Summary of Michael J. Mazarr's Leap of Faith , livre ebook

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51 pages

English

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Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Camp David is the official retreat of American presidents, and it is a rustic facility tucked into the forested northern edge of Maryland. It is a second-rate family resort, according to publicly available photographs.
#2 The decision to launch an ill-conceived invasion of Iraq as the centerpiece of a war on terror has been a historical misjudgment of the first order. The war has been a catastrophe for the Iraqi people, and it has drained US finances.
#3 The decision to invade Iraq was the worst American foreign policy decision since Vietnam, and it was made without a single, clear, dispositive decision. It was a prolonged and methodical preparation for the invasion, but it never came up at the Camp David session in September 2002.
#4 Many people believe that the Iraq war was a result of a self-consciously dishonest plot to hoodwink the American people. But my research has shown that the two factors that are especially relevant to understanding how such a tragedy could occur are the fuel of American missionary ambitions and the spark of an intuitive, value-driven judgment.

Sujets

Histoire

Iraq War

Military

History

Informations

Publié par	Everest Media LLC
Date de parution	05 mai 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9798822501102
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Insights on Michael J. Mazarr's Leap of Faith
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Camp David is the official retreat of American presidents, and it is a rustic facility tucked into the forested northern edge of Maryland. It is a second-rate family resort, according to publicly available photographs.

#2

The decision to launch an ill-conceived invasion of Iraq as the centerpiece of a war on terror has been a historical misjudgment of the first order. The war has been a catastrophe for the Iraqi people, and it has drained US finances.

#3

The decision to invade Iraq was the worst American foreign policy decision since Vietnam, and it was made without a single, clear, dispositive decision. It was a prolonged and methodical preparation for the invasion, but it never came up at the Camp David session in September 2002.

#4

Many people believe that the Iraq war was a result of a self-consciously dishonest plot to hoodwink the American people. But my research has shown that the two factors that are especially relevant to understanding how such a tragedy could occur are the fuel of American missionary ambitions and the spark of an intuitive, value-driven judgment.

#5

While many in the Bush administration believed war was inevitable after September 11, the decision to go to war had not been made clear yet. The planning for war had been going on for months, and the invasion was almost two-thirds complete by the time of the Camp David meeting.

#6

Bush was a man who, on an individual level, possessed a caring touch, but who was completely disconnected from the decisions that affected the lives of millions. He was the son of one of America’s most powerful political dynasties, and yet he eschewed luxury boxes for regular seats behind the dugout.

#7

The story of the Iraq decision is a tale of gradual, piecemeal, and intuitive decisions that led to the war. It was a gradual process that began with the first Gulf War, when the US relationship with Iraq began its downward slide from wary engagement into bitter hostility.

#8

A new assessment is important because what many people think they know about the origins of the war is wrong. The typical story of the origins of the Iraq war is of a sort of malicious crime perpetrated on the American people. But this is not correct.

#9

The Iraq war was a tragic misjudgment of the first order, but it can also be used as a lesson for how not to make decisions regarding foreign affairs. The Bay of Pigs was an effort by mostly decent and intelligent people to perform what they considered to be the necessary emergency procedure of excising Fidel Castro.

#10

The American missionary impulse, which stems from the country’s desire to make the world a better place, can lead to a theological and absolutist conception of America’s responsibility. This mentality has contributed to some of the most disastrous blunders in American foreign policy.

#11

The planning for the invasion of Iraq was muddled and incoherent, as the leaders who advocated for it were operating under the assumption that it was the right and necessary thing to do.

#12

The Iraq War showed us that America is not a new and unique civilization marching ever forward down the road to progress, but a great nation like every other, driven more by emotion than by reason, and prone to making the same mistakes as its triumphs.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The American covert operator Robert Baer was sent to northern Iraq in 1995 to help prepare for a coup against Saddam Hussein. But by 1995, US policy had not yet gotten around to formally seeking Saddam’s destruction. Thus, freelancing by covert operators was allowed.

#2

The story of how the US went to war with Iraq can be found in the 1990s, when the country continued to confront Saddam and the evolution of postwar beliefs about American foreign policy.

#3

The most influential collective belief that drove American policy toward Iraq was the notion that the United States had the right to shape the world in the way it saw fit. This idealism, coupled with the belief that the United States had the power to do so, led the United States to meddle in the politics, economies, and societies of foreign nations.

#4

In 1988, Saddam Hussein’s disastrous decade-long war against Iran was drawing to an end with Iraq deeply in debt and socially devastated. Saddam hoped that America would help him achieve his goals of regional domination, but he was quickly proved wrong.

#5

After the invasion of Kuwait, the United States moved towards sanctions and threats of force, and eventually a full-scale war in the Gulf War. During this time, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, wanted to know how quickly they would move on to liberating Kuwait.

#6

The US military campaign to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait was a textbook example of combined arms. No one was in any mood to rush to Baghdad and finish off the regime, and so they left Saddam in power.

#7

Until 2001, the US would continue to push Iraq under the rug. Covert efforts to go after the regime were haphazard and helter-skelter.

#8

The case for ending Saddam’s rule by force began slowly in 1991, but gained momentum after the Gulf War in 1991. It was largely pushed by Paul Wolfowitz, who was passionate about ending Saddam’s rule.

#9

Wolfowitz was a humanitarian who was committed to using American power to advance liberal values. He was extremely fixated on Iraq, and believed that Saddam would eventually become a nuclear weapons state.

#10

After the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein believed he had won the war, and as such, he did not want to change anything about his regime. He was convinced that he had saved his regime, and he was ready to face any American threat again.

#11

The idea that the United States could seriously consider adventures as militant and elaborate as overthrowing the Iraqi regime came from a concept of American power and purpose that had become firmly rooted in the American national security establishment by the early 1990s.

#12

The American missionary sensibility, which was the belief that America should spread democracy and capitalism, was the most dominant vein of thinking in American grand strategy from the 1990s onward.

#13

The founding fathers, who were largely positive about the world, believed that they had been called out by God to create a new political community. However, the American brand of global idealism was too oblivious of the ironic perils of human virtue, wisdom, and power.

#14

The Bush administration’s growing conviction that Saddam Hussein’s regime needed to be dealt with decisively was not arbitrary. It stemmed from the fact that America had become a missionary nation, fired by an uncompromising sense of purpose.

#15

As the 1990s went on, the Iraqi exile community continued to grow and plan for the day when they would take back their country. They created the Iraqi National Congress, which became the nucleus of a provisional government.

#16

The American government’s decision to invade Iraq was based on the assumption that Saddam could be toppled easily. But the history of Iraq’s ambitions regarding WMDs in the 1990s makes for confused and paradoxical reading.

#17

Saddam believed that he could not survive without the perception that he had weapons of mass destruction, and he kept the secret of the programs’ demise hidden in order to preserve that capability.

#18

The Clinton administration arrived in office in 1993 faced with an Iraq policy full of contradictions. The administration opted for a more passive approach, called aggressive containment, which aimed to deter threats from both Iran and Iraq without tilting toward either.

#19

The Clinton administration returned to the wishful thinking of 1991, building policy on the assumption that the combination of sanctions and covert operations would force the collapse of Saddam’s regime in five years. But the policy was a bluff: there was no appetite for anything the American government came up with.

#20

The idea of using local and exile forces to destabilize Saddam’s regime and remove him from power with very limited US assistance was first proposed by Wolfowitz in the late 1990s. But every time it was subjected to close military analysis, the answer was the same: there’s no way this will work without massive US military engagement.

#21

The Clinton administration took another run at regime change in 1996, this time under the aegis of one of the INC’s rivals in the exile community, Ayad al-Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord. The CIA recruited participants from the tribes of western Iraq.

#22

Saddam’s intelligence service uncovered the plot, and many of the conspirators were killed.