This was going to be a response to Andy’s comment for an earlier post, but got rather long…
I think the difference between Iraq and Afghanistan is important. Afghanistan harbored the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. This was A Bad Thing(tm). In fact to use the cliche, it was a clear and present danger. And that requires action today to deal with, and effort tomorrow to pick up the pieces. I think Bush did a good job with Afghanistan after Sept 11th – he took enough time to be sure where blame lay, and to decide tactically how to deal with it, but still took action quickly. That means you don’t get to work out whether there are risks inherent in the aftermath, or come up with a plan for dealing with those risks; you see the danger, you identify a response, and you enact that response. The problem is that once you’ve removed the present danger, you need to take careful steps to avoid its regrowth, and ideally to put something significantly better in place. That’s really hard, and requires a lot of attention. Which is why we invaded Iraq instead.
So let’s compare that to Iraq. Assuming for a moment that the situation required a war (I don’t see the need, but let’s play). It may have been a significantly risky situation, but it was nebulous and unthreatening enough that there was time to work out what might happen after, and weigh up the risks with the benefits given a range of mitigating actions. Instead we chose the ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’ approach, and more than a year later we’re still flailing around trying to fix it, and generating new terrorists all the while. In this case we should have looked at whether the admittedly undesirable situation in place with Saddam and his Ba’athists was really worse than what might fill the void.
So the Soviet question boils down to a choice; was it a clear and present danger (Afghanistan), or a threat that we ought to address (Iraq)? It’s a difficult choice to make even now. On one hand they had been a threat for 4 decades, so it’s legitimate to question how present the danger was. On the other hand they were critically dependent on a sovietized agricultural system that was one bad weather forecast away from collapse, which would have led to thousands of tanks with funny red logos sweeping across the Western European plains. At the time, however, I think the deck stacked much more clearly in favor of it being something that needed to be dealt with right now, even if that immediacy had to be tempered with realistic means (we couldn’t just declare war, that would be just MAD) So within those parameters Reagan and his team saw the danger, identified a response, and enacted that response.
I’ll restate something that may have got buried in all that. If you take global actions like these, I believe you have an obligation to take care of the consequences. The difference is that if the threat is low-grade, that obligation covers thinking things through first, and tailoring your actions accordingly. If the threat is imminent, the obligation is limited to tidying up after yourself as best you can. We’re not doing that particularly well in Afghanistan, but given the immensity of the task in the former USSR, I don’t think the US and the rest of the world did too badly. It was clear that almost anything could happen, but I don’t think it was clear that it would be worse than Sovietism (nor do I think it is). That doesn’t mean the US is blameless (the lax attitude toward all those warheads is just one example), but it’s orders of magnitude less than for the current Iraq adventure.
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