Perils of Dominance is the first completely new interpretation of how and why the United States went to war in Vietnam. It provides an authoritative challenge to the prevailing explanation that U.S. officials adhered blindly to a Cold War doctrine that loss of Vietnam would cause a "domino effect" leading to communist domination of the area. Gareth Porter presents compelling evidence that U.S. policy decisions on Vietnam from 1954 to mid-1965 were shaped by an overwhelming imbalance of military power favoring the United States over the Soviet Union and China. He demonstrates how the slide into war in Vietnam is relevant to understanding why the United States went to war in Iraq, and why such wars are likely as long as U.S. military power is overwhelmingly dominant in the world.
Challenging conventional wisdom about the origins of the war, Porter argues that the main impetus for military intervention in Vietnam came not from presidents Kennedy and Johnson but from high-ranking national security officials in their administrations who were heavily influenced by U.S. dominance over its Cold War foes.
It should be noted that US military dominance was an overwhelming fact, even though a frightened US public was constantly mislead about it, and while it's certainly true that Porter's perspective is influenced by the time he is writing in, and the concerns of the present, this was no loess true of earlier historians who failed to pay attention to US dominance. With this in mind, let's turn to Porter's diary:
In an interview on the PBS NewsHour last Wednesday, Joe Biden was unwilling to contradict the official narrative of the Iraq War that Gen. David Petraeus and the Bush surge had turned Iraq into a good war after all. That interview serves as a reminder of just how completely the Democratic Party foreign policy elite has adopted that narrative.
The Iraq War story line crafted by the Petraeus and the new counterinsurgency elite in Washington assures the public that U.S. military power in Iraq brought about the cooperation of the Sunnis in Anbar Province, ended sectarian violence in Baghdad and defeated Iranian-backed Shi'a insurgents.
In reality, of course, that's not what happened at all. It's time to review the relevant history and deconstruct the Petraeus narrative which the Obama administration now appears to have adopted.
The Sunni decision to cooperate in the suppression of al Qaeda in Iraq had nothing to do with the surge. The main Sunni armed resistance groups had actually turned against al Qaeda in 2005, when they began trying to make a deal with the United States to end the war.
Porter goes into details on the Sunni side, and then does the same on the Shia side, particularly explaining the dynamics of how Iran's interests were served. What Porter describes is not new--simply a very succinct and timely summary of what's already known to those not distracted by blizzards of official obfuscation. Particularly important is the fact that Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army were not subservient to Iran, and needed to be nuetralized once they'd played their role in crushing Sunni power:
The Iranian interest was to ensure that the Shi'a-dominated government of Iraq consolidated its power. Iran's "supreme leader" Ali Khamenei told al-Maliki in August 2007 that Iran would support his taking control of Sadr's strongholds. Later that same month, al-Maliki went to Karbala and gave the local police chief "carte blanche" to attack the Sadrists there. After two days of violence, Sadr declared a six-month "freeze" on Mahdi Army military operations August 27, 2007.
By late 2007, contrary to the official Iraq legend, the al-Maliki government and the Bush administration were both publicly crediting Iran with pressuring Sadr to agree to the unilateral ceasefire - to the chagrin of Petraeus.
Al-Maliki launched the attack on Mahdi Army forces in Basrah in March 2008 in the knowledge that Iran would back him against Sadr. And when it went badly, he turned to Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard official in charge of day-to-day Iraq policy, to force a ceasefire on Sadr. Soleimani told Iraqi President Talibani that Iran supported al-Maliki's efforts to "dismantle all militias", and Sadr agreed to a ceasefire within 24 hours of Iran's intervention.
So it was Iran's restraint - not Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy - that effectively ended the Shi'a insurgent threat....
But Biden doesn't want to know this and other historical facts that contradict the official narrative on Iraq. For the Democratic foreign policy elite, staying ignorant of the real history of the Iraq War allows them to believe that deploying U.S. military forces in Muslim countries can be an effective instrument of U.S. power.
That, in a nutshell, is how the Obama Administration has been snookered into believing the "surge worked" hoax, thereby buying into an ever-so-slightly more refined version of the neo-con BushCo "Long War" fantasy.
Why would John Bolton want to run for President? Obama's already implementing his main foreign policy objectives, while drawing far less heat in the process.
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