Contributors

Monday, June 16, 2014

If You Have No Exit Strategy Don't Enter

The media is full of Republicans blaming President Obama for the current mess in Iraq. Articles like this one in the New York Times paint Bush as being prescient, saying that leaving Iraq prematurely would have dire consequences.

Yet in 2003 George W. Bush and his cronies said that the invasion of Iraq would be a cakewalk, a brief brilliant burst of glory. We would emerge victorious in six days, or six weeks, or six months at most (remember the Mission Accomplished banner?). But when Bush left office in 2009 our forces had been fighting there for almost six years and more than 5,000 Americans had died there.

Bush's lies were not just about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, or his involvement with 9/11. The real lie was that we could successfully invade and pacify Iraq in a short time, for a minimal investment (they said the invasion would pay for itself), with no help from the rest of the world.

Yes, we invaded and occupied Germany and Japan, turning them into upstanding world citizens and allies. Those countries were united and coherent to begin with, but it still required a huge cost and a permanent military presence for the last 70 years. We've had troops in South Korea for 60 years keeping North Korea at bay.

Iraq is fractured by centuries-old ethnic and religious differences held in check only by ruthless tyrants like Saddam. Yet Bush went into Iraq on the pretext that we'd be done in a matter weeks or months at most.

Bush never developed an exit strategy for Iraq because there is no exit strategy: we would have to maintain troops in Iraq for the next century keeping the Sunni, Shiite and Kurd populations of Iraq from killing each other.

Because they've already been at it for centuries. How many American lives and trillions of dollars would we have had to sacrifice before the Iraqis realized the futility of their age-old hatreds and make peace with each other?

To make it worse, as long as we had troops in Iraq, there would there would be an endless stream of outsider incursions engineered to cause problems for us: Al Qaeda proxies funded by Saudi Wahabis, Hezbollah proxies funded by Iran, Taliban proxies funded by Pakistan, Sadrist proxies funded by Russia.

We could win World War II because Germany and Japan attacked us. We could chase them back home and destroy their war machines. But the we can't win the civil war between Shiites and the Sunnis in Iraq. It's not our fight. You can't invade a country and make them act reasonably.

The best you can do is pick one side and help them destroy the other. So do we help the majority Shiites led by the corrupt Iranian puppet prime minister Nouri al-Maliki who has been tormenting minority Sunnis since Bush installed him in 2007? Or do we help the Sunnis, who tormented the Shiites under Saddam's rule, and most recently stood by and let ISIS commandos overrun Mosul and slaughter thousands of Iraqi soldiers execution-style? Or do we just let the country fall apart and help the Kurds establish their own nation and keep all the oil, letting the Sunnis and Shiites wallow in perpetual poverty and war?

When all of the options are bad, does it make any sense to risk American lives and spend trillions more dollars on wars that will only make us more enemies and put our troops in the crosshairs of every terrorist in the Middle East?

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