How we lost the Iraq war

Lost? Ridiculous, most would say. We won--right? Besides, Iraq is over. Now it's all about Afghanistan. Why dig up ancient history?

Because those who created huge mistakes always demand that we not look at them--that we "move on." (But you know what they say about those who won't learn the lessons of history.)

Because we're still there, in large numbers, with both Iraqis and Americans dying every week.

And because many Iraqis are just waiting for us to leave so they can start a huge civil war there that will most likely undo all the gains we've made there. We may be able to head this off, but it would require years more of a major military and financial commitment to this country.

The mistakes:
1. Going to war under false pretenses (as we also did with the Spanish-American war). There were real reasons we could have used, but we didn't.

2. Failing to prepare for occupation, based on such wishful thinking (out in a few months!) that would qualify an individual with such delusions for commitment in a psychiatric ward.

3. Repeating WWI's mistake of enabling those who were losing before we intervened to take revenge on those who were winning. In Europe, doing so guaranteed WWII. In Iraq, doing so guaranteed the insurgency--and probably a future civil war--by doing everything in our power to convince the Sunnis--inside and outside Iraq--that Sunnis were going to be ground under the Shiite boot, just as Shiites had been ground under the Sunni boot.

This Shiite favoritism has also made it harder to Iraq to build relations with other Arab countries--all Sunni-dominated, except for Lebanon--and thus pushed Iraq into the eager arms of Iran.

4. Invading Iraq removed Iran's biggest enemy--and the biggest check on Iranian power--from the board. If America's Republican Party leadership had been on the Iranian payroll, they couldn't have done more for Iran's dictators.

5. Invading Iraq let the perpetrators of 9/11 go free by diverting most of our military resources to Iraq. This has convinced many who oppose us that we're big, strong--and stupid. So if they can wave the cape at us they can distract us long enough to achieve their goals.

6. Invading Iraq on the cheap guaranteed that many more Americans would die eventually and set up Iraq to be dominated by tribalism instead of nationalism.

One unintended consquence is that George Bush inadvertently became Christianity's biggest enemy in the last 100 years, because one of the first things Sunni and Shiite militias did in the anarchy of our quasi-occupation was to ethnically cleanse Iraq of it Christian community--nearly a million people, many of whose ancestors had lived in Iraq for over 1,000 years. Now most of the men have been murdered and the women and children are running out of money in Syria and Jordan, with many of the girls turning to prostitution in desperation (neither Syria nor Jordan allow Iraqi expats to work in these countries).

7. Choosing American administrators for the occupation based solely on ideological purity meant that hardly anyone we sent there knew anything whatsoever about Iraq, the Middle East, or the Arabic language.

The resulting incompetence of our occupation administration resulted in gross strategic blunders (such as cashiering the Iraqi Army en masse) and in billions of American dollars being diverted into the pockets of corrupt Iraqis and American contractors.

My conclusion from all of this isn't that Republicans are bad, Democrats good. It's that ideologues--right and left--always screw things up, because they derive their grasp of reality from their ideas, instead of deriving their ideas from reality.

Thus Chairman Mao's "Great Leap Forward" was even more disastrous than anything the Republicans have done (well, financial deregulation was a good stab at the #1 slot but it didn't kill as many people). Likewise Pol Pot's extermination of Cambodia's middle class. And it could be argued that the Democrats' efforts at reparations for slavery and other forms of discrimination have often backfired, again from not paying attention to real-world consequences.

I'm not against having strong principles. I'm just against the way ideologues continually deny or discount anything that contradicts any of those principles.

Those of us with scientific training realize that the human mind is really something--but it's not perfect. We need a measure of humility, such that when reality seems to go against what we believe is true, we're willing to re-examine such beliefs.

And the problem with ideologues is that when reality challenges their beliefs they nearly always reject reality--in effect, holding their hands over their ears, squinching their eyes shut and shouting "La la la la la la I can't hear you."

The problem with we who are not ideologues is that they're so utterly certain, and so contemptuous of pragmatists, that it can be daunting in a debate.

And that's what I'm here for--to arm pragmatists for those debates, at home, at work, and in public forums.