Ten
Lessons Of The Iraq War
By
David Krieger
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 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.
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.