From Iraq to Ukraine: A Pattern of Disaster
The War Party’s record is no hits, all errors.
Eleven years ago this week the United States invaded Iraq – an event the late General William E. Odom rightly called the biggest strategic disaster in US military history. The decade since that catastrophe proves one thing about US policymakers: they’ve changed their tactics without learning a thing.
Iraq today is a seething cauldron of religious and ethnic hatreds: a full-scale civil war is in progress, with Sunnis in open rebellion against the majority Shi’ites. As I write this, the latest news is that a car bomb exploding in Baghdad killed 19 people – in addition to another bomb north of the capital killing 2 and wounding 6. And that’s just in the past twenty-four hours: violence has escalated dramatically this year. The US is sending more arms to the government, including 100 Hellfire missiles – a government, by the way, that is staunchly pro-Iranian and which asked us politely but firmly to leave.
< snip >
Our enormous failure in Iraq exhausted us, not only financially but also morally and psychologically. Not that the war hawks of Washington were the least bit deterred by their abysmal failure: it was the American people who began to wonder if perhaps it hadn’t been worth the lives, the destruction of an entire country, and the rise of militant anti-Americanism on a world scale. In reaction, ordinary Americans became increasingly vocal about the need to stay out of the world’s intractable conflicts and instead tend to business at home.
The political class didn’t pay much attention at first, only modifying their approach. Instead of simply invading, in the Bushian fashion, the strategy was to utilize proxies as a temporary expedient, while laying the groundwork for more direct overtly military intervention. Libya was supposed to be the model: this was preceded by a big propaganda campaign, in which our credulous mainstream media picked up the administration’s "imminent humanitarian disaster" talking point and ran with it. That the alleged site of this impending massacre of the rebels by Qadaffi’s men was supposed to have taken place in Benghazi underscores how and why this new strategy began backfiring from the start.
Read More At:
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2014/03/16/from-iraq-to-ukraine-a-pattern-of-disaster/
WOLF! WOLF! WOLF! War! War! War! Epic Fail! Epic Fail! Epic Fail! The neocons have a perfect record, failure at every turn.
And now they want us to go to war with Russia! Gee I wonder how that would turn out?
