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.
As George W. Bush would say: "Mission Accomplished!" But that’s only if you’re Ahmed Chalabi, the "hero in error" who somehow persuaded the Clinton and Bush administrations to put him on the CIA payroll and proceeded to hornswoggle Western governments – and the complicit media – with tall tales of Iraq’s fabled-but-nonexistent nuclear weapons program.
Chalabi, it turned out, was working for Tehran – which naturally wanted its old enemy, Saddam Hussein, put out of commission so the Shi’ite majority could take power. A decade later and the leaders of Shi’ite parties who had found shelter in Tehran for decades rule the roost in Baghdad – thanks to the very same people who are now exhorting us to attack Iran. Yes, the neoconservatives whose policies led directly to the extension of Iranian influence throughout Iraq now insist the Iranian mullahs are building "weapons of mass destruction" and must be stopped.
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.
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