Do Neo-Con's Ever Think Reflectively?

I will be the 1st to admit that I didn't think overt negative thoughts about President Bush II's desire to invade Iraq because I thought President Bush I should have finished the job in The Gulf War by sending the Army onto Baghdad and removing Sadam Hussein from power.

But let us recall why President Bush I held the military back and limited the victory to restoring Kuwait to what it was previously.

You invade a country, you have an obligation to fix it.  If you don't fix it, you end up with a Hitler.

Iraq was not a well thought through colonial creation by the Ottoman's and the British.  As in Syria, the colonial powers created a country that combined tribes without creating a democracy where the tribes respected each other.  Instead, you had Kings and dictators that squashed the tribal influences or bought them off with oil revenues and let them operate in their immediate territory.

But simmering underneath were tribal aspirations which have now become fed by regional power brokers who certainly don't care about the consequences of their actions.

So you have the Saudi dictatorship funneling money to the jihadist Sunni extremists that want to overthrow Shiite dictatorships.  You have the Iranian dictatorship funneling money to Shiite dictatorships that are fighting to maintain power against the Sunni extremists.  The jihadist Sunni extremists want to overthrow the Sunni dictatorships that are friendly to the U.S. once they overthrow the Shiite dictatorships.

So when John McCain says we should have left troops in Iraq that President Maliki didn't want, he obviously is not being reflective of the primary lesson of the Vietnam War:  No outside military can control a country when the outside military can't defeat the domestic military force that keeps replacing itself and can maintain the fight indefinitely because it is their country.

What John McCain wants is the U.S. to use the U.S. military to support a Shiite regime in Iraq that is controlled by Iran, against whom he wants to send the military to end their nuclear program.  And then he wants the U.S. military to support the Sunni  uprising that includes the Sunni extremists and end the Shiite Assad regime in Syria.  So John McCain wants the U.S. military to be active in Iran, Iraq and Syria; countries where substantial numbers of residents want nothing more than for the U.S. to stay away and will fight us if our troops are there.  This is a rats nest where we need to make sure Al Qaeda doesn't resurface and form training camps for exported terrorism, but boots on the ground and pilots putting their life at risk if they are shot down just doesn't make sense to me.  Keep our military out of harms way.  These are domestic political situations that outsiders cannot control.

This domestic vs outside control is what scares the Chinese so much.  Now that the USSR has broken up and Russia can no longer control the countries that had a self identity before 1918, China is the only country controlling places where such self identity exists without political process to relieve stress.  However, I will note that China has populated Tibet and Urugi (or whatever the NW of China is called) with lots of Han people so a breakaway is not likely to happen.

Russia on the other hand, also cannot seem to lose that mentality of desire to control places, where the residents want to govern themselves.  I sort of get why Russia decided they needed Crimea (naval base and lots of Russia identifying people), but Russia did agree to the Ukrainian Borders in a treaty.  You negotiate changes to treaties in a civil society, so Russia, under Putin, is most definitely operating in the area of an uncivil society.  And you would think that Russia, which has enough trouble of its own with Muslim regions within its borders, would not want to ferment anarchy in another part of its immediate universe.  But that is what they are doing in the Ukraine.  Do they want a civil war in the Ukraine? Where the gas pipelines that support the E.U. and Gazprom's/Lukoil's/Rosneft's and Russia's finances might get blown up and destroy a 1/3 of the global economy, which would harm the other 2/3's of the global economy, which would harm the Russian economy.

So my only conclusion is that the neo-cons in the U.S. and Russia need to reflect upon all this.  I hope they see that politics is all local.  Only the locals can work out their differences and find a way to live with each other.  Otherwise, you just let them slaughter each other because outsiders cannot fix it.