Why can’t the greatest democracy on earth set-up decent puppet governments anywhere? Ever since World War II, regardless of the party in the White House, the people we put in charge of running their countries are consistent disasters.
Transparency International’s 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index ranking of 177 countries lists Iraq’s government as seventh most corrupt. Afghanistan tied North Korea for second. Not exactly something to brag about.
President Dwight Eisenhower’s CIA overthrew Iran’s popularly elected president and established the hated Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi as the new leader. His tenure of corruption, brutality and arrogance made us the Great Satan for generations of Iranians.
Democrats made a merry-go-round of leadership coups in South Vietnam. New governments each seemed more inept and corrupt than the one before it. In contrast, we conduct joint military exercises with the Vietnamese government we spent 50,000 U.S. lives trying to keep from power. We are also Vietnam’s largest export market.
President Ronald Reagan conducted a secret war in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas and their leader Daniel Ortega. Since then, Nicaragua elected Ortega as president three times.
Back to the present and installing new governments
President George W. Bush, the “Nation Builder”, handpicked Hamid Karzai as Afghanistan’s president. It would have been difficult to make a worse choice. The former commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Ret. Gen. John Allen, said corruption, not the Taliban, is the worst threat to the future of the war-torn country.
“For too long we focused our attention solely on the Taliban as the existential threat to Afghanistan,” Allen told a Senate subcommittee. Compared to the scope and the magnitude of corruption, “they are an annoyance.”
So, here we have our former top general saying the government we installed is a bigger problem than the enemy we are fighting. That is a problem.
In Iraq, Bush’s choice of Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister is equally disastrous. Aligning his religiously divided nation as almost a satellite of Iran and its Shiite government provoked a civil war. Maliki’s inability to deliver even the most basic government services is another contributing factor to his unpopularity even among Shiites.
Saddam Hussein was far from an ideal leader, but he kept Iraq functioning and people of different sects lived peacefully next to each other. While today Al Qaida is actively entrenched in Iraq, during Saddam’s rule the only Al Qaida operatives in the country were either dead or soon to be.
So what’s the solution? President Barack Obama is the first president in generations to finally get it right by keeping us out of other countries’ wars. While members of congress and the press may wave their machismo and want us to send our young soldiers to die in wars from the Ukraine to Nigeria, this is simply wrongheaded. We may win the war, but after installing a government, our real problems begin.
The other part of this solution is to make ourselves less vulnerable to other countries problems. We are currently using drone attacks on extremists in Yemen that might be considered threats to neighboring Saudi Arabia. While we are protecting Saudi Arabia, it is a good bet that most of the advanced weaponry and training the Sunni groups attacking Iraq’s government have is financed by Saudi oil money.
The real solution to this convoluted mess is making the U.S energy independent. Not only using new energy extraction technologies but developing new conservation technologies that can be adapted by other countries. Isolationism isn’t the solution, but recognizing our limitations in involving ourselves in other countries’ internal and external conflicts and installing pseudo governments is a major step.
