In his op-ed in today's Washington Post, "The Smart Way out of a Foolish War," Zbigniew Brzezinski asks what price the American public would have been willing to accept if honestly informed about the Iraq invasion's "costs":
"Nonetheless, if the American people had been asked more than five years ago whether Bush's obsession with the removal of Saddam Hussein was worth 4,000 American lives, almost 30,000 wounded Americans and several trillion dollars -- not to mention the less precisely measurable damage to the United States' world-wide credibility, legitimacy and moral standing -- the answer almost certainly would have been an unequivocal "no."
Is there a prominent omission here in the list of what would provoke a "no" from the American people?
Or is it my imagination?
What about the concept, "Scores if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, untold wounded, and millions driven into being refugees"-- wouldn't this have also provoked a "no" from the famous "American people"?
Why is this omitted in the calculations by an ostensibly wise man like Mr. Brzezinski?
Can you wonder why non-Americans get a little put-off when they hear this stuff from even supposedly enlightened American powers that be?
[Appreciations to Uber.com, where this appears on my Brain Flakes blog.]
The most maddening part of this is everyone just pays lip service to ending this war. We keep making our departure from it conditional when we know we could just pick up and leave. Write you congress person and your senators and demand an end to the madness and inhumanity. Please.
Well, consider it a rhetorical oversight. The context is as of five years ago, BEFORE the war, before there was general mayhem & destruction in Iraq. After all, Brzezinski is one of the good guys at the moment - cut him some slack. He's still got that naive Demo optimism that somehow we can find a way out of this mess, if we're 'creative' enough.
Getting out of Iraq would have the practical effect of sparing Iraqi lives as well as others.
I think the main reason non-Americans are put off by the "Powers that Be" and
some other Americans is mainly that they have been socialized differently. Totally
different attitudes about almost everything.
Example: In 1968 & '69 I was stationed at Peshawar Air Station West Pakistan.
That's in the Tribal area very near the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. The Pakistani
tribal people had a very harsh view of crime. If you were caught stealing, they might
cut off your hand. Get caught stealing again and they would cut off your head! They
just didn't put up with it! Can you imagine that attitude in America? Most Americans
can't understand that type of mind-set. They are totally offended by our actions and
attitudes. That's kind of an extreme example but I think you get the general idea.
Let me see if this falls to the censor, in the way any such similar criticism of WSJ editorials does...
There innumerable examples like the one described by Mr. Yourgrau. Another serious one, which galvanized Canadian apprehension of the US government and the American public's attitudes, was the case of Maher Arar. Mr. Arar is a Syrian-Canadian who, while transferring flights in New York in 2002 on his way home to Canada from a vacation, was abducted by US authorities and sent to Syria to be tortured (http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/arar/).
What is portrayed inside the US as American "moral authority" from here seems more like specious self-righteousness.
The issue here is that the people's representatives in Congress voted for war. Hillary Clinton and McCain voted for war and would do it again. So, because "history repeats itself" I think we can look forward to more thuggery and lying if Clinton or McCain win as "Commander in Chief."
Why do you anti-war liberals not understand the concept of linear time? That things happen in a sequence...why do you not understand that hindsight is not wisdom?
They insurgency was unforeseeable, we had little reason to believe the conflict would be outside the scope of the military action in Afghanistan or Bosnia, and by the time we did know we had a moral committment to Iraq to not let her fall into Rwanda-like turmoil.
I don't mind those who had the courage to say going into Iraq to is mistake before we went in. But you hindsight=wisdom, liberal-come-lately's make me sick.
What are you talking about? The Bush administration was too headstrong (or stupid, take your pick) to pay attention to facts; and the fact is this INFORMATION was available regarding Iraqi politics, sectarian tensions, etc. prior to our invasion.
Here's a report from 1991: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/iraq/us_policy.html
This was part of the reason why Bush Sr.'s administration DIDN'T INVADE. Don't make excuses for the current administration's incompetence.
I read zig's peice in the WP and I don't understand why everyone wants to make this more complicated than it needs to be. We're there and we need to leave. We'd do it too if only everyone would see how easy it would be. Make the decision to leave and then follow up. There, that wasn't so hard now was it?