Trying to write the history of the Iraq adventure is sad and about
historical inevitability. Inevitable because once good will
evaporates, sectarian power beckons and genocide ensues. The USA
merely broke all the china.
Worse, it disbanded the police and military in place, making it
impossible to escape until it was reconstituted. That is why it took
ten years.
Pile on top a total lack of strategic sense and we have the present
festering pickle. Worse we threw away all possible strategic options
and now stand by waving our finger.
The political truth that needs to be addressed is that we are still
dismembering the Ottoman Empire. The original effort was a horrid
western construct imposed on populations willy nilly. Whatever ends
were served in the time and place, they are now both obsolete and
actually dangerous as we are discovering to our horror.
There is obviously a Greater Kurdistan inside Iraq, Turkey and Iran.
Either we establish a conference to negotiate a new effective
boundary including the facilitation of population transfer as desired
by individual choice or this just continues to fester. The same
holds true for Iran and Shite Iraq and plausibly disparate parts of
Iran.
Just as surely we have Greater Sunni Syria and yes there is an
Alawite homeland there somewhere.
This is all about geography because war eliminates goodwill. The
establishment of good borders makes for good neighbors as time
progresses.
As this item makes rather clear, the USA blundered badly. They broke
the strategic balance, unstable as it was and left far too late after
a foul attempt at reconstruction.
I once posted that the best strategic solution was to rotate American
forces into the Kurdish Sector and hunker down. In time, multiple
peace treaties and settlements would allow the USA to downgrade its
presence.
Mission
Unaccomplished: Why the Invasion of Iraq Was the Single Worst Foreign
Policy Decision in American History
by Peter Van
Buren
Published on Thursday,
March 7, 2013 by
I was there. And
“there” was nowhere. And nowhere was the place to be if you
wanted to see the signs of end times for the American Empire up
close. It was the place to be if you wanted to see the madness -- and
oh yes, it was madness -- not filtered through a complacent and
sleepy media that made Washington’s war policy seem, if not
sensible, at least sane and serious enough. I stood at Ground Zero of
what was intended to be the new centerpiece for aPax Americana in
the Greater Middle East.
Not to put too fine a
point on it, but the invasion of Iraq turned out to be a joke. Not
for the Iraqis, of course, and not for American soldiers, and not the
ha-ha sort of joke either.
And here’s the
saddest truth of all: on March 20th as we mark the 10th anniversary
of the invasion from hell, we still don’t get it. In case you want
to jump to the punch line, though, it’s this: by invading Iraq,
the U.S. did more to destabilize the Middle East than we could
possibly have imagined at the time. And we -- and so many others
-- will pay the price for it for a long, long time.
The Madness of King
George
It’s easy to forget
just how normal the madness looked back then. By 2009, when I arrived
in Iraq, we were already at the last-gasp moment when it came to
salvaging something from what may yet be seen as the single worst
foreign policy decision in American history. It was then that, as a
State Department officer assigned to lead two provincial
reconstruction teams in eastern Iraq, I first walked into the chicken
processing plant in the middle of nowhere.
"By invading
Iraq, the U.S. did more to destabilize the Middle East than we could
possibly have imagined at the time. And we -- and so many others --
will pay the price for it for a long, long time."
By then, the U.S.
“reconstruction” plan for that country was drowning in rivers of
money foolishly spent. As the centerpiece for those American efforts
-- at least after Plan A, that our invading troops would be
greeted with flowers and sweets as liberators, crashed and burned --
we had managed to reconstruct nothing of significance. First
conceived as a Marshall Plan for the New American Century, six long
years later it had devolved into farce.
In my act of the play,
the U.S. spent some $2.2 million dollars to build a huge facility in
the boondocks. Ignoring the stark reality that Iraqis had raised and
sold chickens locally for some 2,000 years, the U.S. decided to
finance the construction of a central processing facility, have the
Iraqis running the plant purchase local chickens, pluck them and
slice them up with complex machinery brought in from Chicago, package
the breasts and wings in plastic wrap, and then truck it all to local
grocery stores. Perhaps it was the desert heat, but this made sense
at the time, and the plan was supported by the Army, the State
Department, and the White House.
Elegant in conception,
at least to us, it failed to account for a few simple things, like a
lack of regular electricity, or logistics systems to bring the
chickens to and from the plant, or working capital, or... um...
grocery stores. As a result, the gleaming $2.2 million plant
processed no chickens. To use a few of the catchwords of that moment,
it transformed nothing, empowered no one, stabilized and economically
uplifted not a single Iraqi. It just sat there empty, dark, and
unused in the middle of the desert. Like the chickens, we were
plucked.
In keeping with the
madness of the times, however, the simple fact that the plant failed
to meet any of its real-world goals did not mean the project wasn't a
success. In fact, the factory was a hit with the U.S. media. After
all, for every propaganda-driven visit to the plant, my group stocked
the place with hastily purchased chickens, geared up the machinery,
and put on a dog-and-pony, er, chicken-and-rooster, show.
In the dark humor of
that moment, we christened the place the Potemkin Chicken Factory. In
between media and VIP visits, it sat in the dark, only to rise with
the rooster’s cry each morning some camera crew came out for a
visit. Our factory was thus considered a great success. Robert Ford,
then at the Baghdad Embassy and now America's rugged shadow
ambassador to Syria, said his visit was the best day out he enjoyed
in Iraq. General Ray Odierno, then commanding all U.S. forces in
Iraq, sent bloggers and camp followers to view the victory project.
Some of the propaganda, which proclaimed that “teaching Iraqis
methods to flourish on their own gives them the ability to provide
their own stability without needing to rely on Americans,” is still
online.
We weren’t stupid,
mind you. In fact, we all felt smart and clever enough to learn to
look the other way. The chicken plant was a funny story at first, a
kind of insider’s joke you all think you know the punch line to.
Hey, we wasted some money, but $2.2 million was a small amount in a
war whose costs will someday be toted up in the trillions. Really, at
the end of the day, what was the harm?
The harm was this: we
wanted to leave Iraq (and Afghanistan) stable to advance American
goals. We did so by spending our time and money on obviously
pointless things, while most Iraqis lacked access to clean water,
regular electricity, and medical or hospital care. Another State
Department official in Iraq wrote in his weekly summary to me, “At
our project ribbon-cuttings we are typically greeted now with a
cursory ‘thank you,’ followed by a long list of crushing needs
for essential services such as water and power.” How could we help
stabilize Iraq when we acted like buffoons? As one Iraqi told me, “It
is like I am standing naked in a room with a big hat on my head.
Everyone comes in and helps put flowers and ribbons on my hat, but no
one seems to notice that I am naked.”
By 2009, of course, it
should all have been so obvious. We were no longer inside the neocon
dream of unrivaled global superpowerdom, just mired in what happened
to it. We were a chicken factory in the desert that no one wanted.
Time Travel to 2003
Anniversaries are
times for reflection, in part because it’s often only with
hindsight that we recognize the most significant moments in our
lives. On the other hand, on anniversaries it’s often hard to
remember what it was really like back when it all began. Amid the
chaos of the Middle East today, it’s easy, for instance, to forget
what things looked like as 2003 began. Afghanistan, it appeared, had
been invaded and occupied quickly and cleanly, in a way the Soviets
(the British, the ancient Greeks…) could never have dreamed of.
Iran was frightened, seeing the mighty American military on its
eastern border and soon to be on the western one as well, and
was ready to deal. Syria was controlled by the stable thuggery
of Bashar al-Assad and relations were so good that the U.S.
was rendering terror suspects to his secret prisons for
torture.
For decades to come,
the U.S. will have a big enough military to ensure that our decline
is slow, bloody, ugly, and reluctant, if inevitable. One day,
however, even the drones will have to land.
Most of the rest of
the Middle East was tucked in for a long sleep with dictators
reliable enough to maintain stability. Libya was an exception, though
predictions were that before too long Muammar Qaddafi would make some
sort of deal. (He did.) All that was needed was a quick slash into
Iraq to establish a permanent American military presence in the heart
of Mesopotamia. Our future garrisons there could obviously oversee
things, providing the necessary muscle to swat down any future
destabilizing elements. It all made so much sense to the neocon
visionaries of the early Bush years. The only thing that Washington
couldn’t imagine was this: that the primary destabilizing element
would be us.
Indeed, its mighty
plan was disintegrating even as it was being dreamed up. In their
lust for everything on no terms but their own, the Bush team missed a
diplomatic opportunity with Iran that might have rendered today’s
saber rattling unnecessary, even as Afghanistan fell apart and Iraq
imploded. As part of the breakdown, desperate men, blindsided by
history, turned up the volume on desperate measures: torture, secret
gulags, rendition, drone killings, extra-constitutional actions at
home. The sleaziest of deals were cut to try to salvage something,
including ignoring the A.Q. Khan network of Pakistani
nuclear proliferation in return for a cheesy Condi
Rice-Qaddafi photo-op rapprochement in Libya.
Inside Iraq, the
forces of Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict had been unleashed by the
U.S. invasion. That, in turn, was creating the conditions for a proxy
war between the U.S. and Iran, similar to the growing proxy war
between Israel and Iran inside Lebanon (where another
destabilizing event, the U.S.-sanctioned Israeli invasion
of 2006, followed in hand). None of this has ever ended. Today, in
fact, that proxy war has simply found a fresh host, Syria, with
multiple powers using “humanitarian aid” to push and shove their
Sunni and Shia avatars around.
Staggering neocon
expectations, Iran emerged from the U.S. decade in Iraq economically
more powerful, with sanctions-busting trade between the two neighbors
now valued at some $5 billion a year and still growing. In that
decade, the U.S. also managed to remove one of Iran’s strategic
counterbalances, Saddam Hussein, replacing him with a government run
by Nouri al-Malaki, who had once found in asylum in Tehran.
Meanwhile, Turkey is
now engaged in an open war with the Kurds of northern Iraq. Turkey
is, of course, part of NATO, so imagine the U.S. government sitting
by silently while Germany bombed Poland. To complete the circle,
Iraq’s prime minister recently warned that a victory for Syria's
rebels will spark sectarian wars in his own country and will create a
new haven for al-Qaeda which would further destabilize the region.
Meanwhile, militarily
burnt out, economically reeling from the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and lacking any moral standing in the Middle East
post-Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the U.S. sat on its hands as the
regional spark that came to be called the Arab Spring flickered
out, to be replaced by yet more destabilization across the region.
And even that hasn’t stopped Washington from pursuing the latest
version of the (now-nameless) global war on terror into
ever-newer regions in need of destabilization.
Having noted the ease
with which a numbed American public patriotically looked the other
way while our wars followed their particular paths to hell, our
leaders no longer blink at the thought of sending American drones and
special operations forces ever farther afield, most notably ever
deeper into Africa, creating from the ashes of Iraq a frontier
version of the state ofperpetual war George Orwell once imagined
for his dystopian novel 1984. And don’t doubt for a second
that there is a direct path from the invasion of 2003 and that
chicken plant to the dangerous and chaotic place that today passes
for our American world.
Happy Anniversary
On this 10th
anniversary of the Iraq War, Iraq itself remains, by any measure, a
dangerous and unstable place. Even the usually sunny Department of
State advises American travelers to Iraq that U.S. citizens
“remain at risk for kidnapping... [as] numerous insurgent groups,
including Al Qaida, remain active...” and notes that “State
Department guidance to U.S. businesses in Iraq advises the use of
Protective Security Details.”
In the bigger picture,
the world is also a far more dangerous place than it was in 2003.
Indeed, for the State Department, which sent me to Iraq to witness
the follies of empire, the world has become ever more daunting. In
2003, at that infamous “mission accomplished” moment, only
Afghanistan was on the list of overseas embassies that were
considered “extreme danger posts.” Soon enough,
however, Iraq and Pakistan were added. Today, Yemen and Libya, once
boring but secure outposts for State’s officials, now fall into the
same category.
Other places once
considered safe for diplomats and their families such as Syria and
Malihave been evacuated and have no American diplomatic presence at
all. Even sleepy Tunisia, once calm enough that the State Department
had its Arabic language school there, is now on reduced staff with no
diplomatic family members resident. Egypt teeters.
The Iranian leadership
watched carefully as the American imperial version of Iraq collapsed,
concluded that Washington was a paper tiger, backed away from initial
offers to talk over contested issues, and instead (at least for a
while) doubled-down on achieving nuclear breakout capacity, aided by
the past work of that same A.Q. Khan network. North Korea, another
A.Q. Khan beneficiary, followed the same pivot ever farther from
Washington, while it became a genuine nuclear power. Its neighbor
China pursued its own path of economic dominance, while helping to
“pay” for the Iraq War by becoming the number-one holder of U.S.
debt among foreign governments. It now owns more than 21% of the U.S.
debt held overseas.
And don’t put away
the joke book just yet. Subbing as apologist-in-chief for an absent
George W. Bush and the top officials of his administration on this
10th anniversary, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently
reminded us that there is more on the horizon. Conceding that he
had “long since given up trying to persuade people Iraq was the
right decision,” Blair added that new crises are looming. “You’ve
got one in Syria right now, you’ve got one in Iran to come,” he
said. “We are in the middle of this struggle, it is going to take a
generation, it is going to be very arduous and difficult. But I think
we are making a mistake, a profound error, if we think we can stay
out of that struggle.”
Think of his comment
as a warning. Having somehow turned much of Islam into a foe,
Washington has essentially assured itself of never-ending crises that
it stands no chance whatsoever of winning. In this sense, Iraq was
not an aberration, but the historic zenith and nadir for a way of
thinking that is only now slowing waning. For decades to come, the
U.S. will have a big enough military to ensure that our decline is
slow, bloody, ugly, and reluctant, if inevitable. One day, however,
even the drones will have to land.
And so, happy 10th
anniversary, Iraq War! A decade after the invasion, a chaotic and
unstable Middle East is the unfinished legacy of our invasion. I
guess the joke is on us after all, though no one is laughing.
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