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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"The Grandsons of Iraq"-- Fighting Until Hell Freezes Over
by
Peter Van Buren
Americas wars in the Middle East exist in a hallucinatory space where reality is of little import, so if you think you heard all this before, between 2003 and 2010, you did.
The Grandsons of Iraq
The staggering costs of all this -- $25 billion to train the Iraqi Army, $60 billion for the reconstruction-that-wasnt, $2 trillion for the overall war, almost 4,500 Americans dead and more than 32,000 wounded, and an Iraqi death toll of more than190,000 (though some estimates go as high as a million) -- can now be measured against the results. The nine-year attempt to create an American client state in Iraq failed, tragically and completely. The proof of that is on today's front pages.
According to the crudest possible calculation, we spent blood and got no oil. Instead, America's war of terror resulted in the dissolution of a Middle Eastern post-Cold War stasis that, curiously enough, had been held together by Iraqs previous autocratic ruler Saddam Hussein. We released a hornets nest of Islamic fervor, sectarianism, fundamentalism, and pan-nationalism. Islamic terror groups grew stronger and more diffuse by the year. That horrible lightning over the Middle East thats left American foreign policy in such an ugly glare will last into our grandchildren's days. There should have been so many futures. Now, there will be so few as the dead accumulate in the ruins of our hubris. That is all that we won.
Under a new president, elected in 2008 in part on his promise to end American military involvement in Iraq, Washingtons strategy morphed into the more media-palatable mantra of no boots on the ground. Instead, backed by aggressive intel and the surgical application of drone strikes and other kinds of air power, U.S. covert ops were to link up with the moderate elements in Islamic governments or among the rebels opposing them -- depending on whether Washington was opting to support a thug government or thug fighters.
Americas wars in the Middle East exist in a hallucinatory space where reality is of little import, so if you think you heard all this before, between 2003 and 2010, you did.The results? Chaos in Libya, highlighted by the flow of advanced weaponry from the arsenals of the dead autocrat Muammar Gaddafi across the Middle East and significant parts of Africa, chaos in Yemen, chaos in Syria, chaos in Somalia, chaos in Kenya, chaos in South Sudan, and, of course, chaos in Iraq.
And then came the Islamic State (IS) and the new caliphate, the child born of a neglectful occupation and an autocratic Shia government out to put the Sunnis in their place once and for all. And suddenly we were heading back into Iraq. What, in August 2014, was initially promoted as a limited humanitarian effort to save the Yazidis, a small religious sect that no one in Washington or anywhere else in this country had previously heard of, quickly morphed into those 1,600 American troops back on the ground in Iraq and American planes in the skies from Kurdistan in the north to south of Baghdad. The Yazidis were either abandoned, or saved, or just not needed anymore. Who knows and who, by then, cared? They had, after all, served their purpose handsomely as the casus belli of this war. Their agony at least had a horrific reality, unlike the supposed attack in the Gulf of Tonkin that propelled a widening war in Vietnam in 1964 or the nonexistent Iraqi WMDs that were the excuse for the invasion of 2003.
The newest Iraq war features Special Operations trainers, air strikes against IS fighters using American weapons abandoned by the Iraqi Army (now evidently to be resupplied by Washington), U.S. aircraft taking to the skies from inside Iraq as well as a carrier in the Persian Gulf and possibly elsewhere, and an air war across the border into Syria
It Takes a Lot of Turning Points To Go In a Circle
The truth on the ground these days is tragically familiar: an Iraq even more divided into feuding state-lets; a Baghdad government kleptocracy about to be reinvigorated by free-flowing American money; and a new Shia prime minister being issued the same 2003-2011 to-do list by Washington: mollify the Sunnis, unify Iraq, and make it snappy. The State Department still stays hidden behind the walls of that billion-dollar embassy. More money will be spent to train the collapsed Iraqi military. Iran remains the foreign power with the most influence over events.
One odd difference should be noted, however: in the last Iraq war, the Iranians sponsored and directed attacks by Shia militias against American occupation forces (and me); now, its special operatives and combat advisors fight side-by-side with those same Shia militias under the cover of American air power. You want real boots on the ground? Iranian forces are already there. Its certainly an example of how politics makes strange bedfellows, but also of what happens when you assemble your strategy on the run.
Much More at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/09/23/apocalypse-now-iraq-edition
Peter Van Buren spent a year in Iraq as a State Department Foreign Service Officer serving as Team Leader for two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). Now in Washington, he writes about Iraq and the Middle East at his blog, We Meant Well. His new book is We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books).
cali
(114,904 posts)leftstreet
(36,108 posts)closeupready
(29,503 posts)So there's always that.
grahamhgreen
(15,741 posts)Hubert Flottz
(37,726 posts)I predicted a meltdown in the entire middle east when BushCo invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. I predicted that the destabilization would never stop at the borders of Iraq and Afghanistan and I'm a damned pile driver! How the duce could the "Experts" failed to deduce this bloody, chaotic, state of affairs? Did our government not see what happened when we stuck our noses into Vietnam and then couldn't afford to stay forever?
KoKo
(84,711 posts)perhaps a New Generation forgot the lessons. Why that could have happened I don't know. We were "In the Streets" trying to stop Iraq Invasion under Bush. I feel Many of Us developed the Netroots Activism once Windows 95 allowed those of us who weren't so computer literate to get online and start post and ORGANIZING....AND THEN.......as time went on "Something Evil Happened to Us."
I'm still thinking about what that was. Forgetting what went before got blotted out.....And.....here we are ....
KoKo
(84,711 posts)It is well worth the read or Bookmark for when one has time...
Shameless
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