Journalist on NPR spoke yesterday about the collapse of the Iraqi military which let ISIS flourish. The moment we left, military commanders started robbing the army blind. As people quit and walked away commanders pocketed their paychecks. Soldiers ended up buying their own boots in local shops as supply chains were rerouted corruptly. When ISIS moved on Mosul, the generals and leaders were the first to flee. They were followed by the rank and file who just went home. We spent hundreds of millions on this army which vanished over night giving its arms to our enemies. Remember this wasnt Obamas decision; we were forced out by the Iraqis themselves. The government that emerged and evolved from the Bush invasion was doomed from the get go; based on lies and fairy tales, created primarily to serve as a model for a government in the region with oil in the hands of private oil companies. Everything else flowed from that decision. After 911, we didnt want another oil-fueled, intractable ally state. Anyway, what this brought home to me is the how money and resources and infrastructure dont matter if the people dont believe in what theyre doing. Nobody believed in the army. It was a job. A way to collect a paycheck. We dissolved Saddams army, sent them home with their guns to become rebels as a part of debathification. The new army we tried to create out of whole cloth had no roots, no tradition, no resonance, no reality. It doesnt matter how much money we have, how many bombing raids we make, how many boots we put on the ground; we learned this in the Viet Nam war and Bush, a draft dodger from that era, is making us learn it all over again. We cant construct friendly states from whole cloth.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 15:34:47 +0000
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