Why Does James Foley’s Beheading Defeat Our Ability to Think Rationally about Achieving Strategic Objectives? — Terrorists Snap Fingers and We Foolishly Dance to Their Tune

© 2014 Peter Free

 

25 August 2014

 

 

You would think that America is as assemblage of easily stampeded wildebeests

 

Now that ISIS has beheaded an American journalist (James Foley), American discourse has impulsively veered toward an apparent enthusiasm for re-undertaking the Iraq “intervention” that failed earlier and adding Syria to it.

 

 

As if the beheading itself is a sign of an impending catastrophe that was not visible earlier

 

Here is a representatively well meant, but strategically dangerous statement from someone who should know better:

 

 

"The first step is to commit the United States, to crushing ISIS unambiguously," [Mike] Doran [senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy] continued.

 

"The second step is to create a coalition to achieve that goal by creating a new order in what is now Jihadistan, the region that ISIS controls from Baghdad to Aleppo.

 

“That coalitions should include, among others, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, France, Britain, and, of course, the Free Syrian Army."

 

© 2014 Michael B. Kelley, America's Top Military Officer Explained The Big ISIS Problem In One Sentence, Business Insider (24 August 2014) (paragraph split)

 

 

The obvious strategic problem with — “crushing ISIS unambiguously”

 

The crush statement’s overweening intent sounds like the foolishly expansive goals that we loudly professed and failed to accomplish in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan:

 

How many of those occupations worked in accordance with expressed American goals?

 

Was anyone crushed unambiguously?

 

Did not the wish to crush people into extinction actually result in creating still more adversaries?

 

 

When will this kind of brain dead thinking on America’s part end?

 

A few pertinent points strike me about the sloppily thought out interventionist aftermath to James Foley’s sad end:

 

(a) Virtually no one among the American public actively cared about Mr. Foley, when he was initially captured in Syria by the human scum who took him.

 

Like all the world’s valuable lost journalists, Mr. Foley disappeared from public consciousness in the way that everything important always seems to. To be replaced, instead, by the trivial diversions that so routinely amuse us.

 

(b) After the stalwart Mr. Foley was beheaded on video, America’s Blowhard Wing arouses itself and is evidently willing to retributively reenter Iraq in some fashion . . .

 

(c) . . . conveniently forgetting that our previous whole-hearted devotion of resources and thousands upon thousands of lives completely failed and created the chaotic mess that James Foley has now lost his life to.

 

(d) In sum, the idiotically undertaken Iraq War achieved the very instability that a smart America would have wished to avoid at the outset.

 

And now, in spite of History’s humbling lessons, the Loud Mouths are calling on us to add a poorly thought out Syrian intervention to another Iraq one.

 

(e) And (laughably) furthermore — says the Blowhard Coalition — these new intervention can be accomplished by putting American material resources in the hands of other people, who will do the fighting and dying for us.

 

That should work out just about as well as it did when we armed:

 

 

(i) the precursors to the Taliban to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan

 

and

 

(ii) the post-occupation Iraqi Army, which (in effect) gave away its American weapons to the vicious ISIS folk, who now have them.

 

 

Impulsive brainlessness on America’s part is probably not what James Foley would have wanted

 

ISIS will fall. But not if America keeps acting in a way that creates more terrorists than it eliminates.

 

A smarter American government (Congress included) would recognize that many of the problems that America has created for itself benefit the Military Industrial Complex, but not the nation’s broader national interests.

 

We seem to be too obtuse to recognize that a reasonably stable world order has more to do with:

 

(a) recognizing the limits of national power,

 

(b) accepting the hegemony of other powers in their regions,

 

and

 

(c) not acting as if we have a direct pipeline to God.

 

 

The moral? — An avenging angel creates more destruction than it prevents

 

Terrorism, like chronic disease, can be managed, but not eliminated. Crushing movements and religions is not possible. When one begins acting as if the complete elimination of other people’s excesses is possible, serious (usually intensely bloody) mistakes are made.

 

Managing terrorism requires that one either:

 

(a) attempt to evolve societies that treat their citizens with (at least) minimally basic respect

 

or

 

(b) support autocrats who maintain an iron grip on their internally warring populations.

 

Distinguishing when to switch between these policy prongs is difficult:

 

Option (a) necessarily means that a people’s fragmented self-direction, due to contesting groups within the nation, is inevitably going to create headaches for someone.

 

To wit, Hamas’ election win in Palestine, which apparently accorded with the will of the repressed people there, but caused both the US and Israel consternation. Whereupon the United States hypocritically retracted its sense that democracy is a good thing. Apparently, democracy abroad is only desirable if people elect leaders that America approves of.

 

Choosing option (b) means that the US will have visibly sided with the oppressors and, should the people eventually get loose, payback is likely to be painful and inconvenient.

 

The saving grace, if it can be called that, is that the United States actually has much less influence over foreign populations and sectarianism than it thinks it does.

 

It might, therefore, be wise for us to speak in accord with our professed Liberty values and to recognize that “getting” the bad guys “over there” — rather than here — is frequently not going to be possible.  This insight, therefore, leading us to exercise restraint and humility in the face of History’s forces.

 

Connecting these analytical dots is not difficult. But the process seems to defeat the leadership abilities of the usually vicariously violent among us.  We Americans do so like to imagine “crushing” our adversaries. That trait is uncomfortably similar to Islamic fundamentalism’s hopes in regard to us.

 

Is there a lesson in this? If there were, would anyone in positions of power recognize and act on it?

 

Probably not.

 

That is why J. Krishnamurti — an admired spiritual teacher in the Twentieth Century — took such a dim view of politicians’ ability to do anything but cause suffering. Wisdom, he appears to have thought, was not something that graced their power hungry and grasping souls.