat and must continue to fight everywhere we wanted to. Iraq is already a defeat far worse than Vietnam. That country became viable once its civil war ended and the Ho Chi Minh regime took over. Iraq has no fortunate future lying ahead. Whether or not civil war breaks out on a large scale, Iraq will be a broken country, open to foreign influence, rife with corruption, torn by sectarian divisions.

In our heart of hearts we know that we created this disaster. How can a good country be the cause of so much that's wrong? By using the tool of war. War will be more discredited after this conflict ends. One cannot hope for American militarism to end also, because we are fatefully tied to the military-industrial complex. But this generation, already skeptical about war after Vietnam, only entered Iraq because of 9/11, and even then, with direct provocation from Arab terrorists, the Bush administration had to use deception, misinformation, and manipulation to get the public to go along with its "good" war.

Being optimistic, the future of the peace movement could turn out to be very bright. It will not score its victories through rallies and protests. Instead, there will be a shift in consciousness across the board, from left to right, just as Russian consciousness shifted away from Communism. Communism was an ideology that could only survive by believing in an illusion. America's invincible militarism is exactly the same, and as we swallow the humiliation of the Iraq invasion and assimilate its lessons, the American people will choose to live in reality instead. The ideology of unilateral war-making is not going to recover from this setback any time soon.

I really hope that Deepak Chopra is correct. There is a great capability of human beings to create an illusion then follow it off a cliff like some grand lemming crusade. Republican conservatives, especially the conservative Religious Right are still proving this.

Maybe Iraq will prove that war is not a path to success for a nation, but people keep creating new false illusions and following them to disaster, and I don't see that ending as long as people are human.