Rachel Maddow joined Jon Stewart for Wednesday’s Daily Show to discuss her upcoming documentary, Why We Did It, which looks as the reasons for the Iraq War.
Stewart asked Maddow why she decided to tackle “the abyss that is the war with Iraq?”
Maddow replied that now that 10 years have passed some people are finally willing to discuss the war and the American people want answers:
“I think that there is a desire to hear the truth told. Honestly, there are two million Iraq war veterans in this country and there are four thousand families who lost somebody. And when you think about that, when you look at Wounded Warriors and the people that are carrying this for the rest of their lives…I think even the people who were part of it in some ways want to see those people hear the truth, and it has never been explained.”
Maddow went on to explain that the errors and misdeeds that led to the war have remained unexamined on purpose:
“There hasn’t been accountability for those who were wrong the first time. The people who said we ought to go, it’s not going to take very many people, it’s going to pay for itself, it doesn’t matter that we’re not going to set up a government, Iraq will be right back on its feet, it’ll be a Jeffersonian democracy in the heart of the Middle East, I mean, those guys – Paul Wolfowitz got to go run the World Bank. Really? Like, you shouldn’t be running a light-rail system in a small town in a country other than this one that we dislike.”
[…]
“The reason Iraq still looms over what we do is kind of the original sin of the 21st Century, and until we reckon honestly about why we did it, we’re never going to escape that, and we owe it to ourselves to get past it.”
You can watch the interview below, from Comedy Central.
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