It won’t be easy. Reliable GOP hawk John McCain has said that strikes could be carried out “easily” and “would not put a single [American] life at risk.” Moreover, he said, a strikes could be carried out in just a couple of days. But the big lesson of so many U.S. military interventions is that they are rarely as easy, quick, or costless as backers promise. As George Friedman of the global intelligence firm Statfor wrote recently, “Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya have driven home the principle that deposing one regime means living with an imperfect successor. In those cases, changing the regime wound up rapidly entangling the United States in civil wars, the outcomes of which have not been worth the price.”
Posted on: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 05:13:33 +0000