My German is not great, but the gist is this: “ten years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, countless men disappear in the jails of Iraq every year. . .According to Amnesty International, they can be no talk of an improvement in human rights, even though the United States pushed that as a reason for the invasion.” The abuses include torture of women as well as men.
It’s true: we did. I did. As I think about it now, two data points seem important: first, we cared about a nuclear armed Iraq–and plainly at some point Hussein was going to build nukes (he said so when arrested)–because it would destabilize the Middle East, and thus our supply of oil. Virtually none of the people chanting “no blood for oil” were able to make this connection. I know this, because I debated them. They thought the “corporations” were going to take the oil. Certainly, Halliburton and others did quite well, but at no point did I see any plausible reason to believe they were the CAUSE of the war, but rather simply in the right place at the right time.
The intelligent policy would have been to devote the same energy to the development of energy independence we devoted to this war. I can see that now. Yes, green jackasses would have opposed this, but they oppose anything that smacks of anything but self destructiveness, which is why James Lovelock, arguably one of the god fathers of the Green Movement, now opposes them, by and large.
Secondly, once you realize that a larger conspiracy was clearly in play, which may well have included Americans, it throws the ENTIRE War on Terror into question. I will post on this concept of “terrorist” in another post, but consider this: if you are anyone you know wanted to cause terror, and was willing to die or be jailed for it, how hard would it be? You could just drive a truck into a crowd, pull out a gun and start shooting, while screaming “Allahu Akbar”. It would not be hard. Given this, why have there been so few attacks, if this is truly a large problem? Is someone arguing that the drone strikes in YEMEN are somehow keeping American lives from being lost?
I don’t see it. What I see is the amorphous threat of “terrorism”, which is so vague that it is portrayed as omnipresent, being used to justify the development of police state apparatus. If terrorism is possibly everywhere, then Big Brother needs to be everywhere. We are colluding in the murder of our freedoms as specifically outlined in the Constitution.
Imagine if George Bush has said he thought he had the right to murder Americans in America. My God, what would have been the reaction from the Left? Now, I see we need to oppose ANYONE, from any Party, who says he or she has the right to do ANYTHING not granted them by law.
With regard to Iraq, I am not quite willing to say we made a mistake, but certainly that that war distracted us from much more important issues, and that it was likely not the BEST strategy to have pursued. Imagine if we now were free from the need for foreign oil. Would that not free up many resources for other productive purposes?
As I see it, we have no good way of preventing Iran from getting a nuke. The military logistics of anything short of a full scale invasion are, I suspect, insuperable. We could at best delay them. Given this, as I said some time ago, we need to grant them the right to have a nuke, and make is crystal clear that if they use, or even credibly signal the use of, nukes, we will fry them, and their civilization will fall back into the Stone Age. No Mahdi will save them. In their hearts, they know this, not least because this idiotic belief is not even contained in THEIR OWN TEXTS. It is a modern invention.