Mission Accomplished, Revisited

By Post-War Correspondent Douglas MacArthur
with Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling

You kids out there Tik Toking and giving away your parents' entire private lives away to Chinese intelligence may not be aware of this, but once upon a time the United States started a war with Iraq, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and sorry and agony for millions more.

Unlike other Top-Ten hits of 2003 (including CSI, Friends, and, um, The Apprentice), though, it's fallen into the same memory hole that swallowed constitutional law, four door sedans, and Sara Lee chocolate cake.

Anyway, briefly, Republican neocons used the 9/11 attack as an excuse to invade Iraq (which had nothing to do with the attack) and overthrow and preside over the lynching of its dictator Saddam Hussein.  An orgy of pointless violence followed, including the commission by U.S. forces and intelligence services of grotesque tortures (apparently witnessed by former Assistant Urinalysis Officer Ron DeSantis).   Then shortly after U.S. forces finally left in 2011, there was another bloodbath as Sunni extremists, capitalizing on the collapse of legitimate authority in Iraq, took over huge swatches of the country.

Probably not the most shining moment in United States history (and therefore Florida students will never learn about it), but we've moved on to other things as a country, like insurrection and insanity.

It turns out though that Iraqis can't move on because they still live there, not far from their dead kin.  According to a fine report in The New York Times,

What's he so grouchy about?  We said we were sorry, didn't we? Actually, we didn't, and never have.  

We were wondering how the devastation visited on the Dhahi family was reported at the time.  You'll be pleased to know that we tried super hard to limit the number of dead civilians:

The New York Times, April 30, 2004.  

At least the Marines were out of lethal range!  That's something!

Beyond the incalculable level of human suffering is the strategic catastrophe brought on by the needless war.  Iraq today is a corrupt failed state plundered by factional leaders many of whom are under the thumb or on the payroll of what we have told is yet another Evil Empire, Iran:

The most powerful among these [Iraqi] militias have links to Iran.

Many Iraqis accuse the militias and Iran of undermining Iraq’s sovereignty and democracy because a number of them function outside Iraq’s military command and because many militias are also linked to political parties, lending a violent edge to politics....

 Sajad Jiyad...and other experts say that every party has tried to grab as much of the spoils of Iraq’s wealth and power as possible, and that over the years, corruption has become institutionalized to such an extent that it is not just the positions of ministers that are allocated by party; parties also control many lower-level jobs and contracts associated with a ministry and use them to reward supporters or curry political favor.

Cool cool cool.  Who could have foreseen that invading Iraq would be a strategic and humanitarian calamity?  Who could have known that supposed case that the Bush Administration confected to justify its war was all bollocks?

Here's my analysis piece originally published in the Spy in October 2002:

Finally a Commander-in-Chief with the rocks to do what has to be done – not like that lily-livered Harry Truman or that glad-handing Eisenhower.

Bush knows what we need to do to rid this world of the scourges of tyranny and terrorism – invade the world headquarters of Terror Incorporated. That's right: this time we're going to the Yalu to stay. 

Iraq is all well and good. I know we've got a score to settle there, but that's nothing compared to the unfinished business on the Korean peninsula. My boys in Seoul are rarin' to go and my sources tell me that the North Koreans will crumple like they did back in the fall of 1950 when confronted with the might of the United States Army, ably assisted by our many allies. 

If you think that was a bit over the top, remember that George W. Bush declared Iraq, Iran, and North Korea to be an “Axis of Evil,” but quit the job at one out of three.

By the way, whatever happened to David Frum, the Bush flack who coined that immortal phrase?  Surely he must have slunk off to obscurity or Toronto (essentially the same thing).

As devoted readers of the Spy are aware, he's thriving as a gasbag for hire, along with other warmongers like Billy Kristol and Max Boot.

Boot at least has admitted he was wrong about Iraq:

In retrospect, I was wildly overoptimistic about the prospects of exporting democracy by force, underestimating both the difficulties and the costs of such a massive undertaking. I am a neocon no more, at least as that term has been understood since 9/11. https://t.co/JhztGTgtrz

— Max Boot 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@MaxBoot) March 10, 2023

albeit with the same insouciance that normally accompanies a confession of error in choosing Kansas and Purdue for the Final Four. 

The Times piece was accompanied by an even more devastating analysis that asks the simple question: why did George Bush invade Iraq in the first place, knowing as he must have the weapons and terror stories were just crap used to persuade the non-Bonesmen rubes [Surely, Congress and the American people? – Ed.].

Twenty years later, he's doin' fine!

The answer will not astonish you:

“If there was a hidden reason, the one I heard most was that we needed to change the geopolitical momentum after Sept. 11,” [Bush Administration flunky Richard] Haass has said of internal deliberations. “People wanted to show that we can dish it out as well as take it. We’re not a pitiful helpless giant.” 

If anyone can think of a better reason to launch a war of choice that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and showed that the United States was in fact pitiful and helpless, please pass it on to that pitiful helpless pygmy, George Bush. 

Twenty years on, America has taken a couple of lessons from the Iraq debacle.  The right lesson is that we do not send our fine young troops into mortal danger unless there is an overwhelming need for their sacrifice.

As usual, Republicans, addled by their perpetual unjustified white grievance, have drawn the wrong lesson.  They now believe that we should let Putin run rampant until he reaches whatever he believes to be the proper boundaries of the Russian Empire, which once included Alaska.  Instead, we should focus our military on machine-gunning refugees seeking legal entry at our Southern border like so many British regiments on the Somme.

There's one final lesson that can be drawn from the Iraq War and 60 years of Republican f**k ups in foreign policy and national security.  (Elsewhere on page 1 of today's Times you can learn how Republicans tried to induce Iran to stonewall resolution of the hostage crisis to grease the election of St. Ronald of Bitburg). 

The lesson is simple.  The last Republican you could trust to protect American national security responsibly and rationally was Dwight D. Eisenhower.