On this day in 2003, a day that will truly live in infamy, in Kuwait the invasion of Iraq began. From thence idiot President George W. Bush directed the U.S. military to undertake a useless war, one that would result in the transformation of that country into a mess. A dictator was toppled and replaced with an unstable elected government. The existing economic institutions were eliminated I favor of Western interests, causing resistance.
Meanwhile, American soldiers conducted brutal door-to-dood searches to find terrorists. The result was armed rebellion. The U.S authorities tried to quell the uprising by forming local militias (which would put the rebels in an awkward position), but people refused to fight their neighbors.
The U.S. resorted to assigned Shiite militias to police Sunni villages and vice-versa. This time the participants were willing. The problem was that sectarian animosity and fighting were renewed among people who had been living together in peace for a long time. To make things worse, the Shiite leaders who won the nascent elections, bitter over Saddam Hussein’s favoritism toward the Sunnis and probably the renewed sectarian conflict, shut the Sunnis out from the new regime.
The result is that the Sunnis supported the invading Islamic State of the Levant, who hid their true nature. That is the state of Bush’s folly at this point, the disastrous results of a misadventure he conned this country into with false claims.
What we need to think about on the anniversary of that travesty is will any more happen? From Vietnam to Iraq the evidence is ample that invading and imposing one’s will on an unwilling population is not only wrong but destructive and unfruitful. Even President Obama’s toppling of dictator Moammar Khadafi without sending in troops has resulted in societal disarray under a weak government. When will we learn?
Potano's Garden 