In its lead editorial this (Wednesday, 9/17/14, page A14)
morning, the Wall Street Journal urges the Obama Administration to lift the siege on Aleppo by bombing Syrian President Bashar Assad’s airfields. This
would put the United States ,
explicitly, on both sides of the Syrian conflict and clearly on one side of the
larger Sunni/Shiite conflict in the Middle
East . Who but someone who
urges us to fight a war for the sake of fighting a war would urge such an
insane policy?
Even dedicated non-interventionists like yours truly can see
some merit in a bombing campaign against ISIS,
ISIL ,
the Islamic State, or whatever it is
being called today, especially after this especially cold-blooded group of
terrorists has beheaded two Americans and one Brit. We don’t like our country putting its
considerable proboscis where it doesn’t belong, but we also can’t see our
country standing idly by while its citizens are tortured, killed, and otherwise
abused.
But I have also urged caution, reminding members of the War Party, and its most stentorian
voice at the Wall Street Journal,
that only a few months ago, they were urging the United
States to bomb Syria
in support of the Syrian rebels, the most salient group of which was, and is, ISIS . (See, for example, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ON THE ISLAMIC STATE: “I WAS FOR IT UNTIL I WAS AGAINST IT”?, 8/21/14 ,
MORE ENLIGHTENED THINKING FROM WASHINGTON: LET’S FIGHT IN BOTH IRAQ AND SYRIA!, 6/25/14 ) A military campaign against ISIS ,
however, would put us on the side of Mr. Assad,
a guy that the Journal and its fellow neocons were urging us to oppose only a
few months ago. Fighting ISIS
thus would have the implicit effect of our fighting on both sides of the Syrian Civil War. Only the geniuses at the State Department and other bastions of deep thinking foreign policy formulation in Washington would put
us on both sides of a war.
Now the Journal,
by urging the Obama Administration
to bomb Syrian airfields and take other steps to lift the siege of Aleppo, is
advocating explicitly placing us on both sides of the Syrian Civil War,
fighting both the Assad regime and its most powerful and visible opponent,
ISIS.
The rationale the Journal
provides for getting us on both sides of the Syrian conflict is that
Sunnis will not
support the campaign against Islamic State if they think our air strikes are
intended to help the regime in Damascus and its Shiite allies in Beirut
and Tehran .
This might indeed be the case, though we could, by the
intensity and targeting of our air campaign, show the world that our objective,
and only objective, is to rid the world, to the extent we can, of a group of
extremists who have committed what ought to be the worst of sins on the
international stage, i.e., the
cold-blooded killing of American citizens.
But I digress.
More to the point, though, is that while the Sunnis may misinterpret an effort
solely directed against ISIS as our taking the sides of
the Shiites in Syria
and in the larger Middle East , what will be the reaction
of the Shiites if they see us fighting explicitly on the side of the Sunnis in Syria ? Perhaps they will take solace in that we are
supporting the Shiite dominated government in Iraq ,
but I wouldn’t bet on it.
The larger point is that it’s easy to see how byzantine the
politics of the Middle East are and
the best policy is to stay as far away from such intrigue as we can, limiting
our involvement to making it clear that killing and torturing American citizens
will not go unanswered.
One suspects, though, that the neocons, their manifesto writers at the Wall Street Journal, and the rest of the War Party in Washington
care little for either the complexities of the Middle East
or the rationalizations they provide for military action there. Their sole, or at least their paramount, goal
in urging us to bomb both the Assad regime and the Islamic State that opposes
it is to get us involved in a war, any war…doing so is good for the “defense”
contractors who keep War Party members comfortably ensconced in their Washington,
D.C. sinecures. And what could be more
important than that?
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