The Middle East has been America’s military playground for over 30 years. Starting with the first Gulf War, the US has gone beyond the installation of dictatorial puppets and into the realm of constant warfare, with drone strikes only a part of our present involvement in that region. Up until now, not much of this has touched the average American, who lives thousands of miles away from the carnage. Unless you or a someone you knew was in the military and deployed there, it didn’t feel real. Or at least it didn’t, until recently. Paris changed all that. Suddenly, the battlefield was no longer just the Middle East, where we could safely ignore it, but potentially here, where we live.
ISIL, popularly known as Isis, is threatening the world with something that security people have long feared – decentralized global war. Past enemies emanated from a single geographic area – Russia, say, or Vietnam. They could be driven back within their borders and contained. But ISIL is not bound by national boundaries. It’s wherever there are people angry enough to be willing to strap on an explosive device and blow themselves up for a cause.
The spectre of such a conflict is both scary and depressing. Sadly, it was also preventable. As non-mainstream media have been making clear, America played a role in the rise of ISIL, starting with the essential disenfranchisement of the Sunni people. But more broadly, America has done much to provoke resentment, from saddling Muslim nations with authoritarian regimes and overthrowing popularly elected leaders to drone attacking people throughout the Near East and parts of Africa (Muslim nations all) and funding local wars of insurgency. As many in America call for further arming of militants in the Middle East, and especially Iraq and Syria, it might be prudent to remember that one of the problems so far with “arming militants” has been that in many cases, the armaments end up in ISIL’s hands almost soon as we drop them. Arming militants has meant that ISIL always has arms.
Do we want ISIL to have arms? When we talk about the cover of Syria and Iraq for the rise of militant jihadism, we aren’t taking into consideration the fact that there would be no cover in these places if they didn’t remain war zones. What’s worse is that these war zones are largely our own creation: we overthrew the president of Iraq in 2003 and materially supported the opposition against the president of Syria. Furthermore, the destabilization of these and other governments has led to a flood of refugees, not only from Iraq and Syria, but Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, and the Sudan.
Meanwhile, our political leaders, for the most part, flounder. Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State during 2011 when a lot of this got started, says wep need to send in troops, lots of troops, possibly for a long timein “a sustained commitment.” This begs the question of how troops in Iraq and Syria are going to protect capitals such as Paris and Brussels (New York and Washington) which are far away from the acknowledged theater of war. Likely the answer will be more police state, surveillance-based lockdown of the sort that has failed to prevent big terrorist attacks in the past. But as one glib commentator pointed out – the terrorists who attacked Paris didn’t need high tech communications. They just “set their watches” and went at it.
Localized, low-tech terrorism is nerve-wracking because it’s difficult to detect and incredibly disruptive. People are killed, people get scared and angry, people lash out, and pretty soon, bombs are exploding, killing more people. It’s an ugly, vicious circle.
That said, ISIL does seem like a truly dangerous organization, and it’s easy to find yourself thinking that it would be nice to just wipe them out with a quick blast of military might, and be done with it. If only it were that easy. The trouble with ISIL is that it isn’t a foreign country that we can blow up—it’s a mindset that makes its members want to kill and disrupt people who have nothing to do with any wars anywhere. The question then becomes: can you stop a global movement like ISIL with bullets and bombs? Where is the battlefield? Who are the combatants? How will we know who to kill?
For all their bold words about taking on this new terrorist enemy, politicians on both sides of the aisle are whistling Dixie if they think that air strikes in Syria are going to prevent bombings in Western cities. This isn’t a conventional war and it’s unlikely that conventional, tried-and-true methods will succeed. So assuming it’s too late to defeat ISIL militarily (if that was ever possible), what do we do? It’s easy to say, stop creating the situations that lead to people being radicalized in the first place, but there’s probably too much water under the bridge for that now. To even attempt such a de-escalation would require rare visionary leadership of the kind we see once every few generations if we’re lucky. Certainly neither Hillary Clinton nor the Republicans have broken any new ground with their responses; only Sanders sounds like he’s got it in him, and he would be fighting an uphill battle if he tried.
Meanwhile, America and France are among the world’s oldest and most inspirational democracies, both founded on freedom and human rights. Yet once again, people around the world are going to be asked to surrender their liberty and their privacy in the interest of fighting terrorism (and defeating ISIL). We know this because it happens every time, and every time, we do surrender just a bit more of what makes us human and free. Oh well. It’s too bad we have to make our core values the first casualty in every fight, but ironically, it will make both ISIL and the NSA very happy if we do. Whether it makes any of us any safer remains an open question.
Rather than laying this at
Rather than laying this at the doorstep of Hillary Clinton, “Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State during 2011 when a lot of this got started,” let’s discuss when this all actually began. Isis got it’s start long before this administration, the main founders were all imprisoned at Camp Bucca during the Bush administration and it is believed that the formal formation of Isis began at that time. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-origins-of-isis-finding-the-birthplace-of-jihad/ However there have been warnings of an Isis type group forming for some time and there were warnings by those knowledgable about the Middle East at the time of the Bush invasion to remove Saddam that we were creating a terrorist Hydra. And sad to say these predictions are coming true.
While I don’t think that bombing will solve this problem either, I do think that it may be necessary to use a many pronged approach. It appears that the celebrated Arab Spring has become the Jihadi Spring. But the sparks that created this fire existed long before Hillary Clinton was ever Secretary of State, perhaps to some degree even prior to the second Bush administration. However it was the Bush administration that fanned the sparks into a big huge glowing flame.
An article in Huff Post today
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/paris-attacks-iraq-war-isis_5650e110e4b0d4093a5807ba
Helpful links
Thank you Rosa Bonheur. In an atmosphere of so many “shooting-from-the-hip” assertions, a participant whose contributions are factually grounded and documented is, indeed, refreshing.
Fricasseed
As much as the Bush clan’s actions may have been misguided, boneheaded and opportunistic, it does seem useful to keep the larger picture in mind. There is a finite amount of space and resources on Earth. Overlay this with artificial boundaries, and imperialistic designs..how can there not be conflict? Especially considering that all the people involved in the fight are self-identified as reactive breakaway factions, an outgrowth of what came before, going back to “the time of Adam”.
The fear now has our attention…But isn’t this a chickens come back to the roost scenario. I don’t see the bombs helping much in the short or long term.
If we only could calm down and take stock. What leader will lead us there?
Good assessments of the situation
I always look forward to the read when i see your name attached, Lise. Always a very well thought-out analyses of the social-political issues of the day, well-written, cogent, and good food for thought as we grapple with myriad intractable problems. Thank you so much.
With his permission, I’d like to paste Steve West’s comment on the topic which was printed in last week’s Commons. I found it to be a concise well-framed assessment of the situation, one which deserves a wider audience:
It stuns me every time.
A) An orchestrated act of violence against innocent people in a “first world” country, and the world gasps and mourns, changes its Facebook profile pic, reminds us to pray while exacting vengeance, and then waits for the next attack.
But when B) acts of orchestrated violence against innocents happen on a daily basis, are funded by tax dollars, driven by profit motives, ordered by “leaders,” yet don’t dominate the 24-hour “news” feed (despite literally the same number dying daily), the world shrugs and calls that “unfortunate.”
Which is how we get A.
American 'Interests'
America’s involvement in the Middle East goes back a lot further than 30 years, Lise. U.S. oil companies made their presence known there shortly after oil was discovered in Saudia Arabia, around 1933. FDR signed a treaty aboard the U.S.S. Quincy in the Suez Canal in 1945 with the horribly repressive Saud royal family which remains intact to this day. And then there’s the Shah of Iran, another puppet dictator installed by a US and UK-backed coup d’état in 1941 because his father had started the process of nationalizing the oil industry.
For more on America’s geopolitical interests in Central Asia, check out the book “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives” by Zbigniew Brzezinski. He is unabashed, and much of what he called for in this 1998 treatise has been accomplished. Syria and Iran are the big targets still looming.
Strategy has got to change
Drone operators have come out saying they have been regularly bombing innocent people, and are heavy alcohol and drug users as a result, with PTSD. They said they have killed children on a regular basis, calling them “fun-sized terrorists” – and state that the drone program is both being abused, and is not a good long-term strategy.
This is the strategy that the Obama administration embraced and expanded.
The drone operators point out, as many here do, that drone killing people’s innocent relatives makes them want to get revenge.
We have been messing with the middle east for 50 plus years, but I think noting Mrs. Clinton’s role in recent events is relevant, especially since she would like to take charge and send more troops. Her judgement is at issue. It’s fair game to discuss her work history. She’s one of the many who seem to have the wrong approach.
For all those who’d like to bomb or troop them to oblivion, why not use nukes? Conversely, we could try negotiation and diplomacy. perhaps in exchange for us leaving that part of the world alone, they’d leave other parts alone. Deal?
Any bombs we drop today will just guarantee that we have a new crop of terrorists in 2030, in my view.
A little more info please
Not to say this isn’t accurate but citing simply “drone operators” isn’t really all that helpful. Could you please post some links to information where these supposed “drone operators” are quoted and/or named. Otherwise this is just simply internet junk.
Sure
Here’s the interview in the Guardian with a drone operator. He’s part of group of operators that have come out against this method of warfare.
You can read their letter to the President, the CIA and Defense Dept, too.
Here’s part:
“When the guilt of our roles in facilitating this systematic loss of innocent life became too much, all of us succumbed to PTSD. We were cut loose by the same government we gave so much to ?? sent out in the world without adequate medical care, reliable public health services, or necessary benefits. Some of us are now homeless. Others of us barely make it.
We witnessed gross waste, mismanagement, abuses of power, and our country’s leaders lying publicly about the effectiveness of the drone program. We cannot sit silently by and witness tragedies like the attacks in Paris, knowing the devastating effects the drone program has overseas and at home. Such silence would violate the very oaths we took to support and defend the Constitution. “
Will This Blow Up Blow Up?
Anyone else getting World War III vibes out of the current conflict? When I see headlines about Turkey shooting down Russian planes, and France calling for war, and lots of saber-rattling all over, I don’t feel so good.