Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
I do not recall anyone here saying we should not have gone in, and to me that is still a no-brainer. But in retrospect we supported guerrillas, not really people bound to govern. Still I think early on there was a sense that they could defend themselves eventually. And the hell the women experienced there then, and are again, is a hard thing not to try to change.
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https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/t...s-what-happens
The movie cited in the article contains several great lines. One of the best, paraphrased as accurately as I can recall is, "You can't create peace within a country by invading it."
Bush I understood this in Iraq. Probably because he was not a McKinsey sort. He didn't run models. He didn't apply metrics from afar as would an MBA. Because he'd actually been to war and accumulated decades of experience in foreign affairs on the ground - working directly with other nations - he was humble enough and shrewd enough to view Hussein as a lamentable but necessary garbage pail lid that kept a festering pile of shit from leaking around the greater middle east.
His son, OTOH, w/no experience, and Dick Cheney, the very worst form of Beltway know-it-all consultant-think operative, had nothing but hubris. "They'll greet us as liberators." And of course, once you've broken all the china, put a guy like Bremmer, a half-wit middle manager, in charge of the whole thing.
There are many lousy reasons Americans distrust people calling themselves experts. There are just as many quite valid ones. Colin Powell might've on to something far more than he knew when he said people who haven't gone to war aren't the right people to make decisions about going to war.
Maybe add to that, policy wonks and MBAs who don't have any direct experience with the culture they're liberating are the last people who should be guiding any of our foreign policy, let alone military interventions.
We can't force democracy on the rest of the world for two reasons. First, many cultures simply don't want it. Second, the alleged best and the brightest who task themselves with doing so are just as often incompetents as they are experts.
