Bush legacy: Opening the gates of Hell
An opinion article by David Stockman
The ISIS terrorists are winning against the hapless Iraqi military and even the formidable Kurdish peshmerga fighters—using some of the most lethal arms that the US military-industrial complex could concoct.Yes, that wasn’t supposed to happen. During the bloody years after George W. Bush declared “mission accomplished” the Iraqi’s were ostensibly provided the arms and training to provide for their own defense. The American “occupation”, therefore, was really not all that. Instead, it was actually an exercise in “nation-building” that would bequeath to the people Washington had “liberated” a self-governing democracy equipped with the means to insure internal order and external security. Washington politicians—including President Obama—gave endless speeches about that. You can look them up!
Except…except….Iraq was never a nation. At least the Ottomans knew that you don’t put Shiite’s, Sunni and Kurds in the same parliament or police force, and most certainly not the same army!
By contrast, it was the British and French foreign offices which in 1916 drew the Sykes-Picot boundaries and created the historical illusion that a nation called Iraq actually existed. And it was their successors in the west which installed a series of corrupt and brutal rulers, including kings, generals and Saddam Hussein himself, who maintained an always tentative and frequently blood-soaked semblance of governance within these artificial borders.
Then came the neo-cons who for no discernible reason of national security could not leave well enough alone. By god, they were going to have regime change, a stable supplier of 6 million barrels of oil per day, and a stalwart ally armed to the teeth on the very doorstep of the Axis-Of-Evil; that is, the Iranian Shiite theocracy which happened to be religious kin to the single largest block of the Iraqi population.
What these fools did was to open the gates of hell...
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