The similarities between Iran in 2026 and Iraq in 2003 are obvious, and have been commented on before, most thoroughly by Frederick Deknatel in New Lines magazine. Like Trump, George W. Bush promised a quick, easy victory, only to plunge the U.S. into a conflict much more protracted and bloody than the one he’d advertised. Like Trump, he slaughtered untold numbers of civilians.
In both cases, this was a unilateral assault on a sovereign nation in the Middle East which had not attacked the United States, making it a clear-cut war of aggression. Aggression is the “supreme crime” in international law, and one of the primary crimes Nazi officers were hanged for at Nuremberg. The point of those trials, as chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson said at the time, was to establish for the world that actions like invading Poland would never be acceptable: “civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
And yet, more than 20 years after the fact, Bush and his associates have never faced any serious penalties for their invasion of Iraq, or for the litany of human rights abuses they committed in the process. Bush himself continues to be treated as a respectable figure in mainstream American politics, often compared favorably to the more vulgar and erratic Trump.
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And so, just a few decades later, Trump has walked through the door that Bush left wide-open, secure in the expectation that he, too, is unlikely to ever face real consequences.
It didn’t have to be that way. Over the course of the 2000s and 2010s, plenty of people made noble efforts to bring Bush to account for his crimes, and if they had been listened to and empowered, the world might be a very different place today.
This article is written from what would perhaps feel a bit too US centric of a perspective for this community normally but the analysis I think is globally relevant because of how large the consequences were. It is a relevant read for anybody unfortunately.
I think it makes sense to feel as angry at the "good cop" as the "bad cop", they must work in unison together to be effective.
Neither cop in this metaphor is a perfectly monolithic entity though which is why you still probably want to vote for the "good cop" in the hopes that some goodness escapes the event horizon of fatal neoliberalism.
We are forced to ask however if the DNC actually desires to win except under extraordinarily alienating circumstances for the average person living in the US which makes this a different question at this point.
It is no longer "are they in the way?", it is "are they actively against us or just so incompetent and stubborn enough to functionally behave as though they are?".
The sobering thing is, normally it doesn't really matter either way in practice, but when a country is on the verge of shattering into a million pieces as the US is it really does matter.
I mean, why would the DNC want to win? Like any big organization, the point of the organization eventually becomes the continuance and growth of the organization itself. And in this organization, that means money. And it's simply a lot easier to raise money when you're out of power than when you are in power. When you're in power, you have to start showing tangible results for what your donors and voters are demanding. When you're out of power, all you have to do is shout from the mountaintops about all the evil the other party is doing. Do that and the money rolls in. Actually governing is hard. Often satisfying one constituent mean angering another. The Democratic Party is a big tent, we don't agree with each other on everything. And it's really easy to anger one donor while trying to please another donor. But simply highlighting the misdeeds of Republicans? That ultimately doesn't help or hurt anyone. But it sure does bring in the dollars.
If you are a leader at the DNC, and your goal is to advance your own power and influence, unless you have aspirations for office yourself...Why exactly do you want Democrats to win? I would think you would want your side to win frequently enough to still have credibility as a competitive party, but otherwise seek to be out of office as often as possible.