Democrats’ Denial of War Problem Grows Even as Blowback Blossoms
“I don’t currently know the specific goals and objectives of the Saudi campaign, and I would have to know that to be able to assess the likelihood of success.”
- General Lloyd Austin, Commander, US Central Command (CENTCOM), before Congress, March, 2015, when asked about the chances of success of Saudi Arabia’s attacks on Yemen which President Barack Obama had just decided to join.
If the goals of America’s youngest foreign war were unknown four years ago even to the man in charge of it, its consequences suddenly became painfully clear this week.
A squadron of just 10 drones — glorified model airplanes — was able to knock offline half the production capacity of the world’s most important oil producer.
A hasty decision to insert the US into yet another foreign war has — again — exponentially worsened a conflict in which our nation had little or no stake to begin with. Now the potential for full-scare war in the world’s most volatile region — the oil patch — threatens to derail the global economy.
And yet just days before this attack, the so-called opposition party in the US held a presidential debate from which the leading/only candidate in favor of ending these blatantly counter-productive wars was excluded. Representative Tulsi Gabbard — an active National Guard member and Iraq invasion veteran who has seen firsthand the folly of these wars, was not deemed to have satisfied whatever magical formula was used to narrow the field for the latest personality parade masquerading as a debate.
We have learned from the debate how leaving a record player on at night will help overcome the legacy of slavery in America’s education system, but still have not and will not hear an impassioned plea for a reconsideration of our nation’s murderous, counter-productive and bankrupting shoot-first-ask-questions-never foreign policy.
Truth be told, no failure of the interventionist mindset seems great enough to spur reflection about its essential wisdom or efficacy.
We supposedly learned from Vietnam that you never get involved in another country’s civil war unless we have a vital national security issue at stake, clearly defined goals and a clear exit strategy. Costs, even, are to be frankly analyzed, if you can imagine that happening. The policy, known as the Powell Doctrine, was anyway the supposed lesson of getting 58,000 Americans killed in a failed war fought in a jungle for nothing.
That the man who gave his name to this idea would later completely contradict his own advice and become a chief salesman of the Iraq invasion would be risible indeed if the consequences of that disastrous invasion weren’t so dire. While allegations that Saddam Hussein had links to Islamic fundamentalist terror groups turned out to be false, the decision to topple the dictator actually allowed al Qaeda to set up camp in the country for the first time, only to later morph into the even-worse ISIS.
Consequently the invasion set off a chain reaction of radicalization across the entire oil region, not of the Iranian variety our chickenhawks and Netanyahu stooges keep cackling about, but of the same Saudi-backed Wahabbi strain you might remember from 9/11. Following Iraq, intervention after intervention only widened the chaos and deepened the power vacuums across the region.
First up was Libya.
While as usual the Western intervention there was couched in terms of coming to the rescue of beleaguered civilians and giving a nascent movement toward civil society and democracy the one tiny nudge it needed to get over the top, it was of course in the end merely about toppling a government and leaving the good citizens we allegedly came to help, helpless.
The true benefactors?
Islamic fundamentalists, human smugglers and even slave traders.
Humanitarian mission?
Right.
Many Americans might be tempted to brush off yet another reckless and casual decision to decapitate the government of a nation most citizens can’t even find on a map. But in Libya we saw clearly that these wars always come back to haunt us, too.
The chaos in Libya (and of course later in Syria) spurred a huge increase in refugee and migrant flows to Europe. The millions fleeing Africa and the Middle East for Europe massively stressed social support networks in Europe and, more gravely, fueled the rise of far-right nationalist political movements in many parts of Europe.
Bottom line: Interventions fuel extremism both in the target country and in the West in general.
Of course no one goes back and remembers how these failed missions began in the first place — with a war masquerading as a humanitarian mission. Instead, conservatives retreat into racism against the immigrants fleeing the conflict and liberals retreat into blaming immigration tensions on racism instead of on the wars they themselves launched.
Wouldn’t it have been better for refugees if they did not have to leave their homes to begin with?
After the lesson of Vietnam was stood on its head by its own exponent in Iraq, it was not hard to imagine the clear lessons of Libya would be similarly disregarded.
And they were.
Fresh off the fiasco in Libya, the Obama administration faced a new challenge when it was once again decided somewhere, by someone, that time was up on the Assad regime in Syria.
Once again as billions in covert arms were funneled to some very unsavory (read terrorist) fighters, the usual propaganda machine was once again fired up. A downtrodden people were yearning to breathe free, held in check only by a dastardly regime possessing chemical weapons.
Now the earlier claims that the rebels in Libya were Western-style democratic centrists (instead of the radical Islamists who were actually driving the bus), or the failure of claims Saddam had WMDs, might have given pause to any truly skeptical journalist or curious citizen when it came to Syria.
But that apparently was not the case.
The same narratives always seem to have the desired effect, which is to get the American public behind yet another pointless, expensive and ultimately counter-productive war. And so it went, too, in Syria.
But there was one key difference between the operation to topple Libya’s Qaddafi and the mission to oust Assad.
It didn’t work.
The negative effects on the people of the country were the same: As in Libya, a huge percentage of the civilian population of the country was forced out of their homes as war raged. In Syria, an estimated 6 million people have been forced to flee the country altogether and another 6 million are out of their homes, but still in the country.
Thank goodness we came to their rescue!
Yet Assad remains in power. The Syrian people suffered massively, but even the basic aim of the mission to topple the demon failed.
Worse, the Syrian Civil War has led directly to numerous terror attacks in Europe carried out by former fighters from the Syria conflict or by planners living in the battle zones.
What’s more, just last month the UN warned that groups like ISIS — having lost their home playground to the resurgent Syrian government — may be even now planning new attacks in Europe.
So when, exactly, will the time come for reflection on these wars?
We have moved from Iraq, where at least had a mission, even if our leaders had to lie about it, to Libya and Syria, where our stated mission was to boost democracy, but instead we boosted fundamentalists and terrorists, to Yemen, where the man in charge of the mission did not even know what the mission was.
So why DID President Obama decide to insert the United States into the war which is now blowing up in our faces?
Ironically, it was to said to be necessary to assuage Saudi concerns over the pending nuclear deal between the West and Saudi’s arch-nemesis, Iran. This was despite the fact that the Houthis — the people we are helping the Saudis bomb-were seen by the US military as the most effective force in the country at countering al Qaeda (it seems weird to have to say it AGAIN, but those are the folks that blew up lower Manhattan on 9/11),
The whole thing has come absurdly full-circle: To try to improve relations with Iran, we sided with the Saudis in attacking the Houthis, who have now attacked the heart of Saudi’s oil industry . . . which threatens to blow up into a war with Iran.
See how effective interventionism is?
Gen. Austin may have been unable to predict the outcome of the US mission to help cudgel Yemen into submission, but we can be sure of three things: It is Yemen’s starving children who will pay the price for this latest war; the war will result in serious blowback like what we saw last weekend, and America’s wars abroad will remain conspicuously absent from consideration in the 2020 election cycle.
One really wonders what level of failure it will take to finally call into question the price we are paying for blindly following the neocons — Republican and Democrat alike — into war after pointless war.
We will no doubt find out.
The hard way.
