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There may be a hidden upside to this whole Iraq mess
In a twisted way, to be sure, and it is a terrible mess, with lots of our people maimed and killed and lots MORE of Iraqis maimed and killed, and I don't have to go through the whole litany - we all know it.
But consider this: Bushco is currently sabre-rattling at Iran. Today they did some major financial cut-off and are slowing turning the screws until, I presume, they will announce that they have "no choice but to take military action".
Here's how Iraq has helped. They have screwed Iraq up. They have screwed it up so badly that it has taken years. Sure, there's money to be made from the oil and the no-bid defense contractors, but the cost has been huge, not just financial, but in terms of good will and, perhaps more importantly: timing.
What they wanted to do was go into Iraq, be greeted as liberators, take control, run the oil, and go onto step two. Well, it's been a huge cock-up, and it's set them back.
Set them back how? If I recall correctly, the original PNAC (Project for a New American Century) envisioned them going after Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and just about every other state in the region that (1) has oil and (2) we perceive as not being friendly to America.
We're just getting to Iran now, and we're doing it weakly, like staggering, bleeding, from one bar fight into another. Had everything gone just peachy-keen in Iraq after May of 2003, when we announced "Mission Accomplished", we would have probably set after Iran or Syria or Lebanon then, and continued, one by one, until we had conquered the region.
Now, history is full of countries conquering to preserve and expand their own empire. It could be argued that in the big scheme of things we should do this in order to ensure our viability decades from now in terms of energy independence (terrorism does not enter into it). However, history is also full of empires that overreached, from the Romans to the British Empire to Nazi Germany. Invariably they would collapse upon themselves back to their original size, if not actually disappear altogether. It's a risky way to go, it fails more often than not, and as a rule, America has taken the "live and let live" approach and just tried to coexist peacefully and go the benevolent dictator route.
It's a formula that has served us well in these very busy modern times, and basically, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Anyway, back to Iraq. As I was listening to today's news about our latest sanctions on Iran, I was thinking how we are seemingly determined to militarily engage Iran before this current administration expires, and it struck me that if Iraq had actually gone as planned, it would not have ended there, but we would have had three, four, five, perhaps six other real and/or potential wars since (depending if anyone caved in or not), so in a perverse way our screw-up in Iraq may have actually saved us from a greater overreaching.
Don't get me wrong - Dubya's little adventure has exacted an enormous cost for our nation (not to mention Iraq), but perhaps their incompetence have saved us from an even greater mistake, if you can imagine that. Iraq is in horrible shape, but it's not irredeemable, nor is our national reputation (although that will take decades, if not generations, to repair), but had we moved through the middle east as PNAC wanted us to do, systematically taking out Syria, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and whoever else before moving on to North Korea, we would have truly changed the political landscape of this world, and not necessarily for the better. The empire we built by strategic relations and cooperation could stand, but an empire built on repeated conquering and hubris is doomed to fail.
Again, we shouldn't have gone into Iraq to begin with, but since we did, and have screwed it up, we have, in a twisted, perverse way, perhaps avoided a truly larger mistake. Chimpy learned the hard way that people don't like their countries invaded, particularly in a half-assed fashion by people that don't like you.
It's not much, but it's the only consolation I can find.
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