I sometimes forget how Bill Clinton turned my parents into hawks. In these troubled times, it’s worth remembering the degree to which people’s political affiliation determines their worldview. If George W. Bush dropped bombs on Serbia, mom and dad would have been against it, but Bill Clinton … he must have had a reason.
We’re seeing some of the same effect with Obama. His new policy on Iraq and Syria differs from George W. Bush’s Iraq policy mostly in its implementation. Bush trumpeted his intention to go in strong, drop a bunch of bombs, “shock and awe” them. Obama is incrementalist – we’ll do A but not B, then a week later, we’re doing B and C with promises (soon broken) that we won’t move on to D. Ultimately this ends up with regime change, as it did in Libya with disastrous results. What’s the difference? Psychology. Obama knows marketing. He knows that we’ll only eat one or two of those big cookies, but a boat load of those little ones.
The media, as always, is in the tank for this war. On the morning after bombing began in Syria, the first voice you heard on NPR’s 6:00 a.m. newscast was that of a retired general who had “crafted” America’s bombing campaign during the Gulf War – a man who thought we weren’t bombing Syria hard enough. That’s NPR, no surprise, but don’t expect any better from the liberal media. Rachel Maddow, while a war skeptic, gave a thumbnail recent history of the Iraqi Kurds and the Gulf War that might have been torn out of a Bush campaign media release. Our only role in that saga, according to this telling, was liberating freedom-loving Kuwait and helping the Kurds preserve evidence of Saddam’s pogrom against them.
Maddow left out the small detail that the U.S. helped Saddam to the hilt throughout the 1980s, including during the campaign against the Kurds, then looked the other way when Saddam attacked them again after the Gulf War (until Bush I was shamed into establishing a no-fly zone in northern Iraq). I suppose I should excuse this level of ignorance due to her relative youth – she probably doesn’t remember the events very clearly. I sure as hell do. It was the genesis of the conflict we are entering now, just as our Afghan war was the birth of Al Qaeda.
We go through this cycle of attack repeatedly, and the results are always the same – a bigger mess, more people hating us, more misery in the region. The fact that people like Maddow, who should know better, don’t understand that makes it that much harder to stop this from happening yet again.
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The response to ISIS is another instance of decision-making driven by decades of bad policy. We are, in essence, seeking to deal with a mess of our own making, to put it charitably, and in so doing making an investment in future crises while bankrupting ourselves in the present. The money and arms flowing to ISIS emanate from Saudi Arabia, other gulf states, and abandoned resources in Iraq, not to mention oil payments from third countries, like Turkey (our NATO ally). Many if not most of the weapons are stamped “Property of the U.S. Military”. Working with the Saudis to arm and train “moderate” opponents of the Assad regime is akin to working with the Pakistanis to arm and train “moderate” opponents of the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s. How did that turn out again?
I can’t say which part of Obama’s proposed campaign against ISIS seems the most confused and misguided. It may be the notion that we should fund the training of “moderate” Syrian opposition forces in Saudi Arabia, of all places. First of all, there is no meaningful moderate opposition in Syria. The lead forces opposing the Assad regime are hyper-religious extremists. They have walked off with many of the weapons we have dropped on the so-called moderates, just as billions of dollars worth of weapons have gone missing in Afghanistan (probably falling into the hands of the Taliban or worse). Any effort to train the “moderates” will be symbolic at best and will likely result in yet another stream of jihadist heading from the gulf to the conflict zone.
This Russia/Ukraine matter is remarkable in its stupidity. It’s as if our “National Security” state imperial institutions cannot justify their own existence anymore without resurrecting the Cold War, and in so doing, are attempting to make it seem like Putin is intent on resurrecting the Soviet Union. I have to say, that’s pretty weak sauce, as they say on the “coast”. (The sauce must be kind of weak there.) It’s the usual appeasement/slippery slope narrative – sure, it may seem like small potatoes to you, sliding a handful of armored personnel carriers across the border, but if we let him get away with THIS, ANYthing can happen.
Still, the U.S. military action will continue in Iraq, sans dramatic justification. Neatly done. And we will continue to provide arms to the people fighting those other people we provided arms to. There’s a foreign policy for you. What’s even more worrying than that, though, is the degree to which our military have been providing arms, armored vehicles, and advanced tactical gear to police departments across the country, like the one in Ferguson, Missouri. In the wake of the seemingly arbitrary police killing of teenager Michael Brown, this mostly African-American community looks reminiscent of Soweto, South Africa, during the bad old days of Apartheid.
bothered to follow the money back from ISIS to their funders in Saudi Arabia, a nation our own John McCain and others have praised to the rafters for funding the Syrian opposition. Once again, we are staring down the barrels of our own guns, scratching our heads in wonder.
Of course, they already had their hair on fire about Obama’s foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Middle East. Once again, the alarm bell is cranked up to eleven … like it was for the capture of the Benghazi jihadist, and for the the Bergdahl deal, and for pretty much every thing that happens anywhere, every day of the week. Not sure why we should listen to people like Dan Senor, or John McCain, or Bill Kristol, or anyone else still on television after having been so fantastically wrong on what they were supposed to be experts about, but we keep hearing from them anyway. Go back into Iraq, they say … it’s the only way to keep the country from falling apart.
First of all, they were not high-value detainees. They were leadership within the Taliban regime of the 1990s – 2001, yes, but they were not implicated in the deaths of any Americans. Nor were they captured at great cost, as has been suggested by some. Two or more of them turned themselves in; others were turned in by Pakistani intelligence, probably in exchange for some payment. Will they return to “the fight”? Well, that may be, but keeping Guantanamo open all these years has inspired more (younger) people to join the fight than we could ever release from that legal limbo on Cuban soil. A lot of people want us dead; are we that worried, really?
Yeah, not so much. But it did sound good at the time, didn’t it? And now, many deaths, dismemberments, and billions of dollars later, we are faced with an enormous backlog of wounded and battle-stressed soldiers, attempting to access a VA system that does not have the physical infrastructure to serve them in a timely fashion. That’s a large part of what’s behind the deceptive practices we are hearing about now – people trying to feign success when the system is failing miserably, at least on the intake end.
Once again, thank you, George W. Bush, for locking in this reactionary Supreme Court majority for the rest of my natural life. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, like the Iraq war (motto: killing people from Fallujah to Fort Hood since 2003). So we should expect more of this sort of thing; ultimately, I am sure, the remaining flaccid constraints on the outright purchase of our elections by billionaires will be condemned as violations of “speech” and stripped away. McCutcheon was delivered with the same Panglossian assurances offered in Citizens United that, in essence, the market will govern itself. We’ve seen where that goes.