Saturday saw the last significant combat troops leave Iraq, bringing to a dithering and anti-climactic end major American ground involvement in Iraq. I won’t bring up how much we resemble the Roman wastage and pointlessness of nearly 2000 years ago. I’ll stick to more recent events.
As Chuck Hagel said in his Sept 11 column this year (about 9/11), we dramatically overreacted, overreached, and became so intellectually and morally lazy as to be easily manipulated by those with inordinately selfish agendas. We committed to foreign and domestic involvements far beyond our capacity to finance them, let alone whether they could have been successful policy (they almost certainly could not have been).
And now, trillions of dollars (which we didn’t have and had to largely borrow) and many thousands of scarred or lost lives later, we leave, with many Iraqis’ good riddance.
Can’t blame them. We f’d up their country’s economy and infrastructure, shoved them aside, inspired terrorism, and made possible heavy Iranian influence.
Because when it comes to foreign policy, we’re selfish, immature, morons. Others have told the story of how the trumped up march to war seems, now that we are a bit clearer, like corrupt madness emplaced by those who would in another era be called war criminals. Some others have chronicled how we blew the occupation, the transition, the sovereignty. Still others have told how financially corrupt we were, how much we enriched the companies of the national security apparatus, that at times their wealth enrichment seemed to be the ONLY real objective of our invasion.
Because, nope, there weren’t weapons of mass destruction. Our intelligence agencies may or may not have known that, but since they didn’t allow the regional experts to speak to power (and those powers would have ignored them even if they had), we overlooked the blatantly obvious: Saddam Hussein and Iraq had/have a historical arch-enemy—the Persians/Iranians. Saddam was wily and clever—too clever for his own good, it turns out, especially where it concerned arrogant, cowboy American neo-conservatives—in making the world think he had those weapons. But he needed the world to think that, not because of phantasmal “threats” to Israel, the US, and the West, but because he needed that regional power to the east to think that.
And we got rid of both the belief and the force behind that belief (and no, I shed no tears for SH or any of the murderous dictators of history). And what do we fear as too powerful now? Iran, of course.
Charles Krauthammer’s analysis of Iraq is primitive, parochial-partisan, and far off the mark: no one “lost” Iraq, as it was never “ours” to win. The Obama administration, for all its problems, did not “blow” it. A foreign occupying force had been there long enough, under arrogant and infuriating (to the Iraqis) circumstances. It was time to go. That’s why NATO, which had a far smaller and far more successful and Iraqi-respected mission there, also had to leave: the Iraqis had had enough of the West wanting special privileges—for their troops and their countries in general. Thank the heavens for the situation in Iraq that Al-Qaeda was such a bunch of murderous fanatics there. The Iraqi people found a semblance of common cause, and not only many former insurgents, but the civilian population also, turned on the terrorists. THAT’S the primary reason that the effectiveness of the terrorists there has been much reduced. A terrorism, btw, that did not exist prior to our invasion (Saddam had no connection to 9/11 or Al-Qaeda).
We seem unable to get it in our short-term, infantile foreign affairs skulls that petty modern dictators come and go with pathetic regularity. Human mortality ensures that they don’t last even when they can last a good while, and the descendants/successors of such dictators are usually either partially inept, or unable to deal with the forces that the tyranny of their predecessors have brought into volatility. If the desire for freedom is one of the strongest urges, why would we think such authoritarian systems would be long-term viable? John Adams once warned us not to “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” That goes a hundred-fold for petty ones.
In Lancelot’s words, “we have lost our way, Arthur.”
Such are the ways of hegemons. Obsessed with both the arrogance of their power, and their insatiable “need” for “security,” they spend themselves erecting shoddy, transitory structures on foreign lands. Structures doomed to collapse and fail because of faulty foundations—that the hegemons themselves have ensured are undermined.
Sure, the Iraqis have a big mess in front of them. Not only do they have to deal with the messes we left them (and the corruption we helped along—and it didn’t need much), but the possibility of sectarian warfare always looms, and they have to deal with their historical arch-enemy from a position of semi-supplicant weakness. Our hope is that they will eventually sort it out, and that the up and coming generations do not hold America responsible for too much. Then relations with the (historically) fairly secular Iraqis can begin at something near “normal.”
As for ourselves, to turn around a Churchill phrase: Once again, so much was expended, and so much risked, for so little. And so much damage done to others—and especially to ourselves. We are notably weaker because of this conflict we initiated. America will be done in if it keeps having historical amnesia and keeps involving itself in wars that serve neither true national interest nor the true interests of the international community.
This people and this culture are inherently complicit in this failure to ask insightful questions and demand hard answers. Lack of interest in history and politics keeps giving these results. We were the ones who were only too willing to march to war, to not think through to the end, to not ask enough questions, to utterly and arrogantly NOT seek to truly understand the actions of international actors.
Guess whose ass REALLY got kicked?
As Chuck Hagel said in his Sept 11 column this year (about 9/11), we dramatically overreacted, overreached, and became so intellectually and morally lazy as to be easily manipulated by those with inordinately selfish agendas. We committed to foreign and domestic involvements far beyond our capacity to finance them, let alone whether they could have been successful policy (they almost certainly could not have been).
And now, trillions of dollars (which we didn’t have and had to largely borrow) and many thousands of scarred or lost lives later, we leave, with many Iraqis’ good riddance.
Can’t blame them. We f’d up their country’s economy and infrastructure, shoved them aside, inspired terrorism, and made possible heavy Iranian influence.
Because when it comes to foreign policy, we’re selfish, immature, morons. Others have told the story of how the trumped up march to war seems, now that we are a bit clearer, like corrupt madness emplaced by those who would in another era be called war criminals. Some others have chronicled how we blew the occupation, the transition, the sovereignty. Still others have told how financially corrupt we were, how much we enriched the companies of the national security apparatus, that at times their wealth enrichment seemed to be the ONLY real objective of our invasion.
Because, nope, there weren’t weapons of mass destruction. Our intelligence agencies may or may not have known that, but since they didn’t allow the regional experts to speak to power (and those powers would have ignored them even if they had), we overlooked the blatantly obvious: Saddam Hussein and Iraq had/have a historical arch-enemy—the Persians/Iranians. Saddam was wily and clever—too clever for his own good, it turns out, especially where it concerned arrogant, cowboy American neo-conservatives—in making the world think he had those weapons. But he needed the world to think that, not because of phantasmal “threats” to Israel, the US, and the West, but because he needed that regional power to the east to think that.
And we got rid of both the belief and the force behind that belief (and no, I shed no tears for SH or any of the murderous dictators of history). And what do we fear as too powerful now? Iran, of course.
Charles Krauthammer’s analysis of Iraq is primitive, parochial-partisan, and far off the mark: no one “lost” Iraq, as it was never “ours” to win. The Obama administration, for all its problems, did not “blow” it. A foreign occupying force had been there long enough, under arrogant and infuriating (to the Iraqis) circumstances. It was time to go. That’s why NATO, which had a far smaller and far more successful and Iraqi-respected mission there, also had to leave: the Iraqis had had enough of the West wanting special privileges—for their troops and their countries in general. Thank the heavens for the situation in Iraq that Al-Qaeda was such a bunch of murderous fanatics there. The Iraqi people found a semblance of common cause, and not only many former insurgents, but the civilian population also, turned on the terrorists. THAT’S the primary reason that the effectiveness of the terrorists there has been much reduced. A terrorism, btw, that did not exist prior to our invasion (Saddam had no connection to 9/11 or Al-Qaeda).
We seem unable to get it in our short-term, infantile foreign affairs skulls that petty modern dictators come and go with pathetic regularity. Human mortality ensures that they don’t last even when they can last a good while, and the descendants/successors of such dictators are usually either partially inept, or unable to deal with the forces that the tyranny of their predecessors have brought into volatility. If the desire for freedom is one of the strongest urges, why would we think such authoritarian systems would be long-term viable? John Adams once warned us not to “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” That goes a hundred-fold for petty ones.
In Lancelot’s words, “we have lost our way, Arthur.”
Such are the ways of hegemons. Obsessed with both the arrogance of their power, and their insatiable “need” for “security,” they spend themselves erecting shoddy, transitory structures on foreign lands. Structures doomed to collapse and fail because of faulty foundations—that the hegemons themselves have ensured are undermined.
Sure, the Iraqis have a big mess in front of them. Not only do they have to deal with the messes we left them (and the corruption we helped along—and it didn’t need much), but the possibility of sectarian warfare always looms, and they have to deal with their historical arch-enemy from a position of semi-supplicant weakness. Our hope is that they will eventually sort it out, and that the up and coming generations do not hold America responsible for too much. Then relations with the (historically) fairly secular Iraqis can begin at something near “normal.”
As for ourselves, to turn around a Churchill phrase: Once again, so much was expended, and so much risked, for so little. And so much damage done to others—and especially to ourselves. We are notably weaker because of this conflict we initiated. America will be done in if it keeps having historical amnesia and keeps involving itself in wars that serve neither true national interest nor the true interests of the international community.
This people and this culture are inherently complicit in this failure to ask insightful questions and demand hard answers. Lack of interest in history and politics keeps giving these results. We were the ones who were only too willing to march to war, to not think through to the end, to not ask enough questions, to utterly and arrogantly NOT seek to truly understand the actions of international actors.
Guess whose ass REALLY got kicked?
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