Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, August 17, 2011


Sweet...

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1 comment:

William R. Barker said...

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/08/16/lessons_of_two_wars_we_will_lose_in_iraq_and_afghanistan

* YOU NEED TO READ THE FULL PIECE, FOLKS. I'LL EXCERPT ANYWAY... BUT YOU REALLY WANNA READ THE FULL PIECE - AND BROWSE THROUGH THE VARIOUS COMMENTS!

The truth is that the United States and its allies lost the war in Iraq and are going to lose the war in Afghanistan.

There: I said it.

By "lose," I mean we will eventually withdraw our military forces without having achieved our core political objectives, and with our overall strategic position weakened.

[I]nvading Iraq was never necessary, because Saddam Hussein had no genuine links to al Qaeda and no WMD, and because he could not have used any WMD that he might one day have produced without facing devastating retaliation. It was a blunder because destroying the Ba'athist state left us in charge of a deeply divided country that we had no idea how to govern. It also destroyed the balance of power in the Gulf and enhanced Iran's regional position, which was not exactly a brilliant idea from the American point of view. (Invading Iraq also diverted resources and attention from Afghanistan, which helped the Taliban to regain lost ground and derailed our early efforts to aid the Karzai government.)

* AND SPEAKING OF AFGHANISTAN:

[W]e keep getting told that we are going to achieve some sort of "peace with honor" in Afghanistan, even though sending more troops there has not made the Afghan government more effective, has not eliminated the Taliban's ability to conduct violence, and has not increased our leverage in Pakistan.

The real lesson one should draw from these defeats is that the United States doesn't know how to build democratic societies in large and distant Muslim countries that are divided by sectarian, ethnic, or tribal splits, and especially if these countries have a history of instability or internal violence.

Nobody else does either.

[T]here is an enormous difference between defeating a third-rate conventional army (which is what Saddam had) and governing a restive, deeply-divided, and well-armed population with a long-standing aversion to all forms of foreign interference.

There was no way to "win" either war without creating effective local institutions that could actually run the place (so that we could leave), but that was the one thing we did not know how to do. Not only did we not know who to put in charge, but once we backed anybody, their legitimacy automatically declined. (And so did our leverage over them, as people like President Karzai understood that our prestige was now on the line and we could not afford to let him fail.)

The United States rose to world power by staying out of costly fights or by getting into them relatively late and then winning the peace.

[We] won the Cold War by maintaining an economy that was far stronger than the Soviet Union's, by assembling a coalition of allies that was more reliable, stable, and prosperous than the Communist bloc, and by remaining reasonably true to a set of political ideals that inspired others. [Our] major missteps occurred when [we] exaggerated the stakes in peripheral conflicts - such as Indochina. (Fortunately, the Soviet Union made more blunders than we did, and from a weaker base.)

Since 1992, the United States has squandered some of its margin of superiority by mismanaging [our] own economy, by allowing 9/11 to cloud [our] strategic judgment, and by indulging in precisely the sort of hubris that the ancient Greeks warned against.

The main question is whether we will learn from these mistakes, and start basing national security policy on hard-headed realism rather than either neo-conservative fantasies or overly enthusiastic liberal interventionism.

Unfortunately, the first shots in the 2012 presidential campaign do not exactly fill me with confidence.

August 17, 2011 at 10:22 AM

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