Any failures in Iraq and Afghanistan are due to political incompetence, not flawed strategy

[bemildred]

For your amusement, a stirring defence of war, war is good policy, if only the politicians were not hacks.

The conclusions reached in "Wars in Peace", a publication by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), which claims to offer an audit of Britain's military campaigns since the end of the Cold War, makes for depressing reading, particularly its damning conclusion that the estimated £29 billion spent on the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in "strategic failure" and have had the effect of increasing Islamist-inspired terrorism.

I have not yet had the opportunity to read the publication itself in full, but if the press reports of its contents are accurate then I profoundly disagree with the conclusions that Prof Michael Clarke and his team have reached.

For a start, I do not think you can judge yet whether either of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have been strategic failures. Anyone with any knowledge of Iraq during the Saddam era, and that includes the overwhelming majority of Iraqis, understands that modern-day Iraq – which has once again conducted another successful democratic election – is a far better place today, with far better prospects, than it could have ever hoped to be under Saddam's tyrannical rule.

Iraq has its problems, it is true, which have been exacerbated to an extent by President Barack Obama's decision to abandon the country to its fate, rather than to ensure that all the sacrifices made during the post-Saddam era by the US-led coalition were not in vain. But having an Iraqi state that it not forever seeking to destabilise the region by invading its neighbours – as it was under Saddam re Iran, Kuwait etc – seems to me more like a strategic success than a failure.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/concoughlin/100273570/any-failures-in-iraq-and-afghanistan-are-due-to-political-incompetence-not-flawed-strategy/

[Jefferson23]

1. Those words,...a far better place, with far better prospects. Yes, if you're blind.

What an apt first name, Con.