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By Charles P. Pierce on August 8, 2014
With which long-term moral debt of the extended Bush family would you like to discuss first? The one that Junior locked the country into by kicking over the hornet's nest in order to drain the swamp, or the one Poppy ran up by selling the Kurds down the river in 1991? I know, I know, there's a lot more that went into the president's decision to drop humanitarian aid to the Yazidi people stuck on a mountain in northern Iraq, and into the president's decision to drop a couple of 500-pound bombs on the genocidal barbarians who have surrounded the mountain with the intent of killing everybody on it. But if there's one family that best symbolizes the historic price paid by the people of Iraq by a century of Western bungling in that part of the world, it's the Hapsburgs Of Kennebunkport. Or, I guess, you can blame the Treaty Of Versailles and/or the League of Nations for helping to create the country of Iraq in the first place and guaranteeing that, one day, its basic ethnic instability would erupt into savagery. See also: Yugoslavia. The Great Game never was so Great for the people whom expiring empires used as chips. I would be surprised if, in five years, there's even a country called Iraq any more.
(And not for nothing, but whatever happened to the ferocious Kurdish fighters about whom we were told so much down through the years? They seem to have gotten rolled up as easily as the Iraqi army was. Perhaps the real strength of the Peshmerga was as a guerrilla fighting force and not as a standing army.)
What the president announced last night, and what the president did today, strikes me as being beyond reproach. ISIS is a legitimately scarifying group, death-maddened fanatics with a taste for religious insanity and public executions. There is little doubt that they would make bloody shrapnel out of every man, woman, and child on that mountain. Every other alleged power in the region -- including al Qaeda -- are scared witless of these people and of what they are seeking to create.
"Al Qaeda will now want to challenge ISIS's appropriation of its key objectives and tactics. The only way for al Qaeda to stay relevant now is through a violent and spectacular attack. Although ISIS may eventually be a victim of its own success, the real victims will be the thousands of innocent Muslims and non-Muslims caught in the crossfire of this millennarian struggle."
They may be medievalist in their religious outlook, and in their military tactics, but they're also shrewd hustlers. They seize dams and hold them, realizing that dams are more valuable when you can threaten to blow them up than when you actually do it. They have put to good use the arms they captured from the disintegrating Iraqi army. Their original financing came from extorting businessmen in Syria and Iraq. Now, they're said to be selling bootleg oil through various middlemen in the region. They are paying their own civil servants in the areas they have already conquered. Al Qaeda seeks to create chaos. ISIS seeks to create something resembling a country. It also seems that every other actor in the region, and every other actor who has a stake in the region, is waiting for the United States to bail them out. Sooner or later, every nation has an obligation to self-defense. So, when Andrea Mitchell meeps away on TV that Jordan and Saudi Arabia are reluctant to provide military aid in a crisis right in their own neighborhood because the president won't "lead," she's letting those two countries off a pretty enormous hook. If "our allies" are threatened, as I keep hearing over and over, then "our allies" need to fking do something.
(And why do I think that, for the Saudis in particular, the answer to this crisis is going to be, "Let's let other people die while we buy the crazy people off"?)
And, over here, there is the usual cacophony from the back seat. Barry McCaffrey, the architect of the Highway of Death in 1991, was on with my man Chuck Todd this morning, bemoaning the "pinprick" strategy of the airstrikes and offering the usual vague banalities about "overwhelming force." The empty suit once known as John Boehner mustered up his staff to "support" what the president is doing, but also to remind everyone that there are still midterm elections this fall.
Vital national interests are at stake, yet the White House has remained disengaged despite warnings from Iraqi leaders, Congress, and even members of its own administration. Such parochial thinking only emboldens the enemy and squanders the sacrifices Americans have made. The president needs a long-term strategy - one that defines success as completing our mission, not keeping political promises - and he needs to build the support to sustain it.
And, of course, the Fred and Ginger of foreign policy have weighed in.
But two Republican senators said in a statement that the President's actions do not go far enough. And the United States should not wait on Iraq to pull together before Washington takes action. Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina want to see U.S. forces take the fight to the Islamic State. "It should include U.S. airstrikes against ISIS leaders, forces, and positions both in Iraq and Syria," their statement read.
The whole thing is a damnable mess and there is no good solution. This is murderous religious fanaticism run amok, and the modern mind occasionally fails to grasp what that's all about, since it seems to the modern mind to be a relic of distant times. And yet, here it is again. It's the Thirty Years War with modern weaponry. There is absolutely no constituency in the United States for another large American military commitment in Iraq. There is absolutely no indication that any other country will step up, and that's not just because of the president's alleged lack of "leadership." It's because America's credibility in that part of the world was drained to dry over the last half-century. Which, I guess, brings us back to the question at the beginning of this post. The Great Game is no fun at all, if you happen to be one of the chips.
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