The Lessons of History
â??Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.â?
- George Santayana, Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense
Let’s talk about a war. Let’s talk about a war in which the greatest power the world has ever known, despite winning far more battles than it lost, was defeated. Defeated by logistics. Defeated by being overextended because of multiple conflicts. Defeated by the inability to move soldiers across the ocean quickly enough. Defeated by an insurgent army who had advantages of local terrain. Defeated by an army dedicated to religious ideals.
It’s not a quick conflict. It was expected to be, by everyone in the world. But it doesn’t work out that way. It drags on, and on, and on. It’s expensive, economically and politically. It leads to widespread public protests against the war.
It had its share of atrocities, committed by both the occupying force, and the natives of the land. Bloody massacres of civilians, sneak attacks on soldiers from behind every tree.
The war is as costly for the victorious defenders as it is for the defeated invaders. The country teeters on the verge of civil war for years. The first government proves to be too weak, and fails. It is only the second government, formed 8 years after the war (14 years after the original invasion) that finally takes hold. Even that government collapses in the bloodiest civil war the world has ever known.
The new government has religion at its very core. Every founding document of the new government mentions God. The new leaders are sworn in with their hand on sacred texts. Leaders who are not of the majority religion have virtually no chance of being elected, and only very rarely are there leaders selected even from the minority branch of the all but state religion. Many policies are enacted (some even against the majority of the electorate) because of pressure from conservative religious leaders.
No matter how hard I tried… everyone knows that I am not talking about Iraq. I’m talking about the American Revolution. Most Americans have forgotten that it took us 6 years to defeat the British. Even more have forgotten that it took 8 years following the end of the war for the Americans to come up with a workable government. The first one was a dismal failure.
But across the nation, our representatives, our Leaders, and, to be fair, a majority of the people… thought that Iraq would be easy. The invasion would be easy. Setting up a new government would be easy. After all, it was easy for us, right?
We pride ourselves on being the foremost experts on democracy and representative government in the whole world. And yet, we thought it would be quick and easy to introduce it to an entirely new culture, with no history of knowing what it means to vote (and yet they had a far greater turn out in their first election than we did in any recent Presidential election).
On the other hand, we do have experience in setting up new governments, so called â??country building.â? We have tried it in Cuba, Panama, and most recently in Afghanistan. We had to go in and fix our problems in Panama, the new Afghan regime is in the process of collapsing, and I think we all know what happened in Cuba.
And yet, somehow, we thought it would be easy. We were wrong. We didn’t listen to the lessons history tried to teach us. It’s not easy, and it’s not going to get any easier.
And now, I’m going to go back to writing something non-controversial, like religion.