Iraq is a mess. Our mess! Was it worth taking down Saddam Hussein?
The mess that we made of Iraq just won’t go away and we can’t seem to clean it up.
Can anybody really be surprised?
The Bush administration had it wrong from the beginning. We are still paying for Bush’s great miscalculation! (Note: I’m being way too generous by calling it a miscalculation.)
No succeeding president, Republican or Democrat, could have saved our nation from this perturbing headache that Iraq has now become to us—this thorn in the flesh, this pebble in the shoe, this gnat in the eye that Iraq is to us. Thorn, pebble, gnat, whatever it is, it plagues us and is sure to become a swelling infectious wound in our nation’s body, sensitive to the touch, full of pus, eventually needing cutting, cleaning, and suturing.
Here’s the trump card argument: we don’t want to have sacrificed our military’s finest, men and women alike, for nothing. What a waste that would be! The sacrifice of our young must not be allowed to be an empty one. But what if it was destined to be so from the beginning? What if that is the very point?
It is true. We should never needlessly sacrifice our young. Going to war is a nation’s call for its young to make the greatest sacrifice of all, the surrendering up of one’s life for one’s country. This is why we should never have preemptively struck at Iraq in the first place.
WE started it! We bigheadedly and arrogantly thought Iraq would be a cinch to take care of. We thought it would be a quick, in-and-out job. How ever-so wrong we were! With the benefit of hindsight, we obviously see how ridiculously simple-minded and naïve we were to have thought so.
But there were those who didn’t need hindsight, they foresaw the inevitable. Do we remember? There were some who vehemently warned against pouncing on Iraq with a preemptive strike? Do we remember how the naysayers were talked down, ridiculed, laughed at, and accused of being unpatriotic? Basically they were told to shut up—with an accusatory “you’re either with us or against us” attitude. It would seem that the same people who shouted down the naysayers back then are the ones who are now saying that Obama is mishandling Iraq and perhaps is even the cause of this present day mess Iraq is in.
Reality Check!
1. The cause of Iraq’s present day mess is President G. W. Bush’s decision to declare war against Saddam Hussein with a preemptive strike, naïvely believing that it was only about taking-out Saddam, having no exit plan, and having no understanding of the volatile and complex dynamics between and within the Iraqi people—social, political, historical, cultural, religious, etc. He opened a Pandora’s Box, bringing chaos and disorder to Iraq, which perhaps only a demigod could restore. That is, G. W. Bush effectively assured failure for any president following him, to bring peace and stability to Iraq afterward.
2. No amount of military might and striking power, as exercised by the US, will effectively subdue all the Iraqi people to do our bidding and force them to pursue our preferred outcomes. We may be “the most powerful nation in the world,” but we are in no position to dictate to the Iraqi people and call their steps, as if we could have them dance to our every tune.
3. The Iraqi people, of whatever side they fall on, understand our true motive for being in Iraq at all. They know that we are really only there because of their oil reserves. That is our deepest and truest national interest in Iraq. We want cheap safe and uninhibited access to their oil. Because of that, we want them to form a government that will “favor” the U.S. for negotiating profitable business deals in that direction. That’s the outcome we would like to dictate and command.
4. The Iraqi people also clearly see our greatest weakness. We, the American people, have grown tired of this war. We can no longer stomach the constant sacrificing of our young for the sake of a foreign people in a foreign land, with a foreign agenda—oil fields or not. Yet, we still want that oil, so we are caught between a rock and a hard place. We are there with a lukewarm heart, pursing a very selfish interest, with a growing dislike for their climate and all that that climate entails. Thus, Iraqi special interest groups (religious, political…, whatever), know that time is on their side. They have to live there, we don’t!
5. And finally, we have our own internal political fighting going on, which contributes to further instability. Instead of uniting to find the best solutions or to make the most advantageous decisions possible for resolving our dilemma in Iraq, our politicians are themselves busy playing politics. Our politicians are more interested in internal division, more concerned with scoring political points against their political opponents, by what they say and do, than they are in actually cooperating and working together in a unified way to clean up and resolve the Iraqi mess—for they don’t want to give their political opponents any credit for a job well done, of any kind, at any time, in any situation, including the situation in Iraq.
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