 |
| ISIS militants (courtesy: RT.com). |
Ah, Iraq, that Bush-era (forties one and
three) throwback that won’t go away even after we leave it behind. The
Democrats swept Congress in 2006 calling for a swift exit plan from that dusty
place, and now the Democrat White House (which had the approval of 39% of the
American people about a week and a half ago, according to Gallup) is sweeping
over and raising dust there with a freshly authorized airstrike campaign to
curb the advance of radical militants. The circle is now complete: when we left
we had lessons to learn, and know we’re rushing back to make up for time lost lecturing
ourselves about what we did wrong.
I’m not at all opposed to airstrikes and
bombings; in fact I’m quite strongly supportive, even hoping to see the effort widened.
I certainly hope the campaign works out as well as possible, too, because if
there’s anything I won’t be supporting this time, it’s another large scale
ground invasion. Even if the intelligence was wrong, the moral purpose behind
the mission was right from the start back yonder even before 2003 (Tony Blair,
who you may know is something of a leftist, has said so much himself), and I
supported that mission. But something started to happen during the late Bush
years, as the America began to grow weary of the conflict. We began to lose our
initiative and sense of direction, it seemed, as we stretched into a long war
with an ever-unconventional enemy. Talk of a victory all but disappeared,
replaced with discussion of an “exit plan;” and, as Steyn would say, once you
get to focusing on an exit plan, the road to victory trails off and is never
found again. And no matter how much I wish things then had gone otherwise, no
redeployment now can change what happened in that past. And so no more of that.
Airstrikes it will be, airstrikes it will have to be.
But the long, winding, and bizarre road
to this point has been a fascinating ride. In retrospect (and even out of it),
Syria has to be the most perplexing stop along the way. Somewhere yesterday I heard
the question asked of the White House why we hadn’t launched an air war into
Syria just as we have over Iraq. ISIS (or ISIL, if you really prefer. Either
way they’re still pure dark evil) is certainly active there. And thusly exposed
is the entire mess that is American foreign policy: striking against ISIS in
Syria, as evil as they are, blows a hole in the resistance against resurgent Syrian
strongman/president Bashar al-Assad, ally of America’s enemies Iran and Russia
(I don’t care what the official State Department policy is on the nomenclature
here, I will call a spade a spade. And in doing so I will be following in the tradition
of Mitt Romney, whom the American electorate now wish had been elected President,by a margin of 53 to 44 percent).
And of course, this little-talk-before-we-commence-to-blowing-things-up
approach provides a great contrast to the apparent Syria “crisis” and ensuing
humanitarian air war that never really was to be of last fall, the one that
came about when the White House was called on to actually stand up and enforce
the “red line” it had set in regards to chemical weapons usage by the Assad
regime (a few incidents of chemical weapons being deployed and causing mass civilian
deaths are horrific, yes, but apparently the White House is less offended at
the massacre of even more civilians in the same place by…“conventional” means).
For days and days, I remember, it dominated the talk, the updates constant;
first the White House began “seriously considering” action, then a coalition of
the Western powers emerged, and the President got ready to go on live TV to
present the case for intervention…then, as quickly as it started, Congress
started to express doubts, that coalition of western powers fell apart (with
Dave Cameron particularly taking a notable stumble in the House of Commons),
and Putin emerged with perfect timing to make an irrefutable peace offer rooted
in an unscripted answer John Kerry gave to a reporter’s hypothetical question.
By the time those TV cameras started rolling, the President settled on the wonderful
idea of explaining all the reasons why we should start dropping bombs, except
not really because Vlad is offering us peace in our time. In the end, as Pete Hegseth
said it, the speech that ultimately became President Obama’s anti-climax for
the ages all "crescendoed to 'how long do we pause.' It crescendoed to
nothing." And we haven’t un-paused in Syria since.
The quagmire is thus: if you strike
ISIS, you risk shifting the balance even further into Assad’s favor; strike
Assad, and you not only risk empowering the wrong sort of rebel front, you
anger your leading geopolitical foe, whose increasingly influential leader
rivals the American President for title of “most powerful man in the world”
(and makes for awkward positioning with that one Islamist power with whom you’re
politely asking to let go of their nuclear ambitions). So either way, Syria is
for now a no-go for American power.
The only thing left to do now is find a
less politically delicate target area to try over again, and to streamline the
process, skipping straight from the “seriously considering action” phase to the
“authorizing action as necessary” phase, then quickly finding some “necessity”
to carry out said action, all within the span of a week, before anyone has a
chance to voice an outside opinion. And so, dripping with irony, the 2009 Nobel
Peace Prize winner who campaigned on promises both to wind down foreign wars
and to ensure that “the rise of the oceans” would begin to slow, authorized a
new air campaign against radical insurgents in Iraq—in its most simple form, a
conflict he vowed to leave behind.
-Mitch
Carter is an Illinois State Scholar and a member of the Kendall County Young
Republicans.
No comments:
Post a Comment