One thing about the on-going
crisis that is the Middle East is the lack of discussion of what will happen if
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) actually succeeds in establishing
itself as the “government” in Syria as well as Iraq. What threat could it pose
to half-Christian Lebanon and eventually Israel? ISIS is obviously more
dangerous and fanatical than Hezbollah and perhaps even Hamas. Human life to
these “people” is cheaper than dirt—even that of their own people.
Did it have to be this way? No.
We were constantly told what a threat that Saddam Hussein was to the U.S., yet
there was no evidence that he was that stupid; most of the bad press about him
had to do with his heavy-handed efforts to maintain control over Iraq, in which
he was accused of mass murder in some circumstances. But everything is
“relative” in the Middle East—between “bad” to much worse, and it seems in
retrospect that Saddam was merely “bad.”
The Bush administration had planned the Iraq war from the very
beginning, to avenge “family honor” for the fake war that was the Gulf
War. George W. Bush and his
puppetmasters, Cheney and Rumsfeld, just
needed an excuse, which is why they ignored warnings of a planned Al-Qaeda
attack on U.S. soil, and why the FBI apparently ignored reports that suspicions
persons were learning to fly airborne planes on simulators, but not how to
takeoff or land them. That is why Bush looked so “surprised” when it was
whispered in his ear what had happened while he was in that classroom
patronizing minority children. Of course, Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11,
but that was just a minor detail.
Today, there are one or two on
the Republican side who in an effort to distance themselves from the current
crop of presidential hopefuls who admit that the Iraq adventure was a mistake.
One is Sen. Rand Paul, who claims that
the taking down of Saddam only served to strengthen Iran by removing Iraq’s
secular/Sunni-regime, destabilizing the country to the extent that
blood-thirsty Islamic fanatics who give their religion a bad name, and with
distinctly anti-West inclinations threaten the entire region; note that ISIS
doesn’t even bother with a media “spokesperson” who attempts to “explain” the extremist’s actions and
ideology to the international community.
The Obama administration has been
accused of failure to act swiftly and with force to support opposition groups
Syria, but Western support for anti-regime elements has been nothing if not
self-destructive, given that Libya received the blanket air attack treatment
leading to swift regime “change”—and to similarly disastrous effect on the
ground. The West has absolutely no sense of the Middle East and its internal religious
and ethnic divisions, or how they are kept in check, regardless if by
dictatorship either secular or religious fundamentalist in nature. Death as a
means of control is “glorified” either in the taking of or being the victim of.
It is clear that whatever was the
ultimate objective of the Bush administration was of toppling the Saddam regime,
the situation on the ground has not only become worse, but the U.S.’ strategic
interests in the region have become far worse. Only a permanent occupation of
Iraq would have “stabilized” a situation that U.S. forces only succeeded in
destabilizing, in which the cost in American lives would only have become a
daily event. The current Shiite regime
has become little more than a puppet of Iran even as the Saudi Arabia and other
countries “friendly” to the U.S.
“secretly” bankroll ISIS that seeks to topple the U.S.—supported regime.
What sense does this make?
The U.S. and the West should have
kept their foolish hands out of Middle East “nation-building” adventures. Egypt
is a case in point of what happens when you let countries figure out their own
messes. Being the only organized opposition “party” in the country, the
previously banned “Muslim Brotherhood” won the presidency and a majority in the
national legislature. But the “constitution” they wrote appeared to contain
wording that opened the way to an Iranian-style Islamic republic, in which the
ultimate arbiter of law was the opinion of religious leaders. In a “revolution”
that had largely been instigated by urban secularists but had seen religious
fanatics take advantage of their influence with the less sophisticated rural
majority to “hijack” it, it is not surprising that a second “revolution” was
soon underway. With the increased attacks on the Christian minority and
increased violence overall that seemed to be tacitly supported by the
newly-elected president who was of the Muslim Brotherhood “party,” inevitably
brought the still independent military and courts back into the picture to
essentially launch a popularly-supported coup. There followed the election of a
secularist president with ties to the Mubarak regime. For the interests of the
West, it was essentially mission accomplish without involving themselves at all.
Ultimately for the U.S., the
question is why did more than 4,000 American soldiers have to die, and many
thousands more maimed either physically or emotionally for life? Personally,
I’m not into this “hero” business. I was in the Army for seven years, and there
was a reason you received free room and board and a little spending money on
the side; it was in the contract: You had to do what Uncle Sam told you to do,
even if you didn’t like or expect ever to do it. Looking at the Iraq War, these
soldiers deserve more pity than worship; they were used by Bush, Cheney and
Rumsfeld to play out their own little game of revenge against Saddam, and it
could be said they were just pawns in the war games of generals itching to have
an opportunity to be big shots in the history books.
That it all was a tremendous
failure in the end only illuminates the arrogance and conceit of our leaders
for human life, not just American life, but that of hundreds of thousands,
probably millions, of civilian lives caught in the quagmire of sectarian
violence. We might not have liked the dictators of Iraq, Libya and Syria, but
were the alternatives better for either the West or their own people? Certainly
the argument can be made that matters have been made far worse, given the utter
failure of our “intelligence” to understand the reality on the
ground—particularly the continued ignorance of the role that Islam plays in the
lives of people for whom there is apparently nothing else, and use it to
rationalize their own thirst for vengeance on the world by the “promise” of
“paradise” in the next world.
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