The surging expense of our illusions
We live in a world of illusions. Those illusions are expensive. For instance, the illusion that we could impose a Westernized, friendly to the US and Israel, OPEC busting government in Iraq was an illusion that was apparent to the dirty fucking hippies by the summer of 2002 and to most of the Serious People by 2006. However to lose that illusion would require the United States’ elites to admit that our will is insufficient to mold the world without constraints and that other actors have agency. So instead, we got the Surge(tm) which was a strategic failure when it is evaluated on its stated objectives of using military force to create political reconciliation space.
Stirling Newberry argues that Iraq is a failed state where the improvement of the past few years is merely the return to a decaying baseline of the pre-war era after the violent punctuation of the insurgencies, the Iraqi civil war, ethnic cleansing and the screw the Sunni’s political coalition.
Iraq is spiraling downwards, as wide spread power outages continue. It is not without a point that this is important. One of the key steps in stabilizing the former Yugoslavia, was providing power. Iraq has two large rivers, and oil, and large reserves of conventional natural gas, and cannot generate enough electricity. A few days ago, the energy minister was forced out over the continuing crisis.
Iraq’s oil production, which supplies virtually all of its hard foreign currency, is between 1.7 million barrels per day, and 1.9 million barrels per day, which isroughly the amount allowed by the oil for food program in 1999.
The Surge(tm) that was supposed to create space for political reconciliation failed by its own metrics. The Sunnis are still the primary latrine of Iraqi politics, continually shitted upon. The reduction in violence that has been attributed to the Surge(tm) that has allowed for a ‘decent interval’ for a ‘controlled chaos’ withdrawal has many confounding factors.The three biggest factors were a shift in the opinion of the Sunni Arab elites from the desirability of fighting a three front war against the US, Shi’ite militias and AQI/foreign jihadi co-belligerents, theeffective end of the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad and other mixed-sect communities along the main lines of fighting, and the ceasefire of the Mahdi Army. The Sunni elite decided to allow their influence to be leased out by the US to beat up on the more relevant local threats poised by the AQI/foreign jihadi groups, and the ethnic cleansing removed the conflict zones between Shi’ites and Sunni groups. None of these factors were caused by the Surge(tm) and they were the actions of local actors with their own agency, agendas and interests.
On its own merits, the Surge(tm) failed. However Matt Yglesias argues that the Surge(tm) was needed to change our illusions:
” No time ever came when Bush redefined the nation’s war aims. So if “success” is judged as meaning something so literal as “achieve one’s goals” then the surge, like the war, failed. Indeed, Petraeus failed.
And for a long time, that’s how I saw it, sitting in Washington vaguely furious that the man was winning accolades for a “victory” that was largely a matter of resetting expectations. In retrospect, that was churlish.
Managing expectations is hugely important and Petraeus did the nation a great service by redefining a win in Iraq as something more like “improve the situation in some respects and recognize that the long-term course of things is out of our hands.”
So we need to delude ourselves at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, a thousand or more American lives, tens of thousands of Iraqi lives in order to avoid reality. We can not afford our illusions yet we embrace them and categorize their expense of needed and vital while it is truly discretionary and ineffective. We are a nation which spends to avoid the monsters under our beds while the roof caves in due to a false rush for austerity.
Comments are closed.
The reality is that is all about who is going to control the energy and resource rich Middle East and Central Asia. The US and West, or…?
These wars are a fool’s errand. They will fail in achieving that objective, and create alliances in opposition to Western expansion of its territory of influence.
The good thing is that it will demonstrate the inherent weakness of military force, and it will reveal the US as “paper tiger.”Again.
I thought you were going to cite it as another expensive illusion that Main Street doesn’t need more stimulus.
Someone at Baseline Scenario said that the U.S. economy won’t get fixed until we break the grip of the oligarchy. Since all the fellow citizens I meet IRL persist in embracing their petty delusions no matter what the cost, I don’t see the problem getting solved internally. This is the line of thought that leads me to the disturbing fear that it will take the external influence of a war to break the grip of our owners on our communities and our minds.
Ironic that the heirs to the Confederacy may lead the whole nation into a war that will be as good for us as the Civil War was for the South. American Southerners are like the Germans after WWI, smarting from the war they lost and itching for another one because they think they can win it on the second try. From what I know of Southerners it really will take devastation as absolute as Hitler’s defeat to change anything. Wonder how long it will take them to figure out that none of it heralds the rapture?
Don’t Digby yourself. Deconstructing MattY is about as useful as tirelessly dissecting irrelevant Republicans. Focus where the power is.
someofparts – where do you get off ranting about Southeners? Are we the source of all the country’s woes? “Heirs to the Confederacy” – WTF???
Allison: “Heirs to the Confederacy” – WTF???
What’s all the talk about secession about that’s coming from down there?
Being from New Orleans, i can say for sure white Southerners are still livid about losing the war. lol. so if you think the Germans were pissed, you have no idea about white Southerners vis a vis the “Negro.” any pretense otherwise is just that: pretense. the whites down here hate Democrats/LBJ for forcing integration. as a result the “whites” aka Republicans/former Democrats of the South were/are easy money for the “scam” of voting against “big Government.”
also the dumb whites believed the “dream” that they too could become like the “rich.” only problem is the Rich don’t welcome competition.
the way white Southerners have voted against their own interests time after time after time, voting Republican, shows you can fool a lot of the white Southerners/people a lot of the time. that’s what is and has been going on since the “War of Northern Aggression” as we white Southerners so colorfully call it. Don’t think it won’t be over anytime soon, either. my mother was one of those “people” who protested in the streets after “LBJ” gave the country away to the “others.” i know the passion that is there today and keeps the “whites” voting Republican. separate but equal will never go away for these people.
just drive through Alabama Mississippi, like i did two weeks ago and listen to the radio. the Confederacy is back and not giving an inch. to think otherwise is to think the rich/Banksters will cede control of Congress.
if only the South would secede, then hope might return to America.
Bernard,
Being from the South myself, I would have to say that you are talking about the old southern upper and middle classes. This is an ever shrinking demographic. Poor and working Southerners, despite their reputations for racism and ignorance, actually have much more complex attitudes toward race and politics than many of the people that speak for them. The truth of the mater is, most of the South has become a homogenized, bland mish-mash of cultures. The South has had a population explosion due to a great deal of migration from northeastern and rust-belt states. Many of the most strident “Heirs of the confederacy”, in sumofparts words, aren’t even native Southerners. I would actually argue that the Southwest is more reactionary than the Southeast, which is the region traditionally referred to as “The South.” The South does have its problems, and in many ways, it seems the recent transplants to the area have embraced those problems and negative traits and made them their own. Who knows, maybe the south is where racists and ignoramuses go to be accepted.