SEC DEF: INVADING IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN WAS CRAZY

From the New York Times courtesy of the Huffington Post news wire:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of government in that fashion again were slim.

“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it,” Mr. Gates told an assembly of Army cadets here.

More here.

At the time, I opposed both invasions, and still do.

I opposed the Afghanistan invasion because it struck me that making war on Muslim populations would be, at the very least, counterproductive in terms terrorism reduction--if you were clever enough to listen to what Bin Laden had been saying, you would have known that the presence of American troops in the Middle East was one of his biggest grievances against the West, and it's just common sense to realize that war causes a lot of collateral damage, which would do nothing but bolster the terrorist mastermind's credibility in the Islamic world.

I opposed the Iraq invasion because the entire rationale for it was an enormous collection of lies. Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and this was known to everybody, except, seemingly, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House, well, the entire US establishment, really, when you include Congress and the press. Furthermore, Saddam Hussein, while Muslim, was a secular dictator, and therefore ideologically opposed to Bin Laden's sense of Wahabbist theocracy: the Iraqi strongman would have never handed over nuclear or chemical weapons to him, even if Saddam had them, which he didn't. Invading Iraq would not result in freedom and democracy for its people, and such freedom would not emanate from Baghdad to the rest of the Islamic world on a wave of American good vibes. I mean, that was pure fantasy from the get-go. The reason the elder Bush left Hussein in charge was precisely because the ethnic and religious factionalism was so intense that it was understood removing him from office would result in chaos, not democracy. And chaos was what happened.

Of course, I didn't realize just how bad it would get in Iraq. Ditto with Afghanistan. But I figured it out quickly enough, even while the US government was constantly assuring us that there was no civil war in Iraq, no insurgency, and that Afghanistan was already a success, a new democracy to be cherished and honored. All bullshit, of course. Meanwhile I was reading about Nixon and Vietnam, and coming to understand that if a nation doesn't want American "help," all it has to do is dig its heels in and blow up our soldiers until we get sick of it.

All of this seems like common sense now. Overwhelming force can destroy armies, but not a population determined to be rid of it. I mean, unless that force resorts to genocide, something some Americans have called for. For the most part, however, it is now understood by most of us how massively these two wars have failed, and why.

But think back to those heady days of 2003. We were the greatest country in the world. The strongest country in the world. The bravest, coolest, freest, best nation ever created in the history of the universe. The most righteous simply because we're Americans. People who opposed the wars were idiots and America-haters. This nation could do no wrong. Except, if you go back a couple of decades before that, to the early 80s, it was damned well understood at that point, based on our experience in Vietnam, that not only could we do wrong, but that we do wrong all the time. That we are not invincible. That we are not a shining light for democracy in the world, at least, not all the time.

Apparently, we're back to that zeitgeist now. It's a bad idea to invade and occupy third world nations that don't want us there. "Nation building," where there had not been a functioning nation in a given region's history, is folly, an idea George W. Bush ironically included in his campaign platform back in 2000. We now understand the mistakes of the past...and they will never happen again.

Of course, the lesson to be learned here is that this all very likely will happen again. 9/11 showed us how easy it is for cynical war mongers to take a national crisis and use it as a rallying cry for deploying the Arsenal of Democracy against whoever stands in our way. As Hermann Goering said while on trial for war crimes at Nuremberg:

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

And that's just what the Bush administration did, with a lot of help from Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, Fox News, and the New York Times. They did it as easily here as the Nazis did it in 1930s Germany.

The question we need to be asking, now that we're in one of those rare periods of national sanity regarding the waging of war, is if there is any way to inoculate ourselves against Goering's amazingly effective political strategy for pushing a nation into war. I mean, are we doomed to do this shit again every few decades? Or is there a way to break the cycle?

I'm not optimistic on this.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$