Robert Wright has an excellent newsletter today about lessons unearned. In a nutshell:
Unlearned Lesson #1: The presence of a foreign army can strengthen the enemy by expanding its popular support.
Unlearned Lesson #2: Reports about a military intervention that travel through military channels are subject to systematic corruption.
Unlearned Lesson #3: Countries are really complicated, full of cross-cutting allegiances and internal tensions that you need to understand if you’re going to invade and occupy them.
All true. Some people have known this for a while. I just randomly pulled up a couple from this blog over the years:
Memories of an earlier intervention from 2015:
Yes, we can make things worse. And we often do.
by digby
When the Libya crisis hit there were some very energetic debates on the left about whether or not it made sense to intervene in such a volatile and messy situation even if it was intensely frustrating to watch what was happening. The impulse to humanitarian intervention is a thoroughly understandable — any decent human being wants to do something if at all possible to stop violence and death if they can. But the US isn’t a superhero, just a superpower and there’s a huge difference. A superpower is often a bull in a china shop that is so clumsy and muscle bound that it makes things worse.
This article in Foreign Affairs takes a look at the failure of Libya. It’s well worth reading as the war drums pound in the background:
In the immediate wake of the military victory, U.S. officials were triumphant. Writing in these pages in 2012, Ivo Daalder, then the U.S. permanent representative to NATO, and James Stavridis, then supreme allied commander of Europe, declared, “NATO’s operation in Libya has rightly been hailed as a model intervention.” In the Rose Garden after Qaddafi’s death, Obama himself crowed, “Without putting a single U.S. service member on the ground, we achieved our objectives.” Indeed, the United States seemed to have scored a hat trick: nurturing the Arab Spring, averting a Rwanda-like genocide, and eliminating Libya as a potential source of terrorism.
That verdict, however, turns out to have been premature. In retrospect, Obama’s intervention in Libya was an abject failure, judged even by its own standards. Libya has not only failed to evolve into a democracy; it has devolved into a failed state. Violent deaths and other human rights abuses have increased severalfold. Rather than helping the United States combat terrorism, as Qaddafi did during his last decade in power, Libya now serves as a safe haven for militias affiliated with both al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The Libya intervention has harmed other U.S. interests as well: undermining nuclear nonproliferation, chilling Russian cooperation at the UN, and fueling Syria’s civil war.
Despite what defenders of the mission claim, there was a better policy available—not intervening at all, because peaceful Libyan civilians were not actually being targeted. Had the United States and its allies followed that course, they could have spared Libya from the resulting chaos and given it a chance of progress under Qaddafi’s chosen successor: his relatively liberal, Western-educated son Saif al-Islam. Instead, Libya today is riddled with vicious militias and anti-American terrorists—and thus serves as a cautionary tale of how humanitarian intervention can backfire for both the intervener and those it is intended to help.
[…]
I don’t doubt that people had good intentions in Libya. But the idea that the US has the capability of parachuting into a country, deposing a leader and then all the flowers will bloom just isn’t realistic. I know people want to help. But the sooner we get off the idea that the best way to help is by bombing and deposing, the better off we’ll be.
Libya was the one time where Obama let the military interventionists have their way. His instincts have proved to be better since then. Unfortunately, the war drums are getting louder and louder and I’ll be very surprised if he’s able to resist escalating. And I have not heard even one person offer a scenario in which that escalation will do anything to fix the situation. If experience is any guide, it’s likely to make things worse.
Not that that matters. Politics are now fully engaged, the hawks are circling, and when that happens, war happens.
“Our track record is dismal” from 2013:
by digby
Via Kevin Drum I find that John McCain went and got himself photographed with a bunch of Syrian rebels who had apparently kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shiite pilgrims. Considering McCain’s belief that he can “put people together in a room and tell them to cut the shit,” this might be funny except for the fact that it illustrates so perfectly why we must fight the American hubris that says we have the ability to sort out this conflict from afar.
Kevin quotes Joe Klein, who is right in this instance:
I don’t blame McCain for this. It’s hard to advance a trip into rebel territory….The point is: We just don’t know these places well enough to go over and draw grand conclusions about policy. In a way, McCain’s trip is a perfect metaphor for the problem of involving ourselves with the Syrian rebels. We may be siding with the greater evil. We may be throwing fuel on a fire that could consume the region. Our track record when it comes to such things is dismal.
That’s right. And this shows a rather amazing evolution by the Joe Kleins of the world. He used to be a lot more sure of America’s ability to get on the “right side” of everything. Very sure:
Klein: And, by the way, we’re very much well liked among the young, educated Iranians. But this is not Iraq we’re dealing with here. This is an ancient country, a very strong country, and a very proud country. And so, yeah, by all means, we should talk to them, but, on the other hand, we should not take any option, including the use of nuclea-….tactical nuclear weapons off the table.
Stephanopoulos: Keep that on the table?
Klein: It’s absolutely stupid not to.
Stephanopoulos: That’s insane.
Klein: Well I don’t think we should ever use tac-…I think that…
Stephanopoulos: Well, then why should they be on the table?
Klein: Why?
Stephanopoulos: Why do we want that specter of crossing that line?
Klein: Because we don’t know what the options on the other side…what their options are on the table.
That post contains the full Joe Klein treatment, circa 2006. That was a very creepy time. (It should be noted that he did later withdraw that statement and sort of apologized.)
Our (mis)adventures in the middle east, including the ongoing problems in Iraq and Libya, are proof that we are not particularly good at this sort of thing. It’s horrible to watch people suffering and do nothing, but unless one is very sure that intervention will make things better it’s best to be humble and accept that a country as powerful as we are is more often than not a bull in a China shop. It’s good to see that some of the “moderates” who were once inclined to see America as always being a benevolent and positive force for good finally realize that good intentions aren’t enough.
Judging from the past few days a whole lot of them have unlearned that lesson.