While following the unfolding story of the US conquest and colonization of Iraq, one cannot but think that with victories like these, Americans hardly need a defeat.
Squeezing Iraq like a lemon will not cover the vast expenditure of subjugating it. Add to it the cost of occupying Afghanistan and you have a complete mess.
The sheer cost of this harebrained enterprise in economic terms, to say nothing of the political and cultural costs, makes it impossible for the US to gain from it enough to cover even a fraction of the money spent.
One must ask the question “Why, what is all this in aid of, what are the Americans thinking they will achieve?”
The only answer that makes a little sense is that the Americans did not expect to get themselves into such a mess.
This may be due to the generally Western obsession with gadgets.
Westerners, especially Americans, have a deep and abiding faith in machines and technology.
This started in the Industrial Revolution, when, Westerners reorganized their societies from the ground up to accommodate the needs of their machines and the practice continues to this day.
This infatuation can be observed in the many films and books that portray a world where machines take over the world and replace humans or where humans become themselves machines.
It may be an exaggeration, yet nevertheless true, that to many Westerners the idea of heaven is when he and his computer become one.
This love of the machine led the Americans to believe that because they have such interesting machines and Iraq has none, the Iraqis will quickly submit to American will.
Don’t laugh!
Another mistake, as I see it, is that Americans still believe that the white man can enter a country and tell its people what to do and that they will fall all over themselves to obey.
They do not realize yet, in their “Splendid Isolation”, that that has stopped being the case for quite sometime now.
We have a saying in the Arab world, “Never use the wand of prestige to beat someone!” (For it may break and then you will be in trouble).
