Predictably, the 2016 presidential field didn’t exactly give a rousing endorsement of President Barack Obama’s prime time speech on fighting terrorism. The reactions ranged from the superficial – Donald’s correct but irrelevant observation that Obama’s use of the presidential podium in the oval office was "odd" – to the downright scary: Chris Christie’s retro solution of turning the U.S. government’s surveillance machine loose again, even in the wake of George W. Bush’s ineffectual usurpation of cherished American civil liberties.
Surprisingly, Rand Paul and Ted "Carnival" Cruz, supposedly the most libertarian candidates in the race, called for restrictions on immigration, undermining one of the most iconic aspects of the American identity as a melting pot. Finally, Hillary Clinton distanced herself from Obama, by referring to her previous more hawkish position and also urged greater control of firearms at home.
Of course, these Democratic and Republican candidates can be as tough as they want rhetorically, because they do not yet have to sit in the president’s seat and make the tough decisions. Although I have been critical of Obama’s approach to other problems and do not totally agree with his approach to terrorism, his speech resisted the neo-conservative George W. Bush-style post-9/11 hysteria, when the president should have adopted a cool-headed approach to dampen public panic but instead stoked it to carry out his own counterproductive agenda of invading yet another Muslim country.
Instead, Obama at least seems to realize that taking the bait of the hawks – that is, Hillary and the Republicans – and being sucked into another large-scale ground quagmire in Iraq, and also in Syria, would merely further inflame anti-U.S. terrorism. Obama should be given credit for implying to the American people what few politicians have ever told them: their own government’s actions are contributing to the terrorism problem.
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Showing posts with label Ivan Eland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ivan Eland. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Scorecard on U.S. Interventionism
Since 9/11, the United States has flailed away and attacked or invaded at least seven Muslim countries. (I say "at least" because, in contravention of the U.S. Constitution, American presidents now run secret overseas conflicts, including the latest drone wars, without public knowledge or the consent of their representatives in Congress.) Since U.S. (non-Muslim) military presence or intervention in Muslim countries was the original motivator for the 9/11 attacks, doubling down on a failed policy seemed a poor bet among many expert analysts, even during the period of hysteria after the attacks on the Pentagon and Twin Towers.
Of course, the U.S. government has never wanted to focus public attention on its own irresponsible conduct before 9/11, so politicians and government bureaucrats have always told the public that the terrorists attack us because of our "freedom" or because they are poor and jobless--neither of which stands up to objective analysis. Yet the American public, content to only cursorily examine the problem, is content to see it as an "us" versus "them" or "good" versus "bad" phenomenon, never wanting to believe that their government had been part of the original problem. In a democracy, that would then implicate public negligence in correcting the root of the disease: allowing the American governmental elite to conduct profligate and unneeded U.S. meddling into the affairs of Islamic countries.
So because we can't tread on this sensitive ground, how about just looking at the counterproductive results since 9/11 of escalated U.S. interventionism--more of the same that motivated the anti-U.S. Islamist terrorist attacks in the first place. The obvious place to start is Afghanistan. Instead of just blasting the central al Qaeda group, the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, in Afghanistan and Pakistan and calling it a day, the United States decided it was going to pacify (and democratize) Afghanistan with a nation-building occupation. Never mind that the British failed to do this three times and the Soviets once very recently and that the last successful occupation of untamed and xenophobic Afghanistan was accomplished centuries before Christ by Cyrus the Great of Persia. But somehow, American politicians thought, the U.S. experience would be different. Not really.
Most of U.S. troops have now been withdrawn from Afghanistan, and the Afghan Taliban have just conducted multiple attacks on the capital of Kabul and have made inroads in the north--not a traditional Taliban area of strength. After more than a decade of fighting--costing more than 2,300 American lives, many more Afghan lives, and at least hundreds of billions of dollars--the United States lost the war and Afghanistan's future still looks bleak. The U.S. war in Afghanistan also destabilized the neighboring nuclear-armed state of Pakistan--perhaps the most dangerous country in the world--leading to the rise of the Pakistani Taliban and that group's attacking U.S. targets, including an attempted bombing of Times Square in New York.
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Of course, the U.S. government has never wanted to focus public attention on its own irresponsible conduct before 9/11, so politicians and government bureaucrats have always told the public that the terrorists attack us because of our "freedom" or because they are poor and jobless--neither of which stands up to objective analysis. Yet the American public, content to only cursorily examine the problem, is content to see it as an "us" versus "them" or "good" versus "bad" phenomenon, never wanting to believe that their government had been part of the original problem. In a democracy, that would then implicate public negligence in correcting the root of the disease: allowing the American governmental elite to conduct profligate and unneeded U.S. meddling into the affairs of Islamic countries.
So because we can't tread on this sensitive ground, how about just looking at the counterproductive results since 9/11 of escalated U.S. interventionism--more of the same that motivated the anti-U.S. Islamist terrorist attacks in the first place. The obvious place to start is Afghanistan. Instead of just blasting the central al Qaeda group, the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, in Afghanistan and Pakistan and calling it a day, the United States decided it was going to pacify (and democratize) Afghanistan with a nation-building occupation. Never mind that the British failed to do this three times and the Soviets once very recently and that the last successful occupation of untamed and xenophobic Afghanistan was accomplished centuries before Christ by Cyrus the Great of Persia. But somehow, American politicians thought, the U.S. experience would be different. Not really.
Most of U.S. troops have now been withdrawn from Afghanistan, and the Afghan Taliban have just conducted multiple attacks on the capital of Kabul and have made inroads in the north--not a traditional Taliban area of strength. After more than a decade of fighting--costing more than 2,300 American lives, many more Afghan lives, and at least hundreds of billions of dollars--the United States lost the war and Afghanistan's future still looks bleak. The U.S. war in Afghanistan also destabilized the neighboring nuclear-armed state of Pakistan--perhaps the most dangerous country in the world--leading to the rise of the Pakistani Taliban and that group's attacking U.S. targets, including an attempted bombing of Times Square in New York.
Read the entire article
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
The Republicans Need To Debate Foreign Policy
After the hysteria stirred up by the Islamic State lopping off a few heads in a faraway land, including those of a very small number of Americans, Republicans running for president fell all over themselves in beating the drums of war. That response was predictable, given public opinion polls that showed Americans, horrified from media stories about the beheadings, wanted something to be done about the group – as long as it didn’t involve heavy costs in blood and lives, a la Afghanistan or Iraq. Never mind that beheadings have also occurred in the U.S.-friendly countries of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, President Obama read the same polls and sent U.S. air power over Syria and send air and ground forces back into Iraq to battle the group without any congressional approval, as the Constitution requires.
Yet the Republican narrative of criticism, of course, has been that Obama somehow caused the rise of ISIS by doing too little rather than doing too much. In their minds, Obama should have enmeshed the United States earlier in the Syrian civil war by aiding "moderate" Syrian rebels and negotiated with then Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to leave a small number of U.S. troops in Iraq – even though George W. Bush also was unable to do so with an Iraqi leader dealing with his own population that was fed up with eight years of foreign occupation. Republicans love to forget that the Islamic State group sprang from al Qaeda in Iraq, which in turn had been created to fight George W. Bush’s idiotic invasion of Iraq. (This misadventure bore a striking similarity to U.S. military assistance to the Afghan mujahideen during the 1980s, which inadvertently led Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to eventually give us Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.) And providing arms and training to indigenous forces in the Middle East hasn’t gone well recently. The U.S.-trained Iraqi army fled the battlefield with the Islamic State on two major occasions, allowing the group to capture much sophisticated U.S. weaponry, Furthermore, the Pentagon trained a whopping 60 "moderate" rebel fighters in Syria and the CIA a few more, only to have both groups debilitated by an attack from al Nusra, the al Qaeda in affiliate in Syria.
With a track record of gross military incompetence during the two most recent presidential administrations of both parties, one would think politicians would be more leery of pulling the military trigger and making the Islamist jihadist threat worse, as the track record indicates has occurred. Unfortunately, the worse the American military does in combat, the more militarized American society becomes in singing the praises of a sclerotic and unimaginative bureaucracy. The country’s founders – most of whom were cognizant of America’s uniquely safe strategic position away from the world’s conflict zones and who were squeamish about even having a standing army in a republic – would be shocked and dismayed at modern day America’s conception of "patriotism."
Republicans always cite the founders’ vision much more than Democrats, but they usually omit the founders’ distaste of standing militaries and needless overseas wars. The one Republican candidate who did mention such niggling issues had been Rand Paul, but he then became so enamored with expanding his appeal that he started dancing with the many hawks in the party. He signed Senator Tom Cotton’s letter to Iran interfering with and undermining the president’s constitutional responsibility to negotiate treaties with foreign countries and proposed a hefty hike in defense spending in exchange for cuts in U.S. foreign aid.
Read the entire article
Yet the Republican narrative of criticism, of course, has been that Obama somehow caused the rise of ISIS by doing too little rather than doing too much. In their minds, Obama should have enmeshed the United States earlier in the Syrian civil war by aiding "moderate" Syrian rebels and negotiated with then Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to leave a small number of U.S. troops in Iraq – even though George W. Bush also was unable to do so with an Iraqi leader dealing with his own population that was fed up with eight years of foreign occupation. Republicans love to forget that the Islamic State group sprang from al Qaeda in Iraq, which in turn had been created to fight George W. Bush’s idiotic invasion of Iraq. (This misadventure bore a striking similarity to U.S. military assistance to the Afghan mujahideen during the 1980s, which inadvertently led Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to eventually give us Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.) And providing arms and training to indigenous forces in the Middle East hasn’t gone well recently. The U.S.-trained Iraqi army fled the battlefield with the Islamic State on two major occasions, allowing the group to capture much sophisticated U.S. weaponry, Furthermore, the Pentagon trained a whopping 60 "moderate" rebel fighters in Syria and the CIA a few more, only to have both groups debilitated by an attack from al Nusra, the al Qaeda in affiliate in Syria.
With a track record of gross military incompetence during the two most recent presidential administrations of both parties, one would think politicians would be more leery of pulling the military trigger and making the Islamist jihadist threat worse, as the track record indicates has occurred. Unfortunately, the worse the American military does in combat, the more militarized American society becomes in singing the praises of a sclerotic and unimaginative bureaucracy. The country’s founders – most of whom were cognizant of America’s uniquely safe strategic position away from the world’s conflict zones and who were squeamish about even having a standing army in a republic – would be shocked and dismayed at modern day America’s conception of "patriotism."
Republicans always cite the founders’ vision much more than Democrats, but they usually omit the founders’ distaste of standing militaries and needless overseas wars. The one Republican candidate who did mention such niggling issues had been Rand Paul, but he then became so enamored with expanding his appeal that he started dancing with the many hawks in the party. He signed Senator Tom Cotton’s letter to Iran interfering with and undermining the president’s constitutional responsibility to negotiate treaties with foreign countries and proposed a hefty hike in defense spending in exchange for cuts in U.S. foreign aid.
Read the entire article
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