bush’s history lessons
by Stefan Koski
Published: May 30, 2008
You have to wonder what kind of history lessons Bush had as a kid. On the one hand, he recalls enough from his high school days to cite Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement when he was in front of Israel’s Knesset the other week. On the other, he unwittingly (or perhaps willingly) uses the lessons of history completely out of context.
Bush has twisted history into a justification for his foreign policy on numerous occasions before. World War II comparisons are among his favorite. Last Wednesday, he made remarks to graduates of the U.S. Air Force Academy that America could win a two-front war in Afghanistan and Iraq because we had done it before in Japan and Germany in the 1940’s.
But the wars we’re fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq are nothing like the war we fought against the Japanese and the Nazis. World War II had definable terms for victory. Today’s war in Iraq is murkier than ever. John McCain has said while campaigning to become president that he would win the war in Iraq during his first term of office. I wonder - what does he consider winning?
Is it when al-Qaeda in Iraq is wiped out? If so, then we have already pretty much won. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which never made up more than 3% of the Sunni population to begin with, has had its power base increasingly diminished in the wake of the Anbar Awakening and the Sunnis allying with the U.S. Army (not that it ever stood a chance of surviving in a country with such a large Shi’ite majority).
Do we win when Iraq is a unified, peaceful, democratic country? If so, then McCain might be right when he says we might be there for another hundred years. Bush has called building a democracy in Iraq while under attack by extremists “unprecedented,” but a more accurate word would be “impossible.” History has shown that democracies cannot thrive without three important ingredients: security, economic stability and a unified populace.
The first we’re still nowhere near achieving. Violence is down but only because Al-Sadr has ordered a ceasefire and the Sunni rebels are on the U.S. payroll. Even with those gains, General Petraeus still describes the security situation in Iraq as “fragile.” The second has no chance of becoming a reality anytime soon. Most of Iraq’s infrastructure still hasn’t been rebuilt in the years since it was bombed to pieces, not to mention that the issues with security mean that the business environment is still less than friendly.
And the third is something that is both completely out of our hands and likely to never happen. Animosity runs deep between the Sunni and Shi’ite populations in Iraq - partly because of the Iran-Iraq war, partly because of the repressive regime of Saddam Hussein, and partly because of religious differences that go back over a thousand years. Iraq’s people, let alone the elected officials representing them in the Iraqi government, are not ready to let bygones be bygones.
If Bush knew his history better, he would understand this, and he would know that having a unified Iraq is something of a non sequitur because Iraq is a fictitious country. The British drew its borders as a way of more easily managing the former Ottoman Empire’s territory after it collapsed following World War I. It is an invention of colonial rulers from a lost era. If he knew his history, he would know that the British likewise found controlling Iraq to be impossible. That’s why they pulled out.
Bush has said that this war will be unlike the wars of the past, with surrenders on battleships and all that jazz. But in the same breath he justifies the war in Iraq as if it were the same as all previous wars, and he insists on continuing it as if it were the same thing. Hopefully the next president of the United States will know that it’s not.
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