A ten year perspective on Iraq!
So, now we are ten years out from the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
We were among the many who argued vainly against this invasion before it began. It has been said that at the time of the invasion, only twenty five percent of the American public was against the military action that took place. It is interesting to note that the Syrian dictator Assad recently said that he wanted to know where the intellectuals were on the side of the opposition inside of Syria. He seemed to equate the lack of any intellectual underpinning to the war that is going on there to the lack of legitimacy in his eyes to what the rebels are waging against him and his regime. Someone had apparently told him that this might make a good talking point in a speech that tried to rally the troops. What had probably happened was that Assad had imprisoned or killed any intellectual underpinning to anything but himself if his claim was to be believed at all.
We suppose that we were among the intellectuals arguing against the 2003 invasion and there, as we recall, were no lack of them around at that time. People of all stripes and persuasions were against this war at the time, however, their voices and their words were drowned out in the rush to war. We were among those who posed the simple question: if we are to take out Saddam Hussein, will this set a precedent that we must take out every evil minded dictator in this world; and, can we afford the manpower and the national treasure to accomplish that feat. That did not mean that Saddam was not a bad man. He was a bad man and he was brutal to the people in his nation when he wanted to be. However, we just heard news the other day that the new leader in North Korea has expanded the gulags that contain his enemies in the last year or so. But, the leader of North Korea has the bomb!
It is interesting to note that Saddam forwent his weapons of mass destruction and ended up losing both his regime and his life. The leading cleric in Iran once told Kaddafi in Libya that if he forwent his weapons, that he would be overthrown just as well! And now we have the specter of an Iran who is not going to forgo their weapons of mass destruction. Just another legacy of the Bush invasion of 2003?
We also postulated that the very best democracies are those who gain their own freedom through internal actions of their own. Everyone looks to the United States as the best example of a long standing democracy, however, we fought our lonely war for freedom alone without help from the outside against the mighty British empire for over five years before any help came from the French! We had placed the bedrock of a democracy in place in the faces of the continental army that were the first true Americans and also those who had risked their lives and fortunes for the cause that they began. It would be in the mid 1820’s before the last of them, in the persons of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, faded from the scene on the same fourth of July day. If one wants to talk about intellectuals, revolutionary war America had a slew of them!
As we look at Iraq today, we have gotten little from our time spent there other than 4, 400 deaths and around thirty thousand life altering injuries that will affect this nation for generations to come as we care for those who we dispatched to war who can no longer really care for themselves. It has been said that it will be seven decades before our obligations to Iraqi veterans come to an end. We backed the wrong horses in the wake of the invasion and those steeds have basically turned against us and are now growing closer and closer to our main nemesis in the region--Iran.
If anything, Iran has grown stronger because of the Iraq invasion. So many in Iraq today do not look favorably on America because of the many blunders that took place after we conquered their nation. In the 2000 presidential debates, George W. Bush stated that he would engage in no nation building, and he didn’t really lie. He and his team did a very poor job of it and what came out at the end was nothing like what they had envisioned that it might be. Don Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, made glowing pre invasion pronouncements about how we would be viewed as liberators and how Iraq would become the model for a Middle East made over in the image that the Bushies thought democracy should be. We have seen, in the Arab spring, what a difficult thing creating something other than a dictatorship can really be.
It is so easy to forget that the Iraqi dictator that we over threw in 2003 fought an almost decade long debilitating war against the cleric led theocracy in Tehran as our proxy in the region. We created the huge army that Saddam had and the first Bush took care of that in 1991 with the first entanglement with Iraq when he basically placed Saddam Hussein in a box. We could have gone for generations keeping him there with much less loss of treasure and manpower than we expended in what George the second chose to do in 2003.
Everyone grows old and dies and Saddam would have eventually passed from the scene!
We left Iraq in 2011 because the regime in Baghdad would not negotiate a terms of force agreement that would have protected our remaining troops there from the eccentricies of the Iraqi legal system. This is a prerequisite to our maintaining troops anywhere in the world, much less Iraq. And, now, we face an erratic leader in our remaining war zone in the presence of Afghanistan leader Hammed Karzai, who now accuses us of colluding with the Taliban in some crazy scheme to prolong our presence there.
One of the great lessons of Iraq and the entire Middle East may be the fact that these extremely religious based people who pray to Allah five times and day and for long periods every Friday may simply not be the stuff that traditional democracies are made of! It takes the right temperament and education and social and political climate to create a democracy and all that we may have accomplished in Iraq is hastening the day when our own temperament may also turn us away from democracy. An American population which arms itself voluntarily against the supposed excesses of its democratically elected government may become a nation that will, through the imaginings and posturing of elements within it, become a nation that violently destroys itself one day. After all, there are four million guns in the lands of its military and police forces and almost three hundred million arrayed against them in any potential war. If a future American leader has to use the force available to him to constantly put down these misguided insurrections at home, will what he has to do to preserve this democracy actually turn him into another version of Saddam and destroy the essence of this nation along the way? All it would take is someone else made up like George W. Bush! We might tell ourselves that could never happen again. But truth has a habit of usually being stranger than fiction and history can be a repetitious thing!
We took a trip recently with a group of senior citizens on their way to a day of fun in a neighboring town and all that many of them could talk about was how the government was trying to take their guns away! We said very little but we wondered just what these people would do if they knew that those behind the push to get them to believe what they believe are the same ones who would like to take their pensions and their benefits away from them at a time in their lives when they have no more earning power or energy to do anything much about it. It has just been noted in the press how a couple of major coal companies spun their pension and health liabilities off into a company, by design, that became immediately overloaded with them and declared bankruptcy, destroying the economic lives of some of the hardest working people in dangerous occupations on this earth.
This nation has come a long way down the road since that fateful day in March of 2003 when this whole thing got under way. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld stated to us unequivocally that the invasion and everything else surround it would not cost more than fifty billion dollars and would be paid for out of Iraqi oil revenues. They scoffed at the ideas floated by some that it might end up being three hundred billion dollars before it was all done. And now it looks as if it might be between two and three trillion dollars before it is all done. And we didn’t even get many of the oil contracts!
The United States is viewed differently in the world today than it has been in the past. Instead of being the great champion of democracy who only reacts after it has been attacked, we are now viewed as a potential aggressor if the right political party and the right administration inhabits the White House. It should never be forgotten that those surrounding Mitt Romney’s campaign in the areas of defense and foreign policy were the same people who surrounded George W. Bush back in 2002 and 2003. And, they are growing older very slowly and are breeding more of their kind in the many think tanks that the Koch brothers are funding around the nation. The world knows this and they will never really ever trust us as they once did again. They may be throwing money at us to fund our burgeoning debt, but, they are also watching their backs!
At the end of the Cold War in the late 1980’s, this nation had a golden opportunity to remake itself as the great shadows of the past gave way to limitless opportunities for a better and less militaristic future. Adventures such as Iraq and Afghanistan have, instead, given us a defense budget that is the largest that it has ever been in our history as we fight phantom and real terrorists who operate with literally no budget at all. It surely goes without saying that the United States defense budge ranges between as much as the rest of the worlds nations defense budgets combined or at least the next fifteen nations below it, depending on how it is measured. We had around five trillion dollars of debt and a glowing economy when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took the oath of office in January of 2001. Now, twelve years later the situation that we are in economically reminds us of Germany towards the end of Hitler’s twelve year Reich that was to last a thousand years. We find ourselves floating in debt and on a path that can lead no where good.
Is there a solution to prevent all of this from happening again?
After he was elected president in 2008, Barack Obama made a decision not to pursue any charges against Mr. Bush and his team. Obama said that it did not appear that any wrong doing had taken place. That no laws had been broken. Even in the face of all the evidence to the contrary that showed that Bush and Cheney and the rest had followed a reckless road filled with half truths, no truth, and downright deception partially clothed in shared intelligence that so many inside the intelligence community knew was questionable and bad, the president chose to follow the path of people like Gerald Ford who had pardoned Richard Nixon to spare the nation the grief of trying him for what he had done. In point of fact, so much of what has plagued the country has come from that decision to let Richard Nixon go free. Perceptive people in places of authority and power got the signal that breaking the law was an acceptable thing to do. And the populous also got the signal that they had better take precautions to protect themselves from a government that would not enforce legal and moral obligations that it had accrued.
The idea that bringing a national leader to justice might affect what a future leader could do, in effect, led to what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney chose to do because they were reasonably sure that they could get away with it. It is our contention that prosecuting Nixon might have prevented that from happening. It surely would have aided in Ford’s reelection which might have prevented Ronald Wilson Reagan from ever coming to power with all of the subsequent actions that have led to the neoconservative problems that we now have. And, make no mistake about it, the neoconservatives are a major problem. As we have discussed in previous pieces, they are, in our view, nothing more than a cult! They constantly chant their rosary of low taxes, small government and deregulation and will not deviate from any of it as they listen to leaders who take their orders from the very wealthy who control it all.
If we are to move this nation back to a safe and democratic course, the laws must be applied and justice must be done for Bush, Cheney and the rest. At the end of the Second World War, the trials at Nuremberg set the course for generations to follow. All of that has now been cast into the dustbin of history by the decision that Barack Obama chose to make. At the time that he made it, we faced great economic perils. Those immediate perils are now mostly behind us and it is time for justice to be served. If we do not do it, we send a signal to the neoconservatives that what Bush did was a model for them to follow in their future endeavors when they eventually come back to power once again.
There will always be another Saddam, and another excuse to fight another war!
When discussing Bush and Cheney with a religious cleric friend some time ago, we postulated that there should be Christian forgiveness. He simply replied that there is forgiveness but there is also justice too!
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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