"Lessons in Disaster"

As the drums continue to beat on Barack Obama's seemingly unstoppable march to war with Syria, the comparisons to the run-up to Iraq have unsurprisingly been frequently noted. But while it's easy to congratulate ourselves on remembering that we did end jp fighting an incredibly costly war over complete lies only a decade ago, it isn't enough to insist that we should be "100% sure" of the evidence, as though this is the only prerequisite to bombing Syria.

The importance of studying history is that it allows one to learn from the mistakes of the past, to avoid repeating them in the future. Listening to Obama and Secretary Kerry speak, you wouldn't think that the former is the first American president to have their foreign policy truly shaped by a poat-Vietnam environment, and that the other actually fought in the war and saw first hand the failures of policy development then. What one sees instead is a blatant lack of analytical rigor applied to the argument for attacking Syria. In the last days of his life, McGeorge Bundy, national security advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and one of the chief architects of the Vietnam escalation, admitted that the lack of such analysis was one of the chief reasons the US failed so spectacularly in that arena. (For a full account of the decision making process that led to American involvement in Vietnam, I highly recommend Gordon Goldstein's Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, whose title I borrowed for this post.)

So, what is holding back Messrs. Obama, Kerry, and Secretary of Defense Hagel this time? Is it hubris? Their full-throated support and confidence in the effectiveness of military action sounds hollow. Have they considered all options of what could occur in Syria? About what impact a strike would have? About what the end goal will be, and what the options are, if the strikes have no effect om Assad. Do they fully understand the resilience of their enemy? Are they pretending to completely understand the situation and all of the players on the ground? It doesn't sound like they do, when they can only brag that other Middle Eastern or Arab nations like Saudi Arabia and Turkey support military strikes, both of whom do so for purely geopolitical reasons (and because they have actual troops who would benefit from such a strike), and not for any humanitarian reasons at all. It sounds like the politicians rounding up the cattle are suffering from an extreme lack of ability to connect current events to the mistakes of the past. 

It is embarassing to see how much reliance, air time, and deferment has been granted to the architects of the Iraq invasion when discussing Syria. When people like Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Bremer are brought on TV shows talk about why we should invade another country, you have no choice but to stare in wonder at how fully the wool is being pulled over our eyes, and if indeed we ever pulled it off.