I finally got around to cracking open Barbara Tuchman's 1985 book The March to Folly: from Troy to Vietnam. It's a sort of case study of why governments so often engage in policies that are not only "wrong" but foolish, and against even the self-interests of their countries. In the very first chapter, I started seeing lines that had not just a little resonance today.
Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function [in government]?
If I get to the answer by the end of the book, I promise to share, because at that point, I'm at a loss, so I should be in for a good read, especially as I very much enjoyed Tuchman's The Guns of August. In any case, the next couple of pages defined that sort of governmental folly, and that's where it struck home:
Electing John McCain would be literally elevating the Iraq War to "folly."
According to Tuchman, to qualify as a "folly," a policy must have three attributes. First, "[I]t must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time[...]." This doesn't mean unanimity, but that a significant number of contemporaries recognize that the policy is unwise. We obviously meet this definition in spades. While there was a minority at the time, the majority of the public is clearly of the opinion that the war in Iraq is, and has been, unwise.
"Secondly, a feasible alternative course of action must have been available." There was certainly no imminent threat to the nation, so any number of feasible alternative courses could have been undertaken. Anyone who argues this as a necessity is suffering an acute failure of imagination.
The third is the key going forward, however:
[T]he policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime. Misgovernment by a single sovereign or tyrant is too frequent and too individual to be worth a generalized inquiry. Collective government or a succession of rulers in the same office, as in the case of the Renaissance popes, raises a more significant problem.
Allowing George W. Bush to prosecute and continue the Iraq war has been an exercise in bad judgement and bad government. But if the American people allow their government to continue this disastrous policy, even given the widespread realization of its impact and no direct necessity to continue, they fulfill the definition of folly.
I will not be made a fool of by my government.