Letter 2 America for August 12, 2014

Dear America,

We are at a crossroads with regard to American foreign policy for the long-term future.  This moment in world history is the nexus between the old Bush Doctrine, which was really the reiteration of the hawk mentality harbored by conservatives and everyone who considered himself a patriot from the end of World War II, through the Vietnam era up until the withdrawal from Iraq that President Obama implemented finally two years ago under what could be called the Obama doctrine.  The Bush Doctrine in all forms has shown itself to be a rolling quagmire for this country.  We have sunk fortune after fortune in every kind of terrain from swamp to desert for over fifty years and buried tens of thousands of our young in the name of proliferating our own aspirations as if there could be no question as to whether such would succeed in other nations and cultures, but at last we are asking ourselves the questions we should have been asking all along, the first of which is whether our goals and values are transplantable to other societies universally.  It seems abundantly clear that in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, there are various inimical factors at work, and without an indigenous movement for social change in our direction, there is no prospect of success for anyone but the few political leaders who emerge under our auspices during our military adventures.  The current form of the debacle in Iraq, that is the ascent of radical (or reactionary to my way of thinking) jihadist Islam in the form of a military force led by a chiliastic tyrant who thinks himself a visionary, is only one of the most recent outcomes of our wars, and it is largely a consequence of what we left behind after declaring victory.  The Malaki government may not have been as brutally suppressive as the Hussein regime, but it was seen as just as sectarian and exclusionary as Hussein's government, and it spawned the success of the Islamic State, as the militia sweeping through Iraq presumes to call itself, but it was not the only cause.  The sectarian schism in Iraq is the condition of the middle east, not just Iraq.  In fact, religious schism is the root cause of clashes all over the world, including The Balkans, where peace seems to have taken hold over the past twenty years since the Dayton Accords, but that is more likely an anomaly than the norm.  In the area formally known as The Levant, the likelihood of a Pax Arabia, so to speak, seems so remote as to be no less than six hundred years away.  I say six hundred because that is how much Islam is younger than Christianity by, and it took us six hundred years for Christians to go from Crusaders and anti-Semitism to polyglot society, and I believe it will take Islam that much more time to do the same.  It is a matter of doctrinal evolution, and there is no substitute for time.

So, given that there is nothing we can do to tame the wild, wild east, the definition of the American role in the world becomes the central task for our foreign policy makers, and President Obama has taken the first step.  He takes no measures, for the most part not even humanitarian ones, until there is consensus in the world and a political alliance that acts.  In the instance of the present crisis on a mountain in Iraq where tens of thousands of Zoroastrian Arabs are taking refuge from the sectarian rampage of the Islamic State below, we have been supplying provisions and air cover for those trying to escape for a few days, and now the British are helping out with the supply of sustaining aid to the refugees, but President Obama continues to insist that we are not going to fight Iraq's battle again, and of course, the Republicans are piling on him with criticism that we aren't doing anything more, though they are short on recommendations other than to undo history and the departure from their war that Obama engineered.  But American politics is not the worst of it.  The world sits by and waits for us to solve the problem of the Islamic State's rise to power, and as it progresses it gains more and more acceptance from Iraqi Sunnis previously persecuted by the political posterity we left in place when we withdrew.  Thus, the questions now are, first, does Mr. Obama have the political fortitude to stand his ground and refuse to act unilaterally in Iraq, and second, does the world recognize what may well be a historic reiteration of the Islamic control of Spain for centuries from about 700 A.D. until the beginning of the next millenium.  That occupying culture did many great things, and it led the emergence from the dark ages into the light, but the new Islam seems to be based on a nostalgia for the dark past.  And if the Islamic revolution that the most violent and ardent Islamists propose occurs, the dark is where Europe will go again.  Of course, that seems very far fetched a prospect today given the vigor of modern militarism in Europe and the rest of the modern world, but who would have believed that Ayatola Homeni could have seized the throne of The Shah half a century ago from his exile in Paris.  Who would have predicted the disintegration of a half-million man force in Iraq at the first shot from what turns out to be a formidable foe.  And who would have guessed that Europe would have sat around waiting for us to handle it until now.

It is time we recognized in our foreign policy that we are sheltered by two oceans, so the bacon we save in our military dalliances is never our own...at least not directly.  As we approach independence from foreign oil and our economy recovers from the mess made by our financial industry, it is less and less incumbent on us to lead the world when it comes along in its own best interest only kicking and screaming.  The necessary alliance was formed in Libya, but now it seems that even with our help, some states are doomed to fail, and the causes of those failures may well be addressed only by autocratic control in the form of dictatorships and juntas.  But whether such is the case or not, without a world order, nothing can be done about it...not even by us.  So let us continue to participate in the political life of the world, and in its commercial life as well.  But when it comes to being the world's protector, it's time to let the world protect itself in its own best interest--with our assistance of course.

Your friend,

Mike