https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e9yy84we8o
Three weeks on from the statue coming down, America's President, George W Bush, stood aboard a US aircraft carrier, anchored off the Californian coast, behind a banner saying "Mission Accomplished". Except it was anything but.
Iraq and Iran are very different countries but can lessons be learnt? So far there is little sign of a coherent plan for what the US wants to bring about or what kind of future it envisages for the country. This time, the improvisation seems to be a deliberate strategy as it leaves President Trump with different options for what he can declare as victory before moving on, creating his own "Mission Accomplished" moment.
But this time round in the US, there has been no attempt to publicly resolve the sometimes contradictory desires to take action. In fact, US President Donald Trump has himself seemed to veer between them depending on which day he is talking and who to.
Nor has there been any attempt to sell the war to the American public – a process which unfolded over months with Iraq. And nor has there been any attempt to seek international legitimacy through the UN. Back in 2003, there was endless discussion of which states might back action.
Iraq is now in a much better state than it was in the immediate aftermath and many are glad to see Saddam Hussein gone. But democracy did not spread through the Middle East in the aftermath as some had claimed it would. Instead, one of the biggest winners of the invasion would be Iran whose main adversary was removed, allowing it to extend its influence into Iraq and beyond in the years after the war. And it would increase the terrorist threat within the UK and the broader West. Wars do not always have the outcomes people expect or want.
Except they didn't claim in the beginning a war objective of regime change. They were clear that they just wanted to cut down the nuclear and missile capacity.
ReplyDeleteIt's the bleach quote all over again.
DeleteRemember when Trump said "It would be nice if we could invent something that acts like bleach and inject it into people to kill viruses like CoVID"? And everyone with TDS announced that Trump told people to inject themselves witih bleach.
Same thing here. Trump and Bibi would like the regime to fall, they'd like the people to rise up and take over but the bottom line is that the mission is to end the nuke threat once and for all and they're well on their way to doing it.