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TEN LESSONS OF THE IRAQ WAR
There are always lessons
to be learned after a war. Often governments and pundits focus
only on lessons having to do with military strategies and tactics,
such as troop deployments, engagement in battles, bombing targets
and the effectiveness of different weapons systems. There are,
of course, far bigger lessons to be learned, and here are some of
the principal ones from the Iraq War.
- In the eyes of the Bush administration,
the relevance of international organizations such as the United Nations
depends primarily upon their willingness to rubberstamp US policy,
legal or illegal, moral or immoral.
- The Bush Doctrine
of Preemptive War may be employed against threats that have no basis
in fact.
- The American people appear to take little
notice of the “bait and switch” tactic of initiating a war to prevent
use of weapons of mass destruction and then celebrating regime change
when no such weapons are found.
- A country that spends $400 billion a
year on its military, providing them with the latest in high-tech
weaponry, can achieve clear military victory over a country that spends
1/400th of that amount and possesses virtually no high-tech weaponry.
- Embedding journalists with troops leads
to reporters providing only perspectives sanctioned by the military
in their reports to the public. It is analogous to the imprinting
of ducklings.
- The American people can be easily manipulated,
with the help of both embedded and non-embedded media, to support
an illegal war.
- An imperial presidency does not require
Congress to exercise its Constitutional authority to declare war;
it requires only a compliant Congress to provide increasingly large
sums of money for foreign wars.
- It is far easier to destroy a dictatorial
regime by military might than it is to rebuild a country as a functioning
democracy.
- If other countries wish to avoid the
fate of Saddam Hussein and Iraq, they better develop strong arsenals
of weapons of mass destruction for protection against potential US
aggression.
- In all wars it is the innocent who suffer
most. Thus, Saddam Hussein remains unaccounted for and George Bush
stages a jet flight to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, while
Ali Ismaeel Abbas lies in a hospital bed without his parents and brother,
who were killed in a US attack, and without his arms.
The most important lessons
of the Iraq War may be as yet unrevealed, but there is a sense that
American unilateralism is likely to continue to alienate important allies,
while the triumphalism of the Bush administration is likely to taunt
terrorists, making them more numerous and tenacious in their commitment
to violent retaliation.
David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).
"If you rejoice in victory,
then you delight in killing;
If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself."
---
Lao Tzu
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably
to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
---
US Constitution, First Amendment
"Peace is the only battle worth waging."
---
Albert Camus
To become a free on-line participating member of the Nuclear Age Peace
Foundation,
click here: https://www.ndic.com/wagingpeace/supportus.htm
____________________________________
David Krieger, President
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
PMB 121, 1187 Coast Village Road, Suite 1
Santa Barbara, CA 93108-2794
dkrieger@napf.org
Web site: http://www.wagingpeace.org
http://www.nuclearfiles.org
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