Straight talk by some brilliant people. As Iraq bleeds, a massive failure in US foreign policy has impacted the whole region in the Middle-East. The British after World War I divided the Ottoman Empire, The Iraq project as a country has failed and its proces is irreversible. I would extend the failure of the Bush administration in Iraq to the utter failure of the Obama administration in the Syrian uprising which has developed into a bloody civil war with 70,000 victims and counting. This combination of failures will change the region lasting through the 21st century. Not only Iraq, the Middle-East bleeds. The arrogance of the British from Tony Blair to Cameron and FM Hague is truly sickening. Nothing has been learned from history. Read today’s news here , here and here.
The Changing Calculus of War from Iraq to Mali
(Al Jazeera) – It has been 10 years since the US-led invasion of Iraq, which marked a turning point in the West’s so-called war on terror. The pretext of the Iraq war was security and freedom, but the bombastic and openly pronounced objective was no less than remaking the greater Middle East region.
For Iraq, the invasion and occupation were cataclysmic. It claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, smashed the country’s infrastructure, and tore its social fabric apart with a civil war that continues to kill hundreds of Iraqis a month. Baghdad – a cosmopolitan capital for thousands of years – has been reduced to a cluster of walled ghettos, armed against each other.
“We have gone in with bombastic ideology, self interest, and no real plan.
I mean If you’re going to do this, at least do it competently. We have
done all of that incompetently.”
– Barbara BodineFor the US, Iraq became a quagmire and a humiliation – a strategic and moral failure that the country has spent the last four years trying to forget. President Barack Obama entered the White House with the promise of a new relationship with the Arab and Muslim world. His administration is withdrawing troops and replacing them with airstrikes, drones, and a surge of special forces. But how much has America’s calculus of war really changed?
And as Africa becomes the new frontline in the ‘war on terror’, have the Europeans learnt from America’s mistakes?
Empire explores the merits, objectives, costs and morality of these wars with our guests:
John Nagl, a retired Lieutenant Colonel who co-authored the US army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual;
Jean Marie Guéhenno, the director of the Center of International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University, and former United Nations under secretary general for Peacekeeping Operations;
Barbara Bodine, a professor at Princeton University and a former US Ambassador to the Republic of Yemen who also served with the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq; and
Chris Hedges, a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, former New York Times Middle East bureau chief, and author of several books, including War is a Force That Gives us Meaning and Empire of Illusion.
