After reading several articles about Iraq today, I think more and more of that article I read some time ago which compared Iraq not to Vietnam, or WWII, but to WWI. One of the greatest problems with starting wars is that you can't always know where they will stop, and what you might envision as a limited war, suddenly bursts its bounds like a wild river, and floods the surrounding area. As the Iraqi conflagration heats us, I hope against hope that we are not seeing a situation analogous more to WWI, than to Vietnam. Vietnam was a terrible curse for the Vietnamese and Cambodian people, but WWI threw whole continents into a tailspin, and set the stage for WWII. The birth of the disaster that is now Iraq, attended as it was by the midwifery of Mr. Bush, has put America in a terrible position going forward. I am no longer sure we can limit the damage in Iraq, or in the region. It would help if the republicans could at some point step up and do a really sincere Mea Culpa, and admit they royally screwed up- NOT just in the execution of the deed, but in coming up with this foolish idea in the first place.
I do hope we learn some real lessons from this- lessons that contemplate the limits of force, and the impossibility of forcing certain kinds of sea changes in philosophy and government on peoples who have not themselves asked for, and demanded, such changes, but I fear that John M may be right- and America will merely retreat, without learning the real lessons to be learned here. It's not that engagement all over the world is bad, but rather that arrogance, hubris, and violence do not mix well with engagement, and do not give us the long term returns on our engagement "investment" we might wish for. |
