An American Tragedy Unmasked by Democratic Revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt

The mindset of the Bush Administration that prompted the United States to invade Afghanistan and Iraq asserted that democracy could only be brought to Middle East countries through military invasion.   The spontaneous uprisings that ousted dictators in Tunisia and Egypt showed beyond a doubt, that democratic revolutions do not require U.S. military intervention in order to get off the ground.  In fact,  one would be hard pressed to call the regimes installed by the U.S. led NATO forces, in either Iraq or Afghanistan, functioning democracies.      
 

A February 5, 2011, New York Times article, reported that a monument to Saddam Hussein’s rule is being re-erected in Baghdad, whom one observer described as “Nuremberg and Las Vegas all rolled in one.”   The most charitable comments observers can make about Iraq is that it is on the road to democracy  or is a "delayed democracy." 

As for Afghanistan, the government of President Hamid Karzai was not democratically-elected.  And candid observers, noting electoral fraud and corruption, simply refer to the country's democratic aspirations as a lost cause, here and here 

Six thousand Americans have died in these wars, tens of thousands have returned home wounded physically, psychologically or both.  Even the most conservative of estimates identify the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan and Iraq as numbering in the hundreds of thousands. 

No one in the White House nor Congress could ever face the American public with the truth, which is that trillions of dollars, and countless lives have been lost in vain.   But who knows, maybe we the American public will have our own democratic uprising some day.    

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