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Tag: iraq invasion
Afghan evacuees

Forgotten Lessons Led To Tragedy In Afghanistan

The spectacle of Americans and their local allies rushing desperately to evacuate from Kabul brought to mind similar scenes from Saigon in 1975. The repetition suggested that Americans and their leaders didn't learn from the earlier experience. In fact, we did learn. But then we forgot.

Maybe the surprise is not that we had to rediscover the difficulty of extricating our people and allies after giving up on an unsuccessful war. Maybe the surprise is that there was such a long interval between the two debacles. For a while, we avoided such failures, and not by accident.

In the 1980s, liberals depicted President Ronald Reagan as a trigger-happy warmonger. But his two terms stand out as a time when the United States, haunted by Vietnam, largely rejected direct military intervention abroad. He did dispatch Marines to Beirut as part of a peacekeeping force — but when a terrorist attack killed 241 American service members, he quickly withdrew our forces.

Reagan's Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger laid out a set of principles for deciding when to go to war. He argued that "vital national interests" must be at stake and that we must have clear objectives and the means to attain them.

By 1992, the "Weinberger Doctrine" was incorporated into the "Powell Doctrine" by Gen. Colin Powell, who served President George H.W. Bush as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Among his contributions was the rule that we have "a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement."

This approach didn't mean the U.S. would never go to war: We did so in 1983 in Grenada to topple a Marxist government and rescue American students. We did so in 1989 in Panama to remove a dictator blamed for drug trafficking. Most notably, we did so in 1991 to evict Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait.

Whether these wars were wise and necessary is subject to debate. But in each case, we did what we set out to do and got out.

Success, however, bred amnesia. President George W. Bush had little choice but to invade Afghanistan after Osama bin Laden used it as a base for the 9/11 attacks. But once the Taliban were defeated and al-Qaeda was on the run, Bush chose to stay in an effort to cultivate freedom, democracy, and prosperity. It was the antithesis of the Powell Doctrine: an ill-defined mission that lay beyond our core competence and was not essential to our security — all without an exit strategy.

It has been clear for years that our efforts in Afghanistan were not working. But three presidents chose to prolong our involvement rather than admit futility.

What we learned when President Joe Biden refused to continue the war is that our failure exceeded our worst assumptions. We didn't know what was really going on in Afghanistan, and we didn't know we didn't know. We were clueless in Kabul.

The sudden, complete disintegration of the government revealed that it was no more viable than a brain-dead patient on life support. All Biden did was pull the plug.

It's fair to say that his administration should have been better prepared for the collapse so it could manage a more orderly withdrawal. But as Texas A&M security scholar Jasen Castillo tweeted, "There is no pretty way to leave a losing war." The nature of wars is that winners dictate the final terms. And the Taliban won this war.

It's commonly assumed that we could have preserved the previous status quo by maintaining a military presence in Afghanistan. But by May 2020, long before Biden arrived, the government had seen its control dwindle to 30 percent of the country's 407 districts, with the Taliban controlling 20 percent — more than at any time since the U.S. invasion.

Back then, one expert told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, "The Taliban has so far been successful in seizing and contesting ever larger swaths of rural territory, to the point where they have now almost encircled six to eight of the country's major cities and are able to routinely sever connections via major roads." Sound familiar? The longer we stayed, the greater the risk of being forced into an even bigger commitment — with no hope of victory.

During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus said to a reporter, "Tell me how this ends?" Before we embark on a war, not after, is the time to answer that question. If we don't have an answer, the enemy will.

Follow Steve Chapman on Twitter @SteveChapman13 or at https://www.facebook.com/stevechapman13. To find out more about Steve Chapman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com

Did American Media Learn Anything From The Iraq Debacle?

Did American Media Learn Anything From The Iraq Debacle?

The press sure seems to love glorifying Republican presidents against the backdrop of possible war. 

Rushing in to get the behind-the-scenes telling of how Donald Trump decided to approve the drone killing of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani, who was killed while traveling in a convoy near the Baghdad International Airport on January 2, CNN collected pleasing quotes from administration officials. Steering clear of any dissenting voices, the news outlet reported there had been  “serious debate within the administration leading up to the strike,” CNN stressed that Trump, who was “wary of war,” had been “defiant” on the day the kill order was given, and seemed to “be freshly aware of the gravity of his role and the power he wields.” Perhaps most importantly, the raid represented an “immediate victory” for Trump. 

Got that? Anti-war Trump was deeply engaged with advisers, at turns “defiant” and reflective while he scored a major “victory.” Left out of that GOP-delivered narrative that portrayed the president as a modern-day FDR, was the idea that Trump has no idea what he’s doing and with the rogue raid he represents a growing danger to America’s national security. 

Meanwhile, the first expert the New York Times quoted in the wake of the deadly strike was a conservative hawk, and the first column the paper published about the raid was from a conservative hawk. 

Elsewhere, “CNN is allowing a parade of Republican lawmakers to go on air and cheerlead for war with Iran, and barely bothering to ask any of them how the U.S. keeps the region safe or what the plan is,” writer Matthew Chapman noted on Twitter. “We’ve learned much less since 2003 than we should have.”

Indeed, for days it’s been hard to shake the “here we go again” feeling as news consumers are hit with lots of White House-friendly narratives about the unauthorized raid in Iraq. It’s impossible not to think back to how the mainstream media effectively co-sponsored the disastrous war in Iraq back in 2003. 

Battered by accusations of a liberal bias and determined to prove their conservative critics wrong, the press during the run-up to the war — timid, deferential, unsure, cautious, and often intentionally unthinking — came as close as possible to abdicating its reason for existing in the first place, which is to accurately inform citizens, particularly during times of great national interest. The press went out of its way to tell a pleasing, administration-friendly tale about the pending war.

In truth, President George W. Bush never could have ordered the invasion of Iraq — never could have sold the idea at home — if it weren’t for the help he received from the press, and particularly the stamp of approval he received from so-called liberal media institutions such as the Washington Post, which in February of 2003 alone, editorialized in favor of war nine times. By the time the invasion began, the de facto position among the Beltway chattering class was clearly one that backed Bush and favored war.

At least during the Bush years during the run up to the Iraq War, Republicans went to some lengths to produce the appearance of bogus intelligence to support its premise for an unprecedented pre-emptive war for the United States. Recall that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was drafted by the White House to give a wildly hyped presentation at the United Nation just weeks before the invasion where he supposedly laid out the U.S.’s ironclad proof that Saddam Hussein posed a weapons of mass destruction threat to the world. And the media fell for it. “He persuaded me,” the Washington Post’s Mary McGrory announced. “And I was as tough as France to convince.”

In the end though, the entire presentation turned out be a mountain of lies and disinformation, which Powell himself eventually conceded. Today though, the Trump White House doesn’t even bother to put on a show. Instead, officials have simply told reporters that the assassination raid was done in order to fend off some vague looming threats against American troops in the region. There’s no documentation. There are no intel report, no photo surveillance, and no intercepted communications. It’s just the Trump White House, which lies about everything, making a hollow claim to cover for an unauthorized military strike. 

And note that the justification Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave, that Soleimani was planning future attacks on U.S. troops and therefore had to be killed, doesn’t make any sense since, obviously, those supposed plans to kill U.S. troops, didn’t die with Soleimani. I mean, there is an Iran military that could conceivably carry out those attacks. 

Yet for several news cycles the administration’s thin justification was treated as serious. 

CNN: “Pompeo: Strike on Soleimani disrupted an ‘imminent attack’ and ‘saved American lives'” 

 

USA Today: “Trump: Iran’s Soleimani was plotting ‘imminent’ attacks on diplomats, soldiers before US killed him”

 

ABC News: “US strike on Iran’s Soleimani saved hundreds of American lives, disrupted attacks in three countries: State Dept.”

When Pompeo appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows to defend the administration’s paper-thin justification for the assassination strike, he was met with mostly differential questioners who effectively tip-toed around the large elephant in the room: Trump and his lieutenants were possibly lying about everything in conjunction with the assassination. 

The good news is there is already far more media skepticism about Trump’s dangerous maneuver than there was during Bush’s rush to war, when the nation’s post-9/11 nationalist fever was still strong. That might be because Trump isn’t nearly as popular as Bush was at the time, and because Democrats are quickly standing up to Trump. 

Still, lots of warning signs remain that the Beltway press hasn’t learned enough lessons from its Iraq War debacle.

IMAGE: Former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney (left).

The Arrogance That Led Us To Iraq Infects Washington Again

The Arrogance That Led Us To Iraq Infects Washington Again

Is anyone here old enough to remember the urgent warning issued in a speech to the National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 2002 by an American vice president who had artfully avoided the military draft during wartime? Dick Cheney, after acknowledging he was convinced that Saddam Hussein would “acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon,” went on to beat the war drums: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction; there is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”

There was not then, and there never would be, any stockpile of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs to be used against us. It was worse than “fake news”; it was taking his country into war under false pretenses, leaving as its legacy death, disillusionment and, yes, despair. But let us also recall the wise, if unheeded, words of a former Marine Corps company commander in Vietnam who there earned the Navy Cross, a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts; he posed the consideration the Republican administration sending American troops into Iraq refused to broach with the American people: “whether we as a nation are prepared to physically occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years.”

That was Jim Webb, who would later be elected to the U.S. Senate from Virginia as an anti-war Democrat. He warned, “wars often have unintended consequences — ask the Germans, who in World War I were convinced that they would defeat the French in exactly 42 days.” Today, 75 years after World War II, the U.S. still has troops stationed in both Germany and Japan, and 67 years after the Korean War ended, American soldiers remain on dangerous watch in Korea.

Does anyone else remember the young Army captain in Vietnam who had held in his arms a young soldier who had stepped on a landmine and was dying? Colin Powell knew firsthand how painful it was to write condolence letters to the grieving next of kin. That led directly to the doctrine that would carry his name; it says that the U.S. should commit men and women to combat only as a last resort and after policy options have been exhausted — and then only 1) when a vital national security interest of the nation is at stake, 2) when the U.S. force employed is overwhelming and disproportionate to the force of the enemy, 3) when the mission and military action are both understood and supported by the American people, and the mission has international support, and 4) when there is a clear and plausible exit strategy for the U.S. troops sent into harm’s way.

Maybe you recall the gentle rebuke Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf had for the fawning flatterers who lionized him after his successful leadership in the Persian Gulf War. He said: “It doesn’t take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.” These thoughts all come back when an American president, our only chief executive never to have served a single day in either public service or military service before coming to the White House, again confronted a hostile Iran by sending more American troops into harm’s way in Iraq. Now is the time to be sure to remember.

To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Trump’s Foreign Policy Sage Is Himself, Of Course

Trump’s Foreign Policy Sage Is Himself, Of Course

Hot off winning every state but Ohio last night, Donald Trump has taken his campaign of self-aggrandizement to the realm of international politics. According to Trump, there’s no one better suited to provide foreign policy insight than… himself.

Trump appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe earlier today. When asked who his foreign policy advisors were, Trump responded, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”

What any of that means to anyone is unclear. But does Trump have “a very good brain” when it comes to foreign policy? Does he have the wisdom necessary to make decisions whose consequences may take years to unfold? History says no: just look at Trump’s vacillation over the 2003 Iraq invasion.

One of the greatest foreign policy blunders ever committed by this country, the power vacuum left behind in Iraq — after George W. Bush dismantled the Iraqi army — aided in the rise of ISIS years later. Trump, who presents himself as a tough guy who would bring back torture to keep America safe, started off by claiming that he was against the invasion of Iraq. In a 2002 Howard Stern interview, he was asked directly if he supported the invasion. “Yeah, I guess so,” Trump responded. “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

This was not a one-off case of supporting interventionist foreign policy. In his book The America We Deserve, he wrote, “We still don’t know what Iraq is up to or whether it has the material to build nuclear weapons. I’m no warmonger,” Trump wrote. “But the fact is, if we decide a strike against Iraq is necessary, it is madness not to carry the mission to its conclusion. When we don’t, we have the worst of all worlds: Iraq remains a threat, and now has more incentive than ever to attack us.”

In fact, in parroting the provocations of the Bush administration, Trump very much was a war-monger.

Fast forward to 2016, and Trump, in an effort to display his solid foreign policy insights, said during a Republican debate in Vermont, “I’m the only one up here, when the war of Iraq — in Iraq, I was the one that said, ‘Don’t go, don’t do it, you’re going to destabilize the Middle East.'” It was not the first time he claimed to be opposed to military intervention.

Even then, his commitment to non-intervention is political opportunism at best, given only 32 percent of registered voters still think the invasion was a good idea. He returned to espousing militaristic rhetoric during a campaign rally in which he promised to bomb ISIS — and the millions of civilians living under their rule — out of existence. “I would bomb the shit out of them,” said Trump during a rally in November. “I would just bomb those suckers, and that’s right, I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up ever single inch, there would be nothing left.”

While Trump may think that he is the best at everything, from his relationship with “the blacks” to world-altering foreign policy calculations, his comfort with taking seemingly opposing positions should worry his supporters. But who are we kidding — it probably won’t.