This past week the president announced the deployment of 300 “military advisers” to Iraq in an effort to address concerns about recent territorial gains by the radical Sunni group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). This sparked outrage on the part of the coterie of statist reactionaries (not “conservatives” in any way) who started the 2003 Iraq invasion, all of whom wish to turn back the clock to the days when they had some say over what battalion of other people’s children may be sent to what hell-hole.
Of course, they already had their hair on fire about Obama’s foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Middle East. Once again, the alarm bell is cranked up to eleven … like it was for the capture of the Benghazi jihadist, and for the the Bergdahl deal, and for pretty much every thing that happens anywhere, every day of the week. Not sure why we should listen to people like Dan Senor, or John McCain, or Bill Kristol, or anyone else still on television after having been so fantastically wrong on what they were supposed to be experts about, but we keep hearing from them anyway. Go back into Iraq, they say … it’s the only way to keep the country from falling apart.
Fortunately (or not), there is virtually no evidence that American intervention has ever done any underdeveloped country any good at all; quite the opposite, in fact. Our efforts in Afghanistan in the 1980s to rid that country of its Soviet-backed government resulted in more than a generation of civil war, anarchy, and frankly worse government. Our backing of Saddam Hussein during that same period brought disaster to the region, and most sickeningly to Iraq itself; our subsequent removal of Hussein has resulted in calamitous loss of life and a rending of the Iraqi nation that will never be undone.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the very thing advocated by war-lovers like McCain is a primary driver of the current crisis. We have, in fact, been aiding the opposition in Syria, both directly and through proxies in the Gulf. Just as happened in Afghanistan in the 80’s, we have invested in an unstable force whose most aggressive and bellicose elements McCain and others are insisting we must now bomb to smithereens in neighboring Iraq.
When are we going to stop being guided by people who are so reliably wrong?
luv u,
jp
First of all, they were not high-value detainees. They were leadership within the Taliban regime of the 1990s – 2001, yes, but they were not implicated in the deaths of any Americans. Nor were they captured at great cost, as has been suggested by some. Two or more of them turned themselves in; others were turned in by Pakistani intelligence, probably in exchange for some payment. Will they return to “the fight”? Well, that may be, but keeping Guantanamo open all these years has inspired more (younger) people to join the fight than we could ever release from that legal limbo on Cuban soil. A lot of people want us dead; are we that worried, really?
Already, I have heard more about the numbers of killed in Syrian than I ever heard about the Iraq catastrophe. Again, no surprise. The government and the press meticulously count the victims of official enemies, but when it comes to the corpses generated by our misguided policies, we don’t do body counts. They still won’t put a realistic number on the lives lost in Iraq, hovering around the casual 30K guess Bush made in 2007 or so. I suppose once we have both legs in the mire of this conflict they will stop counting again. But for now, the statistics are useful – they are trying to push the American people closer to intervention, and it’s evident that the effort isn’t working very well. Less than one in four is in favor of intervention.