Dear America,
Since the attacks in France by ISIL terrorists, the Republicans have been almost univocal in their criticism of President Obama for a purported lack of a formulated strategy in Syria and Iraq, and in their calls for a full scale invasion of the Levant with American troops on the ground whether or not the states in the region participate. They all say that the United States has to lead the invasion and that the Arab allies must be made to participate fully as well, but none of them have any suggestions as to how we manage to make them when they have shown nothing but diffidence so far, even though ISIL shows no signs of going away, or of limiting its ambitions to areas already conquered. So what it comes to is that the Republicans once again advocate unilateral action by the United States on the other side of the world--unilateral because they surely must know that previous "alliances" were nothing but us and a few token soldiers from the Arab states, Britain and France, and that in reality there is nothing to suggest that anything different is going to happen now--as if they were on another planet for the past 65 years.
We joined the "police action" in Korea in 1950 and we still have just under 30,000 troops stationed there. We had more than half a million soldiers in Vietnam at one point during the Johnson administration and we have buried close to 60,000 of them over the years, all so that we could wear t-shirts made there by the supposedly evil communists we were trying to expel. We watched the French get their collective ass handed to them, and we did the same thing they did anyway because we didn't seem to learn from Korea. Then, after a couple of skirmishes in places like Granada and the first time in Iraq--there really was some semblance of an alliance the first time--we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan again courtesy of the last Republican presidential administration...that of George W. Bush...and we are still fighting those battles. Even though W. set the time table for us to be out of Iraq and Afghanistan by now, the Republicans are trying to blame President Obama for the collapse of Iraq and the chaos in Afghanistan because he tried to follow that timetable, and once again, they are refusing to learn the lessons of Korea, Vietnam, and the same war that they want to revive in Iraq. It is nothing but a reprise of the jingoistic polemic that they always employ when they think American pride is at stake. They don't want to admit that we now have ISIL and the various fragments of al Qaeda thanks to Bush...their guy...not Obama, and that doing what Bush did again won't yield any different result. Doesn't it all make you want to ask, when will they ever learn? Isn't it a mark of insanity to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result? And if the Republicans are insane, what does that make us Americans. We keep electing them.
Ted Cruz is out front banging the drum for a renewed war in Iraq and Syria, and not to be outdone by either Cruz or his brother, Jeb Bush is playing the same tune. There's no need to mention that Trump wants to bomb ISIL back to the stone age and overwhelm him with the same army that couldn't save Iraq and Afghanistan from themselves. What else would you expect from a bombastic blatherskite like him. As to the rest of them, Rand Paul is the only exception to the proposition that Republican presidential candidates never saw an opportunity for war that they didn't want to seize on. Some of them want to limit American action to things like a "no fly zone," which ignores the question, when the Russians violate it for the first time are we going to shoot down their jets and risk a nuclear confrontation? Others want a full blown invasion, but except for the libertarian Paul, they all want to cover our troops in glory one more time, never mind the blood and tomb stones and the virtually zero chance of long term success that we can anticipate without the full participation of the countries in the region. They seem undeterred by the fact that we haven't been able to motivate Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey (except for the Kurds), Egypt or any of the North African countries to make any serious contribution to the "alliance" that we are supposed to be only leading but that in reality is us, virtually alone, dropping bombs that accomplish very little in the long run without troops from the region to occupy the vacuums those bombs create.
Bernie Sanders is right. Unless the Arab states, including Iraq, demonstrate the resolve to participate in the effort to extirpate ISIL, which is more of a threat to them than to the rest of the world...unless the Muslim population of the world takes a more active role in identifying and anathematizing the jihadists among them and expelling them from the faith...ISIL will kill more of them than anyone else by far. So we have no prospect of success if we act unilaterally, and even predominantly, so let's wait until they get serious, and then we'll help them. President Obama does have a strategy despite Republican fulminations to the contrary...and that's it. It's the only thing that makes any sense at all. It's the Republicans who have their heads up their...buried in the sand.
Your friend,
Mike
Leave a comment