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?

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ON THE ISLAMIC STATE: “I WAS FOR IT UNTIL I WAS AGAINST IT”?

8/21/14

The Wall Street Journal editorialized this morning (Friday, 8/21/14, “So What Will You Do, Mr. President”) that the U.S. should “do what it takes to defeat these enemies of American and a civilized world.”  The editorial urged President Obama to take some concrete action, apparently beyond the air strikes he has already authorized, to defeat the Islamic State (“IS”), the band of terrorist thugs and crazies also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (“ISIS”) and the Islamic State in the Levant (“ISIL”) depending on the day and the mood of the politicians and the media.

Even hard core non-interventionists like yours truly are at the point at which we would advocate some action, including heavy and concentrated U.S. air strikes, against IS, especially in the wake of IS’s unspeakable beheading of American citizen and journalist James Foley.   We have few arguments with the Wall Street Journal in that regard, though we suspect the Journal would like to see more than air strikes; the Journal has long seemed to back a recommitment of U.S. ground troops to Iraq after loudly protesting the withdrawal of our troops from the untenable nation.

The Wall Street Journal’s argument weakens, however, when we consider that, just a few months ago, that voice of the neocons was arguing for air strikes in support of IS in Syria.  The Journal wanted the U.S. to conduct air strikes to support the rebels against Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose most salient opponent in Syria was not the reportedly “moderate” Free Syrian Army, but the already radicalized ISIS.   While the Journal, and the neocons for which it is the major mouthpiece, expressed no sympathy for ISIS, the actions it advocated, and the toppling of Mr. Assad in which it helped those actions would result, would have been an injection of some pretty high-powered steroids into ISIS and its zeal to terrorize and radicalize the Middle East.

Further, the Journal was all for the American invasion of Iraq, perhaps the most salient result of which was the establishment of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which morphed into IS.  See 8/19/14’s DAN COATS BLASTS THEISLAMIC STATE…BUT IGNORES HIS OWN CULPABILITY at Rant Lifestyle.

The Journal and its neocon fellow travelers first prescribed an action that created the Islamic State.  Now they want to fight the Islamic State in Iraq but ally ourselves with the Islamic State in Syria.  Such apparently contradictory advocacy does not appear contradictory at all to those of us who believe that the basic neocon tenet is “Any way, any time, anywhere”…as long as the arms merchants, who support neocon pols and the neocon movement in general, can make some money.