A DISMAL ROI FROM OUR IRAQ VENTURE
(…’cause nation-building artistes…we’re not)

We stormed into Iraq (and Afghanistan) in the aftermath of 9/11 like an enraged and badly wounded lion, mauling and shredding everything and everyone in site with our military fangs and claws.

In Iraq, and in something less than six weeks, the ferocity of our attack utterly destroyed Saddam Hussein’s vaunted military might. Most of his troops, despite the promised incentive of seventy willing virgins in paradise waiting to embrace them, if they died for his cause…opted to ditch their military gear and weapons, and ran away (apparently an Iraqi Army characteristic, since today’s military are doing the same, because they don’t see any benefit of fighting for a government they obviously no longer believe in).

Thus, back then, that Iraqi disintegration landed us literally out of breath from racing to keep up with them, smack in the center of Baghdad, as jubilant Iraqis tore down Saddam’s statues, looted his grandiose palaces (and anything else they could), as they celebrated the demise of his tyrannical regime that had screwed them over for nearly forty years. We Americans were hailed as…liberators!…or so it seemed at that moment.

Unfortunately, as the heat of revenge dissipated, that acclaim deluded us into believing we could now switch into becoming evangelical missionaries for the propagation of American brand “democracy” to them, not understanding, or perhaps not wanting to understand, that the matrix of Iraq was a black hole of rabid ethnic and sectarian conflict, liberally supplemented with Ba’athist Party renegades, and assorted al Qaeda jihadis…none of whom could spell the word “democracy”, or had any understanding of how it was supposed to work since nothing in their history had ever had it. Many even considered it an alien, hence subversive, Western concept.

Nevertheless, since we were the new temporary overlords, we went ahead anyway, and despite all sorts of difficulties managed to have them conduct the superficiality of a credible –election- where everyone was able to proudly display a purple thumb as a sign they had participated and experienced our metric for “democracy”, that is…the vote.

None of that produced much of anything viable for us, with our ending up in the middles of an outright civil war, getting hammered and reviled from all sides as “occupiers”, because we were fixated on re-creating the same kind of centralized authority to govern over the new nation-state of Iraq. It was a fixation which could only end in failure.

For the next decade we then sacrificed some 4000 plus America lives, pissed away a fortune large enough to almost wipe out our national debt, and otherwise wasted a lot of effort in following a top-down formula for nation building.

What we’ve ended up with from all that blood, sweat, money, and tears…is a dismal ROI from our Iraq venture…’cause nation building artistes…we’re not. Worse yet, we failed to ever consider an alternative approach that might have resulted in something better, something which would have produced a viable, prosperous, and peaceful Iraq as a bastion of stability in the midst of the chaos and turmoil of the events we now call…the Arab Spring.

And the leading component of that alternative were the Kurds who, all on their own, re-established themselves into a strong autonomous and peaceful entity, while the rest of Iraq kept bombing and murdering each other. Yet, for all that time, we ignored them. It should be noted here that in today’s crisis…all Iraqis fleeing the invasion of the ISIS Islamist forces from Syria are all heading for Kurdistan…not Baghdad…which must tell us something about the validity of what the Kurds have accomplished, and where our remaining choice for providing support should be. It would have been to our strategic advantage in the present situation had we spent much more effort helping them resolve their differences with their Turkish kinfolk, than wasting our time trying to overcome an everlasting Sunni-Shia feud.

As things stand today…that may still be our only viable means of salvaging something of value from this sorry venture.

CENTURION

(the attached annex to this issue was first published back in 2004. We can’t help but wonder how things would be today if we had followed that alternative)