Mike Zuker
2016-03-21 18:44:33 UTC
U.S. Military Official
* * * * * *Any military officer, who publicly supports Barack Obama, isn't
fit to breathe free air. They should be handed a pistol, the
door closed, and if they have any honor whatsoever, will do
their duty as a serving officer of the United States of America.
* * * * * *
The (Obama) administration has caused or exacerbated most of the
current problems in the Mideast. The Syria policy of the Obama
administration is the main reason for the growth of the Islamic
State (or ISIS) and with it, for the current crisis in Iraq,
and for a greatly increased danger of terrorism in Europe and
America.
Administration policy has fanned the rebellion in Syria and kept
it going for three full years, while doing nothing to bring it
to a successful close. Sometimes the administration has
explicitly tried to keep the rebels in a stalemate with Assad;
Secretary of State Kerry said that it was his policy to do just
that, in order to promote negotiations and peace. The result,
so obvious as to make that statement a shameless Orwellianism,
has been to keep the war dragging on.
This has provided the hothouse for the growth of the extremist
Islamic State. In due course, it spilled over from Syria into
Iraq, and it has issued threats against the American homeland.
The Obama-Kerry policy has also made for the more than 190,000
deaths in Syria, 500,000 wounded, and 8 million refugees (more
than 2 million abroad, 6 million inside Syria) this, out of a
population of about 22 million.
It is hard to imagine a policy more irresponsible, or worse from
a moral standpoint. Yet it has been the long-standing policy of
Obama and Kerry and it was Secretary of State Clintons, too,
until her last weeks in office, when she finally seemed to be
getting serious, only to have her new plans thrown out by Kerry.
Fanning a rebellion just up to the point where the country is
bleeding continuously what could be more horrible? As the
saying goes, It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake. Worse,
because it keeps compounding the crime, as a matter of
principle. But absurd behaviors often have their causes in
beliefs.
This policy has been a logical product of the attitudes and
ideologies of the Obama administration: anti-anti-Islamism,
moral posturing, moral inversion enthusiasm about toppling
allies like Mubarak, nervousness about toppling adversaries like
Assad and, under the guise of peace, an ideological neutralism
directed against ones own side, something very different from
an honestly neutral objectivity.
There are several other self-defeating U.S. policies that have
nurtured the rise of the Islamic State, directly and indirectly.
They go beyond Syria; indeed, they span the entire Mideast:
1. The little and late character of the current air strikes in
Iraq. The U.S. for months ignored Iraqs requests for help. It
just let the Islamic State keep growing. The belated help has
been minimalist, and it is given a false, self-limiting
rationale. Militarily, the refusal to put boots on the ground
means that we lack the guidance needed for fully effective air
strikes. Politically, Obama has relied on Iraqs democratic
parliamentary process to make essential changes, and the most it
has been capable of delivering is another leader from within
Malikis Shia party, hardly a good beginning for winning back
Sunni trust. What was plainly needed was a figure from Ayad
Allawis mixed Shia-Sunni party instead.
2. The prior complete withdrawal from Iraq. This compounded the
mistake of the Bush administration in destabilizing Iraq, while
undoing Bushs self-corrective measure, the surge. Obama argues
that he had to withdraw, after failing to get a new status-of-
forces agreement, but that failure was far from a mere objective
fact. Obama did not keep pushing by the usual methods that have
gotten America status-of-forces agreements and allowed us to
keep adequate long-term residual forces on the ground elsewhere.
He was too interested in satisfying his domestic base with a
total withdrawal.
3. Promoting democracy through demanding free participation of
religious and sectarian parties in elections. As I wrote earlier
this week about our actions in Gaza, America regularly calls for
democratic elections, open to all parties, including religious
ones. This policy began under Bush, but he retreated when he saw
that it worked badly; under Obama it became Americas fixed
ideology, applied without regard for consequences throughout the
Mideast. Uncritical democracy promotion is a very dangerous
ideology. The elections we demanded brought Iraq to the edge of
civil war. Elections have kept it there pretty much ever since.
The one relatively happy political period in the entire post-
Saddam history of Iraq was prior to elections, under Allawi,
whose party was genuinely inclusive religiously. Then the
elections brought Malikis Shia confessional party to power, and
it all went for naught. What was needed what is still needed
is not robust-sounding electoral democracy but civilized power-
sharing among the different religious communities.
This is called consociationalism, and it entails cooperation
among the elites of different communities, with decisions made
by consensus among their leaders. The aim is to distribute the
benefits of decisions among the communities and avoid winner-
take-all outcomes. That way, the common power structure is not
perceived as a threat to any of the communities or as something
they need to get control of in order to keep it out of the hands
of an opposed community.
Such a system is not easy to create or sustain. Professor Arend
Lijphart, its most important proponent, thought it works fine as
a form of democracy, indeed better than ordinary democracy. His
highly influential books spoke of Lebanon as a case in point.
Lebanons consociationalism was blown apart a few years later,
largely because of the countrys democracy. The logical
conclusion is that what is needed in countries such as Ira, is
the consociation, not the democracy that Lijphart connected it
with.
Consociation doesnt work so wonderfully after all; its virtue
is that it is the least bad option in a badly divided country.
But it is fragile. It can be blown apart by democracy.
Democracy, with its powerful claim to majority legitimacy, tends
to overpower the delicate consociational compromise
arrangements. So do the passions stoked by election campaigns.
Some very mature polities, such as Switzerland and the
Netherlands (Lijpharts native country), can fairly reliably
continue consociational power-sharing even while they also hold
democratic elections and rely on democracy as the legitimizing
doctrine.
In Lebanon that juggling act has proved too often impossible.
And Lebanon is probably the democratically most mature society
in the Arab Mideast. In countries even less mature than Lebanon
and there are a lot of them reliance on democracy serves to
level the complex consociational cooperative system to the
ground and bring things back to civil war. That is what America
and democracy did for Iraq.
We made democracy our goal there, after giving up on finding
Saddams weapons of mass destruction; we brought the country to
the edge of ruin.
Bush fixed it, up to a point, with the surge; Obama undid the
fix, and now it has to be fixed again. And this is merely the
local situation in Iraq. The entire Mideast is aflame, largely
because of that wrong emphasis on electoral democracy.
The policy has worsened under Obama: Bush stopped when he saw
where the elections he had demanded were leading in Gaza and
Egypt; Obama just plowed straight on.
A look at some of the trouble spots bears out this analysis:
Egypt. It is still a mess, but less than it would have been if
the Obama administration had continued to have its way and the
Muslim Brotherhood were still in power.
It is a near-miracle that Egyptian moderates survived and that
the army reasserted control. Otherwise things would be much
worse, not just inside Egypt but throughout the region. Gaza.
The war there is a consequence of the year of Muslim Brotherhood
rule that the Obama administration promoted in Egypt: The Morsi
regime armed Hamas far beyond anything Hamas had ever had before.
Libya. The country is being called a failed state; America has
cut and run.
The Libyan government continues to call for international help,
and continues not to get it. It accurately states that the
countrys chaos is mainly due to the fact that the West refused
to honor the request of the transitional government for NATO to
stay on after Qaddafi was killed and help it clean up the
militias and their weapons. (Another consequence was that some
of the weapons made their way to Mali, forcing the French to
undertake another intervention there. And the ripple effects
continue farther afield.)
Why didnt NATO stay? The administration argued at the time that
the transitional government was too moderate, too quasi-secular,
and it was better to let the Islamists which meant also the
militias take the leadership in Libya as the natural,
inevitable course of events. After having helped the Muslim
Brotherhood come to power in Egypt, the administration treated
Islamism as the norm for the region.
The administration had earlier delayed the British and French
intervention in Libya, with the result that the war had to go on
in a longer and costlier way: The NATO forces waited until
Qaddafis army had, with huge violence, broken the momentum of
the popular rebellion and was on the verge of taking Benghazi
and committing a genocidal massacre there.
The administration also restrained the British and French in
their conduct of the war, and gave them only grudging military
support; under Obama, the U.S. was not a good ally. His lack of
enthusiasm for the alliance, and for NATO, helps explain why
Libyas request for NATO to stay was not honored, and the
country was left to slide into ruin.
Lebanon. Hillary Clinton insisted in December 2010 and January
2011 that the pro-Western government proceed to the end with the
international tribunal issuing indictments after investigating
the assassination in 2005 of former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri.
With the result it was obvious in advance this was going to be
the result of precipitating a quasi-coup from Hezbollah, and
the further descent of the country into both chaos and Syrian
influence.
IS THERE A WAY BACK? War is overdetermined: That was the
conclusion of Sergei Karaganov, a leading Russian foreign-
affairs analyst, from the early consequences of the Arab Spring.
Now the wars are multiplying. Getting back from here to there
getting back from the brink of a far greater chaos in the
region, finding a path to a modicum of stability and progress
is so vast a problem, with so many interconnected corners to be
turned, that its hard to see a way. But, for starters:
1. We should stop talking about democracy in Iraq and talk
solely about moderation and cooperation among the different
communities there, and move by stages toward getting the
government led again by Allawis inter-communal party.
2. We are finally arming the Kurds against the Islamic State.
Finally! We should continue. And not stop short of sufficient
armaments.
3. In general, we should do more arming of the relative good
guys. We did it during the Cold War in our wiser periods, when
we didnt rely on going to war ourselves, and thats a large
part of how we finally won. There are risks in this there is a
big problem of control over where the weapons eventually end up
but it is even riskier when we outsource the whole matter to
others like the Saudis, or allow conflicts to just keep getting
worse.
The most extremist, war-happy parties gain ground the longer the
conflicts drag on. The Islamic State grew strong enough to seize
weapons we gave to the Iraqi army. It would have been safer to
give weapons to serious fighters, despite the valid fear that a
few of those weapons might have gotten to extremists, than to
give them to weak government forces. There are examples
elsewhere in the world. We should be arming the Ukrainians, not
just in marginal ways, but seriously arming them so that Russia
would know it would pay a high price for invading. It is the
obvious way of reducing the likelihood of full-scale invasion
and war. But thats an out-of-region point. Back to the Mideast
. . .
4. We should be arming the relatively good guys in Syria,
seriously arming them. Very late to do it, but better late than
never. And we should do it directly, not relying on Qatar or the
Saudis, who tend to arm people we have reason to distrust. If we
arent prepared to do that, then maybe we should eat crow and
get together with Russia to throw our full weight behind the
brutal dictator Assad.
For all his horrors, he is a lot less horrible than the chaos
weve spawned and the Islamists weve enabled to emerge.
Supporting Assad is a monstrous thing to suggest, but at least
it would be a strategy of sorts and, as such, superior to our
current policy, which amounts to an anti-strategy.
As of yet, Assad has done more to fight the Islamic State than
we have. Supporting him might have some prospects for success in
dealing with it, and with other problems in the region. And also
in doing something to repair our relations with Russia; it would
show the Russians that were not as crazy as they have come to
believe we are.
The Russian elite has concluded, looking at our Mideast
policies, that we are really clinically insane, actively
promoting the destruction of our own vital interests, and of
elemental stability and decency, in the name of our democratic
ideals.
Russians find this even crazier than the craziness we find in
Putin. Unfortunately, they have a point. After all, which is
worse: supporting Assad, or the approach we have taken in recent
years, fanning an unending war, sponsoring moderate Islamists
and fueling extreme ones? One would of course prefer that we
would come to our senses and do more of the right things,
without and against Assad. However, the present administration
would have to overcome its by now ingrained commitment to not
doing this.
5. The only major good news in the region is that Egypt is back
in sound army hands, despite the administrations best efforts
to prevent this. We should work closely with Egypt. Egypt is
quite concerned with helping Libya out of its current chaos, for
example. The U.S. should start to share that concern. While this
article was being prepared for publication, the news came in
that Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have carried out air
strikes in Libya against the Islamist militias, without giving
notice to the U.S. government.
Egypt has responded to Libyas appeals for help, without and
almost against America. It is a startling confirmation of what
we are saying. (And history rhymes: France went ahead on its own
with the initial strikes in Libya two years ago, before setting
up joint shop and suffering U.S. restrictions.) New York Times
and BBC journalists have commented that it shows how deeply
Americas closest regional allies distrust todays America.
The State Department has justified their distrust: It responded
with a polemic, in neutralist-negotiations language, against
outside interference in Libya. It shows specifically what the
U.S. could be cooperating with, and would be cooperating with if
it were not still largely on the wrong side. The major
difficulty in our working with Egypt is that Egypts leadership
is rather hostile to the U.S., in the form the U.S. has taken
under the present administration.
It feels viscerally that the administration foisted the Muslim
Brotherhood on Egypt, and it expresses this fact in the usual,
dangerously oversimplified nationalistic terms. There would be
opportunities for regional problems to be sorted out if we too
could regain the common sense to be usually on the right side of
things, alongside Egypt. This prospect a major unexpected
window of opportunity, if we will simply see things right
ought to provide us with the sense of an imperative to regain
the ability to see things right.
Unfortunately, this has been beyond the moral capacity of the
present administration. OBSTACLES TO CHANGING COURSE Americas
litany of errors does not leave much cause for optimism that
things are going to be done right in Iraq during the present
intervention. Nor does the political discourse in the U.S. even
outside the administration. The Republican opposition has been
inadequate. The partys establishment has largely stuck by
Bushs mistakes, principally his uncritical democracy promotion.
Its more extreme right wing trades in dangerous interventionist
mistakes for still more-dangerous isolationist mistakes.
The Islamic State grew largely out of isolationist mistakes: out
of Americas not doing enough of the right things, even more
than out of Americas doing the wrong things. Among
conservatives, a fraction has been fairly consistently on the
right side in the Mideast, but it is only a fraction: National
Review, yes; Commentary, yes; but not Fox News, whose reporters,
needing an instant framework for reporting, have often accepted
the categories, language, and assumptions of the mainstream
media.
The loudest criticism voiced by establishment Republicans and
Fox, from the Arab Spring to the 2012 U.S. election, was of
Obamas not promoting democracy with enough wholehearted
recklessness. In a sense, the only subsector of the political
spectrum that has pretty consistently avoided being on the wrong
side of Mideast factions has been the marginalized
paleoconservatives.
Not because they have advocated doing the right things they
havent but because, in wishing to stay out of the Mideast,
and in accepting their own marginalized role of refusing to see
things through any politically correct ideological lenses at
all, they have at least avoided talking themselves into being
actively on the wrong side. The realist school in
international affairs should in theory have had that same
virtue, but in practice it has not. It has mostly gone along
with the medias and intelligentsias false constructions of
reality, merely presenting the same positions as a prudent
acceptance of reality rather than as an express moral wish.
But then, it has long been known that there is a Realism of the
Left. It may be a pseudo-Realism, but it has a powerful academic
reach. It is an inevitable by-product of the intersection of
Realist culture with the hegemonic Left culture in academia
(rather like the way libertarianism often advertises itself as
useful to the hegemonic Left culture in fighting against
American power abroad and against security authority at home).
And it is the official Realism of Obama and Kerry. There is, to
be sure, one large sector of American life that has avoided
placing itself on the wrong side in the Mideast most of the
time. It is the Christian Right. It has been able to hold out
for a simple reason: It is more inclined to align with Mideast
Christians than with Mideast Muslims. Which is not intrinsically
a moral virtue, but it has some commonsense practical virtue,
given that non-Western Christians are inclined to align with the
West, and in this era too many non-Western Muslims are not.
By contrast, the Christian Left in America, with which Obama
identifies, aligns with Political Islam. Moral inversion is the
very cornerstone of its global orientation: The Political
Christianity of the Left identifies with Political Islam as a
fellow postmodernist Left, fighting against the injustice of
the modern Wests global wealth and influence (while dumping the
blame on conservatism the only enemy the Western Left likes
to fight when Political Islam, applying logically its
opposition to Western modernist influences, oppresses women and
minorities).
The Christian Left has been front and center in getting
everything wrong on the Mideast. The Reverend Jeremiah Wright
praises Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam; President Obama
praises Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is not a
coincidence; there is a deep shared reason behind their
preferences. Both are acting naturally on the ideology of the
Christian Left.
Remedying the range of American errors across the Mideast would
require a fundamental change in the administrations thinking.
This is unlikely to happen. The ideologies that have put the
administration on the wrong side of things are deeply
entrenched, not only inside its offices but also in the mass
media and the think tanks. A real change is likely to be
obstructed until there is a new administration, and probably
only a half-change will come even then.
No major mainstream political sector in the U.S. is seriously
rethinking the democracy-promotion ideology facing the depth
of its mistakes, separating them from its important truths,
reworking it to get it right. None is reconsidering application
of democracy-promotion in the Islamic world, despite the major
disasters it has brought there, nor even reviewing the demand
for inclusion of religious parties in the electoral lists.
Americas mistakes in the past do not reduce its obligations in
the present. If anything, they increase the obligations in the
present: We have remedial obligations. Those past mistakes do,
however, give cause for concern that America, instead of
remedying its mistakes, will further compound them. Indeed,
almost inevitably it will do so on the larger Mideast-wide
scale, even if it finally does something right inside Iraq.
It would seem hard for the Iraq intervention itself not to make
things better, compared with letting the Islamic State continue
growing unchecked. Yet even here there is a risk. Without the
intervention, the Islamic State would have expanded further but
might have quickly run into a bloody denouement at the hands of
Kurds, Shias, Turks, Assad, and others. If the U.S. serves
throughits policy of containment to stabilize the Islamic
States territory it is de facto extending the Kerry
Doctrine of stalemate from Syria into Iraq it could help the
Islamic State consolidate itself, and thence terrorize the world.
Given time, it is bound to entrench its tentacles in society, as
the Taliban did, and become much harder to uproot. The Kerry
Doctrine is the old Cold War Left version of containment,
meaning purely defensive containment aimed at best at stalemate,
and thence at peace negotiations from a neutral standpoint of
equality. The Cold War Left evidently persists, both in its
strategic aversion to winning and in the cultural complement to
that aversion: moral-equivalency argumentation; but without the
nuclear standoff that provided a reason for caution about moving
openly beyond stalemate.
There is cause for hope in this loss of a strategic reason
Obama could easily shrug his shoulders as the intervention
proceeds, and walk across the line of containment but also
cause for despair: The self-renunciation has deepened to the
point that it no longer needs its former grain of strategic
justification. Despite this, the current Iraq intervention has
to be supported, and criticisms of its shortfalls have to be
made in ways that encourage a more adequate intervention, not a
less adequate one. It has stopped the Islamic States advance;
it could be built on to turn it back. But much more than this
will have to be done, in Iraq and elsewhere, before there is a
stop to the overall tide of American self-damage in the Mideast.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/386354/how-obama-caused-
isis-ira-straus