There was a FrontLine show on PBS that most of you have probably heard about. It had a lot of information about the plans to deal with a post-Saddam Iraq, how the Iraqi National Congress managed to talk the US government into getting the US military to do it's stated job of overthrowing the existing regime in Iraq. In general, it was as gruesome as you might imagine this whole mess will look to historians, later looking back on what the hell we had in mind when we started this cluster fuck. Short answer: we had no idea what we were getting into, and those that might have known were motivated to lie to us, and we were dumb enough to not take their motivation into account for our own political reasons. It's really ugly, but, hell, you already knew that.
The most interesting part is that the State Department had spent a bunch of time, money, and intellectual resources to develop a detailed plan of how to deal with a post Saddam Iraq. They literally had a playbook.
That was discarded. Know why? Apparently the State Dapartment was against the idea of sending the US Army out carousing for political sport, and believed that the war on terror required us to deal with other problems of more pressing importance than a petty thug dictator ruling over squalor due to wars and years of UN sanctions.
Since the State Department obviously lost that argument, and the US Army was sent in for sport, and political reasons, the result was that the State Department was on the outside, because in a modern government of the world's only superpower apparently petty infighting is really important.
So those that won the argument(who were apparently lying to bolster their pre-war postions) were able to exclude any influence of the State Department, especially their little fully developed plan for post-war Iraq, that was developed by people that had some idea of what they were doing, and predicted the complete shit storm we are now experiencing.
The only conclusion that I can reach honestly is that the institutions of American democracy move in crude and clumsy ways. Really crude, and especially clumsy ways.
It's like finding about that the art work you have been admiring was drawn by a chimpanzee.
I'm certain it was just luck that those founding fathers were there in the late 1700's, cause I haven't seen much since then to justify the optimism they wrote into our original documents. Frankly, it looks like we have just graduated from blowing up some Afghan warlord's enemies wedding party with $50 million bombers to wasting and taking over a country for a slightly more informed and modern Iraqi warlord and a group of other Iraqi's that wanted Saddam out of the way and figured that this was the best way to get the job done.
We should feel like the sorority girl, who when asked "what is the first thing you do in the morning?" replies "get dressed and go home".
But we won't. We'll continue to lie to ourselves. I'm sure there is a reason that isn't demeaning and small, but for right now it just looks like we are big and stupid.
Posted by dglynn at October 15, 2003 02:16 AM