The Ruination Known As Iraq

By, Chris Rossini

Ten years ago, in 2003, Dr. Gary North wrote about the foolish U.S. invasion of Iraq:

"Democracy is not going to be imposed on a Muslim country in the Middle East by Western military force. This naive dream of college professors and high-salary foreign policy experts in Washington and the related think tanks will cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars before some future President finally admits defeat and brings the troops home."

Dr. North was right on the money.

In 2006, Lew Rockwell explained why the U.S. military empire inevitably stumbles:

"The US spends money, invades countries, sheds blood, and becomes ever more powerful at home and unpopular abroad. In the end, no matter how powerful its weapons or how determined its leaders, it loses. It loses because people resist empire. It loses for the same reasons that socialism and its central plans always fail. Large-scale attempts to force people into predetermined molds founder on the inability of the state to allocate resources rationally and to anticipate change, as well as the ubiquitous and pesky phenomenon called human volition. Mankind was not meant to live in cages."

And now, in 2013, Ron Paul provides an update on post-"liberation" Iraq:

October was Iraq’s deadliest month since April, 2008. In those five and a half years, not only has there been no improvement in Iraq’s security situation, but things have gotten much worse. More than 1,000 people were killed in Iraq last month, the vast majority of them civilians. Another 1,600 were wounded, as car bombs, shootings, and other attacks continue to maim and murder.

As post-“liberation” Iraq spirals steadily downward, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was in Washington last week to plead for more assistance from the United States to help restore order to a society demolished by the 2003 US invasion. Al-Qaeda has made significant recent gains, Maliki told President Obama at their meeting last Friday, and Iraq needs more US military aid to combat its growing influence.

Obama pledged to work together with Iraq to address al-Qaeda’s growing presence, but what was not said was that before the US attack there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq. The appearance of al-Qaeda in Iraq coincided with the US attack. They claimed we had to fight terror in Iraq, but the US invasion resulted in the creation of terrorist networks where before there were none. What a disaster.

Read the rest of Ron Paul's column

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