NATO doesn’t exist. The Iraq war killed it.
There is absolutely no likelihood that American voters will support sending troops to any place that didn’t militarily attack the US. And if the US doesn’t honor NATO’s obligations, there’s no NATO.
Everything has consequences. The Iraq war was so colossally stupid and massively immoral that its impact will be felt for a long time. It showed that the US army is weak and incompetent. It changed the perception of the US as a military power abroad, but even more so at home.
American people now see the US as a loser in what concerns the military. It’s a foregone conclusion that the US army will lose. Nobody even fantasizes about a possible victory because that would be too daft. Before you deny it, please tell me why you are opposed (like I am, I’m completely opposed, too) to sending US troops into battle anywhere. Because you don’t want another Iraq and another Afghanistan, right? Because you expect the US to lose. I don’t blame you because I feel the same way.
Once again, I most whole-heartedly oppose sending US troops anywhere. I’m simply honest with myself about why I oppose it. And if the strongest army in the NATO will never engage with anybody militarily, there is no NATO.
The US government knows that the US army is never going to fight again. Hence the forced vaccination, hence the morale-sapping wokeness trainings, hence the sissification of the whole outfit. The army can’t serve its original purpose. So now it’s a pool of free subjects for large human experiments.
When Trump talked about abolishing the NATO, he simply proposed making an already existing fact official. It would be the honest thing to do. There are countries in Europe right now that sincerely believe US soldiers will come to defend them when Russia invades. I talked to a guy from Lithuania yesterday, and he believes this completely. But we all know it’s never going to happen. And I think it’s a good thing because I don’t want to feel humiliated by our loser army. Let’s let people know that we aren’t showing up, and it’s all good.
We don’t really need a standing army. Technology and geography make it unnecessary, so it’s not even a big deal.
Clarissa's Blog 
“It showed that the US army is weak and incompetent.”
You are very wrong about this Clarissa. The US armed forces successfully defeated the Iraqi military in a matter of weeks; including completely overthrowing Saddam and his regime. The Russians dreamed of being able to do the same, but clearly they could not.
The occupation is the part that the US lost, because nobody bothered to think things through beyond the initial defeat of the Iraqi military.
“American people now see the US as a loser in what concerns the military. It’s a foregone conclusion that the US army will lose. ”
WTF? Did you get hacked or something? This sounds as if written by a Russian troll.
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I think the issue is more the realization that you can’t fight other people’s battles for them.
The real strength of the US military has always been the military industrial complex, and they aren’t going anywhere.
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Iraqis were able to fight their own battle against ISIS. The US did provide significant help, of course, just like it’s currently doing with Ukraine.
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“The occupation is the part that the US lost”
So you agree the US lost. The military ‘victory’ was useless without a clear plan for what to do next and no one had one because it wasn’t about it Iraq at all but about W’s daddy issues.
Of course the Iraq debacle never had any hope of success whatsoever and listening to the jabbering of the armchair warriors made it clear that there was no plan at all. They simply assumed Iraqis were Americans at heart who would gladly welcome whatever the US administration came up with for them.
The American disease is not recognizing that people in different places often have very different values and their own agendas – just assuming that everybody is really just like Americans is a very sure path to foreign policy and military defeat.
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I think there was also a backlash against the Vietnam backlash, especially the way the returning troops were treated, which made it difficult to criticize the war.
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There was also still extreme post-9/11 patriotic hysteria in 2002-2003.
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The US military is objectively the greatest military force ever created. It can wipe the floor with just about any country in the world today. The invasion of Iraq demonstrated that clearly; where a once strong military half way around the world was defeated in a matter of weeks.
So, with that out of the way, yes, Iraq was a colossal disaster, but that wasn’t a military disaster, it was a political disaster. The planners of the war clearly had not idea what to do after they had easily overthrown the Saddam regime. They also lied through their teeth to get their war; and in a more just world, they would also be executed for their incompetence and borderline treasonous lies.
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“US military is objectively the greatest military force ever created”
And as useless as tits on a boar hog since it’s run by boobs who have no idea how the world works… so the US destroyed Iraqi infrastructure and made a big mess in its stunning ‘victory’ and…. that’s about it….
“planners of the war clearly had not idea what to do”
That’s not really right… they had a very, clear, detailed plan which was barking insane and which had no chance of success because it assumed that Iraqis wanted an American style society and would understand and want ideas like ‘representative democracy’ and ‘rugged individualism’ etc
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Sure, not disagreeing. I’m disagreeing with the whole premise the US military is this feeble and weak entity because of Iraq. That’s beyond ridiculous and beyond any form of objective reality.
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People always say, “Not another Iraq, not another Afghanistan, not another Vietnam.” But nobody ever said, “Not another D-Day.” And that’s even though the result of WWII was half of Europe in Stalin’s hands and busily imposing socialism.
We all know what’s a win and what’s a loss. And there hasn’t been a win for the US since before my father was born, and he would have been 72 this year.
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Re: WWII: Better to have half of Europe in Stalin’s hands for half a century than to have almost all of Europe in Hitler’s hands for who knows how long.
As for past success and failure, it’s quite interesting: The US’s success in the Gulf War of 1990-1991 might have encouraged Americans to finish the job in Iraq in 2002-2003, especially when Afghanistan also still looked like a success back then.
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BTW, I’m sorry for your father’s death. 😦 May he RIP. 😦
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Thank you. It’s coming up on the one-year anniversary, and I still can’t get over it.
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” one-year anniversary”
I remember years and years ago hearing from someone that the death of someone very close to you takes at least a year for recovery to begin…
One reason I remember that was that my father died not much longer than a year later…. and that’s more or less what happened… it doesn’t mean you stop missing them but… after a year (give or take a bit) it doesn’t keep you dragged down as much.
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Iraq did succeed in the sense that the Iraqi insurgency and ISIS were both defeated and in the sense that the current Iraqi government is better for both the Iraqi people and the US than Saddam Hussein’s government was.
It’s worth noting that by invading Iraq in 2003 the US only gave the Iraqi people what they themselves were demanding in 1991 when they rebelled against Saddam Hussein (at US encouragement, before the US let them down by refusing to support their rebellion and thus caused their rebellion to get brutally crushed by Saddam Hussein, especially for the Iraqi Shi’ites).
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If you think that the US won’t be willing to fight over Poland and the Baltics, I strongly suspect that you’re mistaken unless the US will have Donald Trump or someone else like him as president again. As for Iraq, it was a bigger success story for the US than Afghanistan was. We managed to defeat the Iraqi insurgency and subsequently help the Iraqis defeat ISIS. But we couldn’t defeat the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. And in any case, Russia’s military doesn’t look so good right now either, with its inability to even conquer the entire Donbass, let alone all of Ukraine. So, I think that the US and NATO will be fine in any conflict with Russia that does not go nuclear (and it’s probably unlikely that it goes nuclear since Russia would not want itself to be destroyed as well).
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NATO is the most successful multi-nation military alliance in the history of the modern world. It’s sole purpose, as stated when NATO was founded in 1949, has been to defend member nations against military aggression by external powers like the old USSR or Putin’s Russia — and it has done that very well. Not a single Russian tank has rolled across the borders of Poland or Hungary once those ex-Communist nations came under the NATO umbrella.
It isn’t NATO’s job to exterminate the occasional mongrel dogs that growl at it from non-NATO wastelands like Afghanistan and Iraq — and if certain NATO members, led by a United States determined to remain the world’s dominant superpower, choose to volunteer their armed forces to do so, those wars have nothing to do with NATO’s official function.
And if those outside-NATO wars are fought badly and ultimately lost — well, that may be embarrassing, but it’s also irrelevant to the cost of bread in Berlin or Washington.
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Hey, Clarissa, your goddamn WordPress program (or whatever its current name is) just insultingly labeled my comment as by “Anonymous” — so I’m now taking credit for my erudite post.
Dreidel
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