Who is popular today?

THE EDITOR: Our family spent Christmas 2004 in Houston, Texas, visiting with a number of Trini friends and acquaintances, most of whom were then employed in the discovery and extraction of fossil fuels.
At one particular luncheon I tried to point out the enormous mistake then president George W Bush made the previous year by invading and occupying both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Who tell me to say that to a group of oil and gas cowboys. It led to me being threatened by the more aggressive of these thinly educated Trinidadians who largely performed blue-collar roles in Houston’s renowned energy sector.
Now, 17 years later, the writing is on the wall for all to see how stupidly dishonest and destructive those totally unjustifiable invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan turned out to be, while needlessly sacrificing thousands of American and Middle Eastern lives.
You then add the cost of these chronic misadventures, which is in the region of $2 trillion, and you get a real sense of the horrendous debacle Bush and his uber hawkish VP Dick Cheney perpetrated on the American public.
Indeed, far from turning the region into a bastion of peace and democracy, we have all now inherited a way more unstable Iraq and Afghanistan while witnessing the creation of a terror group called ISIS-K, which is so extreme in its interpretation of Islam that it considers the Taliban to be weak liberals.
Obviously, the lesson learn’t here is that the US must stop overestimating its military might which too often leads it to invade other countries without either justification or even a proper, well thought-out, long term occupation plan.
Hopefully, this will be the last time an American president commits such an egregious error like Bush did in 2003 by invading Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fast forward to today and President Biden is rightfully getting huge criticism for seriously bungling the exit strategy, but in hindsight we will all get to understand one day that it inevitably proves very difficult to bring about a good end to bad policy.
As for my oil worker friends from Houston, they are now more concerned with the election audits in Arizona, and I’ll have to admit that serious, well-run audits can play an important role in safeguarding the integrity of elections.
However, what Arizona’s Republican senators have arranged by contrast is what you would get if you crossed a clown pageant with a QAnon convention and made the whole thing play out on J’Ouvert morning. This entire mess would be funny if it weren’t so destructive.

GREGORY WIGHT

Maraval
The post US foreign policy debacles appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.