THE JOURNAL URGES US TO FIGHT ON BOTH SIDES IN SYRIA: BELLUM GRATIA BELLI?

9/17/14

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?

SYRIA AND THE WAR PARTY: “AFTER YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT YOU DON’T WANT IT…”

6/17/13

President Barack “W” Obama has decided it’s a good idea to take sides in the Sunni/Shia civil war in Syria (See my 5/24/13 post THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR:  A FRIGHTENING HISTORICAL ANALOGY for a not surprisingly amazingly prescient piece on this aspect of the war for which Mr. Obama now has such enthusiasm.) and has authorized sending arms to the Sunnis radicals to fight the Alawite/Shia radicals; see my 6/15/13 piece SYRIA:   HOW LONG BEFORE WE’RE CALLING OUR STOOGES “BRUTAL DICTATORS”?, only my latest piece on this impending next disaster for U.S. foreign policy.

Suddenly, though, the bipartisan War Party, of which, apparently, “W” Obama is now seeking to become the most salient member, is not satisfied with the small arms it was demanding we send to the Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria.   Prominent War Party mouthpiece Senator Bob Menendez (D., but really War Party, NJ) says

“You can’t simply send a pea shooter against a blunderbuss.”

Senator Saxby Chambliss (R., but really War Party, Ga.) talks of sending more powerful weapons to the “moderates” he is confident we have found in Syria and of enforcing no-fly zones.   Penultimate War Party leader Lindsey Graham (R., but really War Party, SC, pictured with the Dr. Frankenstein to whom he plays Igor, John McCain) says that the rebels can’t bring Bashar Assad down with small arms; they need something stronger.

The old expression regarding giving people inches only to have them demand yards immediately comes to mind.

Senator Mark Udall (D., but really War Party, Colo.) whimpers that he is afraid of a slippery slope but, lest he fall out of favor with the “defense” contractors who keep War Party members well larded and comfortably ensconced in Washington, says

“But I think we ought to be listening to the president, we ought to be listening to the military leadership.”

What Mr. Udall doesn’t understand, or understands but delights in, is that we are already on a slippery slope.  First it’s non-lethal aid, then it’s small arms, next it’s a no-fly zone, then it’s American “trainers” (what the Kennedy and Johnson administrations used to call “advisers,” only the “advisers” knew that they were really “troops,” but I digress.), then it’s….well, you know the logical conclusion of this game.  

Among all this craziness, the voice of reason comes from, of all people, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who asked the West, referring to the Al Qaeda dominated Syrian rebels,

“You want to support these people?  You want to supply arms to these people?  This bears little relation to the humanitarian values that countries all across Europe have been propagating for hundreds of years.” 

It’s not as if Mr. Putin’s horse in this race, Bashar Assad, has his feet firmly planted in the soil from which sprang the Magna Carta, either.   Mr. Putin is backing his thug not only out of a degree of affinity but also out of self-interest; not only is Syria Russia’s sole friend in the Arab world  (See my 5/17/13 post, AMERICAN ASSURANCES IN SYRIA:  A RUSSIAN GUANTANAMO IN AL QAEDA’S COURT?), but if the rebels win in Syria and it either descends into an ungovernable dystopia or becomes a radical Sunni dominated state (the only two options, despite the War Party’s disingenuous reassurances to the contrary), Russia’s terrorist problem, which makes ours look quite mild by comparison, will become virtually uncontrollable.   Mr. Putin is understandably bewildered that the West is so gung-ho about supporting people who mean the West, and Russia, so much harm.   This makes absolutely no sense to him, and understandably so.   For all his faults, the Russian president has something that most western leaders, and certainly the two U.S. presidents he has had to suffer through, lack…a sense of strategic perspective and, well, common sense.  Mr. Putin must be baffled as the United States and its allies sink further into the miasma of another deadly, expensive, and unwinnable conflict in a place we have no business being.

Somewhere, however, LBJ is smiling.  But not nearly as broadly as John McCain, the War Party’s leader, and the arms merchants who support the lifelong ego trip he and his fellow War Party members call careers.

JOHN McCAIN, CHUCK HAGEL, AND DEFERRING TO HISTORY

2/1/13

As anyone, and certainly anyone who reads my blogs, could have predicted, the War Party and its majordomo John McCain, are giving former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel one heck of a hard time in Mr. Hagel’s hearings for his confirmation as Secretary of Defense.   It seems that Mr. Hagel has the preposterous notion that we ought to be circumspect in military affairs and think long and hard before we send young men and women into combat for questionable goals.  Mr. Hagel apparently believes that further enriching the “defense” contractors who subsidize the lifelong sinecures War Party members occupy in the city they vociferously claim to detest is not sufficient justification for sending kids to their deaths.  Such apostasy is clearly anathema to Mr. McCain and his colleagues.

Fortunately for Mr. Hagel and for those of us who favor a defense that defends, Mr. McCain is not the brightest bulb in the Congressional chandelier.   Note the following exchange between Mr. McCain and Mr. Hagel on the “surge” in Iraq, of which Mr. McCain was the most salient and ardent champion:

McCain:

“Were you correct or incorrect when you said that the surge would be the most dangerous foreign policy blunder…since Vietnam?”

Hagel:

“It’s far more complicated than that…My answer is ‘I’ll defer that judgment to history.’”

McCain:

“I think history has already made a judgment about the surge, sir, and you’re on the wrong side of it.”

John McCain is, as is his usual custom, clearly wrong on at least one issue here.  History does not make judgments in the space of 5, 10, 20, or even 30 years.  History, unlike current events, takes a long time go play out.   So history has yet to make a judgment on the surge.

Mr. McCain’s narrative is that the “surge” led to pacification in Iraq that gave the United States the opportunity to leave, more or less, Iraq without the guilt of leaving behind a failed state in which anarchy and violence ruled the day.   This former may or may not be true and the latter seems to be turning out to be wishful thinking.

We do know that the “surge” cost 1,200 American lives and, less importantly, billions of dollars.  We don’t know if the “surge” led to pacification, even temporarily, of Iraq.   At the same time we were “surging,” we were stepping up a program of payouts (bribes, really) to various warring factions in Iraq to come over to our side, or at least to behave themselves for awhile.   Whether the surge or the payoffs led to Iraq’s temporary pacification we don’t know.  And we also don’t know whether we would have left regardless of conditions in Iraq; the American people were, even long before we left, sick and tired of George Bush’s Excellent Adventure in Iraq, an Adventure that John McCain was critical of only in the sense that it was not pursued aggressively enough for his tastes.

We also know that the pacification, whether the result of the surge or the expenditures of plenty of spondulicks, was temporary.   Just about every day, we hear of car bombings, kidnappings, or other such goings-on in Iraq.   The minority Sunnis, who used to run the country, are disdainful, or worse, of the now ruling majority Shiites, who are very cozy with their Shiite brethren in Iran.  The Kurds in the north have more or less seceded from Iraq, and neither the Sunnis nor the Shiites are happy about what that means for their access to Iraq’s oil wealth, much of which is located in the Kurdish north, which is now openly called Kurdistan.

It looks like Iraq will wind up being a failed state and will descend into anarchy and civil war.  It may become, or at least parts of it will become, an Iranian satellite.   Thus we will have left either another breeding ground for terrorism or have handed the Iranians a client state at the expense of American blood and treasure.   And John McCain accuses Chuck Hagel of not being sufficiently tough on Iran!

Iraq’s either descending into a hellish dystopia, becoming an Iranian satellite, or both seems to have been inevitable from the moment George Bush decided, for reasons no one has yet been able to discern, that it would be a good idea to invade Iraq.    The only difference the “surge” has made it is to delay this outcome for perhaps a few years.   Was that delay worth 1,200 human lives?

One more thought…

If Iraq keeps heading in the direction it seems to be going, it, too, will become a breeding ground for terrorism, if it has not already become one, as seems likely given the hatred the Iraqi people have developed for Americans after George Bush, er, had his way, with their country.  Note that the justification for our going into Afghanistan was that it had become a breeding ground for terrorism.  So perhaps Mr. McCain and his henchmen are brighter than I think and are simply laying the groundwork for more military adventures in Iraq, which would make the “defense” contractors even richer…and more grateful to the likes of Mr. McCain, his mini-me from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, and the rest of those who find Mr. Hagel’s talk of prudent exercise of military power so reprehensible.

History, a subject that Mr. McCain clearly does not understand, will have to tell us.