If This is What an
Anti-war Presidency Looks Like To You,
You're Detached From Reality
Despite what some Republicans and
neo-conservatives claim, Obama is plenty
militaristic. That’s part of the problem in
the region, not the best solution.
By Trevor Timm
April 01, 2015 "ICH"
- "The
Guardian" -
Nothing sums up the warped foreign policy
fantasy world in which Republicans live more
than when House Speaker John Boehner
recently called Obama an “anti-war
president” under which America “is sitting
on the sidelines” in the increasingly
chaotic Middle East.
If Obama is an anti-war president, he’s the
worst anti-war president in history. In the
last six years, the Obama administration has
bombed seven countries in the Middle East
alone and armed countless more with tens of
billions in dollars in weapons. But that’s
apparently not enough for Republicans. As
the Isis war continues to expand and Yemen
descends into civil war, everyone is still
demanding more: If only we bombed the region
a little bit harder, then they’ll submit.
In between publishing a new rash of overt
sociopathic “Bomb Iran” op-eds, Republicans
and neocons are circulating a new talking
point: Obama doesn’t have a “coherent” or
“unifying” strategy in the Middle East. But
you can’t have a one-size-fits-all strategy
in an entire region that is almost
incomprehensibly complex – which is why no
one, including the Republicans criticizing
Obama, actually has an answer for what that
strategy should be. It’s clear that this new
talking point is little more than thinly
veiled code for we’re not killing enough
Muslims or invading enough countries.
Nobody will say that they want US troops on
the ground to fight Isis, of course, since
public support for such action is crumbling.
But as the Council on Foreign
Relations’ Douglas Dillon Fellow
Micah Zenko tweeted recently, “If 30
years of US as military hegemon in the
Middle East resulted in the region today,
why would more suddenly stabilize things?”
No one seems to be willing to face the stark
fact that US involvement is as much the
cause of the instability as it is the
alleged solution.
Those clamoring for more
war are detached from reality: the US is
already escalating – not pulling back – its
involvement across the Middle East. In
Afghanistan, the president
has quietly delayed pulling US troops
out of Afghanistan by the end of the year so
they can continue special forces raids and
drone strikes, despite loudly celebrating
the supposed “end” of combat operations
during the
State of the Union in January. In Iraq,
US forces
escalated its airstrikes in the
so-called battle to re-take Tikrit, which
the New York Times editorial board decried
as a folly, but received scant scrutiny
elsewhere. The Pentagon also
confirmed last week that they expect the
Isis war to last “3+ years.”
And if you think the
United States is sitting on the sidelines in
Yemen just because it’s not US planes
physically launching the missiles (yet), you
should have your head examined. The US has
given Saudi Arabia an astronomical $90bn in
military equipment and weapons over the past
four years and, as the
Washington Post reported, it will play a
“huge” role in any fighting. US drones are
also still patrolling Yemeni skies and even
helping Saudi Arabia “decide what and where
to bomb”,
according to the Wall Street Journal.
What would his critics
have Obama do in Yemen, for example? He had
already authorized dozens of drones strikes
over the years (which backfired and many
people think
strengthened al-Qaida). He gave the
Yemeni government $500mn in heavy weaponry
and military gear, all of which is
now completely unaccounted for and
likely in the hands of US enemies.
This is America’s modus
operandi in the Middle East: give its
friends a ton of weapons and watch the
weapons fall into enemy hands one way or
another. In Afghanistan, the US
gave the Afghanistan government nearly
500,000 weapons that are now unaccounted for
(and that was a couple years ago). In Libya,
shipments of arms
reportedly sent by the CIA to Libyan
rebels in 2011 via the Qataris ended up, in
many cases, in the hands of Islamic
militants, as the
New York Times reported. Neither stopped
the Obama administration from arming rebels
in Syria, where
many of the weapons promptly fell into
enemy hands as well.
Virtually every month in
Iraq, another large cache of US weapons ends
up being commandeered by Isis or al-Qaida,
either from Iraqi soldiers abandoning all
the arms the US has given them over the past
decade or from US air drops that land in
enemy hands, as we saw in
September,
October,
November,
February, and a
couple times in
March. Isis has commandeered so many US
weapons that there’s
even a Buzzfeed photo listicle about it.
Photographer Gregg
Carlstrom succinctly
summed it up last week as Saudi Arabia
started to drop bombs on Yemen: “US praises
US ally for bombing US-equipped militia
aligned with US foe who is partnering with
US to fight another US-equipped militia.”
It’d be nice if the public
debate over America’s role in the Middle
East even acknowledged our culpability for
some of the problems in the region, rather
than steamroll over it on the way to war in
yet another country.
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