Fear and Loathing in Mesopotamia

Going into Iraq was a mistake. The United States has spent $3 trillion dollars and lost 4,000 soldiers for a war that produced none of the results the Bush administration and intelligence community assured us we’d see. There was no victory, Iraqis didn’t greet us as liberators in the streets, sectarian violence increased in Saddam’s absence as long repressed regional and tribal feuds reemerged, and the Iraqi WMD scourge failed to materialize. The Middle East isn’t any safer now than before the war. Instead, Iraq just traded the devil we knew for a dangerous vacuum of power that’s now spiraling out of control and now the same politicians who conned the American people into a war are trying to force the President back into the Iraqi mess by blaming him and his “weakness”.

Now that the chickens have come home to roost, the same Republican hawks who spent their time selling the Iraq war are raising hell on Fox and The Blaze claiming that this was all avoidable, that President Obama is somehow at fault for the failures of the Iraqi government and is too weak to do what is right by going back in. The real issue with that argument from the Bush administration “experts” is that it assumes that going back in is only politically harmful. They don’t address the fact that it won’t work and isn’t the right thing to do. The war was never “won”. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that a sectarian government that stoked the Shia-Sunni conflict and refused to sign the President’s Status of Forces Agreement, thereby forcing U.S. peacekeepers and military advisers out was going to have a hard time maintaining any semblance of order. This conflict has been long brewing across the Middle East as Iran and Saudi Arabia have waged a proxy war between supporters of the Shia and Sunni sects. Getting involved in a religious war doesn’t end well and the President is right to be wary about getting forces involved in a war with no endgame. President Bush didn’t have these reservations and that’s put us where we are today. The press legitimizing arguments from Vice President Cheney by not calling him out with tough questions only serves to give equal time to terrible ideas. When Megyn Kelly at Fox is the one asking the tough questions something has gone terribly wrong.

The same Republicans who lied and got us mired into this mess are the most outspoken when it comes to their advice and opinion on how to fix the mess they caused. Use airstrikes, troops on the ground, etc. Get involved, regardless of the situation on the ground. When you give a 5 year old a hammer, it’s amazing how the solution to every problem involves it use. The American people don’t want to get involved in another mess. The opposition to Syria, to Iraq, and other flare-ups in the region aren’t because there’s just been bad messaging. After all, we’ve had two elections on whether or not to be involved and Americans overwhelming opposition was one of the reasons we have President Obama in the Oval Office today. Only 22% want to get involved in Iraq again. Republican senators have acknowledged that the only endgame to getting involved in Iraq is an occupation where American forces are committed for decades to a warzone we don’t want to be in and can’t afford. If you want to weaken American military power, I can’t think of a better way and military officials such as Gen. Petraeus have said as much.

No amount of hand washing will absolve the US from its foreign policy failures in Iraq, but that doesn’t mean we can chain ourselves to a nation and map that isn’t willing to work in its own best interests. Iraq as a single nation is a relatively new invention, coming into existence after World War 1 as western powers tried to make a map up out of the aftermath. As a state, it was only held together by dictatorships or occupation. Now that Iraq has a chance to forge its own destiny, it’s going to be messy. The map may be changed, and by god, Vice President Biden might’ve been right that there will be a multi-state solution. But it isn’t our fight to preserve a state that the 3 major active parties (Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds) aren’t willing to work together in. Otherwise, we’re just making the same mistake over again.