John Mearsheimer was on the PBS News Hour talking about the Wikileaks document dump. Great to hear this on the mainstream media:
[I]t does make it very clear how horrible the violence has been in Iraq since we invaded in 2003. And it also is quite clear from the documents that the United States has played an important role in making that violence happen. Not only do the documents show that American soldiers and airmen have killed large numbers of civilians. It’s also clear that we didn’t do much at all to stop the Iraqis from torturing and murdering prisoners...
it’s quite clear from the documents that numerous cases are found where Americans were reporting these abuses. The problem is that people further up the chain of command, both the military and civilian individuals, didn’t do anything to stop it. There is no question that the Americans knew what was going on. It’s not like this was happening in the dark, and we only suspected it and didn’t really know about it. We knew about it, and we didn’t do anything to stop it. We effectively turned a blind eye. And this was strategically foolish and, I think, morally bankrupt.
[I]t seems to me, from looking at these documents and reading all the press reports, that this kind of wanton violence just goes hand-in-hand with civil wars and with counterinsurgencies.
I mean, anybody who has studied the history of counterinsurgency knows that those who are engaged in that kind of warfare invariably commit all sorts of crimes. So, I would think that what this tells us about Afghanistan is that, as we increase the number of forces, and as we begin to move more and more against the Taliban, what we will end up doing is killing more and more civilians.
And Afghanistan will end up looking a lot more like Iraq.
I don’t see much hope at all that we will learn any positive lessons from what we have done in Iraq and then apply those positive lessons to Afghanistan.
