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WORD COUNT
623
JUNE 11, 2008
NOW CLASS, LET’S
REVIEW IRAQ’S LESSONS – by Miriam Pemberton
Those of us with
enough years under our belts may remember one of the favored slogans of
Vietnam anti-war protesters: "What if they gave a war and nobody came?"
Today's revised version might be: "What if they gave a war (or two) and
nobody cared?"
Congress is in the
midst of ginning up the latest "emergency" cash infusion for our two
wars. The public on whose behalf they are doing this is mostly thinking
of other things.
The American people
have expressed themselves clearly on the Iraq War itself for quite a
while now. By large majorities hovering around 70 percent, they want it
to end. Fulfilling this expressed will of the people is our most urgent
foreign policy priority, one that can't be forgotten, ignored or
deferred.
But there is other,
related, unfinished business to which we as a people need to attend. The
worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history may actually have an
upside of sorts: that the war has served as a tryout for a number of
policy innovations. "Thanks" to the war, we know enough now to cross
them permanently off our list.
Here are a few:
·
Preventive war.
In place of the idea that wars should be started only as a last resort,
our current National Security Doctrine is based on the theory that they
should be fought to prevent future enemies from developing. They are the
means to create the conditions of peace. Our Iraq experience has been
the test case for this theory. We know now how well it has worked out.
·
Politicized intelligence.
Knowing that these theories were not, by themselves, going to create
mass public support for an attack on a country that had not attacked or
threatened the United States, the Bush administration set about to
create a false case that such an attack might be imminent. They did it,
among other means, by pressuring and manipulating our existing
intelligence agencies, as well as by creating substitute intelligence
organs, to give them the answers they wanted.
·
The
war on civil liberties.
The preventive war doctrine paved the way for an emboldened assault on
civil protections, from circumventing a congressional ban on torture of
detainees to permitting warrantless wiretapping of citizens.
Other items for the
list can come from the panoply of recent books that have laid them out
in detail. Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes exposed the ravages of
dishonest war cost accounting tricks in “The Three Trillion Dollar War.”
Aziz Huq and Frederick Schwarz detailed the ways war has been used to
push the frontiers of presidential power in “Unchecked and Unbalanced.”
Norman Solomon examined the daring innovations in media manipulation
that sold the public on this war in “War Made Easy.”
In my own book,
“Lessons From Iraq,” these writers and others have boiled down what they
know for the rest of us. The result is a list of 17 lessons, and a brief
for each of them. They are directed at three different targets: the
reasons why we went to war, the ways we were convinced to go to war, and
the "collateral damage," the expansion of both executive power and the
private sector, as well as the constraint of our civil liberties that
were achieved by war. These pernicious achievements now have to be
unachieved.
The pointing out of
these lessons is meant to start a debate rather than end one: Are the
above the right lessons to salvage from this debacle? What others should
be added?
It'll be our job as
citizens to flesh out the list. And most importantly, to figure out how
to pinpoint these items on the policy map as places we never need to go
to again.
--
Miriam Pemberton is a
research fellow with the Foreign Policy In Focus project at the
Institute for Policy Studies. With William D. Hartung of the New America
Foundation, she has edited “Lessons From Iraq: Avoiding the Next War”
(Paradigm Publishers, 2008, www.paradigmpublishers.com).
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