 The Iraq war has had a detrimental effect on the ethics of the entire society. It starts with the lying. The lying that brought us into that war, the claim that there were instruments of mass destruction that the other side had, that actually there was no evidence for and we were all told that there was evidence for it, significant evidence for it. Now the impact of that lying was to undermine people's faith in the government and actually in each other because if the highest and most respected people in the society lie to you and lie to you not over matters purely of trivial issues but of the most fundamental issue about life and death, then who can one trust? And this has an effect all through the whole society. Added to that the attempt to throw out of the administration's reach, anyone who questioned the lies meant that there was an intimidation that went on through the whole society about whether one could speak one's truth and then the prosecution of those truth-tellers, the people who are whistleblowers inside first that administration and that's continued right along in the Obama administration where instead of rewarding and as profits who speak truth to power, we instead imprison or at least try to bring to prison, fire them from their jobs, the truth-tellers has a corrosive effect on anybody feeling that they can tell the truth and when they're challenging people with power. Now, next you have this lying was done for the self-interest of Bush and not for the best interests even of some crazy theory about foreign policy but many people who know Bush know that he was personally offended by the way that Saddam Hussein had treated his father and had decided to use the 9-11 as an excuse to start a war that would end in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq even though there was not a scintilla of evidence that there was any connection between 9-11 and the Iraq regime. So this legitimated an ethos that has already been deep in American consciousness of, hey, look out for number one and it's okay to advance your own interests without regard to the consequences for others. Well, when you see that happening on the national level then everybody says to themselves, well, wait, if they do that and this is the way things are then I ought to also advance my own interests and if I have to advance my own interests by lying I'll do it. So this is an incredibly corrosive effect on the ethical life of a society because people no longer feel that they can count on the truth of what other people are saying because people feel, okay, this is how it is. One can, one should just advance oneself. Now not to say that this is the start of the ethos of selfishness in the American society. Now that's built into the capitalist marketplace but nevertheless the degree to which that becomes pervasive in the government of our society. Well, it's shown right now in the two-facedness of President Obama who has on the one hand made loving statements about how much he respects the Native Americans and on the other hand has ordered, has allowed his administration to order throwing the people off of their land and if they continue to stand up and fight against that pipeline. But so, and then you get the contestants of this in the Trump's way of moving to the White House systematic lies to everybody and media intimidated and afraid to challenge the lies and say that they are lies. Well, this all flows from that original dynamic that came from the Iraq war. So, the ethos of selfishness is so pervasive in the society because people validate it and believe that that's the only way it can be. So there was also in a distinction between acts that are permissible in war and not and the war essentially was carried on through torture and now we are here seeing that torture since the administration never public the Obama administration never punished the people who engage in torture. Right now we see that torture being validated as a public part of the Trump administration. So the corrosive way that the Iraq war was pursued undermines the ethical life of our society in every dimension.