(The image above is by Chris Helgren of Reuters, and was found at the Business Insider.)In May of 2003, only a couple of months after invading Iraq, President Bush declared "mission accomplished". We now know that was nothing more than a sick joke. The war continued for many more years -- killing 4,488 American troops and injuring another 32,223. It also caused the deaths of more than a half-million Iraqis, and turned more than two million others into displaced refugees. And what did it accomplish?
We now know it accomplished nothing except to re-ignite sectarian religious divisions in the area -- divisions that have now erupted into a renewal of the fighting. While American ground troops are no longer in Iraq (and hopefully won't be sent back), this renewed fighting has President Obama considering re-entering the ongoing conflict through the use of air power. I sincerely hope he doesn't do that, because neither the ISIS rebels nor the Maliki government (which is becoming an Iranian puppet) are going to be friends of the United States. We caused the current mess, but there is no longer any rational place for us in the conflict.
Over at Daily Kos, Jon Perr has written an interesting post. He calls it "10 Lessons From Bush's Fiasco In Iraq". I list his 10 lessons below, and if you want to read his more in-depth analysis of each point you should go to the Daily Kos website. They are pretty self-explanatory though.
1. Don't Fight Wars on the Cheap
2. Don't Uncork Bottled Up Sectarian Divisions
3. Al Qaeda Thought It Was Better to Fight Us There
4. Sectarian U.S. Allies Can't Be Bought, Only Rented
5. Don't Hitch the U.S. Wagon to the Wrong Strongman
6. The Enemy of Our Enemy is Not Our Friend
7. U.S. Forces Should Never Be Deployed Permanently in a Civil War Zone
8. Regime Change is a Recipe for Disaster
9. Democracy Promotion Can't Come from the Barrel of Gun
10. Preventive War is an Idea Whose Time Has Never Come
I am not very optimistic about whether anything was learned from that invasion and occupation, so I call it what we SHOULD have learned from Iraq. And frankly, we should have learned some of these things from Vietnam many years earlier.
Unfortunately, many of our leaders don't want to learn anything (especially the neocons). That's because, regardless of the cost in lives, war is very profitable for corporate interests. And the neocons will always love war as long as there is profit in it.
