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Twenty years after the United States led a coalition to overthrow Saddam Hussein, the conventional wisdom is now that the postwar fiasco proved that the war was a mistake from its inception. The war, as it was executed, was indeed a disaster, but there was ample cause for launching it.

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I supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I have changed my mind about some things but not everything, and I hope you’ll bear with me in a somewhat longer edition of the Daily today for a personal exploration of the issue.

In retrospect, almost no American war except the great crusade against the Axis seems to have been necessary, especially for the people who have had to go and fight such conflicts. How could we have asked our military men and women to endure death and mutilation and horror in 1991 so that a bunch of rich Kuwaitis could return to their mansions, or in 2003 so that we could finally settle scores with a regional dictator? Yesterday, The Bulwark ran a searing, must-read reminiscence of the Iraq War written by a U.S. veteran that reminds us how high-flown ideas such as “national interest” or “international order” play little role on the actual battlefield.

And yet, there are just wars: conflicts that require the use of armed force on behalf of an ally or for the greater good of the international community. I was an advocate for deposing Saddam by the mid-1990s on such grounds. Here is what I wrote in the journal Ethics & International Affairs on the eve of the invasion in March 2003:

The record provides ample evidence of the justice of a war against Saddam Hussein’s regime. Iraq has shown itself to be a serial aggressor led by a dictator willing to run imprudent risks, including an attack on the civilians of a noncombatant nation during the Persian Gulf War; a supreme enemy of human rights that has already used weapons of mass destruction against civilians; a consistent violator of both UN resolutions and the terms of the 1991 cease-fire treaty, to say nothing of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions before and since the Persian Gulf War; a terrorist entity that has attempted to reach beyond its own borders to support and engage in illegal activities that have included the attempted assassination of a former U.S. president; and most important, a state that has relentlessly sought nuclear arms against all international demands that it cease such efforts.

Any one of these would be sufficient cause to remove Saddam and his regime(and wars have started over less), but taken together they are a brief for what can only be considered a just war.

Today, there is not a word of this I would take back as an indictment of Saddam Hussein or as justification for the use of force. But although I believed that the war could be justified on these multiple grounds, the George W. Bush administration chose a morally far weaker argument for a preventive war, ostensibly to counter a gathering threat of weapons of mass destruction. (Preemptive war, by the way, is a war to avert an imminent attack, and generally permissible in international law and custom. Preventive war is going to war on your own timetable to snuff out a possible future threat, a practice long rejected by the international community as immoral and illegal. The Israeli move at the opening of the Six-Day War, in 1967, was preemptive; the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, was preventive.

Of course, the Iraqi dictator was doing his damndest to convince the world that he had weapons of mass destruction, because he was terrified of admitting to his worst foe, Iran, that he no longer had them. (He sure convinced me.) But this was no evidence of an imminent threat requiring instant action, and the WMD charge was the shakiest of limbs in a tree full of much stronger branches.

Bush used the WMD rationale as just one in a kitchen sink of issues, likely because his advisers thought it was the case that would most resonate with the public after the September 11 terror attacks. For years, most Western governments saw terrorism, rogue states, and WMD as three separate problems, to be handled by different means. After 9/11, these three issues threaded together into one giant problem—a rogue state supporting terrorists who seek to do mass damage—and the tolerance for risk that protected the Iraqi tyrant for so many years evaporated.

In 2003, I was far too confident in the ability of my own government to run a war of regime change, which managed to turn a quick operational victory into one of the greatest geopolitical disasters in American history. Knowing what I now know, I would not have advocated for setting the wheels of war in motion. And although Bush bears the ultimate responsibility for this war, I could not have imagined how much Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s obsession with “transformation,” the idea that the U.S. military could do more with fewer troops and lighter forces, would undermine our ability to conduct a war against Iraq. As Eliot Cohen later said, “The thing I know now that I did not know then is just how incredibly incompetent we would be, which is the most sobering part of all this.”

My own unease about the war began when America’s de facto military governor, Paul Bremer, disbanded the Iraqi military and embarked on “de-Baathification,” taking as his historical analogy the “denazification” of Germany after World War II. This was bad history and bad policy, and it created a massive unemployment problem among people skilled in violence while punishing civilians whose only real association with Baathism was the party card required for them to get a good job.

And yet, for a few years more, I stayed the course. I believed that Iraqis, like anyone else, wanted to be free. They might not be Jeffersonian democrats, but they hated Saddam, and now they had a chance at something better. Like many of our leaders, I was still amazed at the collapse of the Soviet Union, appalled at Western inaction in places like Rwanda, and convinced (as I still am) that U.S. foreign policy should be premised on a kind of Spider-Man doctrine: With great power comes great responsibility.

Unfortunately, in my case, this turned into supporting what the late Charles Krauthammer in 1999 called “a blanket anti-son of a bitch policy,” which he described as “soothing, satisfying and empty. It is not a policy at all but righteous self-delusion.” Krauthammer was right, and people like me were too willing to argue for taking out bad guys merely because they were bad guys. But that word blanket was doing a lot of lifting in Krauthammer’s formulation; perhaps we cannot go after all of them, but some sons of bitches should be high on the list. For me, Saddam was one of them.

The question now was whether even Saddam Hussein was worth the cost. Twenty years ago, I would have said yes. Today, I would say no—but I must add the caveat that no one knew then, nor can anyone know now, how much more dangerous a world we might have faced with Saddam and his psychopathic sons still in power. (Is the world better off because we left Bashar al-Assad in power and allowed him to turn Syria into an abattoir?) Yes, some rulers are too dangerous to remove; Vladimir Putin, hiding in the Kremlin behind a wall of nuclear weapons, comes to mind. Some, however, are too dangerous to allow to remain in power, and in 2003, I included Saddam in that group.

In 2007, Vanity Fair interviewed a group of the war’s most well-known supporters. Even the ur-hawk Richard Perle (nicknamed in Washington the “Prince of Darkness” when he worked for Ronald Reagan) admitted that, if he had it to do over again, he might have argued for some path other than war. But the comment that sticks with me to this day, and the one that best represents my thinking, came from Ambassador Kenneth Adelman. In 2002, Adelman famously declared that the war would be “a cakewalk,” but five years later, he said:

The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless. I guess that’s what I would have said: that Bush’s arguments are absolutely right, but you know what? You just have to put them in the drawer marked CAN’T DO. And that’s very different from LET’S GO.

Twenty years later, that’s where I remain. The cause was just, but there are times when doing what’s right and just is not possible. For almost 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union and the first Allied victory over Iraq, the United States had the chance to deepen the importance of international institutions. We squandered that opportunity because of poor leadership, Pentagon fads (the “Office of Force Transformation” was disbanded in 2006, shortly before Bush finally removed Rumsfeld), and amateurish historical analogies.

Still, there’s too much revisionist history about the Iraq War. You’ll see arguments that experts supported it. (Most academics and many civilians in D.C. did not.) You’ll hear that it was a right-wing crusade backed only by a Republican minority. (Also wrong.) Had the war been executed differently, we might be having a different conversation today.

The fact remains that the United States is a great power protecting an international system it helped to create, and there will be times when military action is necessary. Fortunately, most Americans still seem to grasp this important reality.

Would I argue for another such operation today? If the question means “another massive preventive war far from home,” no. I have consistently opposed war with Iran and any direct U.S. involvement in Ukraine. I wrote a book in 2008 warning that we should strengthen the United Nations and other institutions to stop the growing acceptance around the world of preventive war as a normal tool of statecraft.

I also, however, supported the NATO operation in Libya, and I have called for using American airpower to blunt Assad’s mass murders in Syria. Iraq was a terrible mistake, but it would be another mistake to draw the single-minded conclusion (much as we did after Vietnam) that everything everywhere will forever be another Iraq. The world is too dangerous, and American leadership too necessary, for us to fall into such a facile and paralyzing trap.

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Illustration by Daniel Zender / The Atlantic; Getty

Please Get Me Out of Dead-Dog TikTok

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

A brown dog, muzzle gone gray—surely from a life well lived—tries to climb three steps but falters. Her legs give out, and she twists and falls. A Rottweiler limps around a kitchen. A golden retriever pants in a vet’s office, then he’s placed on a table, wrapped in medical tubes. “Bye, buddy,” a voice says off camera. Nearby, a hand picks up a syringe.

This is Dead-Dog TikTok. It is an algorithmic loop of pet death: of sick and senior dogs living their last day on Earth, of final hours spent clinging to one another in the veterinarian’s office, of the brutal grief that follows in the aftermath. One related trend invites owners to share the moment they knew it was time—time unspecified, but clear: Share the moment you decided to euthanize your dog.

Read the full article.

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Read. These eight books will take you somewhere new.

Watch. Abbott Elementary, on ABC (and available to stream on Hulu).

Our writer Jerusalem Demsas endorsed the show this weekend: “I’m someone who can usually only watch TV while doing at least one or two other things at the same time, and this show grabs my full attention.”

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P. S.

No recommendations today, other than to thank our veterans for shouldering the burden of a war that we asked them to fight.

— Tom

Pop quiz: Which of the following Shakespeare works is about race? (A) Hamlet, (B) Othello, (C) Romeo and Juliet, (D) the sonnets. If you answered B, you’re not alone. Many of us have been taught that Othello is Shakespeare’s primary race play, because, of course, it focuses on a Black character. You might also recall that Shakespeare wrote a few other plays with nonwhite characters: the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, a suitor to the heiress Portia, who begs her, “Mislike me not for my complexion.” Or Cleopatra, the African queen whom Roman soldiers blame for seducing their general, Antony, with her “tawny front.” Or Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, a schemer alternately villainous and compassionate, who asks, “Is black so base a hue?” Or even Caliban, the island native in The Tempest whom Prospero, his enslaver, calls “this thing of darkness.”

These works compose the lineup typically billed as Shakespeare’s race plays. A limitation of that understanding, however, is that it assumes that race applies only when people of color are present. Such a view is definitively rejected in the revelatory new essay collection White People in Shakespeare. It’s cannily edited by Arthur L. Little Jr., a UCLA professor and notable scholar of Shakespeare and race, and even the title is a doozy. White people in Shakespeare? Isn’t that, well, redundant? That reaction is part of Little’s and his fellow essayists’ point: White people have for so long been taken as the universal norm in the Western canon that to name them as white is to engage in critical race study. White People posits that Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and the sonnets are just as much about race as Othello, because they’re all involved in defining whiteness. Shakespeare’s work, the collection argues, was central to the construction of whiteness as a racial category during the Renaissance, and white people, in turn, have used Shakespeare to regulate social hierarchies ever since.

This is not, to be clear, a book that tries to demonize Shakespeare or vilify folks who relish him. The complexity and power of his dramatic verse are givens in these essays. The collection contends, though, that what’s beautiful in Shakespeare—or what Shakespeare’s speakers take as beautiful—is often cast in racial terms. A striking example comes in the first essay of White People, by the late Imtiaz Habib, a founding scholar of race in early modern England. He takes up the opening line of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 1,” which implores a handsome young man to reproduce: “From fairest creatures we desire increase.” The key word here is fairest. In Shakespeare’s day, fair could mean physically attractive or morally just. It could also refer to complexion. More influential, it could be used to link attractiveness and justness to whiteness. When the Duke of Venice approves of Othello’s virtue, for instance, he calls him “far more fair than black.” (Is it any coincidence that the answer to the fairy-tale question “Who’s the fairest of them all?” is “Snow White”?) The scholar Kim F. Hall, another contributor to White People, demonstrated the racial valence of fair almost three decades ago in her field-defining study, Things of Darkness—a dynamic work whose implications are still contested. Although I’m in Hall’s camp, not all Shakespeare scholars agree with her ideas. As a result, it’s still common for people to read passages such as those that open “Sonnet 1” without acknowledging that a paraphrase could basically be “We want the whitest people to have more babies.” Habib calls the “Sonnet 1” opening a “declaration of the desirable eugenic privilege of white breeding,” which is the kind of bracing take, both unsettling and compelling, that this collection offers at every turn.

[Read: Why I read “King Lear” each Advent]

This method of race scholarship often attracts the charge of anachronism—that it’s imposing contemporary categories on the past. That objection tends not to bother me; every era generates its interpretive questions from its own concerns, and an anti-racist approach to Shakespeare is long overdue. On historical grounds, though, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that even if people in the 16th and 17th centuries didn’t use racial categories in quite the same ways we might, they were wrestling with the construction of social hierarchies based on emerging categories of race that went on to shape our world.

In fact, one of the chief interests of White People is how fluid and vexed the idea of whiteness—as both a racial and an aesthetic category—often was as it developed from the medieval to the early modern period. Little even proposes that in 1613, the first documented occurrence of the phrase white people (in a pageant scripted by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Thomas Middleton) would have seemed an oxymoron. Whiteness was the property of the elite, who could boast pure Christian souls, the illumination of humanist learning, and cosmetically lightened faces, whereas people, the collective term for the common throng who had to labor for a living, couldn’t claim the appearance, let alone the power, of being white. “White people,” Little writes, “was not a thing.”

Yet already during that time, the theater was staging performances, deploying cosmetics, costumes, prosthetics, and props, that helped redefine the boundaries of whiteness. Those boundaries could be national and geographical, as in the case of Shakespeare’s history plays; or historical and civic, as in his Roman plays; or even romantic, as in his courtship plays. Romeo, for instance, spends much of his first few scenes trying to determine if there is anyone “fairer than my love”; degrees of whiteness in Verona, as the scholar Kyle Grady writes in White People, are a recurring concern.

The most provocative essay to show whiteness under negotiation comes from Ian Smith: “Antonio’s White Penis: Category Trading in The Merchant of Venice.” The provocation doesn’t come from naming the merchant’s penis; that’s not a new move for scholars who have wondered whether the bond he signs with Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, in which he promises that if he fails to repay the loan, Shylock can cut off a pound of Antonio’s flesh “in what part of your body pleaseth me,” might involve a kind of circumcision or castration. Smith’s ingenuity is noticing the precise terms of the bond: “an equal pound / Of your fair flesh” (Smith’s emphasis). In Smith’s reading, Antonio’s whiteness is what Shylock covets as a Jew who, though not dark-skinned, is nevertheless excluded from the privileges that fair, Christian Venetians enjoy.

[Read: Shakespeare wrote his best works during a plague]

Is this too tendentious a reading? Not to my ear. Sure, some scholars might want to prioritize a religious interpretation over a racial one, but Smith is simply adding a layer of analysis, hidden in plain sight, that shows how, in Shakespeare’s imagination, race and religion, like sex and money or flesh and blood, were so often intertwined. Smith’s own new volume, Black Shakespeare, includes another innovative argument: that Hamlet’s reluctance to take revenge against his uncle for murdering his father stems from his fear that avengers are marked as a type of “Violent, Murderous Black Man.” If Hamlet committed revenge, he’d no longer be quite as white. That might seem a stretch until you look at the language that describes an avenging figure Hamlet recalls from the Trojan war: “he whose sable arms, / Black as his purpose, did the night resemble / When he lay couched in the ominous horse, / Hath now this dread and black complexion smeared / With heraldry more dismal.” Whenever I started to feel skeptical—was race really the defining issue for Hamlet more than any other psychological or social explanation scholars have proposed?—a passage like this one made the theory hard to dismiss.

By joining established scholars such as Smith, Hall, and Habib with emerging voices, White People heralds a breakthrough for a rising cohort of Shakespeare scholars—many of them people of color—whose focus on race has sometimes been excluded from the field’s top journals. One of this volume’s goals is to chart the history of white people controlling access to Shakespearean interpretation and, in turn, controlling access to the ideas that Shakespeare’s works helped fashion. White people invoked Shakespeare to justify opposition to miscegenation, as when former President John Quincy Adams wrote in 1836 that “the moral” of Othello “is that the intermarriage of black and white blood is a violation of the law of Nature.” A century later, his descendant, Joseph Quincy Adams, opened the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., with a celebration of Shakespeare as a centerpiece of a compulsory education system that had saved America from immigrants “who swarmed into the land like the locust in Egypt,” “foreign in their background and alien in their outlook upon life,” with “varied racial characteristics” that posed “a menace to the preservation of our long-established English civilization.” If in America, “the melting pot of races,” Adams concluded, “there has been evolved a homogenous nation, with a culture that is still essentially English, we must acknowledge that in the process Shakespeare has played a major part.”

Focusing on these invocations, however, risks overshadowing the ways that some people of color globally have appropriated Shakespeare for their own purposes, many of them performing and rewriting the plays to challenge colonial legacies. So it’s salutary to see White People move in its second half toward creative counternarratives. A conversation with the playwrights Keith Hamilton Cobb and Anchuli Felicia King explores how they flipped Shakespeare’s script in their own adaptations of Othello. Discussing Cobb’s American Moor and an Othello reimagining, Desdemona, by Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré, Hall says that is “incumbent on us to help students and audiences hear voices beyond the white noise of the Shakespeare industry.” And the Shakespeare and race scholar Margo Hendricks calls on her white peers to think critically about whiteness as an implicit standard of value. If those of us who, like me, fall into that category heed Hendricks’s call, that may be the lasting contribution of White People: to make it impossible to assume that whiteness is the norm, either for Shakespeare’s characters or for the audiences that interpret them. That doesn’t mean rejecting Shakespeare as an outmoded dead white man. On the contrary, it means reanimating him as a crucial part of a negotiation that continues to script our culture today, far beyond the theater and the classroom.

In 1976, the Argentine armed forces staged a coup against the president of Argentina, Isabel Perón. In short order, the military installed a junta that suspended political parties and various government functions, aggressively pursued free-market policies, and disappeared thousands of people over the next seven years. Victims of the regime—suspected dissidents or “subversives”—were abducted, tortured, and murdered, and many were buried in unmarked, mass graves. This period of state terror, the so-called Dirty War, has left a legacy of trauma that bedevils Argentina to this day.

The Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez’s grand, eloquent, and startling new novel, Our Share of Night, begins during this crisis and unfolds across subsequent and preceding years. We see Argentina attempt to reorient itself after years of chaos and glimpse the conditions that precipitated the turmoil. Most notable, Enriquez also shows how genre elements—including horror and the supernatural—can expand the possibilities of literary fiction. In short, Our Share of Night, Enriquez’s first novel to be published in English, reveals how sometimes, only fiction can fully illuminate the monstrous, indescribable, and ultimately shattering aspects of our reality.

[Read: My sister was disappeared 43 years ago]

The novel begins in Argentina in 1981 as the Dirty War is coming to an end. Juan Peterson and his young son, Gaspar, are urgently fleeing from, or heading toward, something. What we detect, almost immediately, is that Juan is endowed with unusual abilities. When a waitress at a diner asks Gaspar where his mother is, Juan feels “the boy’s pain in his entire body.” It is “primitive and wordless, raw and vertiginous.” Later, when Juan and Gaspar check into a hotel, we learn that Gaspar might be similarly gifted—as they’re walking down a hallway, Gaspar senses an otherworldly presence and “instead of avoiding it … he was drawn to it and was going toward it.” Juan manages to pull his son away, but he mourns the fact that Gaspar is burdened with “an inherited condemnation.”

We soon learn that Juan’s wife, Rosario, recently died in a grisly bus crash. Juan, it turns out, is a medium, and he has been trying to communicate with Rosario’s spirit since her passing, without success. Juan and Gaspar eventually arrive in Puerto Reyes, where Juan has been called to channel a force known as “the Darkness,” a supernatural entity that feeds on humans—in Juan’s words, “a savage god, a mad god.” He and Gaspar are in town to participate in the annual Ceremonial, a ritual during which the most potent occult families in Argentina attempt to summon the Darkness and draw power from it to maintain their status. Juan is, at this point in the story, the only person who can actually channel the Darkness, and he is thus forced to commune with it at the behest of the occult elite.

This novel operates as a kind of radio, constantly switching among stations. At moments the main narratives pipe through clearly, and at others we find ourselves attuned to staticky, liminal frequencies. This is a haunted story, and Enriquez has given voice to the victims of the Dirty War, and the generations that were harmed by its legacy. An infinite scroll of carnage and death plays in the background of this book: Juan and Gaspar observe a succession of ghostly presences (including one who “had no hair and wore a blue dress”), and Tali, Rosario’s half sister, sees spirits while consulting her tarot deck. Juan describes these apparitions as ghosts of the dead. “There were a lot of echoes now,” Enriquez writes. “It was always like that in a massacre, the effect like screams in a cave—they remained for a while until time put an end to them.” The dead are never far away. Our Share of Night features a cast of alluring characters enmeshed in a crackling story, but it is also, in so many ways, a book about how violence haunts and destabilizes a civilization.

Many of the set pieces in this novel—the occult ceremonies, the various acts of invocation—will scan to certain readers as genre flourishes, genre having somehow become a catchall term that, among other functions, consigns unfamiliar ways of being and living to imaginary realms. Yet this novel—powered by urgent, image-drenched language rendered beautifully by the translator Megan McDowell—convincingly captures what it feels like when your life is suddenly interrupted by a series of events that are so unimaginable and devastating, they seem unreal. It turns out that a surreal event is best described in surreal terms.

[Read: A world where death isn’t the end]

Enriquez employs this strategy to stunning effect during the Ceremonial, as the participants prepare a sacrifice for their lord:

Those who were given to the Darkness had their eyes blindfolded and their hands tied, and they stumbled. Drugged and blind, they had no idea what was before them. Maybe they expected pain. Tali saw a young, very thin man who was completely naked. He was crying, more awake than the others, and his lips trembled. Where are you taking us? he shouted, but his cries were drowned out by the panting of the Darkness and the murmuring of the Initiates.

This passage clearly evokes the experiences of those who were killed throughout the Dirty War, sacrificed to serve a god they could never appease. The god, of course, is power; indeed, this scene could be a metaphor for the tragedies throughout human history in which untold numbers of people were killed by demagogues and autocrats determined to eliminate any hint of opposition. Yet what Enriquez seems to suggest throughout the book is that such episodes are not mere tropes. During the Dirty War—as during the Holocaust, the transatlantic slave trade, and the genocide of Indigenous Americans, among many other examples—our worst, most unrelenting nightmares ceased to exist only within the realm of our imagination. They became real.

Our Share of Night is an expansive novel; it is about 600 pages long and roams from Argentina in the 1980s to 1960s London and back to Argentina in the ’90s. Enriquez, already renowned by English-language readers for her short fiction, proves that she can paint boldly and strikingly on a much larger canvas, and she invites us to witness her characters as they grow and love and sin and die. Yet the wonder of this book is that she shows us, time and again, that the supposedly impersonal forces of terror that act on our lives aren’t as remote as they seem. Even when we believe that the monsters have taken over, Enriquez reminds us that there are always human beings at the controls.