gracchusdixit

Less than a month after the United States announced a “strategy” of using air strikes to “degrade and destroy” the terrorist organization called ISIL, it is already clear that the strategy is failing.  Not only does ISIL remain undaunted and unchecked, its fighters are threatening the Iraqi capital and have pushed to the border of Turkey, where the Turks in their tanks sit, watch, and do nothing.

The war mongers who criticized the inadequacy of air strikes in the first place are once again, as they have all along, hollering for the inevitable next step, “boots on the ground,” as if we hadn’t already wasted several trillion dollars—not to mention countless lives— putting “boots on the ground” in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  That earlier “strategy” was no less an abject failure than the present one.  Even worse, it was in large part responsible for fueling the rise of very terrorist organization we are now trying to obliterate.

The delusion that yesterday’s failure can somehow become today’s success is captured in the empty cliché that we hear so often from our political and military leaders, to wit, “failure isn’t an option”.  This glib bit of management-speak is arrant nonsense.  It implies, first of all, that success can be willed into being by the simple act of choosing it.  It assumes that better options and more successful choices are “out there somewhere” if only we had the wisdom to find and act upon them.

Success and failure aren’t choices or options.  They are consequences.  And in this case, failure is the inescapable consequence of our protracted and completely disastrous involvement in the Middle East.  The war in Iraq failed; the war in Afghanistan failed; and now, the “strategy” for dealing with ISIL is failing too.  By now, you would think we might have learned that, when it comes to further military intervention, it is success that “isn’t an option”.

This hard truth runs against the grain of everything we Americans have come to believe about ourselves and our country.

We are a “can do” people, aren’t we?  We are the richest, most powerful nation on the planet.  We have more guns, tanks, ships, and planes than the rest of the world put together.  For God’s sake, we put a man on the moon.  Surely, we can quell a rag-tag band of scruffy and vicious barbarians if only we set out mind to it.

We are also a “good” people, aren’t we?  Our hearts are pure.  Our “values” are superior.  Our “way of life”—a car in every garage, a smartphone in every ear, an iPad on every lap—is envied by everyone.  Surely, the rest of the world can see that.  Surely, other peoples and cultures can’t deny or resist it.

Or maybe they can.

No nation has a monopoly on values.  No nation can impose its way of life upon another.  No nation can “build” another nation.  No people can make moral or political choices for another people, whose cultural and political traditions pull them in a different direction.  We have tried all that, time after time.  And time after time, we have failed.

Like it or not, the people of Iraq and Syria—not to mention Egypt and Libya and Jordan and Saudi Arabia—will have to make their own choices, and those choices may not be what we would prefer.  We may deplore the choices they make.  We may even find ourselves threatened by them.  But we cannot alter or direct them.

Those who proclaim, “We have to do something; we must act,” should consider the possibility that all the military power in the world isn’t enough, that wishful thinking can’t change reality, that sometimes nothing—absolutely nothing—can be done.  It may well be that our only remaining “option” is:  Just do nothing.  Maybe, just maybe, if we left them alone for once, they might leave us alone.