Iraq: We Broke It. We Owned It . . .

. . . . and we walked away from it after thousands of American lives were lost and tens of thousands of American souls returned to our shores with severe physical injuries or the psychological consequences of PTSD.  To what end?

 

Old Glory at the Bridgewater Municipal Complex

That is the disgraceful result of what is today’s Iraq.  It soon is to be our fate in Afghanistan, unless the hapless policies which have emanated from Washington during the last two administrations change and align themselves with the realities that rule The Middle East.

The biggest policy mistake of Washington was to not have recognized and acknowledged what dominates the core of governance in the Arab nations of The Middle East and in Persian Iran:

Religion, and its influence upon every facet of life in that region, particularly the intertwined bond that glues it to the area’s political structures.

When George W. Bush invaded Iraq and naïvely thought that the U.S. could establish an enduring democracy through the electoral process in that country, he made perhaps the worst foreign policy calculation of his career.

When Barack Obama declared that the war on terrorism was over shortly after the killing of Osama bin Laden, he compounded Bush’s mistake by pulling out all U.S. troops too soon, one of the worst foreign policy calculations of that career.

Democracy cannot be exported.  It is a native, home-grown mode of governance – one that people must want to hold dearly enough to fight for it on their own.  We Americans – more than any other nation on earth – know that.  So should our leaders have known.

Our War of Independence which we commemorate today, on this 4^th of July 2014, was won with the blood and meager treasure of the early American settlers who rebelled against the colonial practices imposed by King George III of England. 

Those patriots fought behind every tree, next to every bridge, on every hill, and by every body of water in Colonial America to give us the privilege of freedom.

The shameful desertion of U.S. trained Iraqi soldiers folding their tents and disappearing as quickly as a morning mist under the broiling sun of ISIL’s blitzkrieg is the final proof that democracy rises and prospers from within, not from the  well-intended but disastrous foreign policies of the last two administrations.

America is said to be weary of war.  Yes, it is.

But I think that America is just as weary of having pursued war with Iraq and then of having allowed victory to slip through its grasp because of the ham-fisted strategies of the White House and of Congressional leaders in Washington who seem incapable of seeing the world as it is.

NOTE:  ISIL is an acronym for The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.  It developed as a Jihadist army of several thousand under the leadership of Sunni militant Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an Iraqi with a U.S. Government bounty of $10 million for his capture.  According to news reports, Baghdadi has declared the swath of recently conquered land under his control in Syria and Iraq to be the “Islamic State.”  He intends to institute Sharia Law and to rule as “Caliph of the Muslims.” 

 

A blitzkrieg is a swift, intense, overwhelming military attack.  This strategy was first employed very effectively in mass frontal assaults by the Nazis during the initial stages of WWII.  They used a combination of fighter planes, bombers, tanks, other armored vehicles, as well as fast-moving infantry in their onslaught across Western Europe.