I found myself briefly glancing over the Twitter feed of actor James Woods this morning, and was pleased to run across this Tweet:
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) June 12, 2014
I’m glad to see he appreciates our good friend Robert Ariail.
Given the tone of the rest of the actor’s feed (decidedly anti-Obama), he’d probably appreciate this one from today as well:
Speaking of which — wow, but the president certainly is on a losing streak on the global stage. It’s stunning the way our failure to reach a Status of Forces agreement in Iraq (due to the president’s unseemly hurry to leave) has led to the victories of ISIS.
And we think we’re going to stop that with some drone attacks?
Will the same thing happen in Afghanistan, with our election-cycle-oriented departure date from there? There seems to be good reason to think so.
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Iraq is an absolute disaster right now. What makes it even more tragic is the amount of American blood soaked into the sand over there.
Once these jihadi forces get into these towns, it’s going to take serious ground forces to rout them out again. You can use all the air-power you want: drones, B-2s, F-15s, even B-52s. The fact is that you can’t control a city with air power. You have to have a guy standing on a street corner with a rifle.
And we aren’t gonna do that this time. We’ve already taken all our guys with rifles home. Our Commander in Chief was so happy to get out of Iraq, he was quite willing to drop any SOFA agreement. All he had to do was negotiate a SOFA, and likely, none of this would have happened. We could have secured our gains in Iraq and built a lasting peace.
I wasn’t around for Saigon in ’74, but I’m thinking that I’m going to see Baghdad ’14, and I think it’s going to look similar. There is a sickness in my stomach as I watch Iraq just unravel again at the hands of ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
This is what failure of leadership looks like.
You mean ’75, not ’74. You youngsters don’t know when Saigon fell. What’s the matter with y’all? I know when Berlin fell, and I wasn’t born for 8 more years…
Daniel Henninger and Karl Rove really went to town on the Obama foreign policy record today, and I found both more persuasive than usual. (I’d give you links if WSJ hadn’t started putting EVERYTHING of value behind the pay wall these days.) Rove was particularly effective in pointing out how the president has failed his own foreign policy test, as expressed in a recent off-the-record briefing with reporters: “Don’t do stupid sh—.”
What’s really bad about this is that no matter HOW bad it gets, no matter how rapidly Iraq collapses or how much the collapse spills over on neighbors or threatens the stability of the region, Barack Obama will never send the troops back in. Ever. Because he has totally, completely, absolutely defined himself as The Guy Who Would Never Send Troops Into Iraq. He would change his name before he would do that, it is so ingrained in his political identity.
I want to think that if, in some wild hypothetical scenario (say, Darth Vader sitting out there in geostationary orbit with the Death Star aimed at Washington, delivering an ultimatum), it were absolutely, 100 percent necessary to send troops into Iraq to ensure the continued existence of the United States, or of the entire planet, for another day, he would send them in. I HOPE. But I doubt that anything short of that would move him. And there are a lot of degrees of it being advisable to send in troops that fall short of the Death Star scenario…
He has put himself into such a box on that, and extended that box to apply to the rest of the world, that it creates a dangerous situation for us. Because there ARE situations in which it is advisable to use troops. There just are, whether you agree with me or not on when that is…
Brad your entire argument is a strawman bunch of nonsense. The security of the United States is absolutely, positively not, I repeat NOT in any way threatened by the situation in Iraq. This ISA group, or whatever they are would not even exist without the help of the Bush folly into Iraq. So to suggest in any sense of the word that we need to send troops or even air power into the region is the height of insanity. The region was relatively stable until Bush and his neo-con friends like Lindsey Graham and John McCain got on their high horse and instigated the slaughter of 4000 American troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. So don’t give me any of this crap about Karl Rove somehow being persuasive when he blames this on Obama. This pisses me off more than anything I’ve witnessed in many years. Shame should be the middle name of George W Bush and his minions. And yes that includes one Brad Warthen. For its because of him and his damn lies that we are witnessing this catastrophe. (Bush lies not Brad. Brad is just a toady).
“I am very optimistic about Iraq. I think it’s gonna be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re gonna see 90,000 troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re gonna see a stable Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government…I’ve been impressed by how they’ve been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.” – Joe Biden in speech 2/11/2010
Thanks, VP Biden
’74…’75, you know…whatever it takes
🙂
How’d you like a little trim on that moustache, Ron?
Iraq is an absolute disaster right now.
-Bryan
To be perfectly clear on this point that sentence should read: “BECAUSE OF GEORGE W. BUSH and his neo-con cohorts Iraq is an absolute disaster right now. After 8 years our efforts to help train an effective army were no more successful than our attempt to train ARVN. As for all my liberal friends out there who had such kind words about Lindsey Graham this is the kind of mess his misguided thinking helped to create.
That’s not true. It’s because of the way we left, on this president’s watch.
I’ll walk that back slightly. It was always possible that bad things would happen after we left, and we were leaving one way or the other, eventually.
But the WAY we left, without a status of forces agreement, made it more likely this would happen.
Here’s how Foreign Policy described the scene in which the president enunciated his crude doctrine:
Not exactly a shining moment for Barack Obama, or for the presidency. Or for the press corps, for that matter…
Wow, that is a hard-hitting piece. After posing the question of whether the president is meeting his own stated standard, it continues:
I guess “Don’t do stupid sh–” is more of an aspirational goal for this administration than an actual accomplishment.
What stupid Sh- has Obama done? He hasn’t thrown away MORE trillions of dollars in a fools game of trying to bail Bush out. Sure Iraq is a mess. And it no doubt will remain a huge mess for many years. But it’s for the Iraqi people to sort out not the USA. Eventually some straw man will come to power and bring a bit of stability to the area. Remember Iraq was never a particularly nature setting for a nation. It was cobbled together from a diverse grouping of tribes after WW I in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. These various tribes never felt a sense of nationhood the way many nations do. They were and are more comfortable as semi-autonomious tribes. The British tried and failed to create a sense of normality in this awkwardly created nation.
When Saddam Hussein came along he did manage, through cruel tyranny, to establish some sense of nationality. It was far from ideal but at least by the late 90s it was a reasonably safe and harmless nation WITHOUT any significant military threat to it’s neighbors. The first George Bush, for all his faults, recognized the impossibility of both overthrowing Hussein and establishing a viable, pro-western state. His son was obviously not so astute.
So now what? Of course we don’t want to do stupid Sh__. That goes without saying. At the end of the day we really have no options, nor did Obama EVER have any. He cut our losses as best he could and did the correct thing by withdrawing. As for the status of force agreement. Pleez. The Iraqis rejected our overtures to do that. So why even bring that up? It wasn’t an available option. Let’s just watch this play out then offer humanitarian assistance when appropriate. And try to learn some valuable lessons about the limitations of military force once and for all.
For the “stupid sh__,” read the Foreign Policy piece.
And let’s be very clear: Bush doesn’t need to be bailed out. He’s fine, living in a comfortable retirement.
What needs bailing out is any hope to prevent Iraq from disintegrating, and taking the world economy with it…
“and taking the world economy with it…”
How would that happen? Is the global economy really that dependent on Iraq?
Yep. We are not islands. Iraq especially.
It has a big effect on oil markets, which in turn have a big effect on everything else. The last day or so oil prices have shot up, and U.S. stock prices have dropped, and it’s being attributed to this…
So we respond over time by growing less dependent on foreign oil. A short term bubble is better than throwing billions down a hole for years.
As I was driving back from lunch a little while ago, they were discussing it on NPR. No one doubts that the spike in prices is due to what is happening in Iraq, but an analyst was explaining that so far it’s mostly fear-based, as the oil-production areas have not yet been directly affected.
And the one guy in the world who least wants to do anything meaningful definitely understands that what happens there affects us. At least, that’s what he said today: “Obama says chaos in Iraq could endanger U.S. interests.”
straw man should be Strong Man.
Both domestically and overseas, Obama inherited a situation in which too often there were no good choices left. The good choices — don’t let the banks and investment houses go crazy; don’t go into Iraq and further destabilize that region — were long gone. The wrong roads had been taken irrevocably. And Bud is right — the Iraqi government made it very clear that they were not going to sign a status of forces agreement. We might as well say that Obama failed in Iraq because he didn’t think to send Tinker Bell in with her fairy dust in a timely manner.
Bryan: Iraq is not just unraveling “at the hands of ISIS and Al-Qaeda.” It takes two (or more) to tango, as they say. Maliki’s policies have done much to create the unrest among the Sunni minority. This is, at it always was once we opened the Pandora’s box by removing Saddam, a civil war, and sort of a three-way one at that if you factor in the Kurds. The only difference having some American troops would accomplish is that we would have the honor of having Americans join the ranks of those killed by insurgents.
Even more remarkable is that, if I understand the subtext of this post and ensuing comments correctly, the idea is that the US should join ranks with Iran and Bashar al-Assad in fighting Sunnis?
In a way, what’s happening is Joe Biden is getting what he wanted at one point (and which I sorta kinda thought wasn’t the worst idea at the time) — the three-way division of Iraq. And it’s looking like the Kurds are getting the best of the deal, grabbing what they want while the Sunni and Shia fight it out.
Unfortunately — tragically — instead of three discrete states with secure, peaceful borders, we’re getting a Kurdish state in the north, a mega Sunni state that includes Syria in the West, and a mega Shia state that includes (and is dominated by) Iran in the east. The Iranians and Syrian rebels are dividing up the non-Kurdish portions of the country the way the Germans and Russians once did Poland.
As I read a couple of times this morning, the Sykes-Picot map of the Mideast is falling apart, its borders melting away.
Bush 41 would have said that’s because removing Saddam “wouldn’t be prudent.” Like removing Tito and Soviet influence from the Balkans.
But once we DID remove Saddam — and we can’t put him back, folks; he’s gone — some other strong, stable, residual force needed to be there to prevent this disintegration. That was us. That’s why McCain said we might need to be there for 100 years (and the left freaked out).
You know, the way we stayed in Europe. The way we stayed in Korea. The way we’ve stayed in the Balkans, long past the war. The way we SHOULD stay in Afghanistan.
We’ve got a big military. Not as big as it was, but still big. It has to be somewhere. The best places for it to be is where its presence prevents chaos…
“It has to be somewhere. ”
No, it doesn’t. There – I refuted your argument in three words.
There are many people, like myself, who believe we could do better by using the resources spent on policing the world to help Americans. Plenty of lower level military would transition well into a massive infrastructure rebuilding project. Resources wasted on bombs and aircraft carriers could be poured into healthcare, alternative energy, etc.
We have proven time and again that we can’t fix other countries. Let’s try fixing our own country for a decade or two and see if that makes a difference.
Uh-huh…
See, I refuted your refutation in two grunts.
Is this the moment when we all break into “Give Peace a Chance,” and float away together on a cloud of wishful thinking?
Beats killing people.
with proxies for all the people who won’t make the same sacrifice. If Lindsey Graham is willing to lead a charge into Baghdad, let’s do it!
That’s certainly a fair point, Phillip. I agree there is enough blame to go around. In my most recent post, I acknowledged that point.
And I’m not saying we should definitely rush back into Iraq. That seems to be the easy answer, right? Send in the US Army to kick butt and get everything back in order, right? But is ending this conflict/civil war/whatever thee same as solving it? I don’t think it is.
Ultimately, the Sunnis and Shias have to figure out what they’re going to do. They obviously don’t like living together. They certainly don’t get along. Maybe they need a divorce for the sake of everyone involved. Maybe it was a naive idea for the Brits to make them all live together in the first place.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. Bush got us involved when we maybe didn’t need to be. Obama left in a big damn hurry. Maliki isn’t a unifying figure. The Brits drew some stupid lines in the sand a long time ago. It’s really hot over there.
What should we do going forward? I don’t know. But I’m starting to think that putting the 82nd Airbone in the middle of it ain’t the best idea. Will gas prices go up if there’s chaos? Probably. Maybe that’s the price we pay. It’s a heck of a lot better than paying for it in blood.
I don’t have any dog in the fight between the Sunnis and Shias. I don’t really care who wins. The only interest I have is when people start chanting “death to America” and then acting on that chant. What really complicates it is I don’t think we can do the “You leave us alone, and we’ll leave you alone” thing. Some of the people over there really want to do us harm. And that’s bad, because I’m a big fan of the “You leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone” deal. It’s how I’d like to deal with the government mostly.
The whole thing seems stupid to me. I can’t imagine the Methodists and the Lutherans having a big sectarian war over here, chopping people’s heads off and stuff.
I don’t have a good answer. I think the answer that sucks the least (to take a phrase from law school) is to make sure the hardcore “Death to America/Infidel” guys don’t end up in charge.
It’s an interesting dynamic that ISIS is the enemy of Assad. The Neo-cons are the enemy of Assad. Since, according to an old saying, the enemy of my enemy is my friend that would make ISIS the Neo-cons best buddy. I would suggest that folks like Lindsey Graham who are so determined to send in the troops at least decide who is our enemy. Seems like this is much like the Iran/Iraq war in the 80s. A bunch of people who all hate the USA are going after each other. Why would we want to interfere with that?
What we should have done was what everyone on the Obama national security team except the president wanted to do — aid moderate forces against Assad two years ago, to help them ascend rather than these radicals.
This is another consequence of the president’s inaction.
As a result of the President’s inaction, those moderate forces were wiped out.
“But once we DID remove Saddam — and we can’t put him back, folks; he’s gone — some other strong, stable, residual force needed to be there to prevent this disintegration. That was us. That’s why McCain said we might need to be there for 100 years (and the left freaked out)….You know, the way we stayed in Europe…. ”
The left didn’t just freak out, Brad. Maybe initially it started with the left. But the mess made by the neocon “we can fix it” naivety and delusional thinking, has only succeeded in making Americans in both the center and right begin to freak out too. This is why, thankfully, your view of America’s role in the world is rapidly on the decline in both parties, across the political spectrum.
Also, you cannot keep drawing WWII parallels with the Mideast. For one thing, to a large extent Europe has welcomed the American presence up to a point. But there are not the deep, centuries-old tribal conflicts there (papered over by the colonial legacy) such as the case has been in the Middle East. This is not a movie, this is not Saving Private Ryan, this is not Band of Brothers. The Iraqis did not want us there. The complexities are so vast (for example, it now appears that Saudi Arabia, nominally our ally, is supporting ISIS to some extent) that every time we try to “play God” in the region, we create at least as many new difficulties as we resolve. To “squash down” the internal religious civil war in a region like Iraq or Syria would require troops on a level like…well, a police state like Saddam maintained. I don’t find that a palatable or morally ethical role for the United States to play. A nominal force would have little effect other than to add Americans to the target list. “Preventing chaos” in this region has not worked so well even when we had large numbers of troops there. If this is the world’s goal, to prevent chaos, it cannot be the primary responsibility of just the United States.
It is a bad idea for America to take sides in an Islamic civil war. It is an even worse idea to even suggest that we sacrifice American lives or put them on the line for one side or the other in such a religious war.
First, I didn’t suggest that. I confess that I was doing what critics of our invasion of Iraq do — saying what should have happened, rather than dealing with the current situation. I was saying we should have maintained a stabilizing presence there to help preserve the post-surge security environment. A bit late for that now.
Phillip, you just did something unusual for you — you erected a straw man. You did a partial quote from what I said — quoting only the part about keeping troops in Europe post WWII, and ignoring my Korean and Balkan examples of maintaining a peace-keeping force post-conflict. That set up your “you cannot keep drawing WWII parallels with the Mideast.” I didn’t do that. I cited several examples of staying in place to prevent further violence, in widely differing circumstances.
Allow me to observe that the “You can’t compare this to World War II” argument has become at least as tiresome, and certainly as trite, as people actually comparing things to World War II.
And I know you meant it kindly, but “this is not Saving Private Ryan, this is not Band of Brothers” was staggeringly condescending. Suggesting I get my frame of reference from movies and TV. I am a little better informed than that. I will point out that one of those sources you cite is fictional, the other factual. But the difference between Band of Brothers and any present-day situation is a yawning gulf. For instance, in those days the entire nation was a sort of Band of Brothers, and our resolve as a nation, while not limitless, was exponentially greater. In fact, the difference is almost binary.
People who opposed our involvement in Iraq nowadays want those of us who supported it to confess to having been wrong, and if we don’t, we are greeted with incredulity that we fail to open our eyes in the presence of the Absolute Proof that they see all around them.
Well, I was wrong in one way, and if you’d like, you can attribute it to too much “Band of Brothers,” in the sense I described above: I was wrong in that I thought the nation was fully committed, and had the resolve to see it through. I believed that the administration was fully committed to using the necessary resources and policies to ensure success (it was not, as long as Rumsfeld was SecDef).
The time to disengage from Iraq was BEFORE we engaged. There was no doubt in my mind that once committed, we HAD to stay, for a long time. That’s why I wrote, for March 23, 2003, the following:
I didn’t then, and don’t now, understand how anyone could see it any other way — and the current events there today are further proof of what I was saying. Once we “broke” Iraq, to invoke the Pottery Barn rule, we were going to have to be there for a long while.
Once we went in, it didn’t matter why we had gone in, or whether it was right or wrong, foolish or wise to have done so. Once we had removed the Saddam regime, we could NOT afford to walk away and leave a dangerous vacuum behind us.
I didn’t get those ideas from watching Band of Brothers. I got them from observing the actual situation in front of us.
At this point, someone will point out that the resolve evaporated because the WMD wasn’t there. There will be a mention of “lies,” which will be that person’s term for intelligence failures.
To that, I will say two things:
— I never saw WMD as the main reason to go in, or in any way the deciding factor. It’s tragic that the administration overstressed that (something easy to explain and understand) and that, contrary to the expectations of the world, they weren’t there.
— As I said above, once we were there, the reasons we had gone in, or whether it was right or wrong, were irrelevant. Leaving a vacuum behind us was just as dangerous without WMD being there as it would have been if there had been more WMD stockpiles than Manhattan has Starbucks stores. The situation was what the situation was, regardless of our motivations.
Brad, you set up a straw man, too. P did not say you get your frame of reference from movies or TV, but you do seem to refer to those and similarly jingoistic fictional works with admiration and rather high frequency.
In fact, you wrote extensively about how Snowden couldn’t be a spy because George Smiley…..for example
Name a laudatory culture reference I have made that is “jingoistic.”
see above
Listen to grumpy old man John McCain try to claim that Iraq is an existential threat to the U.S.
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/209266-mccain-gets-testy-on-morning-joe
He actually believes that Iraq was “pacified” and “stable”. For whatever I think of Obama, McCain/Palin would have been a disaster of existential proportions. Stop looking for wars to fight, Senator. Especially wars we can’t win.
He and Lindsey make a great team. Grumpy and Wimpy.
Alla you libertarians, get offa my lawn!
A couple golden oldies from John McCain, pre-Iraq War:
“When asked if Iraqis were going to greet us as liberators, he answered, “Absolutely.” He said, “Post-Saddam Hussein Iraq is going to be paid for by the Iraqis” with their oil wealth (the war ended up costing the American taxpayer upwards of $2 trillion). And my favorite: “There is not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias, so I think they can probably get along.””
McCain is rarely right on any topic. He didn’t think there was a problem with the economy in 2008.
The WW II comparison is tiresome but not nearly so tiresome as the constant drumbeat of economic doom and gasoline prices through the roof if we don’t send in the 82 airborne. Oil prices have actually been remarkably restrained over the past couple of days. West Texas intermediate has hovered in the $100 range for months. It is now about $107 +-. Hardly an economy busting figure. Maybe going forward we’ll have gas lines again but for now there’s scant evidence of a new fuel crisis.
But what really gets me is all the folks who were wrong about Iraq in 2003 now giving those of us who were right a lecture on what we should do now. Those of us who opposed the war, and that includes POTUS, predicted extreme problems if we invaded. Those who supported the invasion famously claimed there would be very little cost to the US taxpayer because the whole, relatively cheap, war would be paid for by a flood of oil money that the Iraqi people would be more that glad to fork over such a small price to get rid of Saddam. Now some $1-3 trillion dollars later isn’t it time to trust the people who were right from the beginning? Instead we trot out one discredited neo-con after another to yammer on about the incompetence of the guy who was right! If they had their way American soldiers would still be dying. Billions of dollars would still be wasted and the end still not in sight. How many lives need to be wasted on this fools errand? How much deeper in debt do we need to go to satisfy the urge to save the Iraqi people from Saddam?
Finally, lets look at the USAs other major military debacle for a best guess for the future. Of course I’m talking about Vietnam. The gloom and doom predictions were rampant in 1975 from the same discredited neocons of that era. The dominoes would fall. The western way of life was threatened. Economic disaster would rain down on the freedom loving people of the world. None of which occurred.
Brad next time I see you use the words of Karl Rove to make any type of point I will never, ever read this blog again.
Brad, I apologize if you perceived any condescension in my comment about WWII films/TV, that was not my intent. Primarily what I meant was that the simplicity of the WWII issues, our resolve, our more or less unified perception of the threat, our understanding of who the “bad guys” were…(even if that “simplicity” is more a matter of hindsight through popular media rather than the reality at the time)…that just doesn’t exist in our current world and recent hotspots in the world. I mean, who are the good guys in a place like Syria, like Iraq? Not easy to identify, or to help without inadvertently helping some folks we maybe would rather not help.
And when I try sincerely to understand the thinking that intervening in various places in the world like Iraq is or was a good idea, it seems that many neoconservatives are stuck in this kind of WWII-era false nostalgia, when we really DID face global threats of major dimensions. If I am falsely lumping you in with this syndrome on the basis of your many WWII references, I stand corrected. However, you yourself said in your response that we don’t have the resolve we did in that time, as if our lack of national resolve re Iraq were some kind of evidence of a change in our national character. To me, it’s evidence only that half of the country thought it was a bad idea to invade Iraq from the get-go (now, more than half think that); and that staying for years to prop up an increasingly authoritarian regime from one side of an Islamic sectarian war (in the name of avoiding the dreaded “vacuum”) can’t inspire resolve on our nation’s part, especially if it involves sending our young men and women to die for that purpose. It’s not lack of resolve, it’s a manifestation of American common sense.
American resolve would be just as strong as it was 70 years ago, if we were to face the kind of threats we (and much of Western Europe and Asia) faced then. (We did briefly have such resolve after 9/11, till Bush/Cheney et al decided to exploit it for other purposes).
To adapt the line from Sunset Boulevard: Our resolve IS strong. It’s the American military interventions that got dumb.
No, actually, I don’t think it is. And I worry about that, because what if we really DID have an existential conflict? Would the nation survive?
And, by the way, WWII was NOT really an existential conflict, for us. It was for Britain, and France, and Poland, and China, and a lot of other countries — and ultimately for Germany and Japan — but it wasn’t for us. Yes, we could have ended up in a world that was very hostile to our way of life, in which we were the last bastion of liberal democracy — but the existence of the U.S. wasn’t threatened the way, say, Britain’s was.
And it had limits — one thing that stepped right up to that limit and almost went over it was daylight bombing. That killed SO many American boys (and European men, women and children) that it was from the start a tough sell on the home front.
But there’s no question that we were totally committed to the fight, as though our very existence were threatened.
And I don’t know whether we would be again, to the same extent.
There were a lot of factors that went into the national willingness to sacrifice for the cause — in the case of servicemen to subject themselves to harsh military discipline and hardships, and even give up their lives; in the case of people on the home front, submitting to rationing and shortages and the surrender of normal life in a number of ways.
One was the Depression. We were used to hardships, and most Americans were unaccustomed to plenty. And we were a less me-centered culture. Our cultural references didn’t stress consumerism and other me-centered ways of looking at the world.
There is the abundance today of media, and far from homogeneous media in terms of worldview, in terms of versions of reality presented. Today, even a very popular, even revered president like FDR would immediately meet a tidal wave of opposition and criticism every time he opened his mouth, because there would be a host of media outlets, from Twitter feeds to cable channels, that defined themselves in terms of opposition to him. You didn’t have that then. (And that is the great danger in hyperpartisanship — that it encourages people to ALWAYS oppose certain people no matter what they say.)
There are just a lot of factors — not anyone’s fault, just the way the world is — that militate against a determined, consensual resolve today. And that’s a worrisome thing, if we were to find ourselves in an all-out war with someone like, say, the Chinese or the Russians. Which is far from impossible. There are even fascist political parties on the ascendance in Europe — far from holding controlling power, but still on the rise.
So it’s something I worry about — if we HAD to summon the resolve, how would we do it? COULD we do it?
Also, before WWII, we DID involve ourselves here and there in other nation’s affairs militarily — think of the way we used the Marines in Central America in the 30s, or the Navy in China in the 20s.
Some of the things we did were far more questionable than anything we’ve done in my lifetime.
But most Americans were unaware of such far-away things, and far less likely to rise up and protest.
In any case, American adventurism isn’t something invented by the neoconservatives.
As a final comment on this thread to show our points of agreement, I absolutely agree with your very last sentence, and also the “questionableness” of many things we did earlier in our history. I would hope that America is continually evolving as a nation into not only a more fully realized version of the ideals upon which we were founded, but also as a member of the community of world nations with a goal of minimizing or ending war and being good stewards of our planet.
Also, while you are more pessimistic than I am about our nation’s ability to rally together were we to face an existential threat, I would of course wholeheartedly agree with your analysis that certainly the media landscape and other societal factors have changed since the 1930’s and 40s and might make that resolve seem less unanimous, one might say. But I think there’s certainly enough pride in country and our home to outweigh that, should our national survival be at stake. Let’s hope we never get the chance to find out which one of us is right.
“American resolve would be just as strong as it was 70 years ago, if we were to face the kind of threats we (and much of Western Europe and Asia) faced then.”
Agree with Brad. I don’t buy that pie in the sky statement at all.
Since we’re using WW II references let me throw one out. In Flags of Our Fathers the Iwo Jima heros came home to a country that was beginning to tire of the war. So even in that most popular of wars there is a limit to how much sacrifice the folks are willing to make. As a result of war weariness we used nuclear bombs to quickly end the war. My point is this, if people could become restless about a war as necessary as WW II then how could it be expected to support a war that has such vague goals as “clearing the swamp” or defending low gas prices? If Lindsey Graham had gone on the stump declaring his desire to send troops back into Iraq I doubt Robert Arial would be drawing a cartoon with a 56% bone in his mouth.
how about The Best Years of Our Lives, made shortly after WW II, before the sepia-rose-colored glasses used?
By the way, here’s a piece that makes my point for me about the inadvisability of leaving Iraq the way we did. And since it comes from someone who doesn’t think we should have gone into Iraq to begin with, it may be more palatable to some than anything I would say…
We’ve had a lot of extended, sometimes bitter arguments over Iraq since I started this blog a little over 9 years ago (if you count my newspaper blog and this one as one blog).
And I’m sure to many it felt like the argument was over whether we should have gone into Iraq in the first place. Because for most people who disagreed with me, THAT was the point on which everything else turned. But that wasn’t the thing that split us so far apart. What we argued over, really — and go back and check — was whether and under what circumstances we should LEAVE Iraq. To my interlocutors, that may sound like the same thing, but it never was.
I always found it easy to understand people who didn’t want us to go into Iraq, and fully respect their position. The whole “let’s be prudent” approach, holding that Saddam was contained and that it was dangerous to create a vacuum in Iraq — the George H. W. Bush position — had a great deal to recommend it. So did the “we don’t start wars” argument, on a gut level. (To my mind, we weren’t starting anything — the conflict Saddam had begun 12 years earlier had never ended. And we had been hassling with it, patrolling the no-fly zone, stopping the odd plot by Saddam here and there, long enough. But that was all so distant in most people’s minds — and we were containing him so WELL — that it LOOKED like we were starting something, which is almost as bad, in its geopolitical ramifications, as if Saddam had been innocent as a lamb.)
Anyway, the “don’t go in” argument always made plenty of sense to me, even though I disagreed with it.
What didn’t make sense at all to me was the idea that, having toppled Saddam and created that vacuum, we could just pull up stakes and walk away. That just seemed to me grossly irresponsible, and likely to lead to what we’re seeing today.
But the “let’s get the hell out of here at any cost” view prevailed, and still prevails, politically, in this country. And this is not good, for us or for the world.
In fact, probably the strongest argument that could be made against going into Iraq in the first place is that it WOULD be a commitment to stay there for the long haul. That just seemed obvious, which is why I said what I said in the “Rubicon” column in March 2003…
The whole “let’s be prudent” approach, holding that Saddam was contained and that it was dangerous to create a vacuum in Iraq — the George H. W. Bush position
and George H.W. got ripped in the media and many circles for not going all the way in Saddam.
Can’t win situation – no matter what.