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What Could Possibly Go Wrong? A Tale of America at War in the Twenty-First Century
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/01/18What could go wrong? Where should we begin.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong? A Tale of America at War in the Twenty-First Century
by Tom Engelhardt
Published on Saturday, January 18, 2014 by TomDispatch.com
These days, when I check out the latest news on Washingtons global war-making, I regularly find at least one story that fits a new category in my mind that I call: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Take last Saturday's Washington Post report by Craig Whitlock on the stationing of less than two dozen U.S. military advisers in war-torn Somalia. Theyve been there for months, it turns out, and their job is to advise and coordinate operations with African troops fighting to wrest control of the country from the al-Shabab militia. If you leave aside the paramilitarized CIA (which has long had a secret base and prison in that country), those advisers represent the first U.S. military boots on the ground there since the infamous Black Hawk Down incident of 1993. As soon as I read the piece, I automatically thought: Given the history of the U.S. in Somalia, including the encouragement of a disastrous 2006 Ethiopian invasion of that country, what could possibly go wrong?
Some days when I read the news, I cant help but think of the late Chalmers Johnson; on others, the satirical newspaper the Onion comes to mind. If Washington did it -- and by it, I mean invade and occupy a country, intervene in a rebellion against an autocrat, intervene in a civil war, launch a drone campaign against a terror outfit, or support and train local forces against some group the U.S. doesnt like -- you already know all you need to know. Any version of the above has repeatedly translated into one debacle or disaster after another. In the classic term of CIA tradecraft that Johnson took for the title of a book -- a post-9/11 bestseller -- send a drone over Yemen with the intent to kill, kick down doors in Afghanistan or Iraq, put U.S. boots back on the ground in Somalia and youre going to be guaranteed unintended consequences and undoubtedly some form of blowback as well. To use a sports analogy, if since 9/11 Washington has been the globes cleanup hitter, it not only hasnt managed to knock a single ball out of the park, its struck out enough times to make those watching dizzy, and its batting .000.
You would think that someone in the nations capital might have drawn a lesson or two from such a record, something simple like: Dont do it! But -- heres where the Onion should be able to run riot -- there clearly is no learning curve in Washington. Tactics change, but the ill-conceived, ill-begotten, ill-fated Global War on Terror (GWOT), which long ago outran its own overblown name, continues without end, and without either successes of any lasting sort or serious reconsideration. In this period, al-Qaeda, a small-scale organization capable of immodest terror acts every couple of years and, despite the fantasies of Homeland and Fox News, without a sleeper cell in the United States, managed, with Washingtons help, to turn itself into a global franchise. The more the Bush and Obama administrations went after it, the more al-Qaeda wannabe organizations sprang up across the Greater Middle East and north Africa like mushrooms after a soaking rain.
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What Could Possibly Go Wrong? A Tale of America at War in the Twenty-First Century (Original Post)
unhappycamper
Jan 2014
OP
bemildred
(90,061 posts)1. Indeed. nt
malthaussen
(17,217 posts)2. In politics, it seems, it is a virtue to repeat the same mistakes.
I think this is because ideology dominates so much of political thought. That, and the need to always be a team player and never admit mistakes.
What's that old expression? "Get with the program!"
-- Mal
Beartracks
(12,821 posts)3. "Repeating mistakes" is known as "standing on principle" in D.C. n/t
russ1943
(618 posts)4. K & R & R