There is nothing like the searing desire for
revenge or the stirrings of righteous indignation when it comes to getting the American public
to sign off on a war. It worked in the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in 1898 when
William Randolph Hearst and his ilk agitated public opinion into an irrational
frenzy against Spain. It worked again in WWI, this time the sinking of the
H.M.S. Lusitania providing the requisite outrage. Even more recently, Bush-the
younger seized upon the American public's understandable shock and horror
following the 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attacks to initiate wars in two
countries, both of which made little sense given the splintered and nomadic
nature of Bush's alleged target, Al Qaeda.
These are oversimplifications, to be
sure; the full conflagration of any war never has its origins in a lone spark.
Still, these precedents do give one pause, especially in light of President
Obama's newly-minted plan to take us back into Iraq, fresh on the heels of the
release of internet-broadcast, ISIL- produced beheadings of American
journalists. In the months leading up to those gruesome videos, polls reported a fifty-five percent majority of
Americans saying that the U.S. had no responsibility to do anything about the
recent rise in violence in Iraq. Just days after the chilling decapitations
were made public, however, a commanding seventy-one percent of respondents supported air strikes in the same
region; while a conspicuous ninety-four percent were aware of the murders--a
figure that is higher than public awareness of any other news story in the past
five years. Political pollsters, in particular, don't often see numbers as
lopsided as those last two; tectonic shifts of this kind only happen when
emotions are running high.
Which is no way to determine foreign
policy, let alone the strategic bombings of an enemy who most Americans didn't
even know existed just a few scant weeks ago. Are we really this knee-jerky
when it comes to girding our young sons' and daughters' collective loins for
battle in a far off land against a justifiably pissed-off and motivated corps
of burgeoning jihadists? Isn't it
possible that we, as the angry mob have a duty to examine the long-range effects
of our interference before we set torches to a monster we helped to create?
It seems likely though that it is
our very tendency to meddle that ISIL is counting on. Without U.S. intervention
(and the vast media conduit that comes with it), ISIL is a localized outbreak
of a particularly virulent and savage pathogen. Once we go back into those
shifting desert sands, ISIL has the attention of the entire world for a long
time to come and thus the capacity to spread into a worldwide pandemic. The
terrorists who killed Sotloff and Foley weren’t as angry regarding U.S. air
strikes as they postured on camera. While it seems a safe bet that, all things
being equal, your average Muslim terrorist prefers not being bombed as
compared to being bombed, dead
Muslims on TV, killed by American munitions make a great recruiting tool aimed
at radicalized sons of Islam. In short, it is highly probable that ISIL wants
to lure us in close where they have home-field advantage. Recent protracted
entanglements in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and yes, Iraq should serve
as cautionary tales against the hubris that comes with military might versus
guerrilla warfare, but the muscle memory in our trigger fingers seems to get
itchy once we are exposed to the vicious brutality that people who live in such
places are forced to reckon with every day.
There is no question that
caliphatists who call themselves the Islamic State must be dealt with
militarily. They are sweeping across Iraq and Syria at an alarming rate
indiscriminately butchering anyone who disagrees with their particularly
medieval brand of fundamentalism. They are well-funded and well organized,
already attracting adherents from Western nations such as the U.S. and Britain.
Their numbers are estimated to be as high as 20,000 and are reported to be
growing rapidly. They have a battery of sophisticated weaponry, including tanks
and anti-aircraft guns. The question then is who is going to stop them and how.
The answer, according to our fearless
leader, appears to be us, and (surprise, surprise) not the bordering Arab nations who have the most to lose should
ISIL become unmanageable. President Obama issued a
plan on national TV last week outlining his "strategy" for dealing
with ISIL, and nowhere in that speech to the Nation did I hear any reference to
the Intelligence failures that got us here, or to any semblance of a plan which
takes into account the endemically fractious underlayment of a region which
seems to produce one extremist group after another. Meanwhile, in spite of the
President's assurances to the contrary, Republican leaders are already pushing
to commit ground troops sooner rather than later.
Does any of this sound frustratingly
familiar to anyone else, or am I the only one scratching his head in wonder? We,
as a nation are about to get waist-deep in a sweltering, dry desert that
stretches on for miles with no water and no end in sight...again. President Obama's plan sounds simple enough. Ferret out the
bad guys and bomb them into submission. Sadly, it's never that simple in this region. What do
you do when the target uses human shields or retreats across the semi-permeable
border into Syria? How do you form alliances in areas where violent
sectarianism is the norm? Who do you trust in Syria where a three-way civil war
virtually guarantees insurmountable strategic obstacles? Fortunately for Mr.
Obama, these are all questions that he won't have to answer. More likely they
will be answered, however inadequately, by his successor. Something tells me that by that time we will all have something new to be angry about.
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