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Just
In Case You've Forgotten: We Told You So!
A
BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Steven C. Day How often during the last year has someone ridiculed you, scoffed
at you, belittled you or even questioned your patriotism because you
had the audacity to question the wisdom of invading Iraq. Once a week?
Once a day? Every freakin’ time you turned around?
Well, here we now stand, our nation stuck in the quagmire of quagmires,
with no apparent way out. The casualty list keeps rising. The damage
to our national reputation keeps growing. And the drain on our national
treasury keeps draining. We are, in short, in the deepest of deep trouble.
And it was all so unnecessary:
Do
you remember Barbara Tuchman’s "The March of Folly?" If
so, you probably also recall that her definition of folly involved
the strange recurring pattern by which governmental leaders throughout
history have taken steps manifestly contrary to their nation's interests,
despite being warned by contemporaries of the foolishness of their
actions. Can anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty doubt that
the War in Iraq meets this definition?
But,
like it or not, that war is now the "reality on the ground." We're
stuck there like a fly glued to a no-pest strip and we're not going
to get completely free for a long time. This means, of course, that
as angry as opponents of the war are, and rightly so, we must, nevertheless,
look forward. We must push for solutions (like giving the international
community through the U.N. the things it wants, needs and deserves
as the price of greater international support), instead of just complaining
bitterly over mistakes and lies that are now part of history. But,
even with that said, there is one other thing we need to do – we need
to tell all of those rats who hounded us for all those months and especially
Bush himself one small thing –
"We
told you so."
So
here is my personal "I told you so" -- just one very
small voice out of many.
Back
just a few days after Sept. 11, I posted a column expressing my profound
discomfort over the reckless way Bush had started to use
the word "war." Here's a small snippet:
Given the sophistication of the attacks and the degree of the damage
done, it is easy to see why so many people, including the president,
are calling this an act of war against the United States. Even the
frequent comparisons to the attack on Pearl Harbor have the ring of
truth. But is all this bellicose language really wise? Should we really
be using the words of warfare, the most potent words in any language,
in such an unrestrained way?
It
would be different if this war talk were just directed against
the criminals involved in the attacks and those supporting them.
No
one doubts the need for strong action there, so long as the response
is measured and reasonable steps are taken to limit civilian casualties.
But the current talk of war goes far beyond that.
In
fact, the president, with apparent bipartisan congressional support,
has said that the U.S. is declaring a war not just against these
terrorists, but against all terrorists everywhere. If that's
true, then we are
looking at one hell of an undertaking. This remains a huge and
complex world. Acts of terrorism occur daily and in virtually
every nook and
cranny of the globe, with each situation carrying its own unique
history, its own complexities and its own set of traps for unwary
outsiders.
What are the rules of engagement for this new global war against terrorism?
What are our strategic goals? Most important, what is our exit strategy?
How long will we remain on a wartime footing? Will a year be long enough?
Or will we need five, 10 or even 20 years? Terrorism is immortal. Will
this then be a war in perpetuity?
"War
of Words":
[LINK]
And
where has this loose and still largely undefined "war against
terrorism" taken us? Tragically, right into the middle of a bloody
Iraqi swamp.
Then
shortly before the Iraq War started, I posted a column attacking
Bush's and the neocons' use of the so-called Munich analogy, under
which they argued that to not immediately attack Saddam would be comparable
to the West's failure to take on Hitler in the early days of German
expansionism. In opposing this, one of my primary points was that history
does not demonstrate that our leaders are smart enough (or honest enough)
to decide, prior to starting a "preemptive war," whether
any given country will ultimately pose the sort of threat to the United
States that would justify an attack:
But then, the whole idea that we're somehow smart enough to figure
out today which nations will pose a dire threat to our security tomorrow
(let alone years or even decades into the future) strikes me as a bit
absurd. We certainly weren't that smart back during the Reagan administration,
when we sent materials suitable for use in biological weapons to our
old ally, Saddam Hussein. And we weren't that smart when, at about
the same time, we provided military support to a certain Saudi exile
named Osama bin Laden because he happened to be fighting our old adversary,
the Soviet Union, in Afghanistan.
You
remember the Soviet Union -- the original "Evil Empire" (not
to be confused with the Axis of Evil). It's now long gone, of course,
and Russia has become something akin to our friend. Yet, for years
before the fall of the Berlin Wall, many of our greatest statesmen
and military leaders were predicting that war between the United States
and the U.S.S.R. was inevitable. From time to time, someone would go
so far as to suggest preemptive war. During the Cuban Missile Crisis,
for example, Sen. Russell, arguing in support of an aggressive military
response, told Kennedy that war against the Soviets was coming "some
day" anyway, then he added: "Will it ever be under more auspicious
circumstances?"
And these are the guys who are supposed to decide when we should attack
someone preemptively?
"Iraq
and the Ghosts of Munich":
[LINK]
So
what ended up happening? We invaded Iraq and low-and-behold we found
that all of those weapons of mass destruction that supposedly
justified the invasion were simply figments of the neocons' machinations.
And just as I (and countless others) predicted, it turned out that
Iraq had never really been the sort of threat Bush & Co. thought
it was (or at least pretended to think it was).
Next
up, came the invasion itself and, for a short while, some of the
Iraqi defenders stunned the United States and Britain by putting
up a heroic, if obviously doomed, defense. The administration's response
was to describe these irregular troops as "thugs." I posted
a column which argued that while many of these defenders were, in fact,
brutal people who had abused their countrymen, plainly they were not,
as the administration was implying, nothing more than a collection
of ordinary thugs and that this difference portended trouble:
The problem, of course, is that however much we may wish this were
true, it clearly isn't. It doesn't fit the facts. Cowards don't charge
selflessly into machine gun fire. Common criminals don't throw their
lives away by taking potshots at the most powerful military machine
the world has ever known from the back of pickup trucks. And thugs
who are just in it for the money don't blow themselves up in suicide
bombings. It may well be true, as a number of reports have suggested,
that some Iraqis are being forced to fight and die against their will.
If so, then that's just one more tragedy in this awful debacle. But
to suggest that this is all that's going on here is a farce.
It
isn't hard to understand why the Bush administration wants to write
off the surprisingly stiff Iraqi resistance to the invasion as the
work of a small group of thugs. In leading the United States into this
modern crusade to bring democracy (and a little Christianity along
the way) to the great unwashed, the administration painted a charmingly
simple picture: We good. They bad. We bomb. They fold. We march. They
cheer. We lead. They follow. We bless. They receive. We leave. They
thank. The fact that some Iraqis have been willing to die in order
to prevent us from "liberating" them blasts a hole into this
fairytale the size of Richard Perle’s ego.
. . . the willingness, on the part of some (of these Iraqi irregulars),
to die for the cause . . . That's something our leaders didn't bank
on in Iraq. It's a truth that will now haunt us for however long our
troops remain in that nation, both during the war itself and in the
occupation to follow.
"No
Ordinary Thugs":
[LINK]
And
here we sit today, with these same "no big deal" thugs
(and others) still giving our troops fits.
But
then came the rapid fall of Baghdad, and like mosquitoes on a spring
evening in Minnesota, the neocons swarmed our television sets, snidely
pronouncing their own I told you sos: "We were right! We were
right! -- and our doubters were fools," they crowed.
In response, I posted a column pointing out that this celebrating
might be a tad premature -- that virtually all of the disaster scenarios
warned of by war opponents before the invasion remained viable in its
immediate aftermath:
It's time to start raining a little cold reality on this giddy victory
parade. The truth is that while the military campaign was a smashing
success, politically we've won next to nothing to this point. Ridding
Iraq of Hussein is a big plus in any rational person's book, but that's
only the beginning of the story. This was a political war fought to
promote political ends. Iraq didn't attack us. We weren't defending
ourselves under any conventional understanding of that concept. The
United States, therefore, will have won this war in a meaningful sense
if, and only if, we are able to achieve our political objective of
establishing a reasonably stable and democratic government in Iraq,
thereby reducing the risk of terrorist attacks against American interests.
This process of nation building hasn't even started yet and the road
ahead looks long and perilous.
And
let's face it. Our track record stinks. We promised to bring stability
and democracy to Afghanistan. Instead, Hamid Karzai, our hand picked "national
leader," hides out in Kabul, protected by Dynacorp rent-a-cops.
Real power in the rest of the country rests with a ragtag collection
of brutal warlords, many of whom finance their operations by growing
opium that will eventually find its way onto American streets. American
military personnel are coming under increasingly frequent attacks by
resurgent Taliban elements. Meanwhile, Afghanistan has fallen so far
off of Bush's radar screen that his administration actually forgot
to include the country in its foreign aid budget proposal to Congress.
Will we do better in Iraq? I would tell you not to bet the farm on
it, but, unfortunately, we already have.
The
truth is that almost all of the Iraq "disaster scenarios" that
have so haunted antiwar activists and foreign policy experts alike
remain very much in play.
"Waiting
For the Other Shoe(s) to Drop":
[LINK]
Once
again, can anyone with even a flake of intellectual honesty deny
that these warnings, issued by so many different voices from far
and
wide, have, in fact, been proven well founded? Not only have almost
all of the less apocalyptic disaster scenarios, such as increased terrorism
and mountainous expense, actually come to pass -- the granddaddy of
all disaster scenarios, open ethnic warfare, remains a very real risk.
Am
I trying to suggest by this that because I got these things right
(and the neocons got them wrong) that this makes me some sort of an
expert? Not even close. Literally millions of other Americans reached
the same conclusions. What I am saying is that the folly of the Iraq
war was so damnably obvious going in that it didn't take an expert
to see it. And I'm also saying that all of those neocon "experts," the
ones who failed to appreciate (or choose to ignore) these obvious risks,
have a lot to answer for.
So let me say it loud and clear:
I TOLD YOU SO! I TOLD YOU SO! AND I TOLD YOU SO!
And so did a lot of other people.
A
BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION |
