Iraq tensions underscore complex U.S. role in the Middle East
Members of Iraqi Shiite "Popular Mobilization Forces" armed group and their supporters attack the entrance of the U.S. Embassy during a protest in Baghdad on Tuesday. Credit: EPA-EFE/Shutterstock/Ahmed Jalil
New year, old plagues in faraway places.
Tensions are on the rise in the Middle East after U.S. attacks on an Iranian-backed militia in Syria and Iraq elicited vows of retaliation. The Iraqi government is saying it will reconsider its relationship with American-led coalition forces, and Iraqi protesters Tuesday stormed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, some shouting "death to America." Meanwhile, tensions are simmering in Afghanistan, where the Taliban said it had agreed to a temporary cease-fire, before slamming that news as "baseless reports."
The region's day-to-day volatility only further illuminates the consequences of our foreign entanglements so comprehensively detailed in The Afghanistan Papers, a Washington Post report published late in 2019 that was based on hundreds of confidential government interviews. It's a study of stunning dysfunction, incompetence and lack of success in Afghanistan. Worse, it showed that three different presidential administrations — those of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — lied to the American people in a massive deception intended to hide the fact that the war was a dismal failure on every level.
We've been down this dishonorable road before. The Pentagon Papers exposed the lie of Vietnam in 1971. Each unmasked a cover-up. Each further eroded the public's trust in government, without which democracy cannot succeed.
It took the Post three years of court battles to obtain the interview transcripts. They showed military personnel, Pentagon officials and diplomats talking of not knowing what they were doing in Afghanistan, altering data to present optimistic assessments of the war, willfully ignoring corruption among Afghan officials who brazenly and relentlessly stole U.S. aid, and holding flawed ideas of nation-building. The consequences were staggering. America's longest war, now 18 years old, has cost nearly $1 trillion, killed more than 2,300 U.S. servicemen and women, wounded more than 20,000, and killed more than 43,000 Afghan civilians. And 13,000 U.S. troops still are there.
The report also highlighted the critical importance of oversight. The interviews were conducted because Congress mandated that a special inspector general assess "lessons learned" in Afghanistan with an eye on reducing corruption and inefficiency in the war zone. The same exercise should be required for our involvement in other global hot spots, especially in Iraq, Syria and the rest of the Middle East.
Honesty, trust and oversight are not optional features of democracy. They are critical to its survival. We abandon them at our peril.
— The editorial board
