Robert C. Koehler: Blowing out the candles in Iraq

I read the news – invasion of Iraq! Twentieth anniversary! – and struggle to transcend the abstraction of my remorse. A million killed? Half a million? The mortality stats vary depending on the source’s politics.

But beyond the numbers looms an indifference that defines what is called “news.”

“Today, 20 years after the president ordered the airstrikes that rained down on Baghdad on the night of March 20, 2003, the war is widely seen in Washington’s power centers as a lesson in failed policymaking, one deeply absorbed if