Time to separate "breaking it" from "buying it"?
Next time we elect to invade some rogue, noncompliant country, someone really needs to rethink the whole "you break it, you buy it" argument. A looser connection between "breaking it" and "buying it" probably makes sense. We can have a compelling interest in neutralizing some threat, and only a much more attenuated interest in "buying" the resulting non-threatening country or situation. For example, "breaking" Nazi Germany and Japan was a vital national interest; "buying" the defeated countries was not.
Iraq is a decent example. I'm sure if it had been possible to poll the Iraqi people, pre-invasion, on whether they would like someone to free them from the despotism of Saddam Hussein, at least 75% would have said yes. We did what many of them would have asked if they could have. Yet the aftermath of our invasion reveals that the country was broken in ways we can't and shouldn't be responsible for.In Iraq, more than three years on, the buying-themed maxim that most suggests itself is "don't buy someone else's problem." It's become axiomatic in the last few years that we couldn't reasonably have expected the Iraqi people to do X, Y or Z. Some of our hopes were surely excessive, but I don't think it was unreasonable to expect that the Iraqis would rise to the challenges and opportunities of their new situation in ways we largely have not seen. Many in the U.S. now seem to believe that all the Iraqi-perpetrated atrocities we see almost daily are the inevitable result of our military action. But that's a little like saying your kid was bound to start torturing cats. (Yes I realize it's only a small segment of Iraqis doing this stuff, etc., etc.) You certainly didn't see such behavior in occupied Germany or Japan. (Yes I know Iraq is not ethnically or religiously homogeneous, there are big differences about who was the rightful heir to Mohammed 1,300 years ago, etc., etc.)
I'm not wanting to minimize all of our missteps and miscalculations, but let's save a little blame for the people of Iraq and the many adult moral actors there who have grossly underperformed reasonable expectations. And we should mourn the many brave Iraqis who stuck their necks out to help build a functioning country and were murdered for it by other Iraqis.
posted at 12:20 AM
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