Western warmongers have all the answers, and they're all wrong

The wars in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan failed not because of noble errors, but because short-sighted Western interests trumped the needs of the people. And this is why the creeping return to war will fail again.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, an investigative journalist and international security scholar, has written an informative article on the issue as follows:  

Despite an almost total lack of public debate, Western military escalation in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya is on the rise. Renewed military interventionism has been justified as a response to the meteoric rise of ISIS networks, spreading across parts of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. Missing from government pronouncements, though, is any acknowledgement that the proliferation of ISIS terrorism is a direct consequence of the knee-jerk response of military escalation. Discarded to the memory hole is the fact that before each of the major interventions in these three countries, the Western political leaders promised they would bring security, freedom and prosperity. Instead, they have done precisely the opposite.

In October 2001, as US special forces were roaming Afghanistan in the search for Osama bin Laden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations - Max Boot – wrote a gushing article in the Weekly Standard titled, The Case for American Empire. He said “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”

Occupation would be a temporary expedient to allow the people to get back on their feet until a responsible, humane, preferably democratic, government takes over… Is this an ambitious agenda? Without a doubt. Does America have the resources to carry it out? Also without a doubt.

Fifteen years into the war in Afghanistan, it is patently clear that this imperial dream is nothing more than a self-soothing fantasy. President Barack Obama has reneged on a promise to withdraw US troops, and will instead keep 9,800 there in 2016 – and has said that at least 5,500 will remain in the country indefinitely. The Taliban, far from being destroyed, is resurgent like never before. ISIS is now active in Afghanistan, and its reach is growing.

Billions have been invested in this failed long-haul military effort – while the economy, infrastructure and basic public services remain underdeveloped, broken and ineffective. Instead, in the name of promoting democracy, the West has cynically supported fraudulent elections, endemic corruption, and warlord cronyism. According to the new Human Rights Watch World Report 2016, under the US-backed so-called "democracy" in Afghanistan: “Little progress was made in reining in abusive militias, reducing corruption, promoting women’s rights, and reforming the courts.”

HRW’s senior Afghanistan researcher, Patricia Grossman said “Donors have been all too willing to ignore abuses taking place rather than using their influence with the government to end them.”

Blaming the troop withdrawal itself for the failure of US counterinsurgency operations, earlier this month a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations - Max Boot –proclaimed: “Afghanistan is not lost even now. A greater US commitment can still save the democratic government in Kabul and stop a Taliban takeover.” But, what is going on in Kabul? Boot conveniently ignores that the acceleration of the Taliban’s insurgency did not begin under Obama, but intensified under the Bush Doctrine.

Between 2002 and 2006, the number of insurgent attacks increased by 400 percent, and the number of deaths from these attacks increased by more than 800 percent. Between 2005 and 2006, improvised explosive device, IED attacks more than doubled from 783 to 1,677, and armed attacks near tripled from 1,558 to 4,542. From 2006 to 2007, insurgent attacks increased by a further 27 percent.

Neither Bush nor Obama have shown much interest in addressing one of the key material causes behind the Taliban insurgency.

Similarly, Washington Post veteran David Ignatius was one of the most ardent cheerleaders for the 2003 Iraq invasion, which he described as “the most idealistic war fought in modern times – a war whose only coherent rationale, for all the misleading hype about weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda terrorists, is that it toppled a tyrant and created the possibility of a democratic future. It was a war of choice, not necessity, and one driven by ideas, not merely interests.”

Ignatius also criticized commentators who wrote “darkly about America's designs on Iraqi oil, or a conspiracy to enrich Vice President Cheney's old friends at Halliburton… It would be nice, in a weird way, if the Iraq war were anchored to such worldly interests. But it isn't.” He went on to write an astonishingly glowing portrait of one of the war’s chief architects, then Pentagon war-planner Paul Wolfowitz.

Never mind that State Department and UK Foreign Office files prove unequivocally that opening up Iraq’s considerable oil resources to global markets was a major strategic goal of the 2003 invasion. Or that Cheney’s Halliburton made $39.5bn from the war, largely from no-bid contracts. No, despite that, Ignatius claims he admits his support for the war was a “mistake”, because the war itself was just a “mistake” – but he remains strangely unable to this day to acknowledge the neoconservative’s “worldly interests” behind the war.

Despite that, Washington Post veteran David Ignatius still thinks himself qualified to advocate solutions to the rise of IS across Iraq and Syria. In Iraq, he thinks, the solution is obvious, calling for more military intervention to empower certain insurgents to fight ISIS – a prescription that ignores how al-Qaeda in Iraq arose directly in response to the US surge which empowered certain tribes, many of whom had previously fought alongside al-Qaeda in the first place. Meanwhile, the US has built up 3,700 "boots on the ground" in Iraq, and the Pentagon is complaining that more are needed.

On Syria, Ignatius suggests in The Atlantic that the US should consider working with al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, to undermine ISIS. He says this might help the US build a “strong” so-called ‘moderate’ opposition, paving the way for violent regime change. Washington Post veteran David Ignatius went on to claim that “The shattered nation can gradually be stabilized if the United States and its allies seriously commit to building a new Syrian force that can help fill the vacuum, post-Assad.” He also added that the US will need to work with people from the incumbent Baathist establishment, fostering an opposition that “can merge with ‘acceptable’ elements of the Syrian army to manage a transition from Assad”.

Conveniently absent from his tragic tale of America’s “feeble”, “weak” and “feckless” approach is the US role in deliberately fostering the terrorists – a process that Ignatius blames solely on US allies, Saudi Arabia, other Persian Gulf states and Turkey.

Never mind that Obama’s former Pentagon intelligence chief Michael Flynn has confirmed that the Pentagon anticipated the rise of an ISIS-type entity in Iraq and Syria as a direct consequence of US support for Syrian terrorist groups. He said that this support was funneled through the US allies, the Persian Gulf states and Turkey. And unsurprisingly, Ignatius seems oblivious to the inherent contradiction in calling for “a political solution – jointly brokered by the US, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia” while demanding that the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey accelerate their war drive to topple Assad, backed by Iran and Russia.

Sadly, this sort of nonsense is routinely regurgitated by defense think-tanks and policy groups on both sides of the Atlantic. The presence of ISIS terrorists in Libya is a direct consequence of the NATO strategy that certain pundits championed. Now the British prime minister, David Cameron, plans to dispatch 1,000 British troops to lead a US and EU 6,000 strong coalition to stop religious fighters from consolidating their control of a dozen of Libya’s major oil fields.

The sad truth is that a significant portion of the pundit class that keeps trying to tell the public and government what to do, are clueless – and their ludicrous track records prove it. In Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, insurgencies has been a direct product of a toxic combination: US and UK led military interventions, occupations, withdrawals, re-calibrations, and on and on and on; the ongoing billion dollars of support for the very groups that Western forces are fighting, by US and UK allies like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, among many others.

The fundamental reason the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya failed is not because of noble errors, but because in all three cases, short-sighted Western interests trumped the needs of long-oppressed local populations. And this is why the creeping return to war will fail again; a matter the influential regional countries, like Iran, has always insisted, calling for political solutions while emphasizing that the fate of those countries should be determined by their people themselves.

EA/ME