Letter 2 America for June 18, 2013

Dear America,

Very seldom do we have a controlled test of foreign policy in the real world; the consequences are too great for experimentation.  But over the past decade and a little bit more, we have been involved in three wars...all in the same region--the middle east--and all in a period of relative tumult, culminating most recently in the "Arab Spring."  And American foreign policy regarding those three wars was a function of two presidential administrations and two legislative administrations as well, beginning with the Bush administration and a fully Republican congress and ending now with the second Obama administration with a Democratic senate, which does all the advising and consenting that is necessary in such situations.  Because the power of foreign policy reposed in two nearly diametrically opposed political camps during the course of these three wars, the hawkish policy of conservatives was tested against the more moderate policy of liberals as a matter of course, not scientific manipulation, so the results are both palpable and predictive in that each had the opportunity to run its course.  The Obama administration continued almost unaltered the policies of the Bush administration in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and it took its own course in Libya.  Simultaneously, American policy in Iran regarding its nuclear program has progressed through ever increasing economic sanctioning of Iran, having started in the Carter administration on account of Iran's radical international and domestic political policies, including its countenancing of terrorism.  In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States engaged in full-blown military intervention to remove autocratic governments: the theocracy in Afghanistan and the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.  And in Libya, the goal was the same but the United States took a part in an international effort and never committed troops to combat.  So now, we have two divergent foreign policies entailing military intervention that have run their courses and we have imminent results that we can compare with non-military intervention like that in the case of Iran.  Unfortunately, the lesson we should learn is not the one we no doubt will.

In the final analysis, neither military intervention policy yielded anything on which we will be able to rely for the purpose of ensuring domestic security or geo-political stability.  Starting with Iraq and Afghanistan--the two cases of direct American military intervention--we have managed to install civil governments in both countries, but the internecine religious schism that afflicts each has led to continuing violence, fractious politics, political and financial corruption and something far short of a promise of peace for the future.  Between the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, the two countries' governments are in the hands of aspiring plutocrats who have enriched themselves, their kith and kin and cling to power tenuously in the historical sense as the forces that operated to create the fractiousness responsible for the emergence of their brutal predecessor governors are unabated, if not exacerbated by the ersatz democratic forms that their new governments have assumed.  Iraq is now essentially demilitarized as far as American troops are concerned, and Afghanistan soon will be, but I haven't heard anyone predict where either country will be in ten years.  The fact is that both societies are torn by religious sectarianism, which is an intractable problem under the best of circumstances, and the best of circumstances doesn't exist in either place.

Then, of course, there is Libya--regarded by many to have been a policy success in that the thirty year incumbent dictator there, Muammar Gaddafi, is dead and gone--in which we took a leadership role to some extent, but we were never more than a participant in an international effort run by a centralized authority other than an American general, and in which American troops were never involved.  Through implementation of a "no-fly zone" by the international consortium that aided the Libyan rebels, the rebels were ultimately able to prevail, but since then we have had the attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, which was inspired by al Qaeda's affiliate in Libya, and the militia's that formed during the revolution against Gaddafi have been transmogrified from the hope of Libya into its central problem in that they all strive not just for their own pre-eminence but for the pre-eminence of their respective creeds as well.  In all three places, it is still Muslim against Muslim, and in each place that factionalism is manifested in blood with bombs, bullets and other forms of violence, not to mention political uncertainty, if not tumult.  And each is a cauldron in which anti-American sentiment boils.  So what does that teach us that we can use to guide our policies regarding Syria.

In my opinion, it should lead to the conclusion that we cannot fix every problem from without, nor can we expect every nation to revere the principles on which our nation is founded, but that isn't what we have learned as a democratically governed nation.  Our politicians are now trying to our-righteous one another with demands for intervention in one form or another or claims that we could have done something awhile ago, but it is too late now.  But the fact is that the weapons we gave to the Afghan mujahedin--the rebels in the war against the Russian puppet state in Afghanistan in the nineties in that case--wound up in the hands of al Qaeda reactionaries who believe that God's way is the seventh century way, and the Taliban ascended to the power to cut off hands and heads in town squares as a mode of government in that country.  That is what we arranged to replace a relatively benign Russian surrogate government with.  As to Iraq, the tyrant, Saddam Hussein, was defeated, captured, convicted of war crimes and executed, but the chaos that he may have been responsible for suppressing reemerged immediately after he was removed from power, and it persists today in that same old form of blood born of guns and bombs combined to create political uncertainty.  So, the Obama administration may be taking the prudent course relative to Syria--waiting for an international movement against Bashar al-Assad to form--but the outcome is not going to be any more to our advantage than it was in any of the three prior wars in which we played a role.  Thus, one way or another, we will be faced with an immutable truth.  Much as we would like to, we do not control the world.  The lesson we should learn is that the best we can do is what we did in Iran: apply exogenous pressure that the people feel and wait for them to force internal political change in their own countries.  Iran now has a more moderate president, at least partially in consequence of such a policy, who may or may not be a beard for the reactionary "Supreme Leader," but the people have made their will clear, and there is now a better chance than ever that a moderate Iran is somewhere in the not-too-distant future.  But will we learn that lesson?  Have we ever?

Your friend,

Mike