The Iraq debate that has erupted three, seven, eight, twelve years too late may end up disproving the old adage, “Better late than never.” Why? Too many glaring omissions from the conversation.
Let’s start with Numero Uno: Islam.
Once again, Islam is not part of the discussion.
This omission, as readers of the website know, is nothing new in discourse about American wars in the Islamic world. Many’s the time over the past dozen years when I attended Washington confabs where the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan were discussed at length by experts, military officers and elected officials, but Islam was not even mentioned — and certainly not as as a cultural-legal-political-religious roadblock against the US policy of “nation-building” through “hearts and minds” “counterinsurgency.” This is a failed policy, as we have seen.
Or have we? I think not.
So long as the discussion of Islam — its collectivist laws of supremacism and inequality, just for instance — is not part of the “what went wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan?” conversation, the answers will continue to elude us.