Leaving Iraq

 

(Photo:  AP/Susan Walsh)

   President Obama has made the correct decision to withdraw American troops from the hellhole known as Iraq.  The Village Elliot's only question is:  What took you so long?

    Usually TVE, like many other bloggers, write in order to criticize current policies and to propose an alternative.  However, when our leaders do something right (I know, I know, it's rare!) they deserve praise.
     In this case, TVE is very happy (with some reservations) that President Obama has announced an end to America's military being stationed in Iraq.  There are no Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Sorry, conspiracy fans.   It is indeed time to go home.
     What we did well in Iraq was to knock the place flat after wrongly believing that Iraq was building nuclear weapons to threaten the United States.  What was terribly wrong was the notion that we would make it all up by rebuilding the place and becoming friends with the peoples of Iraq. Retroactively, we decided that the reason for invasion was "regime change," namely that Saddam was a crummy dictator, and it was the job of the US to improve the Iraqi government, as a public service.   
    Yes, this move could backfire in the sense that Iraq will not develop along the lines of a Pro-American Shi'ite Republic.  But the ideo that the Shi'ites would create a Pro-American Shiite Democratic Republic of Iraq was sheer folly from the very beginning. 

     You don't stabilize countries, particularly in the Muslim world, by invading them, and you don't use the military as a tool to make the people friendly to Americans.  The job of the military is to shoot those who threaten us.  So those who say we need to stay in order to have a stable, Pro-American Shiite Democratic Republic of Iraq are blowing smoke.  
     Our objectives have been disfunctional from the start.  We put  the Shi'ites in power (these are the same folks that run Iran) and then despaired and wrung our hands because they had trouble playing nice with their bitter enemies, the Sunnis and the Kurds.  These are basically tribal conflicts that have existed since at least the seventh century, and for some reason the US decided it was our job to get involved.  But our presence probably only makes things worse, and if there is any unit in that part of the world it is to get us out of their country. 

     Obama's timing of the announcement to coincide with the death of Gaddafi may cause a few Middle Eastern leaders to defecate in their pantaloons.  The clear signal is that dictators are in trouble, and perhaps the US is not going to feel indefinitely responsible for coddling the country after we remove the SOB.  Mubarak and Gaddafi are gone, and we've ordered Assad out as well. Who's going to be next?  We might wonder if President Zardari of Pakistan feels confident about his support of terrorists in Afghanistan, for example.       At the same time, the announcement that the US is pulling out of Iraq may allay concerns that the US is going to colonize Libya.  That may help a new government to form.  Conversely, had we decided to stay in Iraq indefinitely, we would have only heightened anti-American sentiment in the region. 
     It's been 9 years and 700 billion dollars (and probably twice that much, but the government minimizes its estimates of the cost of the war), and 4500 American lives with another 32,000 wounded. Enough is enough.   We've shot all the people worth shooting.  The idea that the military is going to contribute to a stable Pro American Shi'ite Democratic Republic is just a disfunctional fantasy of idiotic bureaucrats.
    We can only hope that our leaders resist the temptation to involve ourselves in additional conflicts.  Our own politics are strange enough without participating in tribal conflicts in countries that do not share our values.