Thinking Citizen Blog — Looking Back at the Second Iraq War — a Mistake or Not?
Thinking Citizen Blog — Monday is Foreign Policy Day
Today’s Topic: Looking Back at the Second Iraq War — a Mistake or Not?
Robert D. Kaplan, one of the most prolific and influential writers on international affairs of the last thirty years, was a supporter of the war in Iraq in 2003 but is having second thoughts today. Jeff Jacoby, a conservative columnist at the Boston Globe, is having no such doubts. Today, a few excerpts from recent articles by Kaplan and Jacoby. Whom do you find most convincing? Have you ever changed your mind about US intervention anywhere over the last 50 years? Why? Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
ROBERT D. KAPLAN — “What I Failed To Understand About Saddam’s Iraq — and American Power”
1. “I hadn’t sufficiently understood that Saddam’s absolutist rule had destroyed every vestige of civil society in Iraq, from the family and tribe at the base of the social order to the regime at the top.”
2. “He had made it impossible for any sort of order to succeed him. His tyranny was so extreme and unpredictable that it was itself a species of anarchy. This was a searing revelation for me.”
3. “America’s military could accomplish many things, but reconstituting and reforming a brutalized, ferociously sectarian Iraq was not one of them.”
NB: “I should have known better.”
HOW THE IRAQ WAR RELATES TO BIDEN’S POLICY TOWARD THE UKRAINE (Kaplan)
1. “Despite the massive transfer of weapons to Kyiv, the U.S. is conducting a policy of strict limits, even as it helps to destroy a great power before our eyes.”
2. “It has eschewed the younger Bush’s emphasis on applying direct force in large numbers, as the U.S. did in both Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, it has avoided President Obama’s overreaction to Bush, which resulted in not standing up to Russia in Ukraine in 2014 and not standing up to China in the South China Sea.”
3. “The Biden administration could be sending more weapons faster, of course, but what it has done so far is a considerable achievement.”
NB: “As a country, we may finally be approaching a healthy synthesis in foreign policy for the first time since the end of the Cold War. Iraq, rather than permanently traumatizing us, has proved to be a great teacher.”
JEFF JACOBY — Lots of mistakes after the invasion, but the invasion itself was justified
1. “After removing Saddam from power, the US-led coalition was too slow to put Iraqis in charge of their government, too quick to disband the Iraqi army, and too short-sighted to anticipate the savage insurgency led by Saddam’s loyalists and Islamist fighters. Because of those failures the war lasted much longer than it should have and cost far, far too many American and Iraqi lives.”
2. “Saddam was a malignant and dangerous dictator who not only ruled Iraq with horrific cruelty but also posed an ongoing threat far beyond his borders. He was a psychopath who had amassed a record of war crimes with few parallels in modern history. During his quarter-century as president of Iraq, he launched unprovoked wars of aggression against neighboring countries, murdered at least 50,000 Kurdish civilians in genocidal attacks, and engaged in torture on a systematic and terrifying scale.
3. “He was responsible for two of the largest military conflicts in the last decades of the 20th century — the eight-year Iran–Iraq war, in which 1 million people were killed, and the Gulf War triggered by his invasion of Kuwait in 1990.”
NB: “And not only had he long pursued and developed weapons of mass destruction, but he had used them — deploying chemical weapons on the battlefield against Iran and to carry out the mass murder of the Kurds.” “If the intelligence agencies were wrong about the existence of WMDs, they were right about Iraq’s undiminished ability to produce them.”
Ending Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror was the right call — The Boston Globe
Essay | What I Failed to Understand About Saddam’s Iraq — and American Power
Jeff Jacoby (columnist) — Wikipedia
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Be thine own palace or the world’s thy jail.” John Donne
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, 11/17/20
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest or most important thing you learned in the last week, month, or year related to foreign policy. Or, even better, the coolest or most important thing you learned in our life related to foreign policy.
This is your chance to make someone else’s day. And to consolidate in your memory something important you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something dear to your heart. Continuity is the key to depth of thought. The prospect of imminent publication, like hanging and final exams, concentrates the mind. A useful life long habit.
