The LuLac Edition #4,205, January 15th, 2020

WRITE ON WEDNESDAY

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This week we delve back in a little recent history with Iraq. That country, thanks to the recent trouble kicked up by President Trump’s reckless actions has been in the news. It is instructive to see why Iraq and our invasion and subsequent nation building put us in a precarious position. That’s this week’s “Write On Wednesday.”

IRAQ INVASION THE BLUNDER OF 21ST CENTURY

Columns of black smoke rising Tuesday above the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad were exclamation points on the folly of the U.S. misadventure in Iraq and further proof that the 2003 invasion was the overwhelming U.S. foreign policy blunder of the 21st century.
The fires were set by Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen who had stormed the compound in response to earlier U.S. airstrikes against Kataib Hezbollah militia targets, strikes that were in response to an earlier militia rocket attack that killed an American contractor. And on it goes.
Despite the militia group’s close ties to Iran, it and the U.S. military worked together to defeat the Islamic State, the Sunni Shiite terrorist enterprise that itself grew from the power vacuum created by the U.S. destruction of the Sunni-dominated Iraqi Army.
Following the Gulf War in 1991, President George H.W. Bush declined to take the fight to Baghdad. He reasoned that the displacement of Sunni Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein would clear the way for Shiite-dominated Iran to vastly increase its influence over the entire region.
Just over a decade later, however, President George W. Bush defied his father’s wisdom and went all -in with neocon advisers Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pearl and others. He authorized the invasion of Iraq based on multiple false premises, including that it somehow had a role in the 2001 terrorists attacks on the United States that were far more associated with Saudi Arabia, and that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction that threatened the region and U.S. interests.
It’s now clear that false premises and outright lies were the true weapons of mass destruction. They always are a threat, even though Americans usually have the power to destroy them at the ballot box.