{"id":34582,"date":"2018-05-29T06:18:59","date_gmt":"2018-05-29T11:18:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34582"},"modified":"2018-05-29T06:18:59","modified_gmt":"2018-05-29T11:18:59","slug":"the-tragic-record-of-american-regime-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34582","title":{"rendered":"The Tragic Record of American Regime Change"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The Tragic Record of American Regime Change<\/a><\/h3>\n

<\/h3>\n
National security adviser John Bolton watches as President Trump meets with South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the White House on Tuesday. (Evan Vucci \/ AP<\/a>)<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n

We used to call him \u201cMookie.\u201d God, we hated him. Back in 2006-07, while patrolling the streets of east Baghdad, Muqtada al-Sadr\u2019s Mahdi Army militia was our sworn enemy. These impoverished, slum-dwelling Shiite youths hit us with sniper fire and deadly improvised explosive devices day after day. They killed and maimed American troops daily, including my boys\u2014Alex Fuller and Mike Balsley\u2014who died Jan. 25, 2007. We\u2019d patch up our wounded, call in a medevac helicopter, then roll back into those city streets the very next day. As we patrolled, Sadr\u2019s ubiquitous face would taunt us, plastered as it was on billboards, posters and flags throughout the neighborhood.<\/p>\n

Now, in a truth stranger than fiction, Sadr\u2019s political party<\/a> has won the recent Iraqi elections.\u00a0The former warlord and killer of Americans may now play kingmaker in Iraq. Of course, mine is only one\u2014highly biased\u2014side of the story. From Sadr\u2019s perspective, we were occupiers, a foreign military force with no legitimacy in his country. Perhaps he had a point. Still, Sadr\u2019s victory demonstrates just how far off the rails America\u2019s project in Iraq has gone, and it epitomizes the unintended consequences of offensive war and regime change.<\/p>\n

When the United States uses its impressive military machine to topple a tyrant\u2014in this case, Saddam Hussein\u2014it\u2019s impossible to predict the course of the chaos that follows. Fracture a society, it seems, and the most nefarious (and well-armed) actors often rise to the top: militiamen, criminal elements, Islamists and sociopaths of various stripes. Sadr is just one example.<\/p>\n

Still, Washington never seems to learn. Since October 2001, our military has been ordered to topple at least three sovereign governments\u2014those of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya\u2014and is theoretically seeking to overthrow another regime in Syria.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Tragic Record of American Regime Change National security adviser John Bolton watches as President Trump meets with South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the White House on Tuesday. (Evan Vucci \/ AP) We used to call him \u201cMookie.\u201d God, we hated him. Back in 2006-07, while patrolling the streets of east Baghdad, Muqtada al-Sadr\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[7844,4487,19532,1343,8738,827],"class_list":["post-34582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-donald-trump","tag-john-bolton","tag-maj-danny-sjursen","tag-regime-change","tag-truthdig","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34582"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34583,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34582\/revisions\/34583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}