I’d like to point all of the ardent supporters of the Iraq War to this post, by my Canadian Counterpart.
Responding to a commenter-( As I am to Lex’s commenter Steve C.)
In the comments, Mook makes a couple of interesting assertions that underscore both how batshit fucking crazy he is and how goddamned dumb the Bush administration is. You have to work awfully hard to be that uninformed and I don’t want him thinking that I don’t appreciate his effort. When Bill O’Reilly finally has the good sense to commit suicide, Mook is more than capable of taking over that chair.
First, he states “Vietnam is a fair parallel to Iraq in that it was a large scale war in which we were not seeking to conquer and rule the country,” which is true for what it’s worth. It just doesn’t happen to be worth much.
You see, Americans live with this adorable notion that people care what American motives are when the United States bombs or invades their country. I can assure you that they don’t. Americans can get away with this because they consume half of the world’s illegal drugs and possess half of its nuclear weapons. I learned a long time ago not to argue with heavily armed, stoned people and hopefully you did, too.
South Vietnamese villagers didn’t like having their huts burned down and accordingly worked with the Viet Cong more than they otherwise would have. The Filipinos didn’t enjoy being waterboarded and their liberation from Spain did little to alleviate that dislike. And I’m pretty sure that your average Iraqi doesn’t feel especially “free” when he can’t go to mosque without getting blown up. Also, replacing Abu Ghraib with, well, Abu Ghraib was probably less than wise. Just sayin’.
He then goes on to give a pretty detailed analysis of how the Bush administration and its political appointees inside DOD (Read-Rumsfeld and his lackeys) then proceeded to lay the foundation of how we got to where we were today. However, it is important to remember that until 2005 – the war in Iraq was not about anything but WMD, not terrorism or Al Qaeda. It was about trying to un-fuck what Paul Bremer did:
And you know what Iraq has been doing for the five years since “Mission Accomplished?” Importing gasoline. They sit on the second largest patch of it, but they’re actually importing it. Turns out that three decades of war and sanctions rips the tits off of your production and refinery capacity. Who knew?
More importantly, the suggestion that the resources of a conquered nation could be exploited to pay for the conquest sort of undercuts the assertion that it was an operation where “invader does not seek to control the invaded country.” The Wolfowitz plan would have been brilliantly original if the Germans hadn’t thought of it first. But it does explain why the only arm of the fallen Iraqi government that was protected when the looting started was the Ministry of Oil.
As to the planning of what “victory” would look like, the history is there for anyone who wants to read it. The planning of the war took a year and a half. The planning for the aftermath only started about 3 months before the invasion. America’s two proconsuls, Jay Garner and L. Paul Bremer arrived in Iraq mere weeks after their appointments and had no documented directives on what precisely they were expected to accomplish. That, in a nutshell, is how Iraq ended up with a fucking flat tax before it had anything that even remotely resembled security. It’s almost as if President Bush invaded a country to decide whether Steve Forbes was right all along.
Anyone who has read Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s majestic Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone knows that the Coalition Provisional Authority was little more than resume padding for budding young hacks from the Bush/Cheney 2000 campaign. If you once blew the guy who got coffee for the deputy director of lying in the Wyoming Republican Party, there was a better than even chance that you were going to rebuild Iraq’s electrical infrastructure. The results are obvious. Iraq still has no reliable electricity, but they do know all about the Bush vision of hack power. Of course, they already learned that from Saddam.
Worse still, the CPA went about attempting to sell off Iraqi state industries in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions, which explicity prohibit that sort of thing. That only further undercut the Bush administration’s already battered reputation for competence and respect for the rule of law.
Nonetheless according to Bush and company, we were making progress. And our cause was noble.
The action we take and the decisions we make in this decade will have consequences far into this century. If America shows weakness and uncertainty, the world will drift toward tragedy. That will not happen on my watch.
He got that right-our actions in Iraq have long term consequences-for the United States and for the rest of the world. They just were not the one’s Bush intended:
The Vietnam analogy is being bandied about quite a bit in the comments of my previous essay, and that’s worth exploring.
Mook contends that “we didn’t deliver any semblance of democracy in Vietnam or in the entire region, whereas Iraq has had democratic elections. Sure Iraq’s political alliances are fragile, but they are undeniably steps toward democracy like nothing we were able to accomplish in Vietnam. And so on. That progress in Iraq costing 4,000American lives vs. 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam.”
Categorical nonsense. South Vietnam had plenty of elections. They just didn’t mean a whole lot because those governments were incapable pf providing basic services, such as security, to their constituents. Sound familiar?
The Vietnam analogy also falls apart in the face of the “what if America wasn’t there in the first place” test. If America wasn’t in Vietnam, the north would have swallowed the south and bunch of people would have died. That’s tragic, but ultimately what happened anyway.
If America never went to Iraq, Saddam would be running a criminal government that targeted political dissidents and ethnic rivals. But since America went into Iraq the way that it did, anarchy has broken out where the violence is completely random and no one of any faction is safe. Worse still, a Kurdish declaration of independence remains a distinct possibility, which would provoke a Turkish invasion with the United States in the middle.
That’s your “superior planning, manpower and execution” at work.
And they call me deranged. And for having the temerity to point out all of these facts and more, somehow, some way, it is Martha Raddatz that comes out as the bad girl. Seems to me, the shoe is on the other foot:
To people like President Bush and Ms. Perino, this is not about the troops, the war, or even American foreign policy. Instead, it’s another exercise in “the press isn’t being fair to us.” It’s whining from people who pretend that they’re the only ones grown-up enough to to govern.
During his last press conference as president, Dwight Eisenhower was asked if he thought he was treated fairy by the media. In response he said “I don’t see what a reporter can do to a president, do you?”
That’s something that all of his successors forgot. Reporters don’t destroy presidencies, presidents do. And this one more than most. That’s something else that should be remembered on this, the fifth “Mission Accomplished” day.
Be as disgusted as you like, when people repeatedly point out that the Iraq war is like an old car that you just keep pouring money into when you know in your heart its time to junk it. The repairs will keep the car running, but you never know when its going to let you down.
Because it will. And that does not really solve your transportation problem does it?