Iraq and Afghanistan. Abject failiure for the USA

"In reality, America's failure to get its way in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, despite deploying large armies and spending trillions of dollars, has been extraordinarily damaging to its status as sole superpower. Whatever Washington thought it wanted when it invaded Iraq in 2003, it was not the establishment of Shia religious parties with links to Iran in power in Baghdad. Similarly, in Afghanistan, a surge in US troop numbers and the expenditure of $100bn a year has not led to the defeat of 25,000 mostly untrained Taliban fighters.

Great powers depend on a reputation for invincibility and are wise not to put this too often to the test. The British Empire never quite recovered in the eyes of the world from the gargantuan effort it had to make to defeat a few tens of thousand Boer farmers.

What makes the US inability to win in Iraq and Afghanistan so damaging is that US policy-making has been progressively militarised. Congress will vote the Pentagon vast sums, while it stints the State Department a few billion dollars. "The Department of Defense is the behemoth among federal agencies," noted the 9/11 Commission Report. "With an annual budget larger than the gross domestic product of Russia, it is an empire."

But it is an empire that has failed to deliver in recent years, though without paying a political price. A senior US diplomat asked me plaintively several years ago: "Whatever happened to popular scepticism about what generals say that we had after Vietnam? People seem to assume they are telling the truth ... they are usually not."
Patrick Cockburn writing in "Wars without victory equal an America without influence" in The Independent.

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Mahler's Prodigal Son

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