Short memory, apparently?

From Fred at Slacktivist, discussing our country's memory problems:

But it’s disorienting and confounding to read a story calling for military intervention in Iraq that almost completely disregards the reality of the very recent history of military intervention in Iraq. Here is one of the few places in which the article makes a slight, glancing acknowledgment of that recent history:

“A decade ago, Iraq’s Christian population numbered 1.5 million,” said Randel Everett, Wilberforce Initiative president and former Texas pastor. “Today, roughly 300,000 remain, and most have no jobs, no schools, and no places of worship.”

Apparently something dramatic must have happened “a decade ago” in Iraq. The article doesn’t say what that might have been.

It doesn’t say that what happened there happened with the full, enthusiastic support and advocacy of then-Rep. Frank Wolf, and of Christianity Today, and of Texas pastors like Randel Everett. It doesn’t say what they all told us at the time would be the outcome of what happened more than a decade ago in Iraq, or how radically, disastrously wrong all those predictions and reassurances proved to be.

A couple of days ago, over at Bill Moyers' site, Andrew Bacevich wrote a piece on the new War Powers legislation in which he remarked

"The US military effort to stabilize or pacify or dominate or democratize the Greater Middle East has failed irrevocably. Trying harder, whether with air strikes or special operations raids or even “enduring offensive ground combat operations,” will not yield a different result."

When we don't remember, or at least won't admit remembering, what we've done in the past, we just keep doing the same thing. And that means we'll just keep getting the same damned results.