It's just as well that President Obama doesn't abruptly end the embargo against communist Cuba. By inching his way there, he'll have time to dream up a way of describing 50 years of failed military, diplomatic and economic warfare on the communist island as a "success."
Fidel Castro and Cuban Marxism are still there, of course. And still, a few hysterical Cubans in Miami still want sanctions ramped up, promising—as they have since 1960—that Castro will fall with just a little more effort.
Diplomats and generals never admit defeat or failure. Whatever President Obama was to have said last night in his Oval Office speech about Iraq, failure was not the theme.
So, Iraq will join the inventory of other bloody U.S. overseas adventures with politicians and generals straining to turn failure into success.
We poured nearly $1 trillion into Iraq. More than 4,000 GIs were killed. More than 30,000 were wounded, many disabled for life. Unfinished civil projects valued at $5 billion are being abandoned. Billions of U.S. contract dollars have been embezzled by Americans and Iraqis. The government is virtually nonexistent except in theory. Some old hands predict an eventual military coup and another despot in charge.
That's failure. Had we withdrawn soon after Saddam Hussein's unhorsing, that would've been success.
We don't learn. Relying on World War II nostalgia of powerful U.S. forces roaming the world and using force to rescue nations from tyranny, war became a habit.
Pig-headed Douglas MacArthur rejected warnings that hordes of Chinese would drive U.N. troops into mortifying retreat if he pushed past the 38th Parallel and to the Yalu River.
The Rambo president, Lyndon Johnson, charted disaster in Vietnam. (Even now, nearly 40 years after Vietnam, some 150,000 veterans of that debacle are lining up for new medical treatment for exposure to toxic Agent Orange—at a new cost of $42 billion over the next 10 years.)
Washington has failed as badly in engineering peace between Israelis and Palestinians for the past 30-plus years.
Lying ahead is a calamity known as Afghanistan. This week, the country's central bank seized a bank partly owned by the corrupt President Hamad Karzai's brother to prevent assets from being plundered. The central authority wants $160 million in luxury villas bought in Dubai with bank funds returned. Throughout history, outsiders have failed to tame, subdue, democratize and civilize Afghanistan, a land of opium, Stone Age religious rituals, tribal warlords, corruption and illiteracy.
This, too, will be another American failure.
