War, we are told, is a rational instrument of policy. States go to war to achieve specific objectives.
On such a view, determining the outcome of a war is a kind of bookkeeping exercise. One need only measure the results against the original purposes.
But war is far too wily a beast to be made sense of by such simple calculations. War draws combatants, their societies and politics, into its vortex and forever changes them. It does so not just once, but over and over again, until people forget who they were before the guns started firing.
War has a tendency to generate uncertainties and ambiguities of the most fundamental kind, about who is winning, about what has happened, and about just who we are.
At a moment of supreme - if relative - world power, the US invaded Iraq in March 2003 to prevent Saddam Hussein from rising from the ashes of the sanctions regime of the 1990s. The US sought also to supplant a hostile Iraq with a friendly American client. Iraq would be a base from which to exercise US influence and a replacement for the pliant Gulf monarchies, whose stability in the face of al-Qaeda was then far from assured.
For political consumption, and for gullible idealists, these goals were packaged as the threat of WMD and the spread of democracy.
A mere three years later, the most powerful armed forces in human history were facing defeat at the hands of a many-sided ragtag insurgency. Each pinprick attack in Iraq bled popular support from the war in the US, and made the dream of a stable, democratic Iraq seem fantastical. Meanwhile, around the world, US legitimacy lay in tatters: stained with the WMD that never were, the chains of Abu Ghraib and the blood of Fallujah.
Most of all, the US' reputation as the unquestioned superpower was destroyed. The war in Iraq brought an end to the American century.
Thanks Scumbags!
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/2011121612513597434.html
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