The Iraq Mistake

There have been many mistakes concerning Iraq, starting with it being carved out of the Ottoman Empire by the French and British around 1920.

Today, we constantly read about mistakes made during the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent occupation. Colin Powell does not get enough blame for his famous statement about Iraq to George W. Bush before the invasion: "If you break it, you own it".

The latest blame game is centered on whether the military gave its civilian masters (Bush and Rumsfeld in particular) good advice regarding how many troops would be needed.

This is nonsense. There was and is only one primary mistake, and that was made by President Bush: the decision to invade Iraq, a nation which was no threat to the United States.

While Bush was partying and avoiding service in Vietnam, others saw the folly of the War in Vietnam (which followed the folly of the Korean Conflict). In all three cases, we were never attacked by the other nation, and the other nation was not an historical enemy of the United States. We should never have fought these wars.

Imagine if we had not fought those wars. Imagine the happy and productive lives of the men and women who might not have been casualties of those stupid wars. Imagine what we could have done with the trillions of dollars (direct and indirect costs) we spent on those wars. Imagine other peoples loving Americans today instead of hating us.

No one can say for sure what might have happened had we not fought those stupid wars. But it is easy to imagine what America might have spent that treasure on.

Just two examples: nuclear fusion power development and thousands of nuclear fission power plants. This could have been achieved at least 30 years ago, and instead of importing oil (and thereby funding terrorism) we would have been exporting our own oil, since it would no longer be needed to fuel cars (which would all be electric) or heat homes.

Of course, the politicians and media pundits will argue for years who "lost" Iraq, but history will be quite clear who made the biggest mistake in foreign policy in modern time: George W. Bush. It was his idea to invade Iraq, and his hubris has kept us in that godforsaken country, because Bush will never admit he was wrong. His ideology will not permit it.