In the shadow of the expanding U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, this reading list gathers work from the BR archive marking two anniversaries with still-reverberating consequences: the beginning of the Syrian revolution on March 15, 2011, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, under the administration of George W. Bush.

In an essay published near the end of Bush’s second term, Elaine Scarry wrote of the corrosive effects of elite impunity that would follow from failing to hold the architects of the Iraq War legally responsible for their lies and crimes:

“How long won’t you stand for injustice?” asks Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage. If you’re going to get tired after half an hour, she advises, or after a week, or after a month, you might as well leave right now. Mother Courage storms into a military headquarters to lodge a complaint, and, finding a young lieutenant there who is waiting to make his own complaint, she launches into her disquisition on the impossible fortitude and stamina required, and does this so effectively that she persuades herself. She promptly leaves without lodging any complaint. The event takes place shortly after the military execution, without trial, of her soldier son.

Part of what makes the thought of prosecuting Bush so aversive is that it would be utterly exhausting. President Bush has repeatedly short circuited protest against one outrageous illegality by quickly carrying out a second, third, fourth, and fifth, so that the citizenry is kept in a permanent state of astonishment and cannot recover its own ground long enough to do more than cry out. Now, at the end of his administration, the sheer number of accumulated wrongful acts disempowers the collective will to act, and tempts us to elect our way back into a legal order, and simply close the door on the revolting spectacle of the last eight years.

Read the whole essay here, plus more from the BR archive below.