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War Perspective? |
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Can We Ever Really Understand the War in Iraq? 4-15-05What's the truth? Did president Bush lie about W.M.D.? Was he simply the victim of poor intelligence? Is this the biggest mistake the U.S. has made in centuries, a fortuitous and accidental "victory" only by way of removing one of many thuggish dictators on the globe, or something totally different? Well certainly I don't know. I'm no foreign policy wonk, and such topics are generally outside the scope of seeking truth through science and reason. Or are they? One of the points I make in Truth-Driven Thinking is that issues are often highly complex. And if there are reasonable people on both sides of a complex issue, it might be a red flag for us that there is more than meets the eye, and that perhaps truth is being subordinated to emotion, hype and rhetoric. My sense has always been that this was especially true with the war on Terror, and the invasion of Iraq. When jockeying in a high-stakes geopolitical game, can you "telegraph" your every move with the level of candor we would like to hear from our US Administration? At the same time, just what ARE they really up to? Is it evil, benign, colonialist, or what? Thankfully, I found a book that I believe is fair, balanced, and provides a highly plausible, big picture perspective. Freidman, George. America's Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between America and Its Enemies. Doubleday, 2004. If you want a clearer picture of America's war on terror, and the war in Iraq - its origins, blunders of unprecedented proportions by the military machine/administration, and at the same the successful brilliant geopolitical and diplomatic maneuverings that very well could turn out to be successful - I'd suggest that you read this book. It may not be a thrill-a-minute page turner, but it is excellent. It seemed as close to a down-the-middle assessment of a complex issue as I could have hoped for. Friedman says, for instance, that W.M.D. was the public sell, but not the primary motive for invasion (and no, he says it wasn't oil). Rather, other geopolitical issues were at play, and they were too complex for the Administration (in the Administration's view) to get American to rally behind. Is it possible they believed in the W.M.D. threat, and articulated it without "lying", as is so often alleged? Is it also possible that it really wasn't the primary, or even secondary reason for going to war? Don't get worried that this book gets conspiratorial. It most definitely does not. Rather, it tries to get at a wide array of cultural and geopolitical forces that truly are a powder keg - and varying opinions about how to proceed. He says other factors were: a) Invasion of Iraq was required to keep any one player in the Arab world from becoming too strong - (Saudi Arabia), and tipping the balance of power throughout the middle east (something both parties seem to agree is vitally important). b) Simultaneously, the action allowed us to gain back the psychological edge for the first time in decades - many in the Arab world hated us before, some argue, but they were not inclined to join the party to hunt us down and kill us. That changed as they observe that there was never a willingness to get American hands dirty or respond to terrorism over recent decades. They felt they were gaining traction - from Carter, Reagan and Bush 41, to Clinton, we have a LONG history of placating terror with weak, incompetent or nonexistent policy or reprisals. The only way to go back to plain hate - - from hate and victory-fueled momentum, was to demonstrate a willingness to get dirty. c) Others I'll probably mess up if I try to summarize them. Is the book an apologist rationalization? Hardly. It is filled with harsh criticism, accounts of blunders and misreads that Friedman says are, "Unprecedented" gaffs. While clearly it will not be a definitive book of recent history, I highly recommend it for both sides of the debate. As always, the more I know the less I know, and the more difficult it seems to ever really understand what goes on in the world (but we have to keep trying:-)! Issues certainly are more complex than both sides would have us believe! |
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