Between Iraq and a Hawk Base
G.O.P. presidential candidates are struggling to craft a foreign policy that can please the gung-ho and win in 2016 — without overpromising military force.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/magazine/between-iraq-and-a-hawk-base.html?comments#permid=15969264
Conservative/neocon foreign policy is characterized by an appalling lack of knowledge about history and a frightening arrogance about what America should/can do in the world. Even without the lessons from the decades of British arrogance and stupidity in their foreign policy in the Middle East, the lessons of the US's recent blunders in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan should suffice to show that WE, the US, have singular responsibility for destabilizing the entire region and unleashing the fanaticizm of the itra-Islam religious and tribal conflict there. The lack of acknowledgement of these FACTS by conservatives is either wilfull ignorance our arrogant stupidity.
Combine this with the woefully inadequate and ingnorant recommendations by our "intelligence" organization (remember "slam-dunk") and the extremely bad advice from our military leadership, and you have a recepie for more disasters. We completely underestimated the level of effort required to permanently "pacify" Iraq and Afghanistan.
The supposed "national interest" we have there is completely fictional. "Fight them there to keep them away from our shores" has proven to be completely backwards: Only by going "there" and wreaking havok have we inspired "them" to come here and retaliate.
We have a fatal weakness, that when it comes to supposed "national security", our civilian leaders always defer to military advisors.
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