Ten Lessons Of The Iraq War
By David Krieger
5-7-3
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.
1. 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.
2. The Bush Doctrine of Preemptive War may be employed against threats that have no basis in fact.
3. The American people appear to take little notice of the ãbait and switchä tactic of initiating a war to prevent use of weapons of mass destruction and then celebrating regime change when no such weapons are found.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. The American people can be easily manipulated, with the help of both embedded and non-embedded media, to support an illegal war.
7. 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.
8. It is far easier to destroy a dictatorial regime by military might than it is to rebuild a country as a functioning democracy.
9. 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.
10. 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
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