Harry Targ
President Barack Obama spoke to the nation Wednesday
night, September 10, about the need to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State
in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). For him ISIS (he calls them the Islamic State in Iraq
and the Levant or ISIL which culls up the good old days of Western Empire in
the region) constitutes “a small group of killers.” This small group of killers
threatens the stability of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other
regional states and Europe. Furthermore, he said, if unchecked some of them may
even threaten the security of the United States as well.
The President reported that the United States had
already been carrying out large scale air strikes against targets in Iraq, has
been working to create a new more diverse Iraqi government in Baghdad, and is building
a regional coalition to respond to the threat.
The President then announced new measures intended to
communicate to the American people U.S. resolve and muscle. In addition to
informing the public, a significant purpose of the speech was to stifle his critics
on the Right who claim he has not been warlike enough. This motivation was more
about the 2014 elections than about reducing violence in the Persian Gulf.
President Obama declared that the United States
would expand bombing of ISIS targets, even, if need be, in Syria. This would constitute
an expansion of the war which the American people rejected in 2013. Also the
United States would train and equip the “moderates” among the Syrian
resistance. In addition, the President announced he was sending 475 more U.S. troops
to participate in military training of Iraqi troops. Further, counter-terrorism
programs would continue and he would be requesting funds for “humanitarian”
assistance for the region as well.
Obama reminded the American people that we are
engaged in a long and arduous struggle to defeat ISIS (reminiscent of President
Truman’s 1947 similar warning of the long-term struggle against “International
Communism”). The upside of the message, he claimed, was that the model for our Iraq
and Syrian military policy was Yemen and Somalia, which the President judged a
success. Finally, he promised that there would be “no boots on the ground.”
President Obama ended with references to American
exceptionalism, the mantra of every U.S. president at least since Theodore Roosevelt.
The United States, he counseled, still led the world in science, education,
development and most other human endeavors. And we had the “enduring burden,”
“the responsibility to lead,” and stood for “freedom, justice, and dignity.”
As I suggested in an earlier essay (“Lies and War!” Diary of a Heartland Radical, September
3, 2014): “Now the latest enemy,
ISIS….is portrayed as a monster movement that beheads its prisoners and murders
masses of people who do not share its religious ideology….War-hungry hawks
inside the beltway particularly those with ready access to mainstream media
demand that President Obama expand bombing, transfer more arms to so-called
friends, and recruit militant opponents of ISIS to even the score. This new enemy,
more scary than the Communists of the twentieth century, includes a handful of
Americans…” They might, so the scenario suggests, return from ISIS training
camps to terrorize the U.S. “homeland.”
Perhaps the most relevant passage from my prior
essay is that “….those who raise
questions about why ISIS is as popular as it is, what its grievances are, why
there is hatred for the West, particularly the United States, in the region,
and whether the application of military force would make matters better or worse,
are drowned out by those who built careers based on arguments about the
inevitability of war and violence and the need to kill for the greater good.”
Andrew Bacevich, historian and former military
officer, raises the question of whether the lens on the world shared by U.S. foreign
policy decision-makers, think tank advisors, media pundits, and most Americans
is outmoded (“The Revisionist
Imperative: Rethinking Twentieth Century Wars,” Journal of Military History, April, 2012, 1033-1046). He suggests that most influential foreign
policymakers in every administration and large numbers of politicians and
analysts still believe “war works,” a proposition belied by much twentieth
century evidence. Bacevich argues that today
the war works hypothesis is believed only in the United States and maybe
Israel.
Those who accept the “war works” thesis defend it by
referring to what another historian Tony Judt called the “moral memory palace,”
or the storehouse of myths about the successes and failures of twentieth
century international relations. The West erred by accepting “appeasement” in
Munich, not paying attention at Pearl Harbor, being naïve at Yalta, but
learning our lessons about the need for force at Normandy, Hiroshima, and
Nagasaki, for example.
Bacevich reminds us that Americans grew up in the
twentieth century buying into myths about the inevitability of war, the
possibilities of human improvement that wars bring, and the dangers of
appeasing foreign leaders. Most critically the consciousness of the most
influential policymakers is shaped by the belief
that the world consists of a handful of great powers that determined the
destiny of humankind. This he refers to as the “Short Twentieth Century”
view.
Bacevich argues that the popular way of reflecting
on the “Short Twentieth Century” involves interpreting the world as “geographically
centered in Eurasia” where a small number of great powers were pitted against
one another. However, he adds that what he called the “Long Twentieth Century”
more aptly describes the worlds of yesterday and today.
The Long Twentieth Century “…has been a contest
between outsiders and insiders. Western intruders with large ambitions, preeminently
Great Britain until succeeded by the United States, pursued their dreams of
empire or hegemony, typically cloaked in professions of ‘benevolent
assimilation,’ uplift, or the pursuit of world peace. The beneficiaries of
imperial ministrations…seldom proved grateful and frequently resisted.”
Applying Bacevich’s analysis to Obama’s speech
suggests that the escalated U.S. military action that was promised on September
10 is precisely the wrong approach to relating to the Persian Gulf and Middle
East. The President refuses to ask the important questions about why ISIS has
been so successful. And nothing announced in that speech can do anything but
create more dead in the region, more hatred for the United States, more
traumatized U.S. troops, more trillions of dollars on wasteful spending, and
the perpetuation of a U.S. political culture in which most people believe that
“war works.”
