![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arhalvaztrirjournal posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
talkpoliticsTime to go with a very recent illustration of how little people can and will choose to learn or not learn from history.
The first example is archetypal, now, as a classic example of imperial hubris bringing about the start of what is now the relative decline of the American Empire in all but the sphere of brute military force.
Specifically in 1990, a man named Saddam Hussein, fresh out of a protracted bloodbath of a war started on the wrongful idea that Iran in the midst of revolution and a full-scale purge of its armed forces was vulnerable to a localized land grab, decided to recoup his financial losses from that with allegations of dubious veracity of slant drilling in the neighboring principality of Kuwait. This itself is already an example but that's for another post reflecting on the selective memory not just in the United States but elsewhere concerning imperialism in the region. Leaving that aside, in 1990 Saddam Hussein chose to send the world's fourth largest army into Kuwait and overran the place against a bare minimum of resistance in 48 hours.
The result was the multi-month buildup under George H.W. Bush of a coallition army linking the USA, Arab states in the region including Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, France, the UK, and a few smattering of other states to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. Crucially the USA stored up for itself trouble by overtly claiming it simply wanted Saddam out of Kuwait, but privately straddling the line of legality by aiming for his assassination (which to be frank is a legitimate choice in wartime when the dictator is the only one holding a rickety structure together).
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2016/01/operation-desert-storm-25-years-since-the-first-gulf-war/424191/
After dealing an overwhelming clobbering that was to be expected when an over-centralized dime store knockoff of the Red Army faced a superpower army with indefinite time and money at its disposal and basic tactical errors that got clobbered into it, the USA stored up more trouble by calling for an insurrection, stabbing it in the back, and then belatedly deploying US troops into Iraq to forestall more of the very genocide the Bush Administration had called up into existence to begin with.
This, Operation Provide Comfort, was timed simultaneously with the institution of the Long War fought mostly as a series of air campaigns. Somehow this was retroactively deemed peaceful circa 2002, presumably because Shrub was that awful, or alternately because nobody except Iraqis not in power in Baghdad actually gave a fuck about Iraqi lives except as a political football. I incline to that latter view.
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/08/world/us-sends-force-as-iraqi-soldiers-threaten-kuwait.html
^In 1993 there was this incident,
https://www.politico.com/story/2009/06/clinton-orders-attack-on-iraq-june-26-1993-024213
As well as this one.
Then this one, in 1998, the largest single airstrike until the 2003 war.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/clinton-orders-air-attack-on-iraq
The overall context of all this summarized here:
https://www.historyguy.com/no-fly_zone_war.html
Now, after all of this, George W. Bush, seeing an endless set of ground and air strife in Iraq, somehow concluded his brilliant move was to do what the USA actually did want daddy dearest to do in 1991 and punished him for being intelligent enough to avoid, namely launching ground troops to Baghdad on a stunning venture of US imperial power. This war, started in 2003, and ongoing anew now in the form of the spillover of the Syrian Civil War and the first attempts to seriously alter the Westphalian concept of the state prevailing since 1648, as well as the Versailles-era geopolitical boundaries of the United States, was and is the great archetype of US military clusterfuckery since Vietnam.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/war-in-iraq-begins
However, content to not allow George W. Bush to have a monopoly on willful, moronic, self-destructive vendettas with a petty tyrant in the Middle East who licked to flip the bird to the Great Satan and tweak the tail of the American turkey, the Obama Administration decided to go to war against the regime of Muammar of Many Spellings, the charismatic military despot who'd presided over Libya for some decades at the time of his removal.
As a reminder of the kind of charming fellow Many Spellings actually was, it's worth noting that among his crowning feats of good judgment was being the literal embodiment of the 'Virgin/Chad' meme in picking on the Republic of Chad and getting his ass handed to him on a silver platter. This was indeed what happened when Many Spellings tried to fight a real war with a real army. Learning the lesson he poked the global powers with relatively ineffectual terrorism campaigns.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/chad.htm
At one point he was the favorite boogeyman of choice for Ronald "Alzheimers" Reagan, who called him the Mad Dog of the Middle East and threw bombs at Libya to intimidate him, something that rather signally failed.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/02/22/133970620/flashback-reagan-calls-gadhafi-the-mad-dog-of-the-middle-east
But what's a US intervention in this region without an avoidable hilariously awful in hindsight, the time, and any possible context grimdark farce?
The USA under the Bush Administration, the same one that invaded the Iraq of the Saddam Hussein regime, decided to make Many Spellings its pet proof the War on Oil-Rich Muslim Dictators actually was working.
http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1194766,00.html
Yes, at one point Muammar ManySpellings was the USA's ally, believe it or not.
Come five years later, Libya's in the middle of a civil war sparked by the 1848 of our time, the Arab Springs (yes, the 1848 analogy is deliberate, if you're unaware of those revolutions this is long enough without that history. I refuse to mention it without the obligatory laugh at the expense of Franz Josef, however. So 'hahahaha pathetic asshole had one job and needed Russia to do it for him').
Ensue the Obama Administration deciding, in spite of the empirically valid proof the Long War in Iraq offered, as well as the Longer War in Afghanistan, to replicate this genius move a third time and remove yet another minor tin pot tyrant with a fetish for sending thugs to shoot up his neighbors to remind people he existed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/02/03/a-tough-call-on-libya-that-still-haunts/?utm_term=.fd70f5ec1820
In the sense of removing ManySpellings the war was successful. In every other standard it replicated and exceeded the clusterfuck of 1991-present on a far grander scale in far less time, which arguably could be said to be the difference between the Bush kind of evil and what Obam did. Obama was much more efficient in his disasters and able to make them worse in infinitely shorter timeframes.
And now, not content to bring US 'liberation' by the crash of the bomb to Libya and Iraq, and to perpetuate and worsen the Afghan Civil War with yet another superpower causing chaos wherever it goes, the USA of Trump is proposing 5,000 troops to ignore logistics, geography, and viability of a proposed approach to presumably launch an anabasis into Venezuela, a move that will go far less well than Iraq did, and since Iraq is a sterling example of a fiasco of Churchillian proportions......
The United States is an empire stuck in a rut of a Roman degree. It sees problems, unleashes awesome military force expecting people to 1) accept it, and 2) be grateful if they survive for living in a bombed-out charred rubble field splattered with the blood and entrails of their relatives. Somehow this never happens and the USA is regularly bemused that it doesn't.
I'd like to think reality will ensue sufficiently the USA has to accept it, but it hasn't with three spectacular failures in a generation, and I see no reason to expect it suddenly will in Venezuela. So even by the bloody and savagely ironic standards of history, these recent illustrations of a cyclical pattern are especially gruesome at multiple levels.
The first example is archetypal, now, as a classic example of imperial hubris bringing about the start of what is now the relative decline of the American Empire in all but the sphere of brute military force.
Specifically in 1990, a man named Saddam Hussein, fresh out of a protracted bloodbath of a war started on the wrongful idea that Iran in the midst of revolution and a full-scale purge of its armed forces was vulnerable to a localized land grab, decided to recoup his financial losses from that with allegations of dubious veracity of slant drilling in the neighboring principality of Kuwait. This itself is already an example but that's for another post reflecting on the selective memory not just in the United States but elsewhere concerning imperialism in the region. Leaving that aside, in 1990 Saddam Hussein chose to send the world's fourth largest army into Kuwait and overran the place against a bare minimum of resistance in 48 hours.
The result was the multi-month buildup under George H.W. Bush of a coallition army linking the USA, Arab states in the region including Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, France, the UK, and a few smattering of other states to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. Crucially the USA stored up for itself trouble by overtly claiming it simply wanted Saddam out of Kuwait, but privately straddling the line of legality by aiming for his assassination (which to be frank is a legitimate choice in wartime when the dictator is the only one holding a rickety structure together).
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2016/01/operation-desert-storm-25-years-since-the-first-gulf-war/424191/
After dealing an overwhelming clobbering that was to be expected when an over-centralized dime store knockoff of the Red Army faced a superpower army with indefinite time and money at its disposal and basic tactical errors that got clobbered into it, the USA stored up more trouble by calling for an insurrection, stabbing it in the back, and then belatedly deploying US troops into Iraq to forestall more of the very genocide the Bush Administration had called up into existence to begin with.
This, Operation Provide Comfort, was timed simultaneously with the institution of the Long War fought mostly as a series of air campaigns. Somehow this was retroactively deemed peaceful circa 2002, presumably because Shrub was that awful, or alternately because nobody except Iraqis not in power in Baghdad actually gave a fuck about Iraqi lives except as a political football. I incline to that latter view.
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/08/world/us-sends-force-as-iraqi-soldiers-threaten-kuwait.html
^In 1993 there was this incident,
https://www.politico.com/story/2009/06/clinton-orders-attack-on-iraq-june-26-1993-024213
As well as this one.
Then this one, in 1998, the largest single airstrike until the 2003 war.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/clinton-orders-air-attack-on-iraq
The overall context of all this summarized here:
https://www.historyguy.com/no-fly_zone_war.html
Now, after all of this, George W. Bush, seeing an endless set of ground and air strife in Iraq, somehow concluded his brilliant move was to do what the USA actually did want daddy dearest to do in 1991 and punished him for being intelligent enough to avoid, namely launching ground troops to Baghdad on a stunning venture of US imperial power. This war, started in 2003, and ongoing anew now in the form of the spillover of the Syrian Civil War and the first attempts to seriously alter the Westphalian concept of the state prevailing since 1648, as well as the Versailles-era geopolitical boundaries of the United States, was and is the great archetype of US military clusterfuckery since Vietnam.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/war-in-iraq-begins
However, content to not allow George W. Bush to have a monopoly on willful, moronic, self-destructive vendettas with a petty tyrant in the Middle East who licked to flip the bird to the Great Satan and tweak the tail of the American turkey, the Obama Administration decided to go to war against the regime of Muammar of Many Spellings, the charismatic military despot who'd presided over Libya for some decades at the time of his removal.
As a reminder of the kind of charming fellow Many Spellings actually was, it's worth noting that among his crowning feats of good judgment was being the literal embodiment of the 'Virgin/Chad' meme in picking on the Republic of Chad and getting his ass handed to him on a silver platter. This was indeed what happened when Many Spellings tried to fight a real war with a real army. Learning the lesson he poked the global powers with relatively ineffectual terrorism campaigns.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/chad.htm
At one point he was the favorite boogeyman of choice for Ronald "Alzheimers" Reagan, who called him the Mad Dog of the Middle East and threw bombs at Libya to intimidate him, something that rather signally failed.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/02/22/133970620/flashback-reagan-calls-gadhafi-the-mad-dog-of-the-middle-east
But what's a US intervention in this region without an avoidable hilariously awful in hindsight, the time, and any possible context grimdark farce?
The USA under the Bush Administration, the same one that invaded the Iraq of the Saddam Hussein regime, decided to make Many Spellings its pet proof the War on Oil-Rich Muslim Dictators actually was working.
http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1194766,00.html
Yes, at one point Muammar ManySpellings was the USA's ally, believe it or not.
Come five years later, Libya's in the middle of a civil war sparked by the 1848 of our time, the Arab Springs (yes, the 1848 analogy is deliberate, if you're unaware of those revolutions this is long enough without that history. I refuse to mention it without the obligatory laugh at the expense of Franz Josef, however. So 'hahahaha pathetic asshole had one job and needed Russia to do it for him').
Ensue the Obama Administration deciding, in spite of the empirically valid proof the Long War in Iraq offered, as well as the Longer War in Afghanistan, to replicate this genius move a third time and remove yet another minor tin pot tyrant with a fetish for sending thugs to shoot up his neighbors to remind people he existed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/02/03/a-tough-call-on-libya-that-still-haunts/?utm_term=.fd70f5ec1820
In the sense of removing ManySpellings the war was successful. In every other standard it replicated and exceeded the clusterfuck of 1991-present on a far grander scale in far less time, which arguably could be said to be the difference between the Bush kind of evil and what Obam did. Obama was much more efficient in his disasters and able to make them worse in infinitely shorter timeframes.
And now, not content to bring US 'liberation' by the crash of the bomb to Libya and Iraq, and to perpetuate and worsen the Afghan Civil War with yet another superpower causing chaos wherever it goes, the USA of Trump is proposing 5,000 troops to ignore logistics, geography, and viability of a proposed approach to presumably launch an anabasis into Venezuela, a move that will go far less well than Iraq did, and since Iraq is a sterling example of a fiasco of Churchillian proportions......
The United States is an empire stuck in a rut of a Roman degree. It sees problems, unleashes awesome military force expecting people to 1) accept it, and 2) be grateful if they survive for living in a bombed-out charred rubble field splattered with the blood and entrails of their relatives. Somehow this never happens and the USA is regularly bemused that it doesn't.
I'd like to think reality will ensue sufficiently the USA has to accept it, but it hasn't with three spectacular failures in a generation, and I see no reason to expect it suddenly will in Venezuela. So even by the bloody and savagely ironic standards of history, these recent illustrations of a cyclical pattern are especially gruesome at multiple levels.
