Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. Ambers, whose views I deeply respect, urges all of us to take a chill pill. He thinks this is simply part of the global police operation that we allegedly consented to in 2001 and that it’s vastly better and different than Bush’s “Global War On Terror”:
I don’t actually think, in his heart of hearts, Obama believes that the U.S. is going to “war” with anyone. Counterterrorism campaigns do not neatly fit into our black-and-white descriptions of the way conventional wars begin and end. There will never be “victory” in the sense that terrorists will stop trying to attack the United States. What there will be, instead, is managed risk. A constant effort to detect and degrade the threat. A balance of measures — political, military, legal, and otherwise — focusing on the capacity of terrorists to create havoc outside their geographical boundaries. Preventing them from obtaining or developing weapons of mass destruction.
But it seems to me that this ignores one critical lesson we have learned (or I thought we had learned) from the war on terror from 2001 onward. That simple lesson is as follows: American military force to pummel Jihadists from the skies can create as much terror as it foils. Our intervention can actually backfire and make us all less safe. How many Jihadists, for example, did the Iraq War create? Our intervention gave al Qaeda a foothold in Iraq and then, by creating a majority Shi’a state for the first time, helped spawn Sunni support for the Caliphate. If the Iraq War was designed to counter terrorism, it failed. It may well be that any Shi’a majority state in Iraq will always be at war with its Sunnis. Expecting this new government to be any different is mere window dressing for the immense and powerful centrifugal forces beneath.
If the impact of military force were that simple, we could wipe out Jihadism from the face of the earth. But force is never that simple, it’s especially complex in the countervailing myriad of factions and nations and sects of the Middle East, and it wins no friends, and merely makes more enemies. What Ambers is talking about is a global version of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. We are “mowing the lawn” with this kind of action, which spawns more hatred of the US, does not lead to a political settlement, and in fact makes such a settlement less likely, and therefore future “police actions” inevitable. It’s a cycle of violence breeding violence, in which we enable and empower Jihadism, rather than insisting that this is a problem first and foremost for the Muslim and Arab world, not us.
So Yemen is no longer producing Jihadists? And Somalia? We’ve turned them into perpetual, low-level Jihadist factories, churning them out as we continue to decimate them.
And our wars in other people’s countries are inevitably unpopular – would you like some distant super-power suddenly striking your town or village? – and so immediately undermine a huge amount of what they are trying to achieve. This is truer now than ever – after the US has been revealed as an incompetent occupier, an inveterate meddler and a practitioner of torture. We are the biggest recruitment tool that Jihadism has ever had.
All of that seems to have been wiped from our collective memory banks in a single month. We do not seem to understand that because there is a problem, we are not necessarily the solution. We may even unwittingly be part of the problem! Now, of course, if terror groups are plotting attacks on the US, I’m glad and grateful that we have a police operation to monitor and take them out when we are in danger. But that is emphatically not the case in Iraq and Syria. ISIS – even the war machine tells us – posed no threat to the homeland – until we intervened. We have created a new and vital narrative that all but encourages loser-wannabes in the West to launch terror attacks because the US is attacking Muslims again. Of course, this isn’t fair to the good intentions of the president, but the Middle East is never fair. We actually begin this war with what we usually end a war with: reluctant allies, pitiful military support, and a commitment from the Arab world that is – how shall I put it? – somewhat typically restrained and two-faced. As for all those arms we have been plying all those countries with? Well, it appears only American arms are really capable of doing anything. Remind me again why we have bankrupted ourselves for this?
A reader captures my mood. I asked my reader if he was as depressed about this whole reversion to the one percent doctrine as I was. He replied:
Yes. Totally and utterly depressed. As in: I give up. It’s as if America (and, more depressingly still, Obama) hasn’t learned a single thing about what feeds jihadism. And they seem to have forgotten totally about the threat of homegrown terrorism (the only form of terrorism that’s actually been successful in America since 9/11), and what feeds that.
And the sheer hysteria from Hagel, Kerry, etc. about the ISIS threat. The job of the president at times like this should be to fight the hysteria, not feed it. Things are so bad that when I think about the Scotland vote I think: Hey, maybe Vermont will secede and I could move there and not be part of all this. So, in a word: Yes.
And if I could sum up my response to this act of folly and amnesia, in a word, it would be: No.
(Photo: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki (L) shakes hands with U.S. President Barack Obama in the Oval Office at the White House November 1, 2013 in Washington, DC. By Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images.)
The Dish 