Massive Failure

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Steve brought us Andrew Bacevich's assessment of the US state of constant war since 1945. His conclusion - massive blood and treasure spent with little or nothing to show for it.  And they may call it "National Defense" but these military misadventures have made us less secure. At the Asia Times Michael Schwartz takes a look at the Bush/Cheney misadventure in Iraq.  A massive failure on almost all counts.

How the mighty have fallen. Just a few years ago, an overconfident George W
Bush administration expected to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, pacify the
country, install a compliant client government, privatize the economy, and
establish Iraq as the political and military headquarters for a dominating US
presence in the Middle East.

These successes were, in turn, expected to pave the way for ambitious goals,
enshrined in the 2001 report of vice president Dick Cheney's secretive task
force on energy. That report focused on exploiting Iraq's monstrous, largely
untapped energy reserves - more than any country other than Saudi Arabia and
Iran - including the quadrupling of Iraq's capacity to pump oil and the privatization of the production process.

Saddam Hussein is gone but that is the only thing that went as planned.

Almost seven years later, it will come as little surprise that things turned
out to cost a bit more than expected in Iraq and didn't work out exactly as
imagined. Though the March 2003 invasion quickly ousted Saddam Hussein, the
rest of the Bush administration's ambitious agenda remains largely unfulfilled.

Instead of quickly pacifying a grateful nation and then withdrawing all but
30,000-40,000 American troops (which were to be garrisoned on giant bases far
from Iraq's urban areas), the occupation triggered both Sunni and Shi'ite
insurgencies, while US counterinsurgency operations led to massive carnage, a
sectarian civil war, the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, and a humanitarian crisis
that featured hundreds of thousands of deaths, four million internal and
external refugees, and an unemployment rate that stayed consistently above 50%
with all the attendant hunger, disease, and misery one would expect.

While Saddam was an arch enemy of Iran the Bush administration's al Maliki - not so much.

In the meantime, the government of Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, fervently supported by the Bush administration and judged by Transparency International to be the fifth-most corrupt in the world, has morphed into an ever less reliable client regime.

Despite American diktats and desires, it has managed to establish cordial political and economic relationships with Iran, slow the economic privatization process launched by the neo-con administrators sent to Baghdad in 2003, and restored itself as the country's primary employer. It even seems periodically resistant to its designated role as a possible long-term host for an American military strike force in the Middle East.

This resistance was expressed most forcefully when Maliki leveraged the Bush administration into signing a status of forces agreement (SOFA) in 2008 that included a full US military withdrawal by the end of 2011. Maliki even demanded - and received - a promise to vacate the five massive "enduring" military bases the Pentagon had constructed - with their elaborate facilities, populations that reach into the tens of thousands, and virtually no Iraqi presence, even among the thousands of unskilled workers who do the necessary dirty work to keep these "American towns" running.

And about that oil:

The entire six-year saga of American energy dreams, policies, and pressures in Iraq has so far yielded little - no significant increase in Iraq's oil production, no increase in its future capacity to produce, and no increase in its energy exports. The grand ambition of transferring actual control of the oil industry into the hands of the international oil companies has proven no less stillborn.

Over the years since the US began its energy campaign, production has actually languished, sometimes falling as much as 40% below the pre-invasion levels of an industry already held together by duct tape and ingenuity. In the Brookings Institution's latest figures for December 2009, production stood at 2.4 million barrels per day, a full 100,000 barrels lower than the pre-war daily average.

Massive failure - but it has done nothing to slow the neocons dreams.  Bacevich:

What are we to make of this record? For Krauthammer,
Boot, and Barnes, the lessons are clear: dial up the rhetoric, increase
military spending, send in more troops, and give the generals a free
hand. The important thing, writes William Kristol in his own assessment
of Obama�s Afghanistan decision, is to have a commander in chief who
embraces �the use of military force as a key instrument of national
power.� If we just keep trying, one of these times things will surely
turn out all right.

Empires fail because of economics but hubris like we see above plays a part.  While I didn't agree with him Irving Kristol was a very smart man - he was smart enough to know that his son Bill was an idiot.