More Deadly American Silliness — This Time against ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State — the Apparent Political Futility of Acting as if One Has a Strategically Minded Brain

11 September 2013

The cycle of emotionally reactive American strategic stupidity that began on 9/11 continues

President Obama, last night, announced a package of superficial tactical measures to be taken against ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State — disingenuously labeling those measures as strategy.

His speech symbolizes virtually everything that is self-destructively dumb about American foreign policy:

(1) We have impulsively elevated another bunch of mildly threatening scum suckers into being an instrument of the Alleged Devil.

(2) And then proposed a means of erasing them that has not an iota of a chance of succeeding.

(3) Topped by determined blindness to the fact that the proposed means of elimination will only recruit more terrorists.

(4) This tactical bundle wrapped in a profound underestimation of:

(a) how far forward in time

and

(b) how culturally appropriate —

genuine geopolitical strategy actually has to be.

In sum, the United States is again being murderously inept.

Two goals for me — in this essay

(1) Illustrate how we are being inept.

(2) Explain, in the immediate context, why we are being inept.

Here is what the Commander in Chief said

From a competent summary by Brett Logiurato and Hunter Walker:

In his remarks, Obama broke his plan down into four key parts:

"a systematic campaign of airstrikes against these terrorists,"

providing "support to forces fighting these terrorists on the ground,"

stepped up counterterrorism efforts to "prevent ISIL attacks,"

and

continued "humanitarian assistance to innocent civilians who have been displaced by this terrorist organization."

The president also stressed his strategy to fight ISIS "will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil," said Obama.

In his speech Obama emphasized his plan will involve what he described as "a broad coalition of partners."

How we are being inept

Regarding President Obama’s four purportedly strategic prongs:

(1) Everyone, even some of the determinedly “stupids” on the Reflexively Obstructionist side of America’s political aisles, recognize that air strikes alone don’t win anything.

(2) Providing support to anti-terrorists on the ground has historically worked to turn a motley crew into future terrorist fighting Americans with our own weapons.

To wit, the Taliban in Afghanistan and ISIS itself in Iraq — the latter having procured its weapons from the preponderantly incompetent (and possibly cowardly) Iraqi Army that we recruited, trained, and voluminously armed.

(3) Couterterroism to prevent ISIS attacks is predictably not going to work any more comprehensively than they did against the Taliban and Al Qaeda — both of which are still around causing trouble.

(4) Humanitarian assistance is not a strategy, but instead a puny response to harm already done.

In short, nothing the President said is new, or likely to work any better than what resulted in the disasters that continue to be Afghanistan and Iraq.

Nor is any of what the President proposed likely to be effective over a long enough term to be considered a management tactic. All of it ignores the true origins of the “ISIS versus Nearly Everybody” conflict.

What the American Commander in Chief has proposed is not strategy, but short-sighted, politically expedient tactics.

Why has the President fallen into this (repetitively discouraging) morass of American geopolitical incompetence?

Because that’s the American Way these days:

Once the warmongering political Right Wing — you know, Senator John McCain, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and their Herd of Brain Blighted Botchers — get into full hue and cry, President Obama drifts to the militaristic right to appease them by becoming a symbolic “Democrat of Warmongering Spine”.

The reflexively emotional American public simultaneously climbs aboard — and the interventionist American die (pun intended) is cast.

What slides out our tiny brain’s backdoor is the slightest semblance of thought as to whether:

(i) our proposed means of war are the measures best suited to

(ii) actually solving or managing the situation that we are pretending to face.

Of course, they are not.

The President’s proposed tactics are not suited to solving the presumed problem — precisely because they were generated for reasons of political expedience and in the face of transient emotional upset.

The true situation is too complex for the majority of the American public and its (culturally and historically) ignorant leaders to grasp.

What took centuries to create, and which modern American heavy handedness has exponentially exacerbated, is not going to fixed with a handful of air strikes and scattered American military tutelage abroad:

The Sunni-Shia Islam division is hundreds of years old. It is vitriolic.

Americans know nothing about it, and being predominantly Christian, have no business coming anywhere provocatively near it — except when necessary to protect his nation’s most vital interests.

At the other end of the time scale, the United States upset the applecart in Iraq with its invasion. Afterward, we visibly supported the immensely divisive provocateur, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in office, while he went around pissing every Sunni in Iraq off.

Thus, the United States is hardly in a position to claim friendship with the Sunnis, much less the Shia (given America’s unremitting hostility toward Iran).

Memory of the Crusades is not dead in this part of the world. And that makes everything much more challenging than we want to admit.

Thoughtfully pertinent to this mess

Marwan Bishara, a political analyst at Al Jazeera, concluded recently that the ISIS horror campaign is an easily exploited excuse for continued unproductive death-dealing in the Middle East:

The Islamic State group provides the US with the ability to wash away its past sins in Iraq and the excuse to intervene once again at the request of its government . . . .

It grants Iran and Hezbollah the ammunition to justify their own military interference in Syria and Iraq . . . .

It's empowering authoritarian Arab regimes . . . .

It offers ammunition to the warmongers in the East and West to continue their military buildups and inciting war.

It empowers the "liberal interventionists", who seek greater "humanitarian military intervention" . . . a contradiction in terms.

[I]t's even helping out the likes of the Assad and Maliki regimes to cash in on . . . fear and indignation [—] even when it is their policies and actions that . . . contributed to the rise of the Islamic State in the first place.

And yet [ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State] horrors are miniscule in comparison with the dictators of proximity.

The same goes for the presumably indignant elites in the West whose wars[,] invasions and occupations have led to millions of casualties in the region and beyond.

Notice that Mr. Bishara’s emphasis is on the spiral of violence that begets uselessly more of the same.

Presumably a sensible person would intuit that further escalating the mayhem, without first considering escalation’s long term strategic direction or its future consequences, might not be a great idea.

A partial solution — to our reflexively indulged love affair with being self-destructively incompetent

A universally imposed American military draft would partially solve our American penchant for substituting tactics in place of strategy.

That is (of course) why the Military Industrial Complex and the public both oppose it:

The Complex does not want public recognition that — “I, as draftee, might get killed” — to cramp its perennially warmongering profit seeking.

And the public does not want its non-volunteer folk to have shed blood or body parts in pursuit of the silly and deadly policies that we so easily approve.

Marwan Bishara’s implied point about personal and national responsibility for vicariously imposed wrongs is well taken.

In a sense, it would have been better had the President said (last night) . . .

That ISIL had pissed him off. And he was going to indulge in a bit of impulsively directed, politically necessary, and admittedly futile ISIL squashing just because he can.

That way, no one would think that this was a rationally coherent or effective policy. And ISIS would not get the satisfaction of concluding that the United States takes the puny threat it poses America much credence.

We could call this more honest delivery the Obama Gnat Slap Doctrine.

The moral? — Here we go (puppet-like) again

The sins of the father(s) are still in play:

More money for the Military Industrial Complex.

More hatred generated against America.

More innocents’ deaths, including probably some from our volunteer military.

PeteFree.com

More Deadly American Silliness — This Time against ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State — the Apparent Political Futility of Acting as if One Has a Strategically Minded Brain