gracchusdixit

When the United States invaded Iraq 11 years ago, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld invoked the phrase “shock and awe” to describe both the strategy behind the invasion and what he expected the consequences to be, i.e., a joyful welcome from a “liberated” people, a quick and painless withdrawal, and a trivial cost tidily paid for by all that lovely oil lurking beneath the Mesopotamian sands.

Things, of course, turned out rather differently.  After squandering more than a trillion dollars and at least 100,000 American and Iraqi lives, the nation we supposedly liberated is disintegrating before our eyes, and, along with it, most of the Middle East.  The shock of our invasion left behind, not awe, but an awful mess.

Now, we are at it again.

Many of the very people who advocated the invasion of Iraq in the first place—Republican neocons, Democratic “hawks,” armchair generals on both right and left—have prodded the President of the United States into involving us once more in the very quagmire we thought we had left behind.   Their excuse is that the President lacked a “strategy” for dealing with the carnage and chaos they were largely responsible for  creating.  About that, they were, and are, right.  The President didn’t have a “strategy” before and he doesn’t have one now.  But neither do his critics.  The reason in both cases is that no possible strategy exists for dealing with a situation that is hopelessly beyond our control.

The interventionists proclaim that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—a.k.a., ISIL—must be stopped.  Fine.  But exactly how?  And why do they suppose that stopping this latest incarnation of Islamic extremism—even if that were possible—is going to change anything?  We “stopped” Al Qaeda by killing Osama Bin Laden, and before we knew it, a new breed of extremists sprang up from the earth like dragon’s teeth.  Why do they imagine that quashing ISIL will have a more lasting effect?

They assert that we must take the fight into Syria.  Fine.  But then what?  The bloody civil war in that country will continue unabated, and its bloody dictator  will continue slaughtering people until another round of insurgency and revenge begins all over again.

They say that the Iraqis must take charge of defending their own country, by forming stable political and military institutions.  Fine.  But saying so does not make it so.  Iraq is an artificial country, cobbled together by the British after the end of the First World War.  It has never had a stable, reliable, or even remotely democratic government.  Miracles may happen, but praying for miracles doesn’t amount to a “strategy”.

They insist that our “partners in the region” must step up to the plate and join the fight.  Fine.  But have they taken a close look at those “partners” or given any thought to their motives?  We have supported authoritarian regimes like those in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states for decades, regimes that ignore and oppress their own populations and, behind our backs, have encouraged and subsidized the very terrorists we now expect them to condemn.

What our foreign policy elite cannot bring themselves to say is this:  the United States is largely responsible for the mess in the Middle East, and more meddling by us will do nothing but make matters more terrible than they already are.

We destroyed the Iraqi state and dismantled its institutions after years of propping up its vile dictator.  We toppled the only democratically elected secular government in the history of Iran and installed a phony authoritarian monarch in his place, poisoning relations with that country ever since.  We intervened in Libya to oust another dictator, one of the few we didn’t like, then left the country to disintegrate.  We have turned a blind eye to Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and its repression of Gaza’s Palestinian population, prompting an endless cycle of violence and retribution by Palestinians and Israelis alike.

The truth is, we have never had a “strategy” in the Middle East beyond the immediate protection of our narrow economic and political interests.  While proclaiming the values of democracy, human rights, and liberal institutions, we have done absolutely nothing to advance those values anywhere in the Muslim world.

The beheadings of two American journalists and a British aid worker were shocking and barbaric.  By all means let us put an end to the awfulness of those responsible.   But let us also put an end to the shockingly awful “strategy” that created ISIL in the first place.  In one year alone, Saudi Arabia beheaded 79 people, many for petty offenses against a repressive and medieval religious code.  If we want to end extremism in the Middle East, perhaps we should worry less about our enemies and spend more time worrying about our so-called friends.