The Wickedness of Foreign Policy
By Sheldon Richman
November 03, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Free
Association" - If you want to
see how inhumane people can be, just watch those who make and
execute foreign policy. We could spend all day discussing the
cruelties that politicians and bureaucrats commit against people who
live inside the United States. Think how many are caged like wild
animals because they manufacture, sell, or consume disapproved
substances; gamble where government has forbade it; traded sexual
services for money; possessed a gun they weren't "supposed" to
possess; etc. ad infinitum. Naturally, America leads the world in
locking up people.
But at least the policy of mass imprisonment gets increasing
attention. Subject to far less scrutiny is how America's (mis)leaders,
(mis)representatives and public (self-)servants treat foreigners,
especially those with dark skins and a still-unfamiliar religion.
When we talk about foreign policy, how easy it is to get wrapped up
in abstractions like empire, intervention,
nonintervention, and kinetic
military action. These are important concepts to understand,
of course, but foreign-policy conversations often become sterile
examinations of "policy," when what we need is a full awareness of
the harm to individual human beings, the destruction of their
families, homes, communities, and societies. These persons are the
victims of our rulers' geopolitical stratagems, which seemly outrank
all other considerations. Yet each victim has a story embodying
unique relationships and aspirations, a story that is permanently
changed by an American cluster bomb, drone-launched missile, or
special-ops mission.
The best that can be said of the perpetrators of this carnage and
social devastation is that they are guilty of gross negligence. Many
of their acts, however, cross into the territory of premeditated
murder and the infliction of
mayhem with malice aforethought.
One need not look hard for the most egregious examples taking place
right at this moment. In Yemen the Obama administration gives
indispensable material support to Saudi Arabia's barbaric war --
war ought not to require a qualifier like barbaric, but
it seems necessary these days -- on the poorest population in the
region. The U.S.-facilitated starvation blockade and cluster-bombing
take an untold number of Yemeni lives while devastating the social
order. Policymakers -- a euphemism for the architects of devastation
-- can rationalize this cruelty in geopolitical terms -- the Houthis,
who incidentally are fighting al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadis,
are (falsely) said to be instruments of Iran -- but the fact remains
that individual persons who did no harm to anyone are being
slaughtered and starved with the help of American politicians and
military bureaucrats.
Or how about Syria? U.S. conduct carries out a seemingly incoherent
policy of simultaneously targeting the regime of President Bashar
al-Assad and one of his chief adversaries, the Islamic State, while
helping another Islamist group, al-Nusra Front, that has pledged
allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's successor as head
of al-Qaeda, perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. Estimates of the
death total in Syria's civil war reach as high as 340,000, a number
that represents the toll at the hands of both government and
rebel forces. (The total is sometimes invidiously attributed to
Assad's military alone.) The injured and refugees are probably
uncountable.
What must be understood is that most of these deaths, injuries,
and dispossessions would probably not have occurred had
the Obama administration -- most especially Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton -- not early on intensified the civil war by
declaring Assad's regime "illegitimate," demanding that he "go"
(i.e., die), and
overseeing the transfer weapons and jihadi fighters from Benghazi,
Libya. While doing all this, the Obama administration was
thwarting promising efforts toward a negotiated settlement, which
might have stopped or at least reduced the killing of innocent
persons. For details see
these
three
articles by the excellent investigate journalist Jonathan
Marshall.
And then there's Libya itself, which
Clinton boasts is an example of
"smart power at its best." In 2011 she had egg on her face
because she was on the wrong side of the Arab Spring, having
defended Egypt's military dictator, Hosni Mubarak, as a family
friend and trusted world leader to the bitter end while throngs of
aggrieved Egyptians were in the streets demanding his exit. Needing
to clean up her image (perhaps in preparation for her quest for the
presidency), she along with administration national-security VIPs
Samantha Power and Susan Rice persuaded a reluctant Obama that the
residents of Benghazi had to be saved from Col. Muammar Gaddafi's
alleged genocidal designs. The only problem was that Gaddafi
had no genocidal designs. (Also see
this and
this.) And in a classic exhibition of mission-creep, the
U.S.-led NATO air campaign went from protecting Benghazi to changing
the regime in Tripoli, prompting Clinton to gloated,
"We came. We
saw. He died." (Gaddafi was killed extrajudicially, reportedly
in a most gruesome manner.)
Since the U.S. intervention, Libya has been wracked by sectarian
civil war -- even the Islamic State now holds territory there --
prompting many Libyans to flee to Europe, which now has to contend
with a growing refugee crisis. As noted, the Libyan power vacuum,
featuring the unlocking of Gaddafi's arsenal of heavy weapons,
helped to boost the Islamist rebel militias in Syria, to the delight
of U.S. allies Turkey (which fears the Kurds) and Saudi Arabia
(which fears Iran and the Shi'ites). After the nightmare in Iraq,
one has to wonder what Clinton was thinking. The closest thing we
have to an answer is from then-Secretary of War Robert Gates, an
opponent of the intervention, who said, “We
were playing it by ear.” (And let's not forget:
destabilization itself can be an objective.)
Of course we could point to Iraq, George W. Bush's invasion of which
in 2003 set most of the aforementioned mayhem in motion, and
Afghanistan, but the story is largely the same: innocent lives are
sacrificed to the politicians' grand agenda. Little people living
small lives can't be allowed to stand in the way.
Sheldon Richman keeps the blog Free
Association and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees
of the Center
for a Stateless Society. Become a patron today!
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