How do you get from it being an absurd amount of money to being an astronomical waste of taxpayer money. You said nothing about what makes it a waste...
Actually I did, you just have ignored it. I believe it is an act of charity for the Iraqis, and as such, should be funded by private donors.
If that absurd amount of money came from private donations, it wouldn't be an astronomical waste of taxpayer money.
Which was actually the topic of the sentence you ignored which is that we are doing it for regional security and that is in our strategic interest. I.e. not a waste of money.
What
is our "strategic interest" the region?
Simple repetition of the "strategic interests" mantra doesn't actually make an argument explaining what those strategic interests are and how we are benefiting them.
If it is your contention that this venture is of strategic importance, you must back that up with some form of
evidence. You must explain in detail
exactly what our strategy in the ME is, why it is important to the US and why invading a sovereign and
stable nation, destabilizing it and instituting a style government that is prone to upheaval every election cycle is
beneficial to the US.
You see, I'm not convinced that this approach is going to be beneficial to the US in the long-term, although it might provide short term gains.
The reason I'm unconvinced is because I look at something like Operation Ajax in 1953 and I see that short term gains were used to justify something that has definitely caused long-term damage to our standing in the region.
My stance is that weakly-justified interventionism typically causes more long-term damage than benefit.
With Iraq, we had a stable, if unfriendly, regime. Now after the invasion, we have a friendly, yet unstable, regime in Iraq. My belief is that the strategic goals in Iraq were fairly short-term: Destabilize an area in the ME creating a target for Al Qaeda and Iran to draw the extremists away from the US itself, potentially destabilizing Iran in the process.
It is also my contention that the strategic importance of Iraq to Al Qaeda and Iran was to try and increase anti-American sentiment in the region in general, and Iraq specifically. The goal wasn't to cause an outright US failure, but to
prolong the process and increase
body counts in Iraq for the purposes of planting the seeds of anti-Americanism that will, if the strategy proves effective for them, lead to an eventual
unfriendly democratic regime in Iraq as well as a foundation for their respective causes elsewhere in the ME.
Essentially, I think their strategies are more likely to be achieved, especially if a democratic regime is in place.
Again, the fact that Operation Ajax has definitely been more damaging to US "interests" in the ME over the long-term is used as the foundation for my assessment. It shows how the seeds of an anti-American sentiment in a country can flourish under certain conditions and spread throughout the region altogether.
I consider most interventionist approaches poorly thought out.
This is
especially true for Iraq. Even though some military strategists and political figures here in the US were clearly in favor of something like the surge from the get go (McCain immediately springs to mind, since he was extremely critical of the lack of boots on the ground way back in 2003) Bush et. al decided to go into the situation with fewer troops than what was needed.
IMO, the war was really lost at that point, because this tactical error prolonged the war and gave Iran and Al Qaeda the
perfect opportunity to come in and lay
their strategy down. I believe the strategists involved severely underestimated the strategic importance in simply
delaying the outcome of the war for Iran and Al Qaeda.
Part of the reason I preferred McCain to Obama in the last election was based on the simple fact that he was one of the first outspoken critics of this tactical error,
before most people even realized it was a tactical error. Even though I disagreed with the interventionist approach, if it is going to be taken, I am of the belief that it must be implemented in a
very thought out manner.
To me, it is appallingly obvious that this was not the case with Iraq. They underestimated the insurgency. They underestimated the strategic importance to our enemies in the region to prolonging the campaign.
This
convinces me that their "strategy" that is used as the basis for the "strategic importance" argument is flawed in the extreme. We won't know the full ramifications for about 20-30 years. My
belief is that the full ramifications will turn out very negatively for the US based on the lack of foresight shown by the strategists involved in the process.
I
hope that I'm wrong, though. Truth be told,
nothing would be better than for Bush to go down in history as the person who initiated a lasting peace in the Middle East.
Unfortunately, my
fear is that he made an Eisenhower-esque **** up in the Middle East. That this war will only exacerbate the long-term problems in the Middle East just as Operation Ajax did.
Again, I
hope I'm wrong, because I think it's too late to fix it if I'm not.
