What exactly were we spending all this money on in Iraq?
by David Atkins
Let’s do a thought exercise for a minute.
Let’s take morality right out of the picture up front. Let’s pretend for a moment that imperialism is hunky-dory, that the invasion of Iraq was legitimate, and that we’re all neoconservatives.
I’d still want to know just what in the heck we did with all the money in Iraq:
The 300 U.S. advisers authorized to assist the Iraqi security forces will find an army in crisis mode, so lacking in equipment and shaken by desertions that it may not be able to win back significant chunks of territory from al-Qaeda renegades for months or even years, analysts and officials say.
After tens of thousands of desertions, the Iraqi military is reeling from what one U.S. official described as “psychological collapse” in the face of the offensive from militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The desperation has reached such a level that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is relying on volunteers, who are in some cases receiving as little as a week’s military training, to protect his ever-shrinking orbit of control.
“Over time, what’s occurred is that the Iraqi army has no ability to defend itself,” said Rick Brennan, a Rand Corp. analyst and former adviser to U.S. forces in Iraq. “If we’re unable to find ways to make a meaningful difference to the Iraqi army as they fight this, I think what we’re looking at is the beginning of the disintegration of the state of Iraq.”
We’ve spent the last many, many years in Iraq supposedly training and equipping their military to be able to function. That’s theoretically in the best interests of the neoconservative program: create a friendly, self-sustaining client state friendly to corporate oil extraction and able to hold off its neighbors while constantly in need of American munitions. That’s the neoconservative gameplan, after all, for everyone who isn’t just an outright war profiteering leech.
So what the heck has been happening over there? Where did all the money go? If we’re going to do immoral things, can’t we at the very least be competent in doing them? Or are immorality and incompetence both prerequisites for neoconservatism?
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