War is a forgetful avenger. He who often turns to it ignores that someday it shall turn on him.
The nobility of warfare is fiction. War has always been a horrid ordeal. Butchery, theft, pillage, rapine and death are the perennial certainties of war while the identity of which side may win the martial contestation is left to chance in most instances. No war occurs without wholesale crime conjoined to it. The advent of modern warfare and the industries that manufacture war’s sophisticated instrumentalities have not altered this fact. Whether by knife or by drone, brutality is unleashed and asked to render its fullest demonstration.
Technology does not abnegate brutality; technology abets it by affecting it at a distance through modern weapons and by making it so widespread in this application that the brutality of superior military force becomes impersonal to us. A beheading appears savage because we all can empathize with the victim. The devastation of a village by bomb cast from afar is more difficult to feel. The bomb does its task so thorough that human remains meld with inanimate rubble. Scores are beheaded and dismembered in the blast. The explosion is so intense that it blinds you to the human destruction. Bone and board, flesh and mortar become one. No visible humanity remains over which to shed a tear. Yet, obliteration of innocents in this instance is more indiscriminate than a beheading can ever be. It is important to remember this point when assessing the moral claims of all the sides to the free-for-all that Syria has become.
It is also important to train our emotions and biases as much as possible when assessing what is happening. There are two postulates I seek to establish before continuing with the critique of the international war in Syria/Iraq.
First, ISIL has proven itself to be a vicious political movement, adroitly using Islam as its calling card; in truth, this group’s behavior has little connection to Islam or any spiritual faith. That a violent political movement attaches itself to a noble belief or idea is not unique. Maoist China and the Stalinist USSR travestied Marxism. Nineteenth century United States, with its enslavement of black skin and genocide against the red (Native American), represented neither the Christian nor democratic ideal although its leaders gasconaded these claims.
That ambitious actors in the Middle East would hitch their lusts for power and blood to the standard of Islam is predictable. To blame Islam for these depredations is to blame Jesus for the massacre of the American Indian and Europe’s colonization of Africa. Clearly, violence ferments in the Middle East; many Muslims embrace it, ignorantly mistaking the xenophobic bloodletting for an element of their faith. This violence is more the child of region’s checkered history and the political culture born of this history than it is of the religion of the people. Again, no surprise. In most instances and places, culture trumps religion to the extent that culture masquerades as the truest religion for most people. Most people don’t study the books of their faith; thus, they don’t live its tenets. However, because one lives his culture he does not have to study to know it. Thus, many White American Christians dirt-washed their conscience into believing kidnapping and turning Africans into bondservants was a Christian act.
Second, most of us would rather live a society like present-day America than in the one lSIL seems intent to erect. However, that one society may internally be more conducive than another, does not give that society carte blanche to attack the harsher one. Such an attack is an act of war and instigation of war must accord with international precepts lest the fairer society become the more blemished one by reason of its self righteousness.
A part from the legal requirements, there is a moral hurdle. Ask the majority of Syrians now under ISIL dominion whether they would prefer living under ISIL control in peace or in war their answer would be neither. Some now long for the days when their only contention was with the harsh Assad regime. Yet, if you press them into recognizing the world is oft unfair and that these two are the only alternatives at present, they would say ISIL and peace. Given the already harsh reality conferred by such an existence, does another nation have a moral right to accost this forlorn population with greater pain by raining on them lethal devices of modern science? These people are now butchered from below and bombed from above. Their lone crime is to live in a land at the crossroads of an international struggle for power and wealth.
We must quash the idea that a nation which might have a more benign domestic system somehow has the moral right to attack another nation or society. This consideration is important when weighing the propriety of America’s aerial war in Syria. This consideration is also important because it just may be as accurate a barometer of sound policy as any other consideration.
Syria has become a condominium of war. Due to political and military miscalculations by a crowded procession of actors in a brief time, Syria has become as complex a situation as one can find. It is a theater of multiple wars: 1. Assad against the vaporous moderate domestic opposition, 2. Assad against ISIL, 3. ISIL against the moderates, 4. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others against Assad, 5. Turkey against Assad, 6. Turkey against the Kurds versus ISIL versus Assad, 7. Israel against Assad, 8. Israel against Iran and Hezbollah, 9. America against ISIL, 10. America against Assad, 11. America against Russia, 12. America against Iran, 13. Sunni against Shi’ite, and 14. Established states against the new entity that claims to honor the line of tradition, ISIL’s emergent caliphate.
The Syrian conflict is a labyrinth of confusion. The opening lines of each player’s strategy are contradicted by the strategy’s latter phases. Every nation is a contortionist. What is said is not what is meant and what is done goes unspoken. For a nation to jump into this maelstrom when none of its vital interests are at stake measures the reach of that nation’s imperial folly. This is the context of the American incursion into Syria. America has entered a war, the full regional dimensions and intricacies of which it does not comprehend. Injecting oneself into the center of a dispute whose language you don’t even understand testifies to an empire blinded by arrogance. This might not be the dance with death for the American empire but it certainly is a dance of diminution. It is a case of foreign policy malpractice on a felonious scale.
America warring against ISIL is the latest incident of Washington eventually battling a force it helped spawn. This dynamic finds its origins in the Cold War. Fearing secular, nationalist movements would angle toward the Soviet Union, America funded reactionary Islamist groups as counterweights throughout the Middle East. As part of its efforts culminating in the 1953 coup against democratically-elected Prime Minister Mossadegh, America funded an Islamic group to stir civil unrest because the prime minister had the temerity to challenge international oil companies. In Mossadegh, America paranoia saw a communist where there was none. A member of the clandestinely-funded group was a young cleric whose surname was Khomeini. Twenty-six years later, he would show America the bitter dividends of its tainted investment against Iranian democracy. The battle between America and Khomeini’s political heirs still wages; it mars the Syrian complexity.
When the Soviet Union dumbly invaded Afghanistan, America rushed to fund the Taliban and the stream of itinerant mujahedeen pouring into the desolate nation. America’s wanted the Soviets to experience their own Vietnam. After the war, America turned its back on the mujahedeen; it turned against America. Al Qaeda was born in the bosom of American foreign policy. Its most prominent son would be Osama bin Laden. The rest is history.
The demise of the Cold War gave America freedom to sally forth and establish dominance in the oil-rich Middle East without risking superpower confrontation. American neo-conservatives believed staking claim to the Middle East would cement American economic and military global hegemony. With many of them personally invested in America’s oil sectors, this segment of the American elite would also financially profit. To accomplish this, stubborn nations in the region needed to be subdued and Russia had to be kept low. The Wolfowitz doctrine was incubated. This doctrine proclaims America should war to ensure its status as the lone superpower and to break recalcitrant nations that might assert a nettlesome independence of thought at the regional level. The doctrine has become the bipartisan capstone of American national security policy.
Pursuant to this doctrine, the defunct Soviet republic would be replaced by Middle Eastern nations as America’s new foundational enemy. Libya, Iran, Iraq and Syria became four of the five charter members of the Axis of Evil, with nuclear misfit North Korea as the group’s lone geographical outlier. In breaking Saddam, America allowed Al Qaeda to flourish in a country where it once had been proscribed. That branch of Al Qaeda splintered. The splinter grew tumescent, expanding into Syria to become ISIL. America teamed with Al Qaeda to topple Libya’s Gaddafi. Again, America would turn its back on the matter, allowing the jihadists free rein in the disheveled nation. That branch of Al Qaeda would export Libyan weapons, fanning the embers of war in regions as far flung as Nigeria and Syria.
To understand American foreign policy, you must understand that the war against terrorism is conditional and flexible. The war against enemy nations is the absolute, rigid one. The Wolfowitz doctrine supersedes the battle against extremists groups. America and its Arab allies wittingly funded ISIL in the battle against the Assad regime. America declared it was funding the “moderate Syria opposition.” This is a falsehood. Like the ersatz moderate Iraqi opposition before it, this Syrian group looms prominent only in international conferences and in the minds of Western policymakers who believe they can call their desired objective in existence simply by willing it so. On the battlefield, the moderate opposition has been a negligible presence. It is an open secret that American intelligence services have been equipping and paying salaries to fighters who can only be described as extremists.
What ISIL has done in Syria is merely compressed the normal time span between receipt of American assistance and fight against America. A friend- to-foe process that took years with Al Qaeda has taken only months with ISIL. Once ISIL declared intention to hold territory, it became America’s foe because it transformed itself from being a tool to upend a troublesome state into becoming an inchoate member of the group of contumacious nations America disdains.
Now America bombs ISIL in Syria and Iraq. In doing so, America breached international norms. It is unlawful to attack the territory of another state unless that state or something in it presented a proximate threat. The Assad regime did not threaten. ISIL presented no closing threat although it brutally executed several Americans. To provide legal pretext for the bombing, the Obama administration invented the Khorasan group, claiming this fictitious Al Qaeda offshoot planned an imminent attack on American territory. The news of this group likely sent Al Qaeda leaders scurrying to check their membership database. They had never heard of this group.
Moreover, American official policy long ago made mince of the phrase “imminent threat.” They are not bound to the common meaning we give it, signaling something near and close. If something is discussed by suspected terrorists and is within the realm of possibility at some future point, the American government considers it imminent. Today, imminent means almost anything. It is akin to executing a man for murder just because he was heard to remark that “he was so angry he could kill” after having a heated argument with a friend. Showing the contrived nature of this ploy, America has intensified bombing of Syria after claiming to have obliterated Khorasan headquarters and its plans against the American nation. If the bombing achieved its aim, the imminent threat to America is no more. A legal rationale for continued operations is unavailing particularly since there is no claim ISIL or Assad conspired with the starkly ephemeral Khorasan outfit.
In Washington, the walls close against President Obama. He is loath to insert ground troops; but, the logic of the circumstance may soon demand he shelve this skittishness. He is on the verge of winning the devil’s lottery. In exchange for ending war in one nation (Iraq), he may return to the region to war against two nations (Iraq and Syria). He has not the political courage to forestall the neo-conservatives who press for war. He will succumb. He hoped Turkey would bail him from the dilemma by furnishing the needed ground muscle. But the Turkish leader is allied to ISIL. Erdogan’s mortal foe is Assad. The Turk envisions himself as a Sunni bulwark against motley Alawite and Shi’ite groups ruling Syria and Iraq, respectively. Moreover, given his troubles with his Kurdish minority, Alawite minority rule in Syria is an abomination to the increasingly chauvinistic Erdogan. After Assad, Kurds are his most irksome national security challenge. ISIL is minor his list of worries.
For now, it serves as his instrument of destruction for it fights both Assad and the Kurds. In a display of frigid indifference that would cause Machiavelli to shudder with embarrassment, Erdogan idled his strong military, asking it not to lift a finger to help beleaguered Kurdish fighters as ISIL steadily captures the strategic border town of Khobani. For Erdogan, ISIL pummels two birds – Assad and ISIL — with one stone. Thus, Erdogan proclaimed Turkey will not engage ISIL unless President Obama agrees to deploy the American military in toppling Assad. He extorts Obama while ISIL decimates the Kurds. This is how realpolitik is played in a rough neighborhood. Yet, it has caught the American leader unprepared. Erdogan is well aware American conservatives now press Obama in the same way. He likely orchestrates his diplomatic extortion of Obama with them. Theirs is a concert for war.
Obama prays the bombing campaign will halt ISIL. So far, it has not noticeably handicapped the group. ISIL advances in both Syria and Iraq. This is not a sign of a battered army. The aerial campaign will prove insufficient. During the Vietnam War, American hurled more destructive tonnage than was expended during the entirety of WW II by all nations combined. Still, America lost. The currently level of bombing in the Iraq/Syrian theatre is a pinprick. If only Obama had the courage and foresight of a man willing to listen to instincts for peace instead of the call of the American war machine. He would have collaborated with the Russian president to contain the war in Syria. If so, ISIL would not be as it is and America would not be on the verge of sending troops back into the fire. However, the war party in America now prevails. Expansion of war is in the offing. The slim chance for peace will be a first casualty. President Obama’s foreign policy legacy will be its second.
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