Saying No to Politicians
An interesting article by the admirable Max Hastings on Comment is Free.
I think two things have been lacking in the Bush / Blair Iraq policy. The first is honesty. Rather than spinning out the rhetoric on WMD, building upon zavaell's letter reproduced in the comments, our political leaders should should have said this:
"Iraq has the second largest known oil reserves in the world, and is bang in the middle of an unstable, strategically vital and oil-rich region.
"We are sorry, but as you all know the economies of the West are totally dependent on oil. If someone like Saddam gets his hands on WMD in the future, or gets away with anything funny like he did in 1991, we're stuffed.
"So we'd really better take him out while we have the chance. Unfortunately blood does have to be spilt for oil and we should have done it 12 years ago, really."
Not pretty, but at least it's honest. I think that voters may have appreciated this message more than than the one we actually got.
The second failure is in historical, political and strategic awareness, and it makes me wonder what the point of the US Army War College and other institutions is unless politicians listen to them.
I wasn't around around during the Vietnam war but I've read some books on it. That's been enough to teach me a few things about what can go wrong in a foreign war. I'm not saying I'm an expert but it seemed pretty obvious that the more the US forces alienated the local population then the stronger their enemies became.
It's not rocket science. Isn't there a library at the White House? Doesn't it contain some of these books and journals, A Bright Shining Lie for example? A lot of lives could have been saved had Bush and his people had simply studied history a bit harder and learnt from previous mistakes.
