We have seen the enemy...

Submitted by Michael (United States), Jul 9, 2008 at 10:25

Amy, you make an excellent suggestion. I've not read The Threatening Storm, but understand it presented the case for an Iraq invasion, on the eve of that invasion, very effectively. I'll look for it in the library. Did it convince you that Iraq, if not destroyed, was any kind of imminent threat to US soil? If so, it would be mistaken.

Iraq, after 1991, was a husk of a country made destitute by punishing sanctions, and militarily impotent. Destroying such a non-threatening place would in my mind be a little like kicking a cripple. Did we find the famous WMD? No... in fact what we found was the mendacity behind the claims that we "knew" they existed. Books too numerous to list have given us the fine detail of administration lies, half-lies and innuendos. And have we shown Iraq a brighter future? Hardly.

By any metric you can mention, they are worse off now than at any point since the close of the Iran-Iraq War, in 1988. Nation building in Iraq (not to mention Afghanistan) has been no more effective than has city building in the wake of Katrina. It's something the current administration does not really understand, and is not equipped to do at all well. What they are actually doing in those three instances is opening up markets.

The greater question your comment raises is that nearly any narrative can be made to sound convincing, when taken on its own terms. Karl Marx, for example, can be very enticing when you know nothing other than how the world looked to Mr Karl Marx. A greater challenge would be to read ALL the narratives, and to put together a picture bigger than any of them taken alone. As for the strategy we've used, one has to be struck by the fact that when you declare an entire portion of the world to be our enemy, the inhabitants of that area, of necessity, must become our enemies in order to survive. That raises the question in my mind as to whether that was our actual intent: to create another "menace to our freedoms" in the absence of any more Communists to demonize. One has to wonder about that.

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