Iraq and Afghanistan have nothing to do with each other. This was a fact sane people were forced to repeat to the point of exhaustion during the Bush regime, when the Orwellian mouthpieces of the Republican propaganda machine were referring to the aggressive and illegal invasion of a country with zero connection to al Qaeda as "a front in the War on Terror." The memory of that criminal insanity - probably because of how extreme it had been - has been gradually diluted to the point of trivialization in the minds of most, and retconned into a vague ideologized mythology by some left-wing activists that perversely mirrors the late regime's Big Lie. We are regularly told, here and on other blogs, that "Iraq = Afghanistan = Vietnam = everywhere Americans are or have ever been except WW2," and it isn't merely fallacious - it is a complete falsification of history and trivialization of the present. And what infuriates me is that it seems to be completely a product of truth-agnostic, intellectually devoid rhetorical convenience - the exact same motive that invented the "War on Terror" and "Axis of Evil" in the first place.
I will admit this shouldn't logically gall me as much as it does: There are far more significant obstacles to foreign policy progress than reality-free rhetoric on blogs, and the TV, radio, and print news that feed most people their information continue to stand by right-wing claims that were discredited years ago. But it's also been years since I saw any value in debunking the claims of media that long ago lost any credibility with me: I would have to actually watch and rely on the claims of Fox News or CNN to care whether it's 1/2 or merely 1/3 of their coverage that amounts to lies. I would have to assume their agendas are not fundamentally corrupt already to care which specific items are deliberately false, which are misleading, and which are merely stupid. And with some individual bloggers, I can be just as dismissive: They're little more than cable news pundits who aren't interesting enough to be given a show.
But somehow it's different with people whose values seem to mock my own by imitating their shape while perverting their substance, using humanistic ideals and the rhetoric of empathy as mere aesthetic tools while the things they actually say are false, irrational, unfair, and corrupt. This has been merely a subtext or undercurrent of discussion on the left, but I can't possibly overstate the offensiveness of equating Iraq with Afghanistan or Vietnam: Treating the single starkest, most baldly and deliberately criminal, murderous act of savagery and Big Lie propaganda in US history as just another example of an arrogant, flawed, or poorly implemented foreign policy. While a life is a life, there is still such a thing as context and perspective, and indeed all understanding of history depends on it: It would be equally ludicrous, offensive, and moronic to equate ethnic cleansing in Kosovo to the Holocaust, or Hugo Chavez to Joseph Stalin.
The invasion of Iraq was irredeemably evil from its earliest conception - a pure conspiracy openly articulated in the language not merely of hegemony, but of personal dominion by George W. Bush as the sole arbiter of which foreign governments would be permitted to exist. Even in the face of Bush's "freedom Tourette's," using the word "freedom" practically as a substitute for "the," the dominion he claimed was not limited to overthrowing dictators: He asserted as a "natural right" of power total authority to determine the composition of all governments, everywhere, irrespective of the public will, and all countries that remained sovereign would be dealt with entirely as a matter of his personal convenience.
In other words, those governments who were democratic and obeyed Bush would be praised for their "freedom." Those who were dictators and obeyed Bush would be propped up and their tyranny reinforced. Those who were democracies and opposed Bush would be publicly slandered, their economic interests attacked, and (his minions hinted darkly) perhaps worse if they were too diligent in their opposition. Dictators who opposed Bush and were strong enough to defend themselves would be contained, but would become convenient objects of propaganda. And those who opposed Bush without having the strength to remain in power would simply be thrown aside and replaced by more amenable leaders, whatever the cost to the civilian population.
So I say this with no trace of exaggeration or melodrama: The invasion of Iraq was the most bald-faced, singular abrogation of world peace since the 1939 German invasion of Poland. There was no gradual escalation from a limited campaign as in Vietnam; no pretext of defending an indigenous allied government, as in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; no invitation by a territorially-relevant internal power disputing for control; no international authorization; no defensive rationale. It was not an "intervention," but pure conquest. No "nation-building" was intended to occur, and little did occur: The plan was simply to smash the country, steal US military and rebuilding funds, and put in power some group of thugs who would exert just enough control over the population (through torture and massacres, when convenient) to stop them from slaughtering the new foreign owners of privatized Iraq.
To call that "US imperialism" would be mind-numbingly obtuse to the point of moronic. Words cannot properly convey how much of a departure from US foreign policy the invasion of Iraq was - it was an aberration beyond measure, so extreme that even today most of its opponents still can't seem to digest the size of it. US imperialism takes the form of its predecessor, British imperialism: First are the economic interests - and by that I mean Americans already have business there, not that some lunatic neo-fascist theoretician thinks they might have business there in the future.
Those interests then form a relationship of some kind with the sitting government, and gradually they will come to a point where they want more than the public sector is willing to give them - either because there is some level of democracy, or because the rulers are themselves too greedy. At that point there may be a rigged election or a coup, preferably bloodless to keep things nice and quiet. And the reality of it is that at this point the US government usually isn't involved beyond providing information and intelligence contacts to the plotters: Most of it consists of the private interests using their money to buy votes, corrupt ambitious subordinate leaders who want to be in control, and perhaps funding illicit weapons procurements by paramilitaries. Only if this fails do US institutions begin to take more of an interest, clandestinely funneling taxpayer money to insurgent movements or to shore up juntas.
Most of the time, that's as far as it goes. Sometimes, however, leaders disliked by US business are particularly strong, their replacements particularly weak, or the domestic population is divided enough that internal conflict drags on and compromises the economic reasons it began in the first place. Then the US government may go public with its support for one faction over another, openly asking Congress to allow funding, training, arms shipments, and supplies. If the problem persists, and the economic reasons compelling - possibly including the profits to be had by the arms industry - that may escalate to limited US troop involvement, which may in turn escalate to broader involvement. At any point in the process, the US government may draw a hard line on further escalation, or reverse course, and contrary to the ideological beliefs of some on the left, that is usually what happens: It is the pragmatic reality of hegemony, rather than the mythology surrounding it.
But that is not what happened in Iraq. There were no US business interests. There was no significant, active internal opposition outside of the Kurdish areas - and even that only survived due to the No Fly Zone. There was no precipitating attack by Iraq on anyone - not its neighbors, not US allies, and not the US itself. Nor was there any credible, specific threat to neighboring countries, let alone to the United States. There was no legal basis, no moral basis, nor even an economic basis if one is judging in the interests of the entire US economy: There was, in other words, no imperial logic behind it if the empire in question was the United States. It only made sense for the personal interests of the Bush's regime's central figures, the businesses directly attached to them (e.g., Halliburton), and their political convenience as a distraction from scandals that occurred on an almost daily basis.
Contrarily, the regime never wanted to be involved in Afghanistan - it was an environment that required intelligence and subtlety in addition to force, and those first two were not qualities they had or appreciated. They did not care about 9/11 or about getting al Qaeda: After the initial shock, they personally were quite safe from further threat, so moving their most valuable person - Dick Cheney - to an undisclosed location was the extent of their real concern over the matter. Beyond that, 9/11 meant only one thing to them: They could command rubber-stamp obedience from Congress, and credulous silence from the public. And that, in turn, meant that invading Iraq had become a practical option for them.
Rather than an escalation of measures over a period of years, they built an escalation of Goebbels-level Big Lies over a period of months until an emasculated regime with no connection to terrorism and no WMD program was in essence portrayed as being responsible for 9/11, having nuclear missiles armed and ready to launch at the US, and having millions of agents and sleeper cells throughout the US poised to destroy our civilization at a moment's notice. The result, objectively speaking, was psychotic: In literal fact somewhat more deranged than the German invasion of Poland, since that at least was aimed at preempting the Soviet Union - an aim every bit as cynically logical as it was murderous. But behind the propaganda that led up to the invasion of Iraq, there was no geopolitical reality. The Bush regime desired Iraq for reasons peculiar to individual leaders and their business associates, and they took it, murdering and impoverishing large numbers of people in the process.
Our involvement in Afghanistan, on the other hand, began as the picture of moral justice and international law and order: We were attacked, suffering great losses, and received the full support of global governments in restoring the UN-recognized Northern Alliance to power in Kabul in order to deny al Qaeda and its taliban allies a safe haven. As always, business interests saw opportunities in the reemergence of a secular authority in an underdeveloped region, but any claim that they were a central motivation for entering Afghanistan is dimwitted, paranoid fantasy with no basis in reason. Business arrangements, to whatever extent they occurred, were purely opportunistic on the part of both the companies involved and the Bush regime (who, as I noted, was never interested in the region in the first place). War crimes were committed and Afghans alienated mostly by actions specific to the regime rather than anything inherent in the UN-approved NATO operations.
There can be legitimate disagreements about policy in Afghanistan: However bizarre and illogical I find it, you may sincerely believe that it will provide Afghans with "self-determination" to let Pakistani mullahs and ISI agents dictate their future at the point of a Kalashnikov; you may believe it serves US national security to just pretend Afghanistan was not a haven for al Qaeda under the taliban, or would magically fail to be so again if the taliban were permitted to retake the country by force; you may believe, without evidence or logic, that a return to taliban/Qaeda rule in Afghanistan would not produce resurgent international terrorism funded and organized from a secure base of operations as it did before; in other words, you may believe that the same conditions would not yield the same results.
These positions are silly, as far as I'm concerned, but they are at least valid domains of opinion - to hold them is to reach a conclusion, however dubious, about something that is debatable. But when I hear someone equate, even by implication, the invasion of Iraq and US involvement in Afghanistan, they are discarding all of history in service to rhetoric, and equating an act of unmitigated evil and wanton criminality with self-defense and morally rational foreign policy. They are accepting the same incoherent, sub-sentient ideological jumble of nonsense that characterized the Bushian worldview and then simply reversing it: All military actions by the US are part of the same huge, undifferentiated, black-and-white struggle, only in this version of the psychosis we're the bad guy and everything we do is wrong.
Even everything we don't do is wrong according to this mythological approach to foreign policy, because we are held responsible for everyone who starves because we do not feed them; and everyone who is harmed by the unforeseen consequences when we do feed them. We are to blame when we defend ourselves, because we are a nation of human beings who cannot foresee all the consequences of what we do using our best judgment. We are to blame when we defend others, because we are meddlesome imperialists who expect some kind of rational benefit, and because opportunistic people among us will predictably look for an angle. We are to blame when we don't defend others when they ask for our help, because we are aloof, cavalier, perhaps even racist aristocrats sitting on our thrones indifferent to the suffering of the world.
Basically we are just absolutely, inherently wrong, and everything we do or do not do is thereby judged - and everyone we fight, be they victims or the most heinous villains ever to walk the Earth, is thereby ennobled by default. There's only one problem: A piece of shit turned inside out is still a piece of shit, and just reversing the subject-object relationship in right-wing reasoning is not morality, and definitely not sanity.
In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party came to reject Darwinian evolution because it seemed to place too high an emphasis on genetics - the be-all, end-all of Nazism. So instead they adopted Lysenkoism as the basis of their biological "science" - a discredited theory based on the demonstrably false premise that genetic traits may be acquired through individual experience: To reduce it to absurdity, the idea that you can teach a giraffe to be an elephant, because if you make a giraffe behave like an elephant, its genes will acquire elephant-like characteristics and pass them on to its offspring. This was much more ideologically acceptable to the Communist Party than genetic determinism, because it meant that people could be remade in whatever image they deemed politically desirable, and any human behavior or desire they found inconvenient could be stamped out through indoctrination.
As with most things, biological reality bears no resemblance to either moronic, ideological perversion of the subject: Human beings are physically deterministic, but the elements that make up that physical nature are not limited to a list of features like some factory-made product - we are connected to our environment in combinatoric ways that approach infinite complexity. Progress can always be made in our understanding and management of that relationship, but it will never, ever be "solved" - our nature can never be complete or completely understood. Likewise, we shape and are in turn shaped by our environment, but we are not magical creatures who can make bricks without straw, nor are we blank slates devoid of intrinsic nature who can simply be scribbled upon with whatever vision a government or religion tries to terrorize us into reflecting.
So you see, turning a lie inside out does not make a truth; and walking in the opposite direction from the one given to you by a deranged moron will still probably not be where you're trying to go. In imposing Lysenkoism on Soviet scientists, the Communists were merely telling an opposite lie in order to promote what was, at its root, the same lie - that truth is related to the claims of power. People who can conceive of nothing more complex than truth being the opposite of the claims of power is still a slave to that power, and essentially its servant for perpetuating the shape of its worldview - even if the colors are inverted. They display either an ignorance or a recklessness beyond toleration, and suggest that it is not authoritarian power in itself they resent, but merely their personal exclusion from sharing in it.
The Iraq War does not exist in the same political cosmos as any American foreign policy then or since: It was part of an 8-year political interregnum that broke the 225-year continuity of US government and threatened the foundations of international law that had been laid down in the aftermath of WW2. Whether out of sheer obtuseness, intellectual laziness, or to aggrandize petty frustrations into titanic historical terms, there are people in our domain of politics who simply have "unpopular war Tourette's," and spew the names of historical events with only superficial connections to each other (if even that) as if they were interchangeable. And that is infuriating, because I watched the events unfold that led into both Iraq and Afghanistan, and I can tell you from every scrap of knowledge I've ever learned about history that no American President would have invaded Iraq or failed to invade Afghanistan. That is why the occupation of Iraq has ended, why there is now a firm deadline for total withdrawal from that country, and why the same approach has not been taken in Afghanistan.
Denying this history is not only an insult to the truth, but to everyone who saw it unfold with their own eyes. It is an insult to me. I have no patience for nihilism and doublethink dressed up in mockery of humanitarian moralism, and I don't have the disposition to hand-hold amnesiacs on a tour of events they personally witnessed but can't bother to recall in the heat of self-righteousness. I am fully aware of the insignificance of such attitudes in the grand scheme of human struggle, but that does not change my disgust at a level of arrogance, willful ignorance, and mendacity that rivals only the Right, and is more contemptible for arising among people who have every opportunity to know better.