Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
As politicians try to lay blame for losing Iraq on Bush’s flawed Mid-East vision instead of Obama’s flawed Mid-East vision, Fernandez points out:
“As recent events in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Iraq show, the problem with Obama’s conception is it doesn’t work. It is so bad that it makes GWB look good by comparison.”
Joe Doakes
One of the standard jokes four years ago was that “everything about Obama’s foreign policy that’s succeeding [continuing Bush’s hard line in Iraq and Afghanistan] is a continuation of the Bush policy”.
Simplistic? Maybe.
Simplistic enough that Biden believed it:
And it’s gotta be simplistic for Biden to buy it.
Strategically for the USA, the culmination point of our profitless adventure in what Dick Cheney calls ‘planting the seeds of democracy’ has likely been reached and passed. We still have considerable leverage but the high tide of influence seems to have begun abating.
The core of the problem is that in a place like Iraq we roll into the country without understanding its institutions so we destroy what we don’t understand and then try to re-build them in our image. The result is an Iraqi government that doesn’t work and an Iraqi Army that can’t fight. Without Americans there to hold the seams together it all falls apart. It seems we have seen this movie before but with different actors in a different locale.
Not having nurtured a tradition of success in our quests in the region it seems unlikely that a strong American public consensus to spend additional trillions of dollars will materialize any time soon. The days of vast military deployments into the strategic vacuum of the Middle East seems already old fashion. Triumphalism is out, caution and prudence is now in.
I agree. Also that the “seeds” were planted. However, they never took root and likely rotted on the spot or were eaten by scavengers. The people of that region probably have less desire for democracy than the US has for Sharia law. However, for them, it was a fun ride. The standard US currency, free stuff, was distributed along with some pretty neat new weapons they can use against each other when the US finally gives up. I, also simplistic, would have grudgingly credited President Obama if he had just shut down the whole mess when he took office. I can’t imagine any worse consequences for having done that. Then publicly aim a few nukes in their direction, buy their oil, and let them do their own killing.
Tribalism. Oil. Force. That is what rules our world.