Iraq, a lost cause. Billions wasted, thousands of lives lost, and a Middle East destabilized.
I am one of those people that do not believe this war will end well for America. As such I am for pulling out now. America has caused far too much trouble in that region and it's presence is further going to add to the destabilization. "No one predicted this" or "We weren't prepared for this", the administration chants. When were they ever ready? Whether 9/11, Katrina, or the insurgency, I have heard nothing but the same "We weren't ready or expecting this" bromide. America grossly underestimated both the history of the region, the peoples, the religion, the insurgency and did not put enough insight and judgement into its strategy and march to war.
America doesn't hold the cards, and nor does it control the situation anymore. It lost control of that situation a long time ago, when it removed Saddam and created a power vacuum. It's surprising how all this is so simple and not beyond common sense, yet the Washington hawks cannot see this, nor their blind supporters and keyboard warriors such as those that fester on this thread.
America doesn't control and hasn't controlled the situation in Iraq since then. It can only respond to events, and that is no recipe for success. Since its removal of Saddam and the power vacuum, things haven't exactly gone the way America predicted. America has been subjected to the law of unintended consequences. Who knows what we can expect? No one can predict what will or is going to happen.
Pulling out now, or later, is not going to make a difference in terms of the outcome which is loss. It is a lost cause, mark my words. It is a lost cause 1) militarily 2) politically and 3)financially. The billions that this war costs to an already overstretched American militarily, and a debt-ridden America financially and economically is not good, not to even begin to mention the lives lost on both sides to what was the worst military and political blunder because of Bush's grand visions. America is a debtor nation that is quickly losing its footing as the worlds superpower. Already the cracks are evident in the world system, with the rise of China and India, and the rebellion of the Muslim world. It no longer has an advantage over other nations. What is more, America's immense debt is financed by the Asian giants such as China and Japan.
Perhaps America will learn the hard way. You cannot march into peoples countries and expect to change thousands of years of history, culture, and tradition. You cannot expect them to have some petty elections where people have the illusion of power, and expect a land of clans, tribes, sects and blood ties to be absolved. What Iraq and recent events regarding cartoons, Iran, Hamas, and the recent events which finally made the unofficial civil war come to the fore, have all shown are two things:
1) First, They have shown that, indeed, America and the West are engaged in a clash of civilizations as Huntington wrote so eloquently in his essay and I urge everyone to read it who has not.
http://www.alamut.com/subj/economics/misc/clash.html
This idea that you can imbue your own values and norms upon other cultures and peoples, and expect them to all of a sudden change miracolously, and embrace yours, is unfounded. Not all cultures are American or Western cultures. Not all cultures are ready to accept the Western 'values', their ideologies, their institutions, and their ways of life, much less their humor or taste in cartoons, nevermind democracy, which in my opinion is grossly overrated as it is. Not all cultures are ready for democracy, much less secularism, all these values so proudly cherished by the 'progressive West'. These people consider themselves as the 'progressives' in their paradigm. Who is right? Both of them. Who is wrong? None of them.
The Western world may regard religion as mere opinion, or relegated to the dust bin of history or the back pages of the newspaper, but in other parts of the world, religion is the centerpiece of life and society and has always been so. This is why the West and America particularly is not equipped to deal with the Muslim world.
2) The second thing these recent events and conflicts have shown is that where you have a multicultural society, you cannot have it held together by the gluestick of democracy, especially in a region that is not affluent, not fully developed, and doesn't have the standard of living to keep people satisfied and shut up, such as in countries like America where multiculturalism is still stable for the time being (although I wouldn't say it is if you look at the prison system or inner city schools). All societies and governments that become too large and too complex and absorb too many elements, peoples and cultures, create the seeds of their own destruction. These work in an entropic fashion. The more complex systems get, the more they move toward disorder. There are too many chaotic variables in Iraq to hold it together. America is simply one variable in the equation of chaos.
Since it's impossible to have a multicultural society like Iraq held together by a weak thread like democracy, the alternative is either a dictator or breakdown. It takes either an iron fist to rule a vast multucultral country, empire or society (with Iraq you had Saddam, in an example like the Soviet Union you had Stalin, or the example of Yugoslavia), otherwise they break apart, and decompose. The Soviet Union was an example of an overly large multicultural empire composed of many cultures that eventually brokedown. You cannot control different peoples, cultures, sects, religions and rule them under one banner, which is an important note Huntington also makes. Furthermore, I recommend
The Breakdown of Nations by Leopold Kohr.
To quote Kohr:
[quote]There seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. Oversimplified as this may seem, we shall find the idea more easily acceptable if we consider that bigness, or oversize, is really much more than just a social problem. It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation.Whenever something is wrong, something is too big. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations have been welded onto overconcentrated social units. That is when they begin to slide into uncontrollable catastrophe. Hence it is always bigness, and only bigness, which is the problem of existence. The problem is not to grow but to stop growing; the answer: not union but division.[/quote]
Iraq was initially itself an artificial creation by the British and as such a big and complex society for the many variables it housed. It has never been truly free, and always under the thumb of either a foreign power, or a local dictator. Now that it has been removed, the seeds of division have resurfaced and the question is not if, but when. The only ones that seem blind to this is America.
Lordy lordy, and all along I thought (and still think) they have been and are being "mean" to themselves, while trying to elevate me to a person of superior stature. That won't work, but what the hell, it's fun to watch.
