The White House has announced the possibility that we will be using American ground forces in an attack on Mosel in about six weeks. So what’s the reaction across the political spectrum? Well, Lindsay Graham and John McCain, who have been screaming for just such an action and have been trying, like the rest of the Right, to force the President’s hand in this maneuver, are now screaming that he shouldn’t have disclosed the fact that he is planning it.
Well, he probably wouldn’t have disclosed this if these two idiots and their buddies hadn’t been making so much noise about wanting it. Now that they got what they wanted, they are screaming that it wasn’t right. Maybe they should just shut the hell up about a war that their president, Bush, started for no good reason and let the guy who inherited the GOP mess try to solve things his way.
Not that this column agrees with any plan to put American boots on the ground in the Middle East. If you added up the armed forces of Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, the UAE and the Kurds, you would have about 5 million troops under arms. This to fight 20,000 ISIS? Why the hell do these Arab countries need our kids to get killed? They are the ones who are under attack from ISIS, not us. ISIS is stomping across downtown Mosul not Times Square. So why aren’t Saudi Arabia, UAE, Turkey and Egypt attacking the ISIS forces? The answer is both pretty simple and very complicated.
The simple part is that ISIS followers are Sunnis and so are the above mentioned nations. The idea of Sunni fighting Sunni when there are Shiites around to attack is a tough one for the Arabs to swallow. The Sunnis and the Shiites have been fighting each other for centuries. It will be very difficult for the leaders of the Arab Sunni nations to convince their uneducated, religiously fanatic populace to fight their fellow religionists. It may be more than they can handle.
And why is it complicated? Because it’s way more than just Sunni versus Shiite; it’s a Machiavellian nest of snakes; mind bending tribal relationships, blood feuds and religious quarrels that go back centuries among people who don’t understand much, but never forget anything. These are peoples whose uncivilized negotiating practices exist without any concept of truth or honor despite the fact that they consider their own bizarre concept of honor to be above all else.
The only way in which we can have a successful plan to defeat ISIS is for us to understand and solve the mysteries that are the people of the Middle East and we aren’t even close to that. We keep aiming at a Middle East of democratic institutions when we are dealing with people who have no concept of what democracy really means or how they would achieve it.
When our past presidents spoke to democracy in the Middle East and invaded to achieve it, they were acting out of almost complete ignorance and when Obama invaded Libya to protect the rebels and expel the dictator Muammar Gaddafi he was doing the same thing.
The rebel force that we protected in Libya evolved into a series of viscous militias, without central command or effective goals. We left behind no strong military presence that could keep the country safe and secure and allow for democratic elections and the entire nation soon sunk into chaos. The Libya that we attacked to create a democracy was not an outlaw state. Now without central government or any idea of safety for its citizens it is hell. The warlords that we left behind after our invasion have since run amok and what had been an evil but functioning dictatorship is now a disaster.
This is exactly what happened in Iraq, in Yemen and actually in Egypt. It will happen everywhere that we intervene with our blundering tactics and our inability to create a strong state that can function along modern lines. Destroying ISIS will not save Iraq or Syria. Syria already has a government, bad as it is. If we help to destroy it we will be left with the same chaos that now exists in Libya and Iraq, where, thus far, there is nothing that looks even remotely like a functioning government.
When you tear down a government, even one as evil as Saddam Hussein’s, you must have a replacement standing by, ready to step in and make a country. Unfortunately we have always turned our conquests over to fawning sycophants who kissed our asses very nicely but whose idea of how to run a country was to steal as much of our aid as possible and then run off to Switzerland.
In Iraq we set up a Sunni government cobbled together from thieving street merchants and would be military dictators who had no idea how to lead an army or run a nation. We canned the Shiite bureaucrats that had been running the government and we kicked out the Shiite military commanders leaving a bunch of incompetent toy soldiers who lost control of their troops and ran for the hills as ISIS rolled into the country, kicked the butt of the Iraqi army and took the weapons we had supplied to them. Just to prove that we don’t learn from our mistakes we did the same thing in Libya. So how have we changed? How are we adapting to meet the problem? How can we solve it?
Well, instead of trying to figure out a way to govern Iraq successfully after we have kicked out ISIS, our president and the GOP are battling over whether we are at war with Islam or with terrorists. It isn’t even a real argument; it’s a semantic one. Sure there is a reason for Obama wanting to call it a war against terrorists and it’s a real one, but instead of responding to the Right’s illogical need to call it a war against Islam, he should just ignore their ludicrous statements and with nothing coming from the White House the whole thing will die. The Media whores need a two- sided argument to make it interesting and appealing to soap customers.
It’s obvious to even the most naïve observer that the most vocal of the Right’s attackers understand why Obama wants to identify the war the way he has. He is trying to take away the propaganda position of ISIS that Muslim people are being attacked by the Christian world. Understanding that sleaze like Ted Cruz will ignore logic to pursue their own ends, there are still people like Lindsay Graham, who, though without a moral center will still, on rare occasions, pursue the goal that is best for the country.
So maybe just once, the GOP will set aside their political agenda and do the right thing for the country. We are wasting trillions of dollars and far too much manpower in a part of the world that no longer holds great significance for us. We have to let the Arab countries with their five million troops under arms, take care of their own problems and we, unfortunately, have to start looking to Africa and the problems that they are breeding. Africa is the future; the Middle East is the past. We have to learn to differentiate the two and deal with them as such.