There are a lot of things to write about this week, to be sure, but I just wanted to get something down about Bowe Bergdahl and the political shit storm that erupted around his disappearance and release from his imprisonment by the Haqqani Taliban network. This is prompted in part by the current season of the Serial podcast, which is focusing on Bergdahl’s case, but also by the fact that Republicans – and particularly Donald Trump – regularly hold this guy up as emblematic of everything that’s wrong with America. (On this they appear to be in agreement with the Haqqanis.)
I won’t run through the particulars of the story. For that, I suggest you listen to the podcast. Suffice to say that Bergdahl suffered grievously over his five years as a guest of the Taliban. He attempted to escape several times, once for as long as nine days, escaping barefoot into the Hindu Kush, injuring himself severely, eating grass, etc. He was beaten badly, cut with razors, kept in a cage not fit for a chimp, threatened with beheading – you name it. He was the first P.O.W. held for anything like this long since the Vietnam War, and under conditions that rival any horror stories from that conflict. Frankly, it’s a testament to his physical and mental strength that he survived.
When he got home, though, he received something less than a cordial reception from his fellow Americans, aside from the folks in his home town and the Obama administration. Now, of course, he’s facing court martial. This is more a political response by the military than anything else, given the heated rhetoric that has accompanied his return. John McCain has insisted that Bergdahl is “clearly a deserter” and threatened to haul top military brass in front of his Senate committee if they didn’t prosecute him as such. Something to bear in mind the next time you consider using the words “McCain” and “integrity” in the same sentence. Mean as a snake.
This is the flip side of the “hero” treatment we give our military personnel – specifically, referring to them as heroes without actually doing anything substantive to help them, keep them from being deployed pointlessly, etc. Bergdahl made a mistake under a great deal of pressure; he did so with the best intentions, and he has more than paid for it. The vast majority of those who criticize him now wouldn’t last five minutes under the conditions he suffered for five years. Time to let him continue with his life and move on.
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The mainstream media portray this as a kind of battle royale between the President and Congress, Democrats and Republicans, extreme left and extreme right. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the one-party state we call politics, there is a remarkable consensus on the topic of Iran. Both factions – Democrats and Republicans – consider Iran an outlaw state, both insist that it can have no nuclear technology, both blame it for the abysmal state of relations between our countries, both condemn it as a supporter of international terrorism, both repeat the mantra that “all options are on the table” with respect to Iran (a thinly veiled threat that is in itself a violation of the U.N. charter), etc., etc. What separates the two sides is nothing more than nuance.
That can only serve as an endorsement of the GOP’s strategy of doing absolutely nothing and letting nothing be done by anyone else. Here we are, at a time when interest rates are at historic lows, letting our national infrastructure rust away when we could be rebuilding it under very favorable terms, putting people to work, and investing in the future. Instead, we’ve opted for austerity at both the federal and the state level, laying off people instead of putting them to work, squeezing the air out of the economy years after the financial crash.
So, after six years of being compelled to drink the fragrant golden beverage of Obama’s national security policy – drones, bombs, domestic spying, whistleblower-persecution and all – we are now to be treated to even more acrid delicacies offered up by Clinton, the next generation. I guess this is an indication of bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, though it remains to be seen how the GOP will outflank the Democrats on the crazytown side. This is truly a race to the bottom. That’s the power of this lesser of two evils electoral philosophy.
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?
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?
Already, I have heard more about the numbers of killed in Syrian than I ever heard about the Iraq catastrophe. Again, no surprise. The government and the press meticulously count the victims of official enemies, but when it comes to the corpses generated by our misguided policies, we don’t do body counts. They still won’t put a realistic number on the lives lost in Iraq, hovering around the casual 30K guess Bush made in 2007 or so. I suppose once we have both legs in the mire of this conflict they will stop counting again. But for now, the statistics are useful – they are trying to push the American people closer to intervention, and it’s evident that the effort isn’t working very well. Less than one in four is in favor of intervention.