Shooting blanks in Iraq

Best comment by a Balloon Juice commentator about the invasion of Iraq:

We had the actual invasion, it was ok ‘till clean up time when it became obvious that no thought to ‘we’ve won, now what?’ happened at all. it was like my old neutered cat who’d jump on the female cat, mount her and then look at us with the ‘i’m supposed to do something important now…what was it?’ look.

EXACTLY.

I opposed the invasion from the beginning. After Hans Blix’s team had pretty much gone over the place with a fine-tooth comb and filed their first report, it was clear that a) Iraq had no functioning WMD factories (you can’t hide WMD factories from men on the ground, they need too much infrastructure, Blix had inspected every possible installation and found nothing that could make WMD), b) Iraq had no large WMD stockpiles that would threaten America and Americans (stockpiles deteriorate with time, no infrastructure since 1992 means no working WMD), and c) Iraq was thus not an immediate threat and handling the issue of Iraq could wait. It was also clear just from looking at the demographics that invading Iraq with the idea of installing a democracy in the place essentially meant Iraq becoming Iran West, due to the Shiite majority—the same reason why Bush Sr. didn’t send his troops to Baghdad. I couldn’t figure out why that would be in the national interests (creation of an Iranian satellite state next door to Saudi Arabia) thus couldn’t support sending troops into the country under the rubric of “spreading democracy” either (the purpose of the American government is to serve America and Americans, not to serve some other folks overseas). I supported sending those troops into Afghanistan and Pakistan instead to find and bring to justice the man who DID attack us on 9/11 (Osama bin Forgotten—remember him?). Osama attacked us. He needed to go DOWN, to show the world that you can’t attack America and get away with it.

Instead, Dear Leader decided to give aid and comfort to our nation’s enemies by making it clear that our nation can be attacked with impunity, and attacked Iraq instead of bringing to justice the man who attacked America. It was as if the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, and FDR had declared war on Mexico in response.

That said, when our troops crossed into Iraq, I did not say “I hope we lose!”. I just muttered “Well, I guess the Rubicon has been crossed, we’re officially an empire now, I just hope the Bush administration does a good job of it.” Of course, they didn’t. They believed their own propaganda about how it was a war for democracy rather than a war for oil, elections were held, the Shiites won (shocker! They’re the majority!), and now Iraq might as well be called Iran West because the “Iraqi” government has ties to Iran that go back to before Saddam’s time. Just as was predicted, by Bush Sr. and myself and anybody else who knew anything about Iraq.

The deal with empire is you can’t play around with all this “democracy” if you want to be an empire. And if you don’t want to be an empire, behaving like one by attacking nations that haven’t attacked you never works, because a democracy simply doesn’t have it in its genes to do what it takes to pacify and hold an empire (hint: Stalin knew. As Stalin would put it, “no man, no problem”—i.e., genocide solves all imperial problems, just ask the Ukrainians, or the 1/3rd of them that were left after Stalin finished slaughtering and starving them to death anyhow). While I am glad to find out that we are not the type of nation that can do empire “right” (i.e. via mass slaughter and genocide), the fact that we can’t do empire “right” means the imperial experiment is doomed to failure, regardless of how many troops we pour onto the burning bonfire that is Iraq.

-- Badtux the History Penguin