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Among the many reasons given for the recent surge in gas prices is China's soaring demand for petroleum. Because the Chinese are running around the world buying up every available barrel of oil, the argument goes, we Americans have to pay that much more to outbid them for the leftover pools of crude.
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Karl Von Clausewitz, the renowned military theorist, famously said that war is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means. Meaning: war is there to serve policy and is useless when it does not. What policies did the wars in the last hundred years serve?
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I'm no economist, and definitely not a Nobel Prize winning one, but by my calculations Joseph Stiglitz has under-estimated the cost of the Iraq war by a factor of 100 in his recently released 'The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict'.
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Five years ago the United States attacked and occupied Iraq. It has lost militarily, politically and morally. The end of the war may be in sight. But the consequences will endure, as will the deep-seated impulse among America’s leaders for global intervention without constraint. The war has exposed the limits of American military power. The promise of a high-tech war of “shock and awe” quickly crumbled and has been all but forgotten.
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NATO stands at a crossroads: the 26-member alliance is simultaneously engaged in the most difficult military mission it has ever undertaken – its first ever ground war – while also undergoing pressure to transform itself in an uncertain world. In particular, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan is being widely held up as the ultimate test of the Alliance in its post-Cold War incarnation. Success in Afghanistan, it is claimed, will also secure the future of the alliance, while failure could lead to a muted 60th anniversary next year and even an end to NATO itself.
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Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a "hell-disaster". But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry – but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.
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Responsibility for this spectacular tragedy must lie with those who ignored the facts five years ago.
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