Madame:
Thank you for your
comments. I will keep working on it.
A tardy Happy Father’s
Day to all fathers. I am posting this
behind schedule for that very reason!
Many subjects could be
discussed at the moment. Before we
return to lighter summer fare, let me light amplify SOME on our Iraq “policy.”
Iraq is an example of
why history is so important. To really
understand the Iraq of today, and especially, to have a meaningful clue as to
how to address issues there, one needs to go back at least to the 1920s, and
really, probably to the 600s or even earlier.
That mosaic is far too intricate to reproduce here, but suffice to say
that decisions made are still reverberating with impact even today.
Because America doesn’t
care to understand history like that, its “policies” don’t have lasting
strength, they don’t have logic and true buy-in, and they end up blowing back
(to borrow from the title of a must-read book) on us. Further ironically, they don’t even work in
the short-term. We don’t have meaningful
or informed discussion prior to “formulating” those policies, and we grasp at
flailing ropes (which could be snakes for all we know) when another perpetual “crisis” appears that seems to “demand”
our national treasure and the lives of not just our people. but many people.
Look at the Iraq mess
(which the unscrupulous are using for their own political and economic and
other selfish ends). We intervened on at
best dubious circumstances (there were no weapons of mass destruction—as any
regional specialist worth his salt knew that Saddam would try to make Iran (the
historical enemy of Iraq) think that he had those weapons even if he didn’t;
there were no terrorists—certainly none connected to 9/11—not because Iraq was
a nice place; Saddam was a murderous
Stalinesque ruler—but because he didn’t
like them because they weren’t controllable).
We had no real plan, no end game, no think through. We improvised when we were “surprised” that
things didn’t go well in the aftermath, and then had to support yet another corrupt/incompetent/repressive/petty
regime (how many times, AmeriRome, are you going to do that?) that we had
little faith in (and, it turns out, neither did its people), and that our very
own counter-insurgency/nation-building doctrine said was doomed to fail because
of that fact.
So today we have an Iraq
that was formerly one of the most secular places in the whole region now becoming
militanized and religious extremized. We
have a mixed bag of people opposing a brutal and pathetic regime, but with the
most effective of that mixed bag of opponents happening to be ruthlessly terroristic
and medieval in outlook. A group,
however, that appears to have little interest outside Iraq and its immediate
surroundings, and virtually none in wanting to strike at American targets on
American soil.
And that could all
change from the first bomb or missile of American intervention.
So: 1) we have created or vastly magnified the
power of terrorists where previously there was virtually none, and 2) we have
painted ourselves into a corner, where almost all our options look various
shades of bad, almost no one trusts us, and there is virtually no confidence we
will do the right thing.
That willful ignorance
thing of ours is the knife in our own hand applied wildly and uncomprehendingly
to our own back.
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