May 06, 2011
missing asset:https://www.takimag.com/images/uploads/bush_sr_jr.jpg
IRAQ
The blowback from American meddling in the Middle East came on September 11th, 2001, eight months into G. W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s neoconservative regime. The terror attacks provided Cheney and his operatives with a field day. There were now no limits to what Washington might attempt to do in the world.
Iraq is still smoldering from the unprovoked 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation. Washington has constructed a billion-dollar embassy in the middle of Baghdad’s Green Zone, but the Shiite government that Washington installed in Iraq wants American troops out of the country as soon as possible. It has been estimated that the price of war in Iraq will cost the US Treasury anywhere from eight hundred billion to three trillion dollars. That’s not a peacetime dividend. That’s a huge wartime debt.
AFGHANISTAN
Peace Prize Obama’s “right war” in Afghanistan (as distinguished from the Republicans” “wrong war” in Iraq) is rapidly going from bad to worse. The fact that General Petraeus has been nominated to head the CIA tells you that Washington has thrown in the towel in Afghanistan. There is nothing Petraeus or anybody else can do there. The Pentagon has hit the wall in Afghanistan, like the Kremlin and the British Empire did before it. And the “dividend” will be another bill of at least four hundred billion dollars”drawn, as it always is, from the taxpayers” account.
LIBYA
Libya is the next convenient target, either by default or as a kind of afterthought. As if there were not enough on Washington’s plate already, Obama’s national security team has allowed itself to be talked into joining Libya’s civil war. It looks as if Robert Gates tried to inform the White House’s masterminds that the US military was stretched to the limit. It did not matter. Obama and Hillary pushed through UN Security Council resolution 1973, which gave all interested parties enough cover to do whatever they wanted.
Muammar Gaddafi is a gangster just like Saddam Hussein was, but at least he is a gangster among his own people. He and his sons could be watched and curtailed, if need be, from over the horizon. Even more than G. W.‘s “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq, Obama’s air war in Libya is blatantly unconstitutional, unauthorized by Congress, and in general, just plain nuts on various levels.
All the above is the natural cumulative result of Washington’s flawed decisions in the Cold War’s aftermath. Why couldn’t DC have withdrawn from “foreign entanglements” and left Middle Eastern security to those in the Middle East? None of this activity is consistent with a peace dividend. Precisely the opposite”it’s a financial liability that will last generations.
How such blood-soaked destruction in Muslim lands benefits the average American is hard to fathom, especially when it comes to oil’s price on the world market and the gargantuan tax bill for such needless meddling.
The peace dividend that was promised back in 1989 has vanished and along with it, a golden age which might have been. Washington’s wrongheaded Middle Eastern interventions remain open-ended and largely unfunded. We have nothing to gain”and everything to lose”in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. On the surface, the incendiary policy that squandered the peace dividend may be considered shortsighted and benighted. Looking deeper, it could be a monstrous crime by insiders who know they will never be held accountable.
