There is no reason to think that America and Iraq must lose the battle for a free and sovereign Iraqi nation.
What will happen if we do?
I have been reading about the fall of nations to see what would happen and the answer is far worse than anything now going on in Iraq.
The nightmare that would ensue makes a “quagmire” for the next two years look better.
The end of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War both saw three nearly certain outcomes in modern times. Let’s call them the Three Laws of Defeat for a Western Power.
First Law: The failure of the West will be worse for the people we fail than for the West.
There will be an outbreak of ethnic fighting to dwarf what we see now in Iraq. Some ethnic group, probably those who supported the old regime, will be killed. Refugees will flood the world.
What was worse than the Vietnam War? The “peace” that followed . . . which killed thousands of the brave Vietnamese people.
Most of the academic and secular left will still not loudly condemn Soviet communism which they supported past any reason. Most are still proud of their resistance to the Vietnamese War and helping bring on the slaughter of many in South East Asia by policies they were advocating and people they supported during the War. How many said kind words about monsters such as Mao and have never taken those kind words back?
Expect the same if the left forces the US out of Iraq . . . suddenly hundreds of thousands of dead people of Iraq will stop mattering, since they will be killed after the US leaves, but US misdeeds in Iraq (however small) will continue to be the subject of dissertations for decades.
Second Law: failure will eventually lead to a bigger confrontation.
Don’t stop Hitler early, fight World War II.
Don’t stop Lenin, face the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
Don’t stop Mao, fight the Korean War.
Third Law: A horrible Empire will eventually fill any gaps left by Western retreat.
Sometimes an inept and flawed regime is replaced by a wicked one as when Tsarist Russia was replaced by the Terror of the Communists.
Sometimes a mixed situation with some hope goes utterly wrong.
Hapsburg Austro-Hungary was arguably better for its people than much of anything that followed for the next hundred years.
Sometimes one monster is replaced by another.
In the case of Eastern Europe the mass killer Hitler was replaced by Stalin who got the concentration camps back in business as part of his gulag.
It is a good thing that the US prevented such problems in South Korea, Western Germany, post-World War II Greece . . . and other places. Ask those folk . . . or better look at the horrors of East Germany, North Korea (still available for view) . . . or the un-free state of Vietnam.
