On November 1, New York Times reporter Alissa Rubin has a look back at her experience as a war correspondent in Iraq. It’s mostly interesting, though when she gets to the part where she draws the big lessons, things turn for the worse:
In my five years in Iraq, all that I wanted to believe in was gunned down. Sunnis and Shiites each committed horrific crimes, and the Kurds, whose modern-looking cities and Western ways seemed at first so familiar, turned out to be capable of their own brutality. The Americans, too, did their share of violence, and among the worst they did was wishful thinking, the misreading of the winds and allowing what Yeats called “the blood-dimmed tide” to swell. Could they have stopped it? Probably not. Could it have been stemmed so that it did less damage, saved some of the fathers and brothers, mothers and sons? Yes, almost certainly, yes.
“Americans, too,” committed violence in Iraq? Well, yes. And “among the worst they did was wishful thinking”? Well, that’s one way to put it.
among the worst they did was wishful thinking
It’s just a replay in slightly different words of the old “misguided good intentions” blather.
Every war was fought on good intentions and always in self-defence. If one believes official pieties then no war in human history has been fought in aggression.
The Iraq invasion was started in falsehood and became humanitarian disaster for Iraquian civilians and american force’s family.Now US Gouverment has the moral resposability to help Iraquian people to have a democratic & stable state , not only for Iraq’s sake, but also for US’s sake, same strategie is true for Afganistan .
I remember the day before “shock and awe”, watching live pictures of Iraqi children playing in a park in Baghdad. Everything was so normal, children laughing, mothers watching. I have never felt more helpless in my life.
Sure, it’s American good wishes that have killed 1.3 million civilians in Iraq.
Doesn’t it occur to Alissa Rubin that there were no intentions apart from control of the region and force projection? Implying that the US had good intentions that went bad is about as realistic as saying Hitler’s policies ‘went bad’. The US perpetrated the bloodshed, tried to blame the Iraqis who then fell for the US ‘divide and rule’ methodology. The US could have stopped the bloodshed by withdrawing.