Back Page News of a Two Trillion Dollar Failure

We have folks in Congress telling us that that reason the Middle East and much of the Islamic world we sent forces “to protect” are failing is because our forces were too few and left too soon. Wow! We send troops into lands already rent asunder by long-standing historical schisms, try to impose some semblance of a democratic form of government to people who hate each other, disempower minorities who once ruled while transitioning power to majorities hell-bent on revenge, challenge deeply-embedded local leaders with an illiterate constituency and an intransigent patronage system with a form of government that requires some education to work… and we think that if our troops had stayed longer, things would be just plain wonderful.

Hubris? Ignorance? Some other fancier word for arrogance? Or just a group of our own “reality deniers” who are simply trying to justify why the United States spent over two trillion dollars – not to mention the “casualties” incurred – on wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan that simply failed to create any semblance of the “solution” we were dead sure our intervention would cause. We could have added 100,000 troops to each theater of war and ten years of further American presence, but as most knowledgeable regional historians would tell you, it would still have been a waiting game for a journey that had “failure” written all over it no matter how deep or long the commitment might be. And in that misdirected process, those locals who actually savored the promises we made became “collateral damage” along the way. We not only lost their hearts and minds, we created new enemies.

There is nothing philosophically wrong with responding with military force against those who have attacked us – like the Taliban who allowed al Qaeda terrorists to plot the 9/11/01 attack under their protection. But thinking you can change the political culture, ignore the internal distrust and internecine struggles to cement very different ethnic mixes under a “unifying” form of government, is the very definition of hubristic naiveté, ignorance and laziness to do the homework before pulling the invasion trigger. Likewise, there is a time and a place for participating in a global response against genocide, whether it was the carnage of Hitler or the slaughter currently being imposed by the Islamic State. The latter appears to owe at least a significant part of its heritage to failed American intervention in Iraq.

I question whether we have learned these necessary underlying lessons. How an American government could not have foreseen that a nation run by a 20% minority of Sunnis (Iraq) would instantly become a Shiite-dominant government (the 60% majority) – with natural strong ties to Iran – back in 2003 staggers my mind. I – an entertainment lawyer in Beverly Hills – knew that result the instant we invaded back in 2003. Our State Department so informed its bosses, who directed such information to stop. And even when the administration that fomented this tragic mistake was voted out of office, the next administration simply dragged out that mistake for many more years.

With Iraq in shambles, unlikely to hold together under any vision imposed by the United States, it’s easy to ignore the instability we left behind in Afghanistan, another failed political experiment based on under-educated American hubris. But stories like this one, from the November 29^th New York Times, are a constant reminder on how deeply we failed: “Taliban fighters overran an Afghan National Army outpost in Helmand Province in the country’s south late [November 28^th] night and by [the next] morning had killed as many as 14 soldiers in one of the insurgents’ deadliest attacks against Afghan soldiers this year, local officials said.

“Elsewhere in Helmand Province, the army battled for the third day against insurgents who had fought their way onto the army’s main base in the south, Camp Bastion. The former British base had been handed over to the Afghans in October.

“Amid this intensifying fighting in the south, where the Taliban have traditionally been strongest, the pattern of escalating suicide attacks in Kabul, the capital, continued late [November 29^th] afternoon. At least three Taliban insurgents stormed a Kabul guesthouse that the authorities said was occupied by a nongovernment organization. The Taliban claimed that the guesthouse belonged to Christian missionaries, but that could not be confirmed.” This didn’t make the headlines, and like the litany of suicide bombings in Baghdad, Iraq, was relegated to the back pages of American newspapers and Web news services… where it was even reported at all.

With two non-hostile borders and oceans separating us from most of the rest of the world, too many Americans have simply assumed as universal cultural similarities and political yearnings that have defined their own experiences. Our political leaders have too often adopted such naïve assumptions as their own. What this country really needs is knowledgeable leadership… from leaders who do not govern from following Gallup polls. We need to elect a representative government that knows how to lead and do what is best for all of us. What we have appears to be the polar opposition of that paradigm!

I’m Peter Dekom, and that we constantly settle for sub-mediocre political leaders never ceases to amaze me, but it does seem that repeating the same behavior and expecting different results is now the very definition of American policies, both internal and external.