What the Iraq War Is and What it Isn’t
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- It’s not a war just about spreading democracy.
- It’s not a war just about oil.
- It’s not a war just about stopping a brutal dictator who supposedly had weapons of mass destruction.
- It’s not a war of humanitarian intervention.
- It’s not a plot cooked up by some secret cabal of Israeli Zionists and American neocons.
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- It is a war partially about oil, partially about spreading democracy, and partially about ousting a brutal dictator.
- It is a war that reflects poorly on the cultural shift toward perpetual growth and expansion of American economic and military interests.
- It is a war fueled by skewed notions of national security and humanitarian intervention.
- It is a war about American military dominance in a region that has American economic interests – in oil, trade and so forth, at its heart.
- It is a war pushed very strongly by the brand of politics known as neoconservatism, which most blatantly embraces such military and economic expansion, but which is certainly not unique in this – only, perhaps, more unabashed.
Look, I opposed the Iraq War in the beginning. I thought it was ludicrous, and the government’s case seemed paper thin. Later, I opposed artificial time tables for withdrawal of American troops, because it struck me as cruel and imprudent and even cowardly to leave a nation in a state of civil war that we essentially instigated. I still oppose withdrawing too quickly, lest the country be sucked into an ever more brutal cycle of civil war and chaos.
But I become more and more dubious that our continued presence is anything more than prolonging the inevitable; that no matter how long we stay, in the end we’ll have to exit, and when we do, the Iraqis will simply have to figure things out on their own. And it will be bloody, and awful, and the violence will last a long, long time. Likely enough, the “democratic government of Iraq” will become ever more despotic, and the country will become even more divided along sectarian lines. No length of stay on the part of the American military can avoid that. Even if we do achieve stability that lasts beyond our own occupation, the only way that stability will be achieved for long will be through the suppression of the Sunnis by the Shiite majority.
April 16, 2009 19 Comments
