War Without End

I first started blogging back in 2004, motivated by the apparent political insanity of the Bush administration.  Its ability to start a disastrous war based on lies without facing political consequences depressed me to no end.  When Barack Obama was elected, I figured that the neo-conservative obsession with "pre-emptive war" would be over.  Turns out that the joke was on me the whole time.

As the war drums beat in 2003, I attended anti-war protests.  I remember talking to a woman who figured that war in Syria would follow one in Iraq, all part of the Bush administration's crusade to remake the Middle East in the American image.  Turns out that war with Syria actually was on the horizon, but under a Democratic president.  Back then Obama was a local politician in the state where I lived (Illinois), and I appreciated him speaking out against the war.  So it goes.

We are hearing the familiar bromides while the bombs are falling this time.  America is supporting "moderates" in Syria, who will somehow magically defeat both ISIS and the Assad regime with a little know-how and  military support.  Considering how a similarly America-molded government in Iraq had totally failed against ISIS attacks, I doubt that the moderates in Syria will gain any more legitimacy than the Diem regime did in Vietnam, the Contras in Nicaragua, Hamid Karzai in Aghanistan or Nuri al-Maliki in Iraq.  The dangerous illusion that America can intervene in complex civil conflicts abroad and control the political process there by remote control just refuses to die.

By my reckoning, America has been engaged in war and occupation in the Middle East almost continuously since 1987, when the navy was sent to the Persian Gulf to escort Kuwaiti tankers during the Iran-Iraq War.  During this now forgotten action lasting into 1988, the US accidentally shot down an Iranian air liner (similar to the sad fate of the Malaysian flight over the Ukraine this summer.)  Less than two years later the American army flooded into Saudi Arabia after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.  Since then we've seen the Gulf War, the enforcement of No-Fly Zones, sanctions, the second invasion in 2003, a resulting guerrilla war, and now an intervention in the uprising by ISIS.  You could maybe even argue that America has been on a war footing in the region since 1983, when Reagan sent the marines to Beirut.  Although he sent them home after a horrific attack, he also simultaneously supported Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, and supplied missiles to Iran in return for hostages.

Basically, the American government has been heavily involved in the Middle East for thirty years, with several interventions by ground troops and many more bombings and drone strikes.  After all of this, what's been accomplished?  ISIS taking down Iraq's government is the worst case scenario, and it looks like that just might happen.  I wonder why our foreign policy mavens haven't figured out after three decades of intervention in the Middle East that they simply aren't capable of bending the region to their will.  When will they stop?  Until there is a truly final moment, like the fall of Saigon, which capped off another thirty year failed American intervention, it will be war without end.

13 Years Later, Still Imprisoned By 9/11

Yesterday brought news that the president wants to start bombing ISIS in Syria as well as Iraq.  While I don't care much for violent religious fanatics, there does not seem to be much evidence that this group is determined to strike the United States.  It was fitting that the news came a day before the anniversary of 9/11, since Obama's new war is entirely consistent with what people used to call "the post-9/11 world" before it just became "the world."

Like most, I remember that horrible morning very vividly, especially my immediate thoughts when I realized the scale of the attacks (I was listening on radio.)  I knew, right then and there, that this attack would bring years of war and bloodshed, which was the first time that day that I broke down into tears.  The thought that the deaths of that day would end of being just the tip of the iceberg was almost too horrific for me to bear.  Even over a dozen years later the cycle continues, with the vague "War on Terror" apparently never-ending.  (Hunter S. Thompson pretty much predicted this on 9/12.)

Despite the changeover from the neo-con Dubya to the most liberal president since LBJ, the war persists and even strengthens.  We still have Guantanamo Bay.  Despite bin Laden's death, the occupation of Afghanistan continues.  The mess made in Iraq has led to yet another military intervention.  Our government treats its citizens with suspicion, and spies on the people in an unprecedented fashion.  The teenagers I teach have never known a time when their country was not at war.

Thirteen years later, it's time to finally break the spell.  The bodies have piled up, but nobody is any safer.  Come home, America.

Would a Syrian Intervention Be a "Stupid War"?

I was living in Illinois when the war in Iraq began, and I was so happy that one of the state's politicians, an up and coming state representative from Chicago named Barack Obama, had come out forcefully against it.  The war made me sick to my stomach, from the lies used to promulgate it, the jingoist attacks on the Dixie Chicks and anyone else who dared to oppose it, to the thousands of lives snuffed out.  As Obama took on national aspirations, his vocal opposition to the war was questioned, even after its failure and false pretenses were made manifest.  (People forget just how awful the climate for dissent was back in 2003-2004.)  He famously said that he was not opposed to all wars, only "stupid wars."

I thought that was a great statement at the time, not only because Iraq was a stupid war, but also because blanket pacifism is not a viable basis for this country's foreign policy.  Obama's military actions in power, such as drone strikes, troop increases in Iraq and the bombing campaign in Libya, have surprised those who missed the second meaning of his "stupid wars" statement.  That said, I have been increasingly alarmed by the continuation of these Bush-like policies when it comes to the "war on terror," especially drone strikes and the activities of the NSA.

The president clearly does not see these interventions, Syria included, as "stupid wars." The covert activities and drone strikes are meant to carry on the same old war against Al-Qaeda, but through different, less costly and risky means than invasion and regime change.  He is pushing for action in Syria on wholly different grounds, namely to dissuade the Assad regime and other nations from using chemical weapons.  Essentially, he is trying to enforce international norms through Bush-like methods of unilateralism.

The goal of these strikes is rather admirable, and reflects a kind of liberal interventionism now prominent in Obama's cabinet.  In so many ways, it would be a far less stupid war than the war in Iraq.  The United States would not be aiming for regime change, it would only be involved short term, and it is responded to a case of mass murder perpetuated by a horrible cruel regime.  The war in Iraq was a naked imperialist adventure by the Bsuh administration to remake the Middle East to conform to a neo-con vision.  The talk of weapons of mass destruction was never anything more than a pretense, rather than the real motivation in the case of Syria.  Obama is not aiming to put a new regime in power, or to subject Syria to occupation.

A potentially open-ended intervention to unilaterally enforce an international norm isn't exactly inspiring the American people to action now, even though they got in lockstep behind the Iraq disaster.  Of course, the fatigue from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan perpetuated by Obama's predecessor has a lot to do with that.  I also think that the horse sense of the public is actually right for a change, but perhaps not for the reasons I usually hear.  The same conservatives who hurled abuse at me while I protested the war in Iraq ten years ago are now against intervention in the Middle East in large part due to their antipathy to the president.  Most other people know little about the war in Syria, and the suffering that Syrian people have endured at the hands of the Assad regime.  Unlike in 2003, they aren't scared of the boogeyman.  

From where I stand, war in Syria would be stupid (namely), namely because it would, no matter how advanced our smart bombs are these days, lead to the deaths of innocent people.  Their deaths would be all for the cause of the United States saving face after its president set a "red line" of behavior that the Assad regime broke.  It will result in more, not less suffering by regular Syrians.  It will not bring an end to that horrible war, and the rebels fighting Assad could end up being even worse (and Taliban-like) when they get into power, anyway.  It would be stupid because it would be unilateral, and harm all the efforts Obama has made to patch up America's relationship with the rest of the world.  It would continue to arouse the hostility of the people of the Middle East, who are tired of American political and military intervention.  That hostility gives Al-Qaeda its foot soldiers.  Any blowback will be worse than anything that might possibly be accomplished.

Perhaps the successful raid on bin Laden's compound and the bombing campaign in Libya have made the president over-confident about the capabilities of American force.  I just hope he thinks about where he was and how he was thinking back in 2003, and somehow changes his mind about this stupid war.