Middle East Strategy – Page 26

We Have to do Something!

Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and ISIS: We have to do something! What’s the plan, Obama? In fact most Americans have heard that Mr. Obama said “we don’t have a strategy yet” to deal with ISIS.

WTF? In fact, Obama was speaking solely about ISIS in Syria. A reporter asked last Thursday:

Do you need Congress’s approval to go into Syria?

Obama replied:

We don’t have a strategy yet…We need to make sure that we’ve got clear plans, that we’re developing them. At that point, I will consult with Congress

This has led to the “We have to do something” chorus. Consider Fox Anchor Heather Childers:

https://twitter.com/HeatherChilders/status/506918798298198018

Ever hear of the “Politician’s Syllogism”? It is a logical fallacy that takes this form:
1. We have to do something
2. This is something
3. Therefore, we have to do this.

Sound familiar? We see and hear it every Sunday morning on “Bloviating with The Old Pundits”, also known as the network week in review shows. Here is what this can lead to: The Hill reports that House and the Senate are considering action to “do something”:

Rep. Frank R. Wolf, R-Va., said in a statement Wednesday he will introduce legislation when Congress reconvenes next week that would authorize the use of military force against ISIS and other terror groups around the world, including al Nusra, Ansar al Sharia, al Shabaab and Boko Haram

House Speaker Boehner said in an appearance on conservative Hugh Hewitt’s radio show that the president will need congressional authority if he wants to strike at ISIS in its Syrian strongholds:

…If he’s going after ISIS…I think he would have to provide a War Powers notification to the Congress…And then it would be up to the House to make a decision about whether we dealt with the issue or not

Are you feeling better? We saw the pitfalls of “We must do something” following 9/11. Initial reactions to the attacks on America were shock and confusion. Traditional ideological divides were blurred, but then the Right trotted out a line that resonated with all Americans and caused the antiwar left to dissolve: We have to do something!

In US political speak, the one thing we have to do “something” about always refers to a foreign policy concern. Politicans don’t feel that we “have to do something” about domestic problems. Poverty? No need to act. Corrupt bankers? Inaction is fine.

In foreign policy, when a crisis flares up overseas, and especially if it involves possible opponents that the War Hawks, the defense industry and the media can categorize as bad guys, “we have to do something” means military action.

But, there are always supplements to military action. Half-measures can come in both military (money and weapons, but no boots on the ground), quasi-military (military and political advisers) and geo-political or diplomatic forms (coalitions, sanctions or embargoes). We can employ some, or all of those options. Or, after careful consideration of our short and long term interests, we can do nothing.

Any and all of that is called “strategy”.

And that’s the problem. We need to do something effective that has long and short term benefits, and that doesn’t bankrupt the nation. We can drop some more bombs and send more advisers. To have a useful strategy, we have to come to grips with these facts:
• We’re going to have to give Assad a pass for killing his countrymen and doing mean things with chemical weapons, because we have to work together on eliminating ISIS
• We may need to ally with Iran, a non-democratic and anti-Sunni regime that most Americans think of as an enemy
• We may need to confront our allies, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, who have, at best, been “soft” on ISIS
• We have to accept that we now bomb our own weapons that have been seized by ISIS. Are we OK with more of that down the road, if that is the outcome of arming the “moderates” in Iraq and Syria?

With two beheadings, American opinion is being whipped up by certain politicians and the media to get us to strike back, hard. Fine, but let’s spend a few seconds thinking about WHY ISIS is whacking the hornets’ nest that is America. We are told that it is to get America to stop the bombing in Iraq.

Could it be just the opposite, that it is their invitation to join in yet another Middle East quagmire?

Could it be that they want a chance to defeat the “sole superpower” on their way to creating their caliphate? The logic of this form of asymmetric terror is pretty straightforward. But our “tough on defense” politicians fall for it every time. They take another bite of the “counter-insurgency” apple.

It may just be that their strategy (emulating Osama bin Laden), is to:

…in any way possible, enmesh the US and NATO in unwinnable wars, and then watch as the imperial powers disintegrate

ISIS and Al Qaeda are playing a long game. By doing flashy terrorist actions they empower the War Hawks and American conservatives. War Hawks and conservatives thereafter use their rejuvenated mandate to insist on crude and violent actions in the Middle East. They push reluctant centrists and liberals to do the same.

America then completely messes up the campaign, and further weakens its economy and social contract.

Perhaps we should let ISIS terrify Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Gulf States to the point where they will all work together to destroy ISIS and its sources of funding instead of begging us to waste American lives and money there.

That is a strategy that is not exactly a do-nothing strategy, but you can already hear the War Hawk chorus, telling America to expect beheadings on Main Street next week.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 24, 2014

Here at Casa Wrong, we see the end of summer coming. It’s a sad time most years, but not now. Today, August HAS TO DIE! Here’s why:

• Foley was beheaded
• Instead of “back to school”, this August it is “back to Iraq”
• Russia invades Ukraine, says it’s for humanitarian reasons
• The Ebola epidemic continues to grow
• The reason why a teen in Ferguson is dead remains unresolved
• Hamas and Israel seem willing to fight to the death
• We still don’t know who shot down the MH17 over Ukraine
• Mitch McConnell says he’s willing to shut down the government again

August brought home that every pillar that has supported international order is tottering, if not yet collapsing. That means the UN, NATO and a strong, unified America. The “what’s wrong” list could be much longer, but what would be the point? August must die. On to humor.

ISIS or IS or ISIL, it’s a cancer:

James Foley is the most recent in a long line:

And in Ferguson news, don’t shoot is everyone’s mantra:

In domestic ~~warfare~~ policing, mindset should be first, not last:

Mayor Daley, 1968: “The police are here to preserve disorder”:

Don’t you feel safer knowing she’s off the streets?

https://twitter.com/stevenjhsieh/status/501492139197759488

You can read about this 90 year old Ferguson demonstrator here

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 17, 2014

Difficult week. Ferguson MO, Iraq and RIP Robin:

The media is making a thing of Robin Williams’s suicide. Media coverage and commentary is wall-to-wall, just like when Seymour Phillip Hoffman OD’ed.

They ignore that CNN says that there are 22 suicides a DAY among America’s veterans. What has happened to proportionality in the press?

A study published this week in Health Affairs states that spending on behavioral health disorders is expected to decline from 7.4% of total health spending in 2009 to 6.5% in 2020, while actual dollars spent are projected to increase from $172 billion in 2009 to $281 billion in 2020. More needs to be done.

From the police blotter:

We heard on Friday that Michael Brown may have stolen cigars from a convenience store. The media says that it shows the kid was no saint. But people aren’t shot for shoplifting, they get arrested and need help from lawyers like these philadelphia criminal lawyers to help reduce their charges. This is despite the fact that shoplifting costs American retailers approximately $14B annually. Once again, the media are conflating the dead boy and his possible crime with the right of the people to free assembly to protest a grievance against their government, as well as the threat that is posed to ordinary Americans by militarized police.

The Ice Bucket Challenge throws cold water on Obama:

We revise our view of Iraqi history:

Iraq owns us. 4 US presidents in row have been called to action there:

What’s Erbil Got to do With It?

David Brooks:

We are now living in what we might as well admit is the Age of Iraq. The last four presidents have found themselves drawn into that nation because it epitomizes the core problem at the center of so many crises: the interaction between failing secular governance and radical Islam.

While Lawrence of Arabia said “on to Aqaba”, President Obama says, “on to Erbil”.

From the 2-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Steve Coll, writing in The New Yorker:

To the defense of Erbil: this was the main cause that drew President Obama back to combat in Iraq last week, two and a half years after he fulfilled a campaign pledge and pulled the last troops out.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 10, 2014

On Sunday, we reach for humor and less seriousness, but lately, the cartoons aren’t funny, they tend toward the ironic, or are downright scary. Maybe that is understandable, since we are back in Iraq. ISIS is now as bad as or worse, than Al-Qadea, which might be good news for the Wrongologist’s defense stocks!

Why is the Iraqi government outgunned by a rogue group of thugs?

Anyone?…Bueller?

Expanding “Arabia” to the wider Islamic world, we Americans have been on very sandy ground, from Kabul to Baghdad to Benghazi. And, like quicksand, we can’t escape:
• We’re working with Iran in Iraq, but against them in Israel and in Syria
• Iran is working with Palestinians in Israel, but against them in Syria
• Turkey a member of NATO, supports Hamas against Israel, but is against Assad

Nations in the Middle East are frequently allies on one front and enemies on the other. Somewhere in that paradox is the solution. Now that we are out of Afghanistan, will we have to fight the new terror group of the month, or the new terror group of the year? Can we be the police department to the world, yet keep our social contract and our domestic freedoms intact?

Military recruiters are about the same the world over:

T.E. Lawrence – Britain’s “Lawrence of Arabia”, warned that Arabia is not a hospitable place:

Iraq didn’t stop being a cesspool when we left;

Reingagement is a tough equation to solve:

In other news, the leaders of Africa came to DC to hear our new pitch:

Finally, Jim Brady died this week. The Wrongologist’s company was a vendor to the Brady Center, and played a very small part in building public support for the Brady Bill:

Remember the Gulf of Tonkin Incident?

August 4th is the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, an event that led to Congress giving President Johnson the legal authorization to begin the Vietnam War. On August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox exchanged fire with three North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. Two days later, the Maddox fired on radar targets, which it reported had launched torpedoes at the Maddox.

And on August 10th, Congress passed a joint resolution giving the president the use of “conventional” military force against North Vietnam.

Why should we remember the Gulf of Tonkin? Because the Iraq War wasn’t the first time we went to war where the intelligence and facts were fixed to conform to the policy. Jessica Desvarieux of the Real News Network interviews Daniel Ellsberg about his experience with the decision-making about the Gulf of Tonkin incident:

For those who don’t remember the Vietnam Era, Daniel Ellsberg was the Edward Snowden of his time. Ellsberg was physically present when the Gulf of Tonkin “facts” were “fixed” to conform to Vietnam policy. Daniel Ellsberg was a highly placed adviser in the Pentagon. He had been a Marine officer, assigned to a ship in the Suez Canal during the Suez Crisis in 1956. Starting in 1964, he worked in the Pentagon for McNamara, and starting in 1967, served 2 years in Vietnam as a civilian working for the State Department. Here is part of what Ellsberg says in the video: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

…my boss–the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, John McNaughton–[was] with McNamara in his office on the morning of August 4, when I came into the office at 9 o’clock they were actually already planning the possible response to an attack…because of indications that the commodore on the spot…thought that he was being shadowed for a possible ambush…a courier rushed in…with a flash cable saying that Commodore Herrick on the patrol in the South China Sea…was under attack at that very moment, that there was a torpedo coming at him, he was taking evasive action…

More from Ellsberg: (brackets and emphasis by the Wrongologist)

…at about 1:30, while…McNamara…was over at the White House, and I think McNaughton was with him, conferring with the president on the exact nature of the retaliation, [in] comes a very dramatic table from Commodore Herrick saying, hold everything…All the torpedo reports except the first one are now suspect and, it turned out, he said, were reports of an overeager sonar man who was mistaking the beat of the ship’s propeller against the wake as they took evasive action, circled in the water. That was being mistaken for incoming torpedoes…

And Ellsberg tells us that the ship’s captain ultimately reported 21 torpedoes. He goes on to say that all but one were false reports, and that the captain said many years later that he was also wrong about the first torpedo: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Now, I took it for granted that anything I was seeing was, of course, also available to the president and to McNamara…So I assumed that they were quite well aware that there was a good deal of uncertainty about what had happened. The commodore at the time, Herrick, did say that there was one torpedo, but one had to take that with a good deal of salt, because he had been just as certain about the next 20 torpedoes, and it really took him many years before, looking at the evidence, he finally acknowledged that he had been mistaken about the first one as well. But even on that night, we knew that what the president proceeded to say and what McNamara proceeded to say to the press in television interviews, that the attack was unequivocal, we knew that that was false…

Just like years later, when it turned out that the assertions by Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush that they had unequivocal evidence of WMDs in Iraq, their evidence was at best, equivocal. Later, we learned it was false.

Just as there were no torpedoes in the Tonkin Gulf, there were no WMDs in Iraq.

Just like Johnson and McNamara got a blank check for war with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, Rumsfeld and Bush got the Iraq Resolution, essentially a predated declaration of war given by the Congress to the president, in violation of the Constitution. We can go back further: the USA always has a pretext for war; remember the Maine! The patterns and degree of deception from Vietnam to Iraq appear to be eerily similar.

Add to that, whatever caused the downing of MH17 is not clear cut and unequivocal either. The US says it has evidence, but it has not provided that evidence to us. It is shrouded in mystery, doubt and propaganda, just as the supposed WMDs in Iraq, the Syrian government gas attacks, what started the latest Gaza/Israeli war, and many other incidents.

It is useful to add more skepticism into the current geopolitical climate. Today’s average Congressional staffer can remember GWB and WMDs, since they were 18-20 years old when that happened, while Vietnam is ancient history to them.

Both wars were started with a lie, but the equally big lie was that when the promoters got their wars, they were smart enough to know that neither war could actually be won.

So, who benefited?

And who will benefit if we engage again in Iraq? If we engage more deeply in Ukraine, or in Syria, or in Gaza?

Hint: It isn’t “freedom”.

Military Sales Complicate Our Middle East Strategy

The Hill quotes President Obama’s impromptu press conference on July 16:

We live in a complex world and at a challenging time…And none of these challenges lend themselves to quick or easy solutions, but all of them require American leadership. And as commander in chief, I’m confident that, if we stay patient and determined, that we will, in fact, meet these challenges.

Of course it is a complex time. But we make our lives much more complicated by the arms deals we make with other countries. In the last three years, the US has provided tens of billions of dollars in military weapons through Foreign Military Sales (FMS) to the United Arab Emirates (UAE); Qatar; Kuwait; and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).

Some are designed to protect against airborne missile retaliation and air attacks. For example, the US supplied Qatar ($9.9 billion), Kuwait ($4.2 billion), and UAE ($1.1 billion) with Patriot anti-missile systems and UAE also acquired a $6.5 billion theater anti-air defense (THAAD) system. The US also sold KSA $6.7 billion worth of KC-130 aerial refueling tankers, the UAE $4 billion and KSA $6.8 billion of munitions including “bunker buster bombs,” typically used to attack hardened targets like nuclear facilities (are you listening Iran?). Qatar received a $1.2 billion early warning radar; KSA $1.3 billion for 30 patrol boats for use in the Gulf of Hormuz; Qatar spent $3 billion on Apache attack helicopters used for special operations insertions. The list also includes Javelin missiles, F-18’s and F-16’s, and Sidewinder anti-air missiles.

Israel is the largest recipient of US Foreign Military Financing (FMF). For FY 2015, the President’s request for Israel adds up to about 55% of our global FMF funding. Annual FMF grants to Israel represent about 25% of the overall Israeli defense budget. We also agreed to sell Israel 19 F-35s in 2010, with options to increase that order to 75 planes. We have recently approved the only foreign sale of the V-22 Tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft to the Israelis for $3 billion.

Business Insider reports that we may have made our lives more complicated by weapons sales to Qatar. You probably are not aware that Qatar is one of Hamas’s reliable international partners:

Last week, Qatar closed the largest sale of American weaponry so far this year, purchasing $11 billion worth of Patriot missile batteries and Apache attack helicopters. The sale revealed that Qatar hasn’t exactly been lacking in strategic daring in the wake of its failed bet on Muslim Brotherhood-linked political movements throughout the Middle East.

Qatar is about the size of Connecticut. It has fewer than 300,000 citizens. The rest of its 2.1 million inhabitants are expatriates and foreign workers. Why does it need all these weapons?

The Israeli-Hamas fight shines a light on Qatar. The New York Times reported on the Qatari Emir’s 2012 visit to Hamas-controlled Gaza:

The emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, pledged $400 million to build two housing complexes, rehabilitate three main roads and create a prosthetic center, among other projects, a transformational infusion of cash at a time when foreign aid to the Palestinian territories has been in free fall.

He was the first-ever leader of a country to meet with Hamas in Gaza. Business Insider quotes Jonathan Schanzer, the vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who said that Qatar is “believed to be the primary financier of Hamas,” which has estimated annual operating expenses of around $1 billion. In June, Qatar attempted to transfer money for long-unpaid civil service salaries for Gaza-based Hamas members through the Arab Bank, a transaction that the Bank disallowed after apparent US pressure.

Qatar is arguably a counter-productive actor in the context of the biggest Israeli-Palestinian crisis since the Second Intifada of a decade ago. Business Insider reports that David Weinberg, a scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that Congress hasn’t been concerned enough with Qatar’s policies to put a hold on weapons sales, and it confirmed the Obama administration’s recent nominee as ambassador to Doha without controversy:

It’s not clear whether Congress has the stomach for a fight over these issues with an ostensible ally when…the administration seems to be vouching for Qatari conduct.

Yes, we vouch for conduct we can’t control, or in some cases, really influence. Why is it that the first thing our lawmakers think of is “send them more arms”?

The powder keg of the Middle East has been filled in part by our policymakers’ conflicted views of Middle East politics, but largely by the political influence of America’s military contractors.

Thanks to our Congress and President, it waits only for another spark to set it off. If and when that happens, count on someone in the administration or in Congress saying: “who could have anticipated THAT happening?”

Can We Learn from Our Middle East War?

Yesterday, the Wrongologist wrote that we do not have a non-military response to any foreign geopolitical problem, that we fail to recognize what is defeating us, or why things are happening that are beyond our control.

Andrew Bacevich has an article in Notre Dame Magazine, entitled: “Lessons From America’s War for the Greater Middle East” that opens the door to understanding how to begin to make things better. He makes the point that for well over 30 years, the US has been engaged militarily in various parts of the Islamic world, and no end to that involvement is in sight. Bacevich asks:

What is the nature of the military struggle we are waging?

After 9/11, we called it the Global War on Terror. Bacevich says we should be calling it America’s War for the Greater Middle East. The original premise was that the Islamic world poses a growing threat to vital US national security interests, and the application of hard power would enable the United States to check those threats and thereby preserve the American way of life. Bacevich points out:

At the time President Carter declared the Persian Gulf a vital national security interest — that was the literal meaning of the Carter Doctrine — he did not intend to embark upon a war. Nor did he anticipate what course that war was going to follow — its duration, costs and consequences.

What Carter and his presidential successors found in the ME caused them to initiate a sequence of military actions that collectively should be called a war. The dots connect. Seemingly disparate events such as the Beirut bombing in 1983, the “Black Hawk Down” debacle of 1993 and the Iraq invasion of 2003 (plus others) form part of a single narrative. Acknowledging the existence of that narrative — seeing America’s War for the Greater Middle East as a whole — is a prerequisite to understanding where we are today. From Bacevich:

Let me state plainly my own overall assessment of that war. We have not won it. We are not winning it. And simply pressing on is unlikely to produce more positive results next year or the year after

Bacevich lists “10 lessons” we should take from the “Middle East War” if we are going to make our future different from the past. Let’s review a few:

First, the center of gravity:

The center of gravity refers to the factor upon which a war’s outcome ultimately turns. It could be a valuable terrain, an army or a city. Bacevich says that Carter and George H. W. Bush thought the terrain was the desert. But the key terrain in the ME War is urban, and people are this war’s center of gravity. That means we can’t just kill adversaries, but we must influence urban populations to succeed. When American soldiers venture onto this key terrain they are alien intruders. They arrive in cities like Baghdad or Kabul as heirs to a Western civilization that has seldom furthered the well-being of Muslims.

The phrase “Anglo-American” for us, conjures up glorious memories of a partnership forged to free a continent gripped by Hitler. Islamic residents of the Middle East inevitably see “Anglo-American” purposes as a desire to conquer.

Sixth, the US military system:

9/11 revealed defects in America’s approach to raising its military forces. Notwithstanding the virtues of a professional military, notably durability and tactical prowess, the all-volunteer army has failed. It encourages political irresponsibility. It’s undemocratic. It turns out to be exorbitantly expensive. And it hasn’t won a war.

It makes the relationship between the US military and US society dishonest. Rhetorically, we “support the troops”, but the support is seldom more than skin-deep. As authorities in Washington commit US forces to wars that are unnecessary, or ill-managed, or unwinnable — Americans seem close to indifferent. The bungled rollout of Obamacare generated both public attention and outrage, while a bungled military campaign would only elicit shrugs.

Our reliance on professional soldiers relieves citizens of any responsibility to contribute to the nation’s defense. Can that be a good thing?

Seventh, the political economy of war:

Washington’s appetite for waging war in the ME has exceeded the willingness of young Americans to volunteer for military service, and the ability for the standing army to continue the fight for 12+ years. This has created a gap: Too much war, too few warriors.

This gap has created an opening for profit-minded “private security firms” in the war zone. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, contractors ultimately outnumbered uniformed military personnel. The results have fallen well short of being satisfactory. Waste and corruption have occurred on a colossal scale — so much so that the Pentagon is literally unable to say where all the money went. War has always created opportunities for some people to make money. America’s War for the Greater Middle East has become a means for many private firms and individuals to get rich.

Ninth, our regional allies:

The longer America’s War for the Greater Middle East drags on, the more apparent it becomes that Washington has done a lousy job of picking allies. Consider Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, for example. The United States seeks to reduce the prevalence of violent Islamic radicalism. The governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia actively promote it. It’s time to stop pretending otherwise.

Then there is Israel. US interests and those of the Jewish state have diverged. To ensure the security and well-being of its citizens, Israel vigorously employs its military muscle to preempt perceived threats and ensure Israeli control of vital terrain and resources.

The chief US interest in the region lies in promoting stability. Anything else falls into the category of “nice to have.” In that regard, the US has an interest in responding to the grievances of the Palestinian people. Yet the government of Israel will respond to those grievances only on Israeli terms. In the meantime, the persistence of those grievances provides either a genuine cause of, or a pretext for, anti-American and anti-Western attitudes across much of the Islamic world.

When it comes to waging the War for the Greater Middle East, Israel belongs in the same category as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan: As allies, all three are unhelpful.

Bacevich closes by saying:

Does the Islamic world pose a problem for the US? You bet, in all sorts of ways. But after more than three decades of trying, it’s pretty clear that the application of military power is unlikely to provide a solution

His Tenth issue is religion. But, he has a simplistic view of the role of religion in the failure of our military strategy for the Middle East. Read his comments and then draw your own conclusions.

The solution, if there is one, must be found by looking beyond the military realm. If we were for example, to become the primary supplier of humanitarian aid to the displaced people in the Middle East, we could position ourselves as a positive force for change among many millions of Muslims, not just another country in a long line of infidel conquerors.

Read his entire article here.

Did 9/11 Change Everything?

“He didn’t know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time comprehend.” –Hubert Selby Jr.

The Wrongologist has changed the blog’s “Quotes We Like” sidebar to add the quote above. The quote is from Selby’s Requiem for a Dream. He also wrote Last Exit To Brooklyn. These are two gritty American novels of their time and place. Exit was published in 1964 and presents a view of 1950’s Brooklyn NY. Requiem was published in 1978. Both were made into movies. Selby died in 2004.

In a Salon article in 2000, Selby is quoted about Requiem:

The dream I’m referring to in the book, of course, is the great American dream: prosperity, property, prestige, etc. And the fact that it’ll kill you dead. Striving for it is a disaster. Attaining it is a killer. It takes many forms, and the results are not happy. It’s not a feel-good thing

Selby continues:

‘Requiem’ is about the cancer of that dream…Of course, there are a lot of people who are successful who work very hard. They’re not all George W. Bush. But the point is they’re misguided. That’s not what life is about. We believe, probably more than anywhere, that life is getting all this material stuff. It’s a case of misguided ambition and desire

We can take this further. Today, America doesn’t know what is defeating it. America senses that it can’t cope, that there are things happening that are beyond our control or comprehension:
• We can no longer solve our domestic problems
• We are powerless to deal with the Malaysian airline disaster in Ukraine
• We can’t resolve the tri-partite struggle in Iraq
• We can no longer restrain Israel in its non-proportional response to Hamas
• We are no longer on the same side as our long-term Middle East allies, Saudi Arabia and Egypt
• We can’t figure out a non-military response for China’s initiatives throughout Asia

In fact, we no longer have a non-military response to any foreign problem. The power strategies that we employed throughout the 1950’s, continuing down to the end of the Soviet Union no longer work. Back then, we played chess, moving pieces across the board. We used whichever proxies or allies were at hand, we overthrew elected governments, thereby violating our own ideology. We supported and installed dictatorial governments. We promised freedom and prosperity, while helping to deliver hegemony, based on our military intervention, or the threat of it.

Today, we have no answers, only posturing from all of our leaders. We have become the kind of people who criticize, not the kind of people who can solve problems.

We are no longer king-makers in the third world, the neo-conservative approach of use of military power cannot stand in the face of asymmetric warfare and the devastating superiority of IEDs to up-armored military vehicles.

From Ian Welsh:

Deny the fruits of western ideology to those who reach for them, and of course they will turn against you. Pervert them even within your own countries by undermining your own democratic principles and by concentrating wealth and income in the hands of a few, while impoverishing the many; make it clear that modern neo-liberal capitalism doesn’t spread prosperity to even the core nations, and you have set up one of the preconditions of not just hegemonic collapse, but of internal collapse of a civilization

And here is Welsh’s money quote:

People who do not believe in the genuine goodness of what they are fighting for, hardly fight for it at all

That is what we see in Iraq. More importantly, that is what we see in America. Today, no one believes in the genuine goodness of what they are fighting for, be they job-hunting Millennials, unreconstructed 1960’s liberals, or today’s money-grubbing Republican and Democrat politicians.

When you no longer know how to solve problems, you turn to what is easy. You buy the next shiny object, you live through the lives of the rich and famous. Snark and incivility replace facts and discussion.

There was a display in the 9/11 Museum that showed a piece of debris about 3’ high by 6’ wide and 12’ long. It was rusty and seemed to be sedimentary in nature, visibly comprised of metal, concrete, and wires. It is actually part of 5 floors of the Trade Center, compressed by weight and softened by intense heat. Nothing of the desks, computers, phones and people are distinguishable in this artifact. The Museum calls it a “composite”. It brings home the destructive power of the falling towers on 9/11:

Photo is from before the “composite” went on display

After the Towers’ fall, the news media said that 9/11 changed everything, and we believed it. But changes to our view of the world, and its view of us, had started long before that. We stopped learning about geopolitics in the 1960’s, substituting false analogies and military aid to local strongmen for true knowledge of how to change the world.

Since then, we have been compressed by the heat and weight of events we cannot understand. If you think about it, our decline after 9/11 came because we panicked, spent all of our money on pointless wars, and gave up our core values in the name of an illusion of safety, and pure vengeance.

So, yes, America doesn’t know what is defeating it. America senses that there are things happening that are beyond its control or comprehension.

But these things are knowable, and fixable. Hopefully, by Americans.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – July 20, 2014

“No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.” ― Edward R. Murrow

Your aspiring blogger visited the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan yesterday. It was very moving and quite crowded. A striking thing was remembering how uniform the reactions of other countries were. They all felt badly for America, many offered help.

Our citizens were very united, showing sympathy for the families of the people lost on that day, working together to search for possible survivors, supporting George Bush in his attack on Iraq.

We are paying a huge price around the world for invading Iraq and Afghanistan. We no longer have the sympathy of the world, many nations no longer trust us, and quite a few have become our enemy. Our overreaction to 9/11 here at home, from the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to the Patriot Act, to the rampant excesses of the NSA, to the financial disaster of going to war while we cut taxes, have left us divided at home. Our foreign policy is reactive, while we have no domestic policy.

The Museum is displaying a brick from Osama bin-Laden’s Abbottabad compound: