Brace Yourselves. This could take a while

“”—‘’
(Just in case you’re reading this after the Holocaust, I’m reacting to the news that a militia representing a group called ISIS, which stands for some mash-up of Islam, Iraq, Syria and Something Else has begun to move across Iraq from the North, and may or may not have taken the capital, Baghdad.  They also like to make videos of shooting off the heads of captured soldiers.  Meanwhile, another puerile bunch of militants keep kidnapping Nigerian girls, and it appears that the Nigerian government is powerless to keep its population secure.  In the US, of course, it is random civilians who go about on killing sprees, but that never seems to bother anyone outside the US.  Our own killing sprees seldom result in more than about twenty deaths, luckily for everyone.)

Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1995, for reasons not clear to most of us (except that Kuwait and Iraq both sit on top of the same oil field, and Kuwait seemed to be draining it off and selling it faster than Iraq could do it, or wanted to do it), and the US (where George H. W. Bush was president at the time) marched in and liberated Kuwait, in Operation Desert Storm.

In 2001, two US passenger airliners were hijacked by Al Qaeda agents, and rammed into the World Trade Center, killing thousands, and causing millions of dollars of damage, and widespread shock.

At this time, many countries were suspected of hiding weapons of mass destruction (other than the US, Israel, Britain, France and Russia, all of which had given themselves permission to own these weapons).  One of the prime suspects was Iraq, which vehemently denied that they had any such thing, in a tone guaranteed to convince the US that they actually had them.  In 2002, right after the attacks of 2001, the US (where G. W. Bush was president at the time) decided to attack Iraq, ostensibly to search and remove weapons of mass destruction, but in actual fact, as retaliation for 2001.  Al-Qaeda, in fact, had little or no presence in Iraq at this time.  The military operation against Iraq in 2002 was pure theatre.  The only truly substantive objective of the operation was to capture the Iraqi oilfields, or at least to ensure that they did not fall into the hands of anti-US interests.

Let’s look at the fallout

There is a long history of the US going to war to protect its economic interests.  The country is by no means unified in its support for this; in fact, the numbers of those opposed to military action for economic ends might be a majority.  The numbers opposed to military action for the sole purpose of keeping a particular party in power is an even larger majority.  At any rate, the emotional response to the attacks of 2001 were so great that many in Congress lost their objectivity, and supported the call to war, and the years between 2002 and the present have been some of the most shameful in US history.  President Obama, who was elected in 2008, was unable to withdraw US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan because of the complications surrounding the process of disengagement, and the practical impossibility of constructing an effective withdrawal strategy.  In every war since 1900, the exit strategy has been increasingly more complex, and less satisfactory.  The postwar reconstruction of Germany will probably stand as the last success story; reconstruction of Iraq has been a failure, reconstruction of Afghanistan will be a failure, and every new war the US prosecutes will be a failure in every respect.

The politics of the world today are not open to solution by simple, clean, decisive military action.  Only a military dictator who is completely uninterested in a sane foreign policy can be satisfied with military action today, and unfortunately the number of political enemies of the US abroad which are headed by such people is proliferating.

In Russia, we have Mr. Putin, who appears to be somewhat short of being a statesman.  If Russia stops exporting gas to Europe, and if it cannot enrich its coffers by selling gas to China instead, it will be looking for international customers for its advanced weapons systems, and any enemy of the US could be a customer.  (In fact, arms manufacturers in the US itself are eager to sell arms to its enemies.  Business comes before patriotism, for everyone in the armaments industry, and they would justify themselves by saying that selling arms to our enemies strengthens us economically, and we have better guns anyway.)

The interesting thing is that there is something common between the US, and the Islamic Fundamentalists who are the most militant enemies of the US.  Both parties are easily inflamed by words.  The US is more easily pissed off by rhetoric than most of its present and former allies, such as Britain, Ireland, Germany, France and Japan.  It takes a lot more than rudeness to piss off the Japanese.  It’s almost impossible to irritate China.  But Putin can enrage Americans with a mere look.

It is the same with the Islamist Fundamentalists.  Both the US and the Islamist Fundamentalists absolutely pride themselves on being easily enraged.  With our short fuses, we could be at war for more than a century.  This is why I have stocked up on a whole lot of DVDs.

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