To intervene or not to intervene. It’s one of the great issues of our time for the few countries powerful enough to consider such a thing. But Iraq for a third time? This should be an easy decision.
Iraq’s history is once again not going the way we’d like it to go (those of us with an opinion about the subject, which I would guess is not many of us). Don’t we owe it to the first two interventions to go in yet another time? Don’t we have a commitment to the democracy we set up over there at the cost of thousands of deaths?
Veterans of that intervention understandably complain bitterly about the “total waste” of their efforts there, the retaking of cities hard won with American blood (and a lot more Iraqi blood). But their bitterness involves a lot of wishful remembering.
Intervention is likely to go badly even if you go into it with wisdom and virtuous intentions. What we learned, the hard way, is that we had little knowledge of (or interest in) the country and highly dubious intentions. This was the war of the “weapons of mass destruction” joke, Abu Ghraib tortures, “black ops,” Halliburton-Cheney scandals.
By the time we backed out of there I doubt very many Americans at any level believed that we had laid on this very different country any but the flimsiest veneer of American democracy.
Return to Iraq to preserve our good works? Unfortunately there were none.
The the failure of the first two interventions is all the evidence we need that we should never have gone there in the first place.
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