Don't bomb Iran, Part One: Some recent history

I figured that this was going to be a nice easy essay to write, based entirely on current events.

Sadly, I know how the blogosphere works, and I know that you can't do that. When you have opinions like mine, particularly when you're of the political bent that I am, you need to explain where you're coming from. Not that it often does very much good.

So this has to be a mutli-part article, much longer than even my ordinary posts, and far longer than anything else you'll read on the blogosphere. As much as I'd like to write RedState or The DailyKos - because it would be so easy to preach to the converted every day - I wouldn't have any fun doing it. Also, political parties won't send me their talking points because I'm a dick.

Instead, I want you to understand what I think the problems are, as opposed to what party-line bloggers and media think you should believe.

You have every right to disagree with me and to say so in the comments. I have a pretty good history of not deleting anything, except in the most extreme circumstances. Frankly, I want to debate with you. Otherwise, I'm talking to myself, which I can do without all of the typing. Did I mention that I'm a two-finger typist and that this is a lot more work than it looks like?

There comes a time in the life of every rational country when it asks itself how many pointless, unwinnable wars it can fight without destroying itself. Those countries that don't ask themselves that question have tended to find themselves a part of history, rather than the present or the future.

By almost any measure, the war in Iraq has failed. It has taken some time to come to that conclusion, if only because there were so many publicly presented (and often contradictory) pretexts for that war (which, I should also note for my newer readers, I vehemently defended for it's first two to three years.)

Iraq is an unnatural country, comprised of people that deeply hate one another, that was imposed upon them by the Treaty of Versailles. It always followed that if you introduced democracy there, the people would follow their democratic impulse to murder one another. This, by the way, is exactly what happened in the former Yugoslavia a decade prior.

The "surge" stopped that for a time, but all of the bad actors knew that the surge would someday come to an end. When the surge was proposed as a policy option, it was posed as a means of allowing a political reconciliation between the various factions that was foolish to expect. Two years of  a (comparatively) increased troop presence cannot be expected to overcome a thousand years of history. And the only people who didn't know that were the Americans. The British, as experienced as they are in the region, got the hell out as soon as the surge was announced.

Weapons of Mass Destruction was also a false argument. Saddam Hussein was evil and given to massive strategic miscalculation, but he was far from suicidal. If he was, he would have used WMD - or passed them on to terrorists - in the first Gulf War, when there was absolutely no doubt that he possessed them, and there was a very real chance that the Coalition would march on Baghdad. A regime is ordinarily only willing to commit suicide when it knows that it's going to die anyway.

For that reason, the United States couldn't have been luckier that Iraq's WMD program didn't actually exist. After all, the military build-up in Kuwait took six months, during which time Saddam could have easily transferred weapons, had they existed. If, as was initially thought by the United States and United Kingdom, the WMD was so easily hidden from the invading troops, it could have just as easily been given away to even more malign forces. And perhaps it was. We may not know that for years to come, if only because that's an assertion that can't be proven or disproved at this point.

I supported the war for the very reason that it was illegal, because it was preventative. The Bush administration painted it as a preemptive action, which was nonsense. Preemption legally requires an imminent threat, and there was no plausible case for an imminent threat to the U.S directly from Iraq unless the U.S attempted to overthrow the Iraqi regime.

History, however, is a complicated thing. Saddam had a long history of waking up one morning and saying "Hey, let's invade Iran! What could happen?", or "Hey, let's annex Kuwait! What could go wrong?"

But by 2002, the sanctions regime was evaporating rapidly, and there was no indication that Saddam had learned his lesson. There was every indication that once the international arms boutique had once again been open to him, his adventurism would resume, necessarily requiring the West to intervene and eventually remove him once and for all. I thought it was the better part of wisdom to do that when he was weak, rather when he was strong. But I never pretended that it was any different than Pearl Harbor or Hitler's invasion of the U.S.S.R, both of which operated on the same premise.

I also figured that the aftermath of the war would be in line with traditional U.S foreign policy in the banana republics in its sphere of influence, which is to say that they would talk a lot about democracy,and then install a military junta that would mind its own business and repress the Iraqi people just enough to keep the country together. Always remember, it was only the fall of communism that permitted the horrors of Bosnia and Kosovo.

If foreign powers are going to oppressively create an unnatural nation, an oppressive native state is going to be required to keep it together, particularly if you believe that the human spirit yearns to be free. Had I have known that the Bush administration was actually serious about democracy in Iraq, I never would have supported the war and probably marched in the streets against it. You cannot have "whole, democratic and free" Iraq, when granting it's people the inherent right to national self-determination when all they want is to be free of one another.

President Bush doomed Iraq to at least two decades of anarchy, until the country finally decides to split apart, the way that Yugoslavia did. But Yugoslavia didn't have oil or Israel in the eqation, which complicates matters greatly.

It was argued at the time that a democratic Iraq would stabilize the international oil market and be friendly to Israel.

Well, do the international oil markets seem more or less stable than they were in 2003? And Iraq had its first democratic elections seven years ago, yet the government still doesn't recognize the right of Israel to exist. Moreover, it still refuses to call Hamas or Hezbollah terrorists.

Are the same voices that promised a wave of peace and freedom rolling through the Middle East recognizing the Arab Spring as that?

Of course they aren't. Some of them refuse to do so simply because it happened too late into the term of a Democratic president to credit it as a victory. But some are recognizing the fact these "democratic revolutions" don't nicely align with American foreign policy objectives, so they therefore aren't democratic at all. It never occurred to the Bush and Obama administrations that these people could democratically decide to despise Israel and the United States.

I believe that those attitudes will change, but it will take years, if not decades, of  work on the part of both the United States and Israel to accomplish it. This won't be as easy as placating a tyrant with money, jet fighters and the training of the training of their monstrous secret police, as was true during the Cold War. Nor will Israel be able to secretly negotiate with monsters and monarchies as they harangue each in public. A great deal of very public daylight over a long period of time is going to necessary.

Then there's Afghanistan, which even very conservative Republicans are starting to understand is never going to be the swarthier version of Connecticut that they imagined it would be.

In transitioning the goal of the war as removing Arab terrorists that are hostile to the West into a place where girls go to school, the Bush and Obama administrations exhibited a fundamental misunderstanding of what Afghanistan actually is: a place where foreign intruders are eaten alive, so that they better settle their scores with one another. The Soviets tried to fundamentally tried to reorder Afghan society, too. Remember how well that worked?

Even if you assume that obliterating the Taliban should have been prime objective of the war, a counter-insurgency in a country of that size with the force that we had put in there couldn't have been done. This war was lost seven years ago when we didn't stop the Taliban resurgence in its tracks. How many more of our kids are we going feed into a meat grinder and still not meet any of our self-declared objectives?

In less than a decade, the West has put itself in two intractable wars in the Middle East that it cannot extract itself from without all of it's war aims falling around our ankles in shambles.  Does anyone need a third?