#And communists in Iraq to make Saddam Hussein rise | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

xtruss · 4 years

Text

VOICE

Everyone Misunderstands the Reason for the U.S.-China Cold War

The left says it’s U.S. arrogance. The right says it’s Chinese malevolence. Both are wrong.

— B yStephen M. Walt | June 30, 2020 Foreign Policy

Flags of the United States and China are placed ahead of a meeting between U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and his Chinese counterpart, Han Changfu, at the Ministry of Agriculture in Beijing on June 30, 2017. JASON LEE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The United States is pretty polarized these days, but nearly everyone seems to agree that China is a big problem. The Trump administration has been at odds with China on trade issues since day one, and its 2017 National Security Strategy labeled China a “revisionist power” and major strategic rival. (President Donald Trump himself seems to have been willing to give Beijing a free pass if it would help him get reelected, but that’s just a sign of his own venality and inconsistent with the administration’s other policies.) Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden may have started his campaign in 2019 downplaying fears that China was going to “eat our lunch,” but his campaign has grown increasingly hawkish over time.

Not surprisingly, hard-line Republican members of Congress like Josh Hawley and Matt Gaetz have been sounding the alarm as well, while progressives and moderates warn of a “new cold war” and call for renewed dialogue to manage the relationship. Despite their differing prescriptions, all of these groups see the state of Sino-American relations as of vital importance.

Unfortunately, discussion of the Sino-American rivalry is also succumbing to a familiar tendency to attribute conflict to our opponents’ internal characteristics: their ruling ideology, domestic institutions, or the personalities of particular leaders. This tendency has a long history in the United States: The country entered World War I in order to defeat German militarism and make the world safe for democracy, and later it fought World War II to defeat fascism. At the dawn of the Cold War, George Kennan’s infamous “X” article (“The Sources of Soviet Conduct”) argued that Moscow had a relentless and internally motivated urge to expand, driven by the need for foreign enemies to justify the Communist Party’s authoritarian rule. Appeasement would not work, he argued, and the only choice was to contain the Soviet Union until its internal system “mellowed.” More recently, U.S. leaders blamed America’s problems with Iraq on Saddam Hussein’s recklessly evil ambitions and portrayed Iran’s leaders as irrational religious fanatics whose foreign-policy behavior is driven solely by ideological beliefs.

In all of these conflicts, trouble arose from the basic nature of these adversaries, not from the circumstances they found themselves in or the inherently competitive nature of international politics itself.

And so it is with China today. Former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster maintains that China is a threat “because its leaders are promoting a closed, authoritarian model as an alternative to democratic governance and free-market economics.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo agrees: In his view, relations have deteriorated because “it’s a different Chinese Communist Party today than it was 10 years ago. … This is a Chinese Communist Party that has come to view itself as intent upon the destruction of Western ideas, Western democracies, Western values.” According to Sen. Marco Rubio: “Chinese Communist Party power serves no purpose but to strengthen the party’s rule and to spread its influence around the world. … China is an untrustworthy partner in any endeavor whether it’s a nation-state project, an industrial capacity, or financial integration.” The only way to avoid a conflict, Vice President Mike Pence said, is for China’s rulers to “change course and return to the spirit of ‘reform and opening’ and greater freedom.”

Even far more sophisticated China watchers, such as former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, attribute much of China’s increasingly assertive stance to President Xi Jinping’s centralization of power, and Rudd sees this behavior as “an expression of Xi Jinping’s personal leadership temperament, which is impatient with the incremental bureaucratism endemic to the Chinese system, and with which the international community had become relaxed, comfortable, and thoroughly accustomed.” The implication is that a different Chinese leader would be a much less serious problem. Similarly, Timothy Garton Ash believes that the “primary cause of this new cold war is the turn taken by the Chinese communist party leadership under Xi Jinping since 2012: more oppressive at home, more aggressive abroad.” Other observers point to rising nationalism (whether spontaneous or government-sponsored) as another key factor in China’s greater foreign-policy assertiveness.

Relying on categories originally conceived by the late Kenneth Waltz, international relations scholars variously refer to such accounts as “unit-level,” “reductionist,” or “second-image” explanations. The many variations within this broad family of theories all view a country’s foreign-policy behavior as primarily the result of its internal characteristics. Thus, U.S. foreign policy is sometimes attributed to its democratic system, liberal values, or capitalist economic order, just as the behavior of other states is said to derive from the nature of their domestic regime, ruling ideology, “strategic culture,” or leaders’ personalities.

Explanations based on domestic characteristics are appealing in part because they seem so simple and straightforward: Peace-loving democracies act that way because they are (supposedly) based on norms of tolerance; by contrast, aggressors act aggressively because they are based on domination or coercion or because there are fewer constraints on what leaders can do.

Focusing on the internal characteristics of other states is also tempting because it absolves us of responsibility for conflict and allows us to pin the blame on others. If we are on the side of the angels and our own political system is based on sound and just principles, then when trouble arises, it must be because Bad States or Bad Leaders are out there doing Bad Things. This perspective also provides a ready solution: Get rid of those Bad States or those Bad Leaders! Demonizing one’s opponents is also a time-honored way of rallying public support in the face of an international challenge, and that requires highlighting the negative qualities that are supposedly making one’s rivals act as they are.

Unfortunately, pinning most of the blame for conflict on an opponent’s domestic characteristics is also dangerous. For starters, if conflict is due primarily to the nature of the opposing regime(s), then the only long-term solution is to overthrow them. Accommodation, mutual coexistence, or even extensive cooperation on matters of mutual interest are for the most part ruled out, with potentially catastrophic consequences. When rivals see the nature of the other side as a threat in itself, a struggle to the death becomes the only alternative.

What unit-level explanations either overlook or downplay are the broader structural factors that have made Sino-American rivalry inevitable. First and foremost, the two most powerful countries in the international system are overwhelmingly likely to be at odds with each other. Because each is the other’s greatest potential threat, they will inevitably eye each other warily, go to considerable lengths to reduce the other’s ability to threaten their core interests, and constantly look for ways to gain an advantage, if only to ensure that the other side does not gain an advantage over them.

Even if it were possible (or worth the risk), internal changes in either the United States or China are unlikely to eliminate these incentives (or at least not anytime soon). Each country is trying—with varying degrees of skill and success—to avoid being in a position where the other can threaten its security, prosperity, or domestic way of life. And because neither can be completely sure what the other might do in the future—a reality amply demonstrated by the erratic course of U.S. foreign policy in recent years—both are actively competing for power and influence in a variety of domains.

This troubling situation is exacerbated by the incompatibility of their respective strategic objectives, which derive in part from geography and from the legacies of the past century. Quite understandably, China’s leaders would like to live in as secure a neighborhood as possible, for the same reasons that the United States formulated and eventually enforced the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere. Beijing need not impose one-party state capitalist regimes around its periphery; it just wants all of its neighbors to be mindful of its interests and does not want any of them to pose a significant threat. Toward that end, it would like to push the United States out of the region so that it no longer has to worry as much about U.S. military power and so that its neighbors cannot count on American help. This goal is hardly mystifying or irrational: Would any great power be happy if the world’s most powerful country had significant military forces arrayed nearby and had close military alliances with many of its immediate neighbors?

The United States has good reasons to remain in Asia, however. As John Mearsheimer and I have explained elsewhere, preventing China from establishing a dominant position in Asia strengthens U.S. security by forcing China to focus more attention closer to home and making it harder (though of course not impossible) for China to project power elsewhere in the world (including areas closer to the United States itself). This strategic logic would still apply if China were to liberalize or if America were to adopt Chinese-style state capitalism. The result, unfortunately, is a zero-sum conflict: Neither side can get what it wants without depriving the other.

Thus, the roots of the present Sino-American rivalry have less to do with particular leaders or regime types and more to do with the distribution of power and the particular strategies that the two sides are pursuing. This is not to say that domestic politics or individual leadership do not matter at all, either in influencing the intensity of the competition or the skill with which each side wages it. Some leaders are more (or less) risk acceptant, and Americans are currently getting (another) painful demonstration of the harm that incompetent leadership can inflict. But the more important point is that new leaders or profound domestic changes are not going to alter the inherently competitive nature of U.S.-Chinese relations.

From this perspective, both progressives and hard-liners in the United States are getting it wrong. The former believe that China poses at most a modest threat to U.S. interests and that some combination of accommodation and skillful diplomacy can eliminate most if not all of the friction and head off a new cold war. I’m all for skillful diplomacy, but I do not believe it will suffice to prevent an intense competition that is primarily rooted in the distribution of power.

As Trump said of his trade war, hard-liners think a competition with China will be “good and easy to win.” In their view, all it takes is more and tougher sanctions, a decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies, a big increase in U.S. defense spending, and a rallying of like-minded democracies to the U.S. side, with the ultimate goal of ending Chinese Communist Party rule. Apart from the obvious costs and risks of this course of action, this view overstates Chinese vulnerabilities, understates the costs to the United States, and greatly exaggerates other states’ willingness to join an anti-Beijing crusade. China’s neighbors do not want it to dominate them and are eager to maintain ties with Washington, but they have no desire to get dragged into a violent conflict. And there is little reason to believe that a supposedly more liberal China would be any less interested in defending its own interests and any more willing to accept permanent inferiority to the United States.

So what does a more structural view of this situation imply?

First, it tells us that we are in it for the long haul; no clever strategy or bold stroke of genius is going to solve this conflict once and for all—at least not anytime soon.

Second, it is a serious rivalry, and the United States should conduct in a serious way. You don’t deal with an ambitious peer competitor with a bunch of amateurs in charge or with a president who puts his personal agenda ahead of the country’s. It will take intelligent military investments, to be sure, but a major diplomatic effort by knowledgeable and well-trained officials is going to be of equal if not greater importance. Maintaining a healthy set of Asian alliances is essential because the United States simply cannot remain an influential power in Asia without a lot of local support. The bottom line: America cannot entrust the care and feeding of those relationships to campaign contributors, party hacks, or dilettantes.

Third, and perhaps most important, both sides have a genuine and shared interest in keeping their rivalry within boundaries, both to avoid unnecessary clashes and to facilitate cooperation on issues where U.S. and Chinese interests overlap (climate change, pandemic prevention, etc.). One cannot eliminate all risks and prevent future crises, but Washington must be clear about its own red lines and make sure it understands Beijing’s. This is where unit-level factors kick in: The rivalry may be hard-wired into today’s international system, but how each side handles the competition will be determined by who is in charge and by the quality of their domestic institutions. I would not assume that America’s will fall short, but I wouldn’t be complacent about that either.

— Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.

2 notes · View notes

newstfionline · 7 years

Text

Little Rocket Man Wins the Round

By Patrick J. Buchanan, Creators Syndicate, January 12, 2018

After a year in which he tested a hydrogen bomb and an ICBM, threatened to destroy the United States, and called President Trump “a dotard,” Kim Jong Un, at the gracious invitation of the president of South Korea, will be sending a skating team to the “Peace Olympics.”

An impressive year for Little Rocket Man.

Thus the most serious nuclear crisis since Nikita Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba appears to have abated. Welcome news, even if the confrontation with Pyongyang has probably only been postponed.

Still, we have been given an opportunity to reassess the 65-year-old Cold War treaty that obligates us to go to war if the North attacks Seoul, and drove us to the brink of war today.

2017 demonstrated that we need a reassessment. For the potential cost of carrying out our commitment is rising exponentially.

Two decades ago, a war on the Korean Peninsula, given the massed Northern artillery on the DMZ, meant thousands of U.S. dead.

Today, with Pyongyang’s growing arsenal of nuclear weapons, American cities could face Hiroshima-sized strikes, if war breaks out.

What vital U.S. interest is there on the Korean Peninsula that justifies accepting in perpetuity such a risk to our homeland?

We are told that Kim’s diplomacy is designed to split South Korea off from the Americans. And this is undeniably true.

For South Korean President Moon Jae-in is first and foremost responsible for his own people, half of whom are in artillery range of the DMZ. In any new Korean war, his country would suffer most.

And while he surely welcomes the U.S. commitment to fight the North on his country’s behalf as an insurance policy, Moon does not want a second Korean war, and he does not want President Trump making the decision as to whether there shall be one.

Understandably so. He is looking out for South Korea first.

Yet Moon rightly credits Trump with bringing the North Koreans to the table: “I give President Trump huge credit for bringing about the inter-Korean talks, and I’d like to thank him for that.”

But again, what are the U.S. interests there that we should be willing to put at risk of nuclear attack tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Korea and our bases in Asia, and even our great cities, in a war that would otherwise be confined to the Korean Peninsula?

China shares a border with the North, but is not treaty-bound to fight on the North’s behalf. Russia, too, has a border with North Korea, and, with China, was indispensable to saving the North in the 1950-53 war. But Russia is not committed by any treaty to fight for the North.

Why, then, are Americans obligated to be among the first to die in a second Korean War? Why is the defense of the South, with 40 times the economy and twice the population of the North, our eternal duty?

Kim’s drive for a nuclear deterrent is propelled by both fear and calculation. The fear is that the Americans who detest him will do to him and his regime and country what they did to Saddam Hussein.

The calculation is that what Americans fear most, and the one thing that deters them, is nuclear weapons. Once Soviet Russia and Communist China acquired nukes, the Americans never attacked them.

If he can put nuclear weapons on U.S. troops in Korea, U.S. bases in Japan, and U.S. cities, Kim reasons, the Americans will not launch a war on him. Have not recent events proven him right?

Iran has no nuclear weapons and some Americans clamor daily for “regime change” in Tehran. But because Kim has nukes, the Americans appear more anxious to talk. His policy is succeeding.

What he is saying with his nuclear arsenal is: As you Americans have put my regime and country at risk of annihilation, I am going to put your cities at risk. If we go down in your nuclear “fire and fury,” so, too, will millions of Americans.

The whole world is watching how this plays out.

For the American Imperium, our system of alliances, is held together by a credible commitment: If you attack any of our scores of allies, you are at war with the United States.

From the Baltic to the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf, from the South China Sea to Korea and Japan today, the costs and the risks of maintaining the imperium are growing.

With all these promissory notes out there--guarantees to go to war for other nations--one is inevitably going to be called.

And this generation of Americans, unaware of what their grandfathers obligated them to do, will demand to know, as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan: What are we over doing there, on the other side of the world?

#North Korea #Kim Jong Un #Little Rocket Man #US-South Korea relations

1 note · View note

libertariantaoist · 8 years

Link

The foreign policy issue in American politics has undergone some remarkable shifts over the years. We are in the midst of just such a shift, but before we can properly understand what is happening today we must consult Clio, the muse of history, and see what patterns we can discern.

As witnesses to the birth of the American empire at the turn of the last century, the two major parties staked out roughly opposite positions. As William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt presided over the acquisition of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Cuba, it was the Republicans – the party of big business, crony capitalism, and “preparedness” – who waved the banner of expansionism, and the populist Bryanite Democrats who stood for anti-imperialism. This changed with the usurpation of the old Democratic populism by the “progressivism” represented by The New Republic and Woodrow Wilson, whose policies would christen an entire school of foreign policy thought under the rubric of “Wilsonian” internationalism.

It was the backlash against Wilson’s war to “make the world safe for democracy” that the “isolationist” (i.e. anti-interventionist) sentiments of the American people – and both parties – were solidified, at least for a while. “Isolationist” sentiment in Congress was centered in the Republican party, exemplified by the “Irreconcilables,” who opposed US entry into the League of Nations, but anti-interventionism was the default position of both parties in the wake of the Great War.

This bipartisan devotion to the foreign policy of the Founders didn’t last, however: as war clouds gathered once again on the European horizon, the left-wing of the Democratic party in alliance with the Anglophile Establishment on the east coast openly agitated for war with the Axis powers. Arrayed against them were Midwestern progressives and conservative businessmen, with a few libertarian intellectuals thrown in to spice up the pot, known today as the “Old Right.”

As per usual, these disparate stances had less to do with objectively observable national security considerations than with the woof and warp of domestic politics. The Old Right, consisting of conservative Republicans and a constitutionalist remnant of the Democratic party, feared that war would give Franklin Roosevelt and his New Dealers the weapons they needed to consolidate their control of the economy and the country. As libertarian Rose Wilder Lane put it, we’ll “beat national socialism in the trenches and get it on the home front.”

The Democrats, heavily influenced by their far left-wing, were also – ironically – subject to considerable pressure by banking interests, whose holdings of British and other European government bonds were at risk as the Nazis steamrollered across the continent. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and the Communist Party turned on a dime and became the loudest interventionists of them all, the die was cast: the “Great Debate” became a battle between pro-Soviet/pro-British elements versus the nationalist-“isolationist” America First movement.

Pearl Harbor doomed the latter, but the anti-interventionists didn’t immediately fade away. Sen. Robert A. Taft, known as “Mr. Republican,” who led the America First wing of the party until 1953, opposed the formation of NATO. But the cold war was rapidly reversing the polarities of American politics, and the McCarthyite rampage led ineluctably to a turnaround among conservatives on the foreign policy question: they became militant interventionists, with National Review under editor William F. Buckley, Jr., leading the call to “roll back” communism. Meanwhile, the liberal-left abandoned its former militance and advocated – for the most part – détente with the Soviet Union.

With the implosion of international communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, it looked likely for a while that the old “isolationism” of the right would rise again, with Republicans skeptical of Bill Clinton’s Balkan war – but several factors intervened to block this development.

First, our symbiotic relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states motivated George Herbert Walker Bush to intervene when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait: the first Gulf War was the result. The Democrats, for the most part, retained their mildly anti-interventionist position, out of habit, although there were significant defections.

Secondly, and more profoundly, the 9/11 attack intervened, and arrested the development of any anti-interventionist sentiment in both parties for a good while. As was the case in the run up to World War I, war hysteria united both parties, with anti-interventionist dissent consigned to the fringes. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was supported by the leadership of both parties.

When war weariness became a general malaise this led to the election of Barack Obama. While Obama campaigned – and won – on the basis of his antiwar credentials, his presidency was anything but anti-interventionist. His reign was marked by the ascendancy of the “responsibility to protect” faction of Wilsonian internationalists, and he intervened in Libya and Syria on this basis, as well as continuing – and even ratcheting up – the endless “war on terrorism” initiated by his predecessor.

So where are the patterns in this historical pageant? If we go all the way back to the earliest days of the republic, we can see that the foreign policy position of the parties has been determined by their designation of the chief danger to our national security. It is an answer to the question: Who is the “the enemy?”

In the days of Washington and Jefferson, the choices were either the British, or the French: the former represented a domestic danger, as imagined by the Jeffersonians, in the form of the restoration of royalism in America, while the latter, in the Federalist mindset, was the source of an alleged Jacobin menace, which was said to inspire Jefferson and his followers. And so we can see that, from the very beginning, these alleged foreign enemies were merely representations – stand-ins, if you will – of domestic political actors.

The same pattern has persisted throughout our history. In the two world wars, the German “threat” was represented at home by our numerous German-American population, who generally resisted the “progressive” domestic politics of the war-making Wilson and Roosevelt administrations, as well as being solidly “isolationist.” During the cold war communism was The Enemy, and this was merely a projection onto foreign soil of the anti-Communist hysteria whipped up by the McCarthy crusade and the general fear of radicalism and communist “subversion” in the United States.

Now we arrive at the present, where we encounter what may be a unique moment in the history of the politics of US foreign policy.

The projection of domestic bogeymen onto a foreign landscape has persisted to the present day, with one important modification, and it is this: in the past, while one of the parties held up an “enemy” as a dire threat to our national security, the other party defined itself largely in opposition to this. For example, during the cold war era, conservative Republicans wanted to spend billions on the military in the name of meeting the Soviet “threat,” while liberal Democrats responded that the money was better spent at home taking care of our own people. They did not pose an alternative threat. That has now changed.

On the Democratic side of the aisle, The Enemy is Russia. In a curious upending of their mindset in years past, liberal Democrats have become rabid Russophobes who see a Putin “agent” under every bed and bush. The reasons for this are entirely domestic, i.e. political: having fielded a presidential candidate who inspired nothing but either ennui or revulsion, they are intent on finding a reason other than their own incompetence and ideological bankruptcy for Hillary Clinton’s unexpected defeat. They’ve settled on “Russian interference,” i.e. the WikiLeaks revelations of Democratic corruption, and are now embarked on a campaign – in tandem with their many friends in the mainstream media – to target President Donald Trump as an outright agent of the Kremlin.

This is what motivates their demands that the President “do something” about the alleged ‘”threat” posed by Putin to our European allies, and their insistence that we must strengthen and expand NATO, and unconditionally support one of the most corrupt and illiberal regimes in Europe, namely Ukraine. Their response to Trump’s desire to improve relations with Russia is to denounce him as “Putin’s puppet.”

As for the Republicans, the aftereffects of 9/11 are still quite strong: the result is that they define The Enemy as “radical Islamic terrorism.” Again, this is a representation, in large part, of an alleged threat that is said to exist domestically. This threat is then projected onto an overseas screen, either ISIS (in Syria) or al-Qaeda (in, say, Yemen). Never mind that, aside from the 9/11 attackers and a few others, most of the worst terrorist incidents that have occurred have been carried out by US citizens who are second generation immigrants. In this sense, Republican foreign policy has become a form of “security theater.”

Furthermore, “radical Islamic terrorism” is a very broad term that, as used by President Trump, encompasses the Shi’ite version of Islam, the adherents of which have never carried out a single attack in the United States. Indeed, Iran – the seat of Shi’ite power – is engaged in a vicious war with the Sunni Islamists, in Syria and elsewhere. Yet the Trump administration persists in labeling Iran “the single biggest exporter of terrorism” in the world – a designation that blanks out the substantial role played by the Sunni rulers of Saudi Arabia in exporting the radical Islamist ideology that motivates both ISIS and al-Qaeda.

And while Trump has given voice to more than a few anti-interventionist sentiments – he’s against “regime change,” he’s skeptical of NATO, he wants to “get along with Russia,” and he claims to represent a foreign policy that puts “America first” – under his administration the historical pattern persists. The only difference is his choice of enemies.

This puts us anti-interventionists is a perilous position: both parties are pushing a war agenda, with the only difference being the target of American bombs.

Now one could argue – as I have in these pages – that Trump’s ostensible reluctance to repeat the mistakes of the past gives us some degree of leverage. And it is true that, in trying to repair relations with Russia, and avoid the terrible consequences of conflict with that nuclear-armed power, the President has stuck his neck out and taken a very big political risk. Yet the fact remains that the targeting of Iran – exhibited, so far, in terms of pure bombast – represents a clear and present danger to the peace of the world.

And so we are between a rock and a hard place. If the Democrats win, we get World War III with Russia: if the Republicans win, we get a reiteration of our endless “war on terrorism.”

That’s why Antiwar.com is more essential than ever – because the danger of war has never been greater. With both parties pushing a war agenda, the political space for anti-interventionists is considerably narrowed.

But that doesn’t mean that the politics of foreign policy is tilted against us: that’s because we have the support of the war-weary public, which is sick and tired of foreign wars and cares not one whit about either alleged Russian “aggression” in some faraway country or whether ISIS is in Mosul or Mauritania. The natural “isolationism” of the average American is our greatest asset and ally, and we here at Antiwar.com are intent on taking full advantage of it. But we can’t do that without your support – your financial support.

The War Party has a bottomless treasury: they not only have the enormous resources of the US government, they also can count on the boundless generosity of the war profiteers, what President Eisenhower dubbed the military-industrial complex. They also have the media in their pocket, which is always eager to broadcast “fake news” designed to lure us onto foreign battlefields.

We, on the other hand, just have you – our readers and supporters. We depend on you for the resources we need to keep this web site going. And we’re reaching out to you once again, asking you to vote with your pocketbooks.

We’ve been at this for over twenty years, and never in that time has the need for Antiwar.com been greater. Please help us fight the War Party. Make your tax-deductible donation today.

#justin raimondo #anti-war

6 notes · View notes

nothingman · 8 years

Link

By Danny Sjursen | (Tomdispatch.com) | – –

The United States has already lost — its war for the Middle East, that is. Having taken my own crack at combat soldiering in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that couldn’t be clearer to me. Unfortunately, it’s evidently still not clear in Washington. Bush’s neo-imperial triumphalism failed. Obama’s quiet shift to drones, Special Forces, and clandestine executive actions didn’t turn the tide either. For all President Trump’s bluster, boasting, and threats, rest assured that, at best, he’ll barely move the needle and, at worst… but why even go there?

At this point, it’s at least reasonable to look back and ask yet again: Why the failure? Explanations abound, of course. Perhaps Americans were simply never tough enough and still need to take off the kid gloves. Maybe there just weren’t ever enough troops. (Bring back the draft!) Maybe all those hundreds of thousands of bombs and missiles just came up short. (So how about lots more of them, maybe even a nuke?)

Lead from the front. Lead from behind. Surge yet again… The list goes on — and on and on.

And by now all of it, including Donald Trump’s recent tough talk, represents such a familiar set of tunes. But what if the problem is far deeper and more fundamental than any of that?

Here our nation stands, 15-plus years after 9/11, engaged militarily in half a dozen countries across the Greater Middle East, with no end in sight. Perhaps a more critical, factual reading of our recent past would illuminate the futility of America’s tragic, ongoing project to somehow “destroy” terrorism in the Muslim world.

The standard triumphalist version of the last 100 or so years of our history might go something like this: in the twentieth century, the United States repeatedly intervened, just in the nick of time, to save the feeble Old World from militarism, fascism, and then, in the Cold War, communism. It did indeed save the day in three global wars and might have lived happily ever after as the world’s “sole superpower” if not for the sudden emergence of a new menace. Seemingly out of nowhere, “Islamo-fascists” shattered American complacence with a sneak attack reminiscent of Pearl Harbor. Collectively the people asked: Why do they hate us? Of course, there was no time to really reflect, so the government simply got to work, taking the fight to our new “medieval” enemies on their own turf. It’s admittedly been a long, hard slog, but what choice did our leaders have? Better, after all, to fight them in Baghdad than Brooklyn.

What if, however, this foundational narrative is not just flawed but little short of delusional? Alternative accounts lead to wholly divergent conclusions and are more likely to inform prudent policy in the Middle East.

Let’s reconsider just two key years for the United States in that region: 1979 and 2003. America’s leadership learned all the wrong “lessons” from those pivotal moments and has intervened there ever since on the basis of some perverse version of them with results that have been little short of disastrous. A more honest narrative of those moments would lead to a far more modest, minimalist approach to a messy and tragic region. The problem is that there seems to be something inherently un-American about entertaining such thoughts.

1979 Revisited

Through the first half of the Cold War, the Middle East remained a sideshow. In 1979, however, all that changed radically. First, rising protests against the brutal police state of the American-backed Shah of Iran led to regime collapse, the return of dissident ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the declaration of an Islamic Republic. Then Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding 52 hostages for more than 400 days. Of course, by then few Americans remembered the CIA-instigated coup of 1953 that had toppled a democratically elected Iranian prime minister, preserved Western oil interests in that country, and started both lands on this path (though Iranians clearly hadn’t forgotten). The shock and duration of the hostage crisis undoubtedly ensured that Jimmy Carter would be a one-term president and — to make matters worse — Soviet troops intervened in Afghanistan to shore up a communist government there. It was quite a year.

The alarmist conventional narrative of these events went like this: the radical mullahs running Iran were irrational zealots with an inexplicable loathing for the American way of life. As if in a preview of 9/11, hearing those chants against “the Great Satan,” Americans promptly began asking with true puzzlement: Why do they hate us? The hostage crisis challenged world peace. Carter had to do something. Worse yet, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan represented blatant conquest and spotlighted the possibility of Red Army hordes pushing through to Iran en route to the Persian Gulf’s vast oil reserves. It might prove the opening act of the long awaited Soviet scheme for world domination or a possible path to World War III.

Misinformed by such a tale that they repeatedly told themselves, Washington officials then made terrible choices in the Middle East. Let’s start with Iran. They mistook a nationalist revolution and subsequent civil war within Islam for a singular attack on the U.S.A. With little consideration of genuine Iranian gripes about the brutal U.S.-backed dynasty of the Shah or the slightest appreciation for the complexity of that country’s internal dynamics, they created a simple-minded but convenient narrative in which the Iranians posed an existential threat to this country. Little has changed in almost four decades.

Then, though few Americans could locate Afghanistan on a map, most accepted that it was indeed a country of vital strategic interest. Of course, with the opening of their archives, it’s clear enough now that the Soviets never sought the worldwide empire we imagined for them, especially not by 1979. The Soviet leadership was, in fact, divided over the Afghan affair and intervened in Kabul in a spirit more defensive than aggressive. Their desire or even ability to drive towards the Persian Gulf was, at best, a fanciful American notion.

Nonetheless, the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were combined into a tale of horror that would lead to the permanent militarization of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Remembered today as a dove-in-chief, in his 1980 State of the Union address President Carter announced a decidedly hawkish new doctrine that would come to bear his name. From then on, he said, the U.S. would consider any threat to Persian Gulf oil supplies a direct threat to this country and American troops would, if necessary, unilaterally intervene to secure the region.

The results will seem painfully familiar today: almost immediately, Washington policymakers began to seek military solutions to virtually every problem in the Middle East. Within a year, the administration of President Ronald Reagan would, for instance, support Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s ruthless invasion of Iran, ignoring his more vicious antics and his proclivity for gassing his own people.

Soon after, in 1983, the military created the United States Central Command (headquarters: Tampa, Florida) with specific responsibility for the Greater Middle East. Its early war plans demonstrated just how wildly out of touch with reality American planners already were by then. Operational blueprints, for instance, focused on defeating Soviet armies in Iran before they could reach the Persian Gulf. Planners imagined U.S. Army divisions crossing Iran, itself in the midst of a major war with Iraq, to face off against a Soviet armored juggernaut (just like the one that was always expected to burst through Europe’s Fulda Gap). That such an assault was never coming, or that the fiercely proud Iranians might object to the militaries of either superpower crossing their territories, figured little in such early plans that were monuments to American arrogance and naïveté.

From there, it was but a few short steps to the permanent “defensive” basing of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain or later the stationing of U.S. troops near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina to protect Saudi Arabia from Iraqi attack. Few asked how such forces in the heart of the Middle East would play on the Arab street or corroborate Islamist narratives of “crusader” imperialism.

Worse yet, in those same years the CIA armed and financed a grab bag of Afghan insurgent groups, most of them extreme Islamists. Eager to turn Afghanistan into a Soviet “Vietnam,” no one in Washington bothered to ask whether such guerrilla outfits conformed to our purported principles or what the rebels would do if they won. Of course, the victorious guerrillas contained foreign fighters and various Arab supporters, including one Osama bin Laden. Eventually, the excesses of the well-armed but morally bankrupt insurgents and warlords in Afghanistan triggered the formation and ascension of the Taliban there, and from one of those guerrilla outfits came a new organization that called itself al-Qaeda. The rest, as they say, is history, and thanks to Chalmers Johnson’s appropriation of a classic CIA term of spy craft, we now know it as blowback.

That was a major turning point for the U.S. military. Before 1979, few of its troops had served in the region. In the ensuing decades, America bombed, invaded, raided, sent its drones to kill in, or attacked Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq again (and again), Somalia (again and again), Libya again, Iraq once more, and now Syria as well. Before 1979, few — if any — American military personnel died in the Greater Middle East. Few have died anywhere else since.

2003 and After: Fantasies and Reality

Who wouldn’t agree that the 2003 invasion of Iraq signified a major turning point both in the history of the Greater Middle East and in our own? Nonetheless, its legacy remains highly contested. The standard narrative goes like this: as the sole remaining superpower on the planet after the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, our invincible military organized a swift and convincing defeat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the first Gulf War. After 9/11, that same military launched an inventive, swift, and triumphant campaign in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden escaped, of course, but his al-Qaeda network was shattered and the Taliban all but destroyed.

Naturally, the threat of Islamic terror was never limited to the Hindu Kush, so Washington “had” to take its fight against terror global. Admittedly, the subsequent conquest of Iraq didn’t exactly turn out as planned and perhaps the Arabs weren’t quite ready for American-style democracy anyway. Still, the U.S. was committed, had shed blood, and had to stay the course, rather than cede momentum to the terrorists. Anything less would have dishonored the venerated dead. Luckily, President George W. Bush found an enlightened new commander, General David Petraeus, who, with his famed “surge,” snatched victory, or at least stability, from the jaws of defeat in Iraq. He had the insurgency all but whipped. Then, just a few years later, “spineless” Barack Obama prematurely pulled American forces out of that country, an act of weakness that led directly to the rise of ISIS and the current nightmare in the region. Only a strong, assertive successor to Obama could right such gross errors.

It’s a riveting tale, of course, even if it is misguided in nearly every way imaginable. At each turn, Washington learned the wrong lessons and drew perilous conclusions. At least the first Gulf War — to George H.W. Bush’s credit — involved a large multinational coalition and checked actual Iraqi aggression. Instead of cheering Bush the Elder’s limited, prudent strategy, however, surging neoconservatives demanded to know why he had stopped short of taking the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. In these years (and for this we can certainly thank Bush, among others), Americans — Republicans and Democrats alike — became enamored with military force and came to believe that it could solve just about any problem in that region, if not the world.

This would prove a grotesque misunderstanding of what had happened. The Gulf War had been an anomaly. Triumphalist conclusions about it rested on the shakiest of foundations. Only if an enemy fought exactly as the U.S. military preferred it to do, as indeed Saddam’s forces did in 1991 — conventionally, in open desert, with outdated Soviet equipment — could the U.S. expect such success. Americans drew another conclusion entirely: that their military was unstoppable.

The same faulty assumptions flowed from Afghanistan in 2001. Information technology, Special Forces, CIA dollars (to Afghan warlords), and smart bombs triggered victory with few conventional foot soldiers needed. It seemed a forever formula and influenced both the hasty decision to invade Iraq, and the irresponsibly undersized force structure deployed (not to speak of the complete lack of serious preparation for actually occupying that country). So powerful was the optimism and jingoism of invasion proponents that skeptics were painted as unpatriotic turncoats.

Then things turned ugly fast. This time around, Saddam’s army simply melted away, state institutions broke down, looting was rampant, and the three major communities of Iraq — Sunni, Shia, and Kurd — began to battle for power. The invaders never received the jubilant welcome predicted for them by Bush administration officials and supportive neocons. What began as a Sunni-based insurgency to regain power morphed into a nationalist rebellion and then into an Islamist struggle against Westerners.

Nearly a century earlier, Britain had formed Iraq from three separate Ottoman imperial provinces — Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. The 2003 invasion blew up that synthetic state, held together first by British overlords and then by Saddam’s brutal dictatorship. American policymakers seemed genuinely surprised by all this.

Those in Washington never adequately understood the essential conundrum of forced regime change in Iraq. “Democracy” there would inevitably result in Shia majority dominance of an artificial state. Empowering the Shia drove the Sunni minority — long accustomed to power — into the embrace of armed, motivated Islamists. When societies fracture as Iraq’s did, often enough the worst among us rise to the occasion. As the poet William Butler Yeats so famously put it, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed… The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Furthermore, the invasion played directly into Osama bin Laden’s hands, fueling his narrative of an American “war on Islam.” In the process, the U.S. also destabilized Iraq’s neighbors and the region, spreading extremists to Syria and elsewhere.

That David Petraeus’s surge “worked” is perhaps the greatest myth of all. It was true that the steps he took resulted in a decrease in violence after 2007, largely because he paid off the Sunni tribes, not because of the modest U.S. troop increase ordered from Washington. By then, the Shia had already won the sectarian civil war for Baghdad, intensifying Sunni-Shia residential segregation there and so temporarily lessening the capacity for carnage.

That post-surge “calm” was, however, no more than a tactical pause in an ongoing regional sectarian war. No fundamental problems had been resolved in post-Saddam Iraq, including the nearly impossible task of integrating Sunni and Kurdish minorities into a coherent national whole. Instead, Washington had left a highly sectarian Shia strongman, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in control of the government and internal security forces, while al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI (nonexistent prior to the invasion), never would be eradicated. Its leadership, further radicalized in U.S. Army prisons, bided its time, waiting for an opportunity to win back Sunni fealty.

Luckily for AQI, as soon as the U.S. military was pulled out of the country, Maliki promptly cracked down hard on peaceful Sunni protests. He even had his Sunni vice president sentenced to death in absentia under the most questionable of circumstances. Maliki’s ineptitude would prove an AQI godsend.

Islamists, including AQI, also took advantage of events in Syria. Autocrat Bashar al-Assad’s brutal repression of his own protesting Sunni majority gave them just the opening they needed. Of course, the revolt there might never have occurred had not the invasion of Iraq destabilized the entire region. In 2014, the former AQI leaders, having absorbed some of Saddam’s cashiered officers into their new forces, triumphantly took a series of Iraqi cities, including Mosul, sending the Iraqi army fleeing. They then declared a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Many Iraqi Sunnis naturally turned to the newly established “Islamic State” (ISIS) for protection.

Mission (Un)Accomplished!

It’s hardly controversial these days to point out that the 2003 invasion (aka Operation Iraqi Freedom), far from bringing freedom to that country, sowed chaos. Toppling Saddam’s brutal regime tore down the edifice of a regional system that had stood for nearly a century. However inadvertently, the U.S. military lit the fire that burned down the old order.

As it turned out, no matter the efforts of the globe’s greatest military, no easy foreign solution existed when it came to Iraq. It rarely does. Unfortunately, few in Washington were willing to accept such realities. Think of that as the twenty-first-century American Achilles’ heel: unwarranted optimism about the efficacy of U.S. power. Policy in these years might best be summarized as: “we” have to do something, and military force is the best — perhaps the only — feasible option.

Has it worked? Is anybody, including Americans, safer? Few in power even bother to ask such questions. But the data is there. The Department of State counted just 348 terrorist attacks worldwide in 2001 compared with 11,774 attacks in 2015. That’s right: at best, America’s 15-year “war on terror” failed to significantly reduce international terrorism; at worst, its actions helped make matters 30 times worse.

Recall the Hippocratic oath: “First do no harm.” And remember Osama bin Laden’s stated goal on 9/11: to draw conventional American forces into attritional campaigns in the heart of the Middle East. Mission accomplished!

In today’s world of “alternative facts,” it’s proven remarkably easy to ignore such empirical data and so avoid thorny questions. Recent events and contemporary political discourse even suggest that the country’s political elites now inhabit a post-factual environment; in terms of the Greater Middle East, this has been true for years.

It couldn’t be more obvious that Washington’s officialdom regularly and repeatedly drew erroneous lessons from the recent past and ignored a hard truth staring them in the face: U.S. military action in the Middle East has solved nothing. At all. Only the government cannot seem to accept this. Meanwhile, an American fixation on one unsuitable term — “isolationism” — masks a more apt description of American dogma in this period: hyper-interventionism.

As for military leaders, they struggle to admit failure when they — and their troops — have sacrificed so much sweat and blood in the region. Senior officers display the soldier’s tendency to confuse performance with effectiveness, staying busy with being successful. Prudent strategy requires differentiating between doing a lot and doing the right things. As Einstein reputedly opined, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

A realistic look at America’s recent past in the Greater Middle East and a humbler perspective on its global role suggest two unsatisfying but vital conclusions. First, false lessons and misbegotten collective assumptions contributed to and created much of today’s regional mess. As a result, it’s long past time to reassess recent history and challenge long-held suppositions. Second, policymakers badly overestimated the efficacy of American power, especially via the military, to shape foreign peoples and cultures to their desires. In all of this, the agency of locals and the inherent contingency of events were conveniently swept aside.

So what now? It should be obvious (but probably isn’t in Washington) that it’s well past time for the U.S. to bring its incessant urge to respond militarily to the crisis of the moment under some kind of control. Policymakers should accept realistic limitations on their ability to shape the world to America’s desired image of it.

Consider the last few decades in Iraq and Syria. In the 1990s, Washington employed economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein and his regime. The result: tragedy to the tune of half a million dead children. Then it tried invasion and democracy promotion. The result: tragedy — including 4,500-plus dead American soldiers, a few trillion dollars down the drain, more than 200,000 dead Iraqis, and millions more displaced in their own country or in flight as refugees.

In response, in Syria the U.S. tried only limited intervention. Result: tragedy — upwards of 300,000 dead and close to seven million more turned into refugees.

So will tough talk and escalated military action finally work this time around as the Trump administration faces off against ISIS? Consider what happens even if the U.S achieves a significant rollback of ISIS. Even if, in conjunction with allied Kurdish or Syrian rebel forces, ISIS’s “capital,” Raqqa, is taken and the so-called caliphate destroyed, the ideology isn’t going away. Many of its fighters are likely to transition back to an insurgency and there will be no end to international terror in ISIS’s name. In the meantime, none of this will have solved the underlying problems of artificial states now at the edge of collapse or beyond, divided ethno-religious groups, and anti-Western nationalist and religious sentiments. All of it begs the question: What if Americans are incapable of helping (at least in a military sense)?

A real course correction is undoubtedly impossible without at least a willingness to reconsider and reframe our recent historical experiences. If the 2016 election is any indication, however, a Trump administration with the present line-up of national security chiefs (who fought in these very wars) won’t meaningfully alter either the outlook or the policies that led us to this moment. Candidate Trump offered a hollow promise — to “Make America Great Again” — conjuring up a mythical era that never was. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton offered only remarkably dated and stale rhetoric about America as the “indispensable nation.”

In the new Trump era, neither major party seems capable of escaping a shared commitment to the legends rather than the facts of America’s recent past in the Greater Middle East. Both sides remain eerily confident that the answers to contemporary foreign policy woes lie in a mythical version of that past, whether Trump’s imaginary 1950s paradise or Clinton’s fleeting mid-1990s “unipolar moment.”

Both ages are long gone, if they ever really existed at all. Needed is some fresh thinking about our militarized version of foreign policy and just maybe an urge, after all these years, to do so much less. Patriotic fables certainly feel good, but they achieve little. My advice: dare to be discomfited.

Major Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. He lives with his wife and four sons near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

[Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author in an unofficial capacity and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Command and General Staff College, Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, as well as Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

via Informed Comment

#IFTTT #Feedly #Nothingman uses feedly

1 note · View note

politicoscope · 6 years

Text

Saddam Hussein Biography and Profile

New Post has been published on https://www.politicoscope.com/saddam-hussein-biography-and-profile/

Saddam Hussein Biography and Profile

Born on April 28, 1937, in Tikrit, Iraq, Saddam Hussein was a secularist who rose through the Baath political party to assume a dictatorial presidency. Under his rule, segments of the populace enjoyed the benefits of oil wealth, while those in opposition faced torture and execution. After military conflicts with U.S.-led armed forces, Hussein was captured in 2003. He was later executed.

Early Life Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, in Tikrit, Iraq. His father, who was a shepherd, disappeared several months before Saddam was born. A few months later, Saddam’s older brother died of cancer. When Saddam was born, his mother, severely depressed by her oldest son’s death and the disappearance of her husband, was unable to effectively care for Saddam, and at age 3 he was sent to Baghdad to live with his uncle, Khairallah Talfah. Years later, Saddam would return to Al-Awja to live with his mother, but after suffering abuse at the hand of his stepfather, he fled to Baghdad to again live with Talfah, a devout Sunni Muslim and ardent Arab nationalist whose politics would have a profound influence on the young Saddam.

After attending the nationalistic al-Karh Secondary School in Baghdad, in 1957, at age 20, Saddam joined the Ba’ath Party, whose ultimate ideological aim was the unity of Arab states in the Middle East. On October 7, 1959, Saddam and other members of the Ba-ath Party attempted to assassinate Iraq’s then-president, Abd al-Karim Qasim, whose resistance to joining the nascent United Arab Republic and alliance with Iraq’s communist party had put him at odds with the Ba’athists. During the assassination attempt, Qasim’s chauffeur was killed, and Qasim was shot several times, but survived. Saddam was shot in the leg. Several of the would-be assassins were caught, tried and executed, but Saddam and several others managed to escape to Syria, where Saddam stayed briefly before fleeing to Egypt, where he attended law school.

Rise to Power In 1963, when Qasim’s government was overthrown in the so-called Ramadan Revolution, Saddam returned to Iraq, but he was arrested the following year as the result of in-fighting in the Ba’ath Party. While in prison, however, he remained involved in politics, and in 1966 was appointed deputy secretary of the Regional Command. Shortly thereafter he managed to escape prison, and in the years that followed, continued to strengthen his political power.

In 1968, Saddam participated in a bloodless but successful Ba’athist coup that resulted in Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr becoming Iraq’s president and Saddam his deputy. During al-Bakr’s presidency, Saddam proved himself to be an effective and progressive politician, albeit a decidedly ruthless one. He did much to modernize Iraq’s infrastructure, industry, and health-care system, and raised social services, education, and farming subsidies to levels unparalleled in other Arab countries in the region. He also nationalized Iraq’s oil industry, just before the energy crisis of 1973, which resulted in massive revenues for the nation. During that same time, however, Saddam helped develop Iraq’s first chemical weapons program and, to guard against coups, created a powerful security apparatus, which included both Ba’athist paramilitary groups and the People’s Army, and which frequently used torture, rape and assassination to achieve its goals.

In 1979, when al-Bakr attempted to unite Iraq and Syria, in a move that would have left Saddam effectively powerless, Saddam forced al-Bakr to resign, and on July 16, 1979, Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq. Less than a week later, he called an assembly of the Ba’ath Party. During the meeting, a list of 68 names was read out loud, and each person on the list was promptly arrested and removed from the room. Of those 68, all were tried and found guilty of treason and 22 were sentenced to death. By early August 1979, hundreds of Saddam’s political foes had been executed.

Decades of Conflict The same year that Saddam ascended to the presidency, Ayatollah Khomeini led a successful Islamic revolution in Iraq’s neighbor to the northeast, Iran. Saddam, whose political power rested in part upon the support of Iraq’s minority Sunni population, worried that developments in Shi-ite majority Iran could lead to a similar uprising in Iraq. In response, on September 22, 1980, Saddam ordered Iraqi forces to invade the oil-rich region of Khuzestan in Iran. The conflict soon blossomed into an all-out war, but Western nations and much of the Arab world, fearful of the spread of Islamic radicalism and what it would mean to the region and the world, laid their support firmly behind Saddam, despite the fact that his invasion of Iran clearly violated international law. During the conflict, these same fears would cause the international community to essentially ignore Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, its genocidal dealing with its Kurdish population and its burgeoning nuclear program. On August 20, 1988, after years of intense conflict that left hundreds of thousands dead on both sides, a ceasefire agreement was finally reached.

In the aftermath of the conflict, seeking a means of revitalizing Iraq’s war-ravaged economy and infrastructure, at the end of the 1980s, Saddam turned his attention toward Iraq’s wealthy neighbor, Kuwait. Using the justification that it was a historical part of Iraq, on August 2, 1990, Saddam ordered the invasion of Kuwait. A UN Security Council resolution was promptly passed, imposing economic sanctions on Iraq and setting a deadline by which Iraqi forces must leave Kuwait. When the January 15, 1991 deadline was ignored, a UN coalition force headed by the United States confronted Iraqi forces, and a mere six weeks later, had driven them from Kuwait. A ceasefire agreement was signed, the terms of which included Iraq dismantling its germ and chemical weapons programs. The previously imposed economic sanctions levied against Iraq remained in place. Despite this and the fact that his military had suffered a crushing defeat, Saddam claimed victory in the conflict.

The Gulf War’s resulting economic hardships further divided an already fractured Iraqi population. During the 1990s, various Shi-ite and Kurdish uprisings occurred, but the rest of the world, fearing another war, Kurdish independence (in the case of Turkey) or the spread of Islamic fundamentalism did little or nothing to support these rebellions, and they were ultimately crushed by Saddam’s increasingly repressive security forces. At the same time, Iraq remained under intense international scrutiny as well. In 1993, when Iraqi forces violated a no-fly zone imposed by the United Nations, the United States launched a damaging missile attack on Baghdad. In 1998, further violations of the no-fly zones and Iraq’s alleged continuation of its weapons programs led to further missile strikes on Iraq, which would occur intermittently until February 2001.

Saddam’s Fall Members of the Bush administration had suspected that the Hussein government had a relationship with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization. In his January 2002 State of the Union address, U.S. President George W. Bush named Iraq as part of his so-called “Axis of Evil,” along with Iran and North Korea, and claimed that the country was developing weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorism.

Later that year, UN inspections of suspected weapons sites in Iraq began, but little or no evidence that such programs existed was ultimately found. Despite this, on March 20, 2003, under the pretense that Iraq did in fact have a covert weapons program and that it was planning attacks, a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq. Within weeks, the government and military had been toppled, and on April 9, 2003, Baghdad fell. Saddam, however, managed to elude capture.

Capture, Trial and Execution In the months that followed, an intensive search for Saddam began. While in hiding, Saddam released several audio recordings, in which he denounced Iraq’s invaders and called for resistance. Finally, on December 13, 2003, Saddam was found hiding in a small underground bunker near a farmhouse in ad-Dawr, near Tikrit. From there, he was moved to a U.S. base in Baghdad, where he would remain until June 30, 2004, when he was officially handed over to the interim Iraqi government to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

During the subsequent trial, Saddam would prove to be a belligerent defendant, often boisterously challenging the court’s authority and making bizarre statements. On November 5, 2006, Saddam was found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentencing was appealed, but was ultimately upheld by a court of appeals. On December 30, 2006, at Camp Justice, an Iraqi base in Baghdad, Saddam was hanged, despite his request to be shot. He was buried in Al-Awja, his birthplace, on December 31, 2006.

Saddam Hussein Biography and Profile (Biography)

#Biography and Profile #Iraq #Saddam Hussein

0 notes

cleopatrarps · 6 years

Text

After ballot box fire, cleric Sadr says Iraqis should unite

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called for Iraqis to show unity rather than squabble over a possible rerun of the election his bloc won last month, in remarks that seemed aimed at defusing political tension after a storage site holding ballot boxes caught fire.

FILE PHOTO: Smoke rises from a storage site in Baghdad, housing ballot boxes from Iraq’s May parliamentary election, Iraq June 10, 2018. REUTERS/Khalid al-Mousily /File Photo

Parliament has mandated a manual recount of the election in which a number of political parties alleged fraud. A storage site holding half of the ballot boxes from the capital caught fire on Sunday in what Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi called a “plot to harm the nation and its democracy”.

The authorities say the ballot boxes were saved and the fire will not affect the recount. Nevertheless it has added to fears that disputes over the vote result could turn violent.

Sadr, a Shi’ite cleric who once led violent campaigns against a U.S. occupation, has emerged as nationalist opponent of powerful Shi’ite religious parties allied to Iran. He scored a surprise victory in the election, with his followers emerging as the largest political bloc in a highly fractured parliament.

“Stop fighting for seats, posts, gains, influence, power, and rulership,” he wrote in an article published by his office.

“Is it not time to stand as one for building and reconstruction instead of burning ballot boxes or repeating elections just for one seat or two?” Sadr wrote.

FILE PHOTO: Iraqi Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr speaks during a news conference with Iraqi politician Ammar al-Hakim, leader of the Hikma Current, in Najaf, Iraq May 17, 2018. REUTERS/Alaa al-Marjani/File Photo

The election, the first since the defeat of the Islamic State group that seized a third of Iraq in 2014, raised hopes that Iraqis could put aside long-standing communal and sectarian divisions to rebuild. Sadr’s followers campaigned in an unlikely alliance with the Communists and other secular groups.

Sadr has in the past mobilised tens of thousands of followers to protest in the streets against government policies he opposed. He said there were attempts by some to cause a civil war but promised he would not participate in one.

“I will not sell the nation for seats and will not sell the people for power. Iraq is my concern, positions for me do not mean much,” wrote Sadr.

One of Sadr’s top aides had said on Sunday that the ballot box fire was intended either to force a rerun of the election or to conceal fraud.

Slideshow (4 Images)

COMPANY DEFENDS VOTING EQUIPMENT

Outgoing parliament speaker Salim al-Jabouri, who lost his seat, called for the election to be repeated after the fire, which he said proved fraud had taken place.

In the election, Iraq used an electronic vote-counting system for the first time. Some Iraqi politicians had argued that the manual recount was necessary to make sure that the electronic system did not hide fraud.

Miru Systems, the Korean company that provided the electronic equipment under a $135 million contract, said there was nothing wrong with its system.

“We have checked our election device provided to Iraq after the fraud allegation erupted, and found out that there have been no malfunction in the device nor its system,” said a spokesman.

Sadr led uprisings against U.S. occupation troops, prompting the Pentagon to call his Mehdi Army the biggest threat to Iraq’s security at the time.

His father and another relative were both grand ayatollahs, spiritual leaders of Iraq’s majority Shi’ite community, slain under Sunni Muslim dictator Saddam Hussein. Their posters can be seen in Baghdad and the southern Shi’ite heartland.

Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Peter Graff

The post After ballot box fire, cleric Sadr says Iraqis should unite appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2y4cyke via News of World

#Daily World News #Daily Entertainment #Daily Sports #Today News #World The News

0 notes

dragnews · 6 years

Text

After ballot box fire, cleric Sadr says Iraqis should unite

FILE PHOTO: Smoke rises from a storage site in Baghdad, housing ballot boxes from Iraq’s May parliamentary election, Iraq June 10, 2018. REUTERS/Khalid al-Mousily /File Photo

The authorities say the ballot boxes were saved and the fire will not affect the recount. Nevertheless it has added to fears that disputes over the vote result could turn violent.

“Stop fighting for seats, posts, gains, influence, power, and rulership,” he wrote in an article published by his office.

“Is it not time to stand as one for building and reconstruction instead of burning ballot boxes or repeating elections just for one seat or two?” Sadr wrote.

“I will not sell the nation for seats and will not sell the people for power. Iraq is my concern, positions for me do not mean much,” wrote Sadr.

One of Sadr’s top aides had said on Sunday that the ballot box fire was intended either to force a rerun of the election or to conceal fraud.

Slideshow (4 Images)

COMPANY DEFENDS VOTING EQUIPMENT

Outgoing parliament speaker Salim al-Jabouri, who lost his seat, called for the election to be repeated after the fire, which he said proved fraud had taken place.

Miru Systems, the Korean company that provided the electronic equipment under a $135 million contract, said there was nothing wrong with its system.

“We have checked our election device provided to Iraq after the fraud allegation erupted, and found out that there have been no malfunction in the device nor its system,” said a spokesman.

Sadr led uprisings against U.S. occupation troops, prompting the Pentagon to call his Mehdi Army the biggest threat to Iraq’s security at the time.

Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Peter Graff

The post After ballot box fire, cleric Sadr says Iraqis should unite appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2y4cyke via Today News

#Daily News #Daily World News #Daily Business News #Daily Sports News #World The News

0 notes

dani-qrt · 6 years

Text

After ballot box fire, cleric Sadr says Iraqis should unite

FILE PHOTO: Smoke rises from a storage site in Baghdad, housing ballot boxes from Iraq’s May parliamentary election, Iraq June 10, 2018. REUTERS/Khalid al-Mousily /File Photo

The authorities say the ballot boxes were saved and the fire will not affect the recount. Nevertheless it has added to fears that disputes over the vote result could turn violent.

“Stop fighting for seats, posts, gains, influence, power, and rulership,” he wrote in an article published by his office.

“Is it not time to stand as one for building and reconstruction instead of burning ballot boxes or repeating elections just for one seat or two?” Sadr wrote.

“I will not sell the nation for seats and will not sell the people for power. Iraq is my concern, positions for me do not mean much,” wrote Sadr.

One of Sadr’s top aides had said on Sunday that the ballot box fire was intended either to force a rerun of the election or to conceal fraud.

Slideshow (4 Images)

COMPANY DEFENDS VOTING EQUIPMENT

Outgoing parliament speaker Salim al-Jabouri, who lost his seat, called for the election to be repeated after the fire, which he said proved fraud had taken place.

Miru Systems, the Korean company that provided the electronic equipment under a $135 million contract, said there was nothing wrong with its system.

“We have checked our election device provided to Iraq after the fraud allegation erupted, and found out that there have been no malfunction in the device nor its system,” said a spokesman.

Sadr led uprisings against U.S. occupation troops, prompting the Pentagon to call his Mehdi Army the biggest threat to Iraq’s security at the time.

Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Peter Graff

The post After ballot box fire, cleric Sadr says Iraqis should unite appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2y4cyke via Online News

#World News #Today News #Daily News #Breaking News #News Headline #Entertainment News #Sports news #Sci-Tech

0 notes

esprit-de-corps-magazine · 6 years

Text

ON TARGET: False Flags Nothing New

By Scott Taylor

In recent weeks we have seen two major incidents occur – the March 4 poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, and the April 7 attack on the embattled Syrian town of Douma.

In both cases we were told by western intelligence agencies, before any actual investigation had taken place, exactly who the culprits were. In the Skripal incident it was of course Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose bumbling secret service are supposed to have used a nerve agent in the attempted murder.

The Douma attack was pronounced to be a chemical strike by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, assisted by his ally Putin.

In both cases punishment has already been meted out by the same western countries who pride themselves on representing the rule of law, wherein the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Based on the unproven British allegations of Russian state involvement in the Skripal attack, Canada has joined 28 other countries in expelling a combined total of 150 Russian diplomats.

The Douma chemical attack is looking more like a clumsy hoax perpetrated by Islamic extremist rebels, yet Canada was among the first to give a big “attaboy” pat on the back to the U.S., UK and France for launching their punishing missile strike against Assad on April 13.

What has been missing from the vast majority of media reports is the necessary skepticism to challenge the original official versions.

False flag incidents, or staged hoaxes have been used throughout history as clumsy pretexts to initiate conflict.

On the evening of August 31, 1939, a small group of German intelligence operatives disguised themselves in Polish army uniforms, crossed the German-Polish border, and seized a German radio station. They broadcast a brief anti-German message and then to make things seem more real, they executed a hapless prisoner named Franciszek Honiok. His corpse, complete with Polish uniform, was presented as ‘proof’ of an unprovoked aggression by Poland on German soil. The operation’s code name was Grandmother died.

The very next day, September 1, with the ink not yet dry on the newspaper accounts of the Polish attack on the Gleiwitz radio station, Hitler’s massed military rolled into Poland. According to the German press, the invasion was in reprisal for this blatant Polish aggression. Hitler was simply defending his people according to the official Nazi narrative at the time.

In August 1964, the U.S. reported that one of its Navy Destroyers had been involved in one, or possibly two firefights with North Vietnamese gunboats. At that juncture, the U.S. was providing just a handful of military advisors to South Vietnam in their ongoing clash with North Vietnam.

The official version of events was that the USS Maddox was minding its own business sailing on an intelligence gathering patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin, when these little North Vietnamese gunboats defied all logic, not to mention international law, and attacked the much larger U.S. warship.

In the one sided exchange, USS Maddox escaped with a single bullet hole in damage, while all three North Vietnamese ships suffered serious damage. However, that alleged attack on USS Maddox was enough for President Lyndon Johnson to pass the Gulf of Tonkin resolution granting him the right to combat “communist aggression” in Southeast Asia. Within months there were 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam to avenge the damage done to USS Maddox.

Following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, a tearful young Kuwaiti girl told U.S. Congress that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers dumping infants out of incubators and leaving them to die on the floor. After Saddam’s defeat the following year, it was revealed that the incubator story was totally fabricated and the ‘witness’ was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador in Washington.

In 2003, the U.S. and UK told the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That lie was exposed after the invasion, and fifteen years later, Iraq remains a failed state of violent unrest.

It does not make one an “Assad apologist” or a “Russian propagandist” to ask western leaders to show proof supporting their allegations. These same agencies have lied to us before, often with catastrophic results.

Long after the war, while in the final years of his captivity in Spandau Prison, Nazi leader Albert Speer opined that the only thing which could have prevented Hitler’s rise to power was “a free press.”

That is a powerful statement.

0 notes

wionews · 7 years

Text

The thinking behind Kim Jong Un's 'madness'

On an icy December day in 2011, North Korea's new leader Kim Jong Un was accompanied by seven advisers as they escorted the hearse that carried his father, Kim Jong Il, through the streets of Pyongyang.

None of the men remain with the young Kim. This October, he demoted the last of his father's aides, both men in their nineties. They were among around 340 people he has purged or executed, according to the Institute for National Security Strategy, a think tank of South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS).

Kim, "obviously a madman" in the eyes of US President Donald Trump, has completed a six-year transition to what the South calls a reign of terror. His unpredictability and belligerence have instilled fear worldwide: After he tested a "breakthrough" missile earlier this week, he pronounced North Korea a nuclear power capable of striking the United States. But a closer look at his leadership reveals a method behind the "madness."

At 33, Kim Jong Un is one of the world's youngest heads of state. He inherited a nation with a proud history, onto which a socialist state had essentially been grafted by Cold War superpowers to create a buffer between Communist China and the capitalist South. Under Kim's father, the economy was mismanaged, and the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union eliminated an important source of support. Up to three million people starved.

To consolidate a weak position, the young leader has been cultivating three main forces: military and nuclear power, a tacit private sector market economy, and the fear and adoration of a god. To this end, he has executed two powerful men and promoted one young woman – Kim Yo Jong, his younger sister, who Korea-watchers say is also Kim's chief propagandist. She is Kim's only other blood relative to be involved in politics: His elder brother, Kim Jong Chol, was rejected by their father as heir.

Over the five years to December 2016, Kim spent $300 million on 29 nuclear and missile tests, $180 million on building some 460 family statues, and as much as $1 billion on a party congress in 2016 – including $26.8 million on fireworks alone, according to the Institute, which employs high-level defectors.

"Yes, he has replaced many top commanders and officials so easily and ruthlessly killed some of them, which could make you wonder if he's sane," said Lee Sang-keun, a North Korean leadership expert at the Institute of Unification Studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul.

"But this is a historical way of governing that can put you in power for a long time."

Great Leader

In ancient days, Pyongyang was the capital of a mighty empire, Koguryo, the root of the modern word "Korea." Going back through history, the Great Leader concept is a blend of several ideas handed down through time: an almighty god, the Confucian worship of a parent, and a king with the Mandate of Heaven, according to Lee Seung-yeol, a senior researcher at the National Assembly Research Service in Seoul.

Lee, a leading North Korea leadership researcher, said the state's theory of succession meansKim the younger's rise should have been completed while his father was alive: Kim's father was anointed 20 years before he took over, giving him time to build allies and a leadership system.

Kim Jong Un had just three years as leader-in-waiting.

Born in 1984, he was third in line for power and a fractious, competitive child, according to Kenji Fujimoto, a Japanese chef who worked for the family and one of the few people to recount meetings with the young Kim. In his memoirs published in 2010, Fujimoto, who now runs a sushi restaurant in Pyongyang, said Kim once snapped at his aunt Ko Yong Suk for calling him "Little General." Kim wanted to be called "Comrade General."

When Kim Jong Il knew his young son would soon succeed him, researchers have said, the father took several measures to protect the boy. Lee said these included shifting the country's power base to create rivalry between the elites so Kim the younger could play one group off against another.

Kim Jong Il had declared the military the country's supreme power – a policy known as songun, which means "military first." At a party conference in 2010, he changed the setup so the military had to compete with the party administration for the leader's favour.

"Poor man's weapon"

Military strategy was the first thing Kim changed. His father had used the promise of nuclear disarmament as a bargaining chip for aid, and in February 2012, young Kim started in his father's footsteps, promising to freeze North Korea's nuclear programme in return for food aid from the United States.

But weeks later he changed tack, saying North Korea would fire a long-range rocket. "The negotiations were carried on as the legacy of Kim Jong Il," said Wi Sung-lac, a former South Korean envoy to talks in 2011 that contributed to the February deal. "Since then his strategicthinking has shaped up."

In Kim's view, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya were fatally weakened by not having nuclear weapons, North Korean media say. "History proves that powerful nuclear deterrence serves as the strongest treasured sword for frustrating outsiders' aggression," the official KCNA news agency said in an editorial in January 2016.

North Korea is racing to achieve a nuclear deterrent because the state feels threatened, worrying particularly that Kim may face a fate like Gaddafi. The Libyan leader agreed in 2003 to eliminate his weapons of mass destruction; in 2011, he was killed by rebels that the United States and its allies had supported.

Months after Kim's accession, North Korea updated its constitution to declare itself a nuclear weapons state.

One leading pallbearer at Kim Jong Il's funeral was Ri Yong Ho, Chief of the General Staff of the Korean People's Army. Kim sacked him in July 2012. South Korean intelligence later confirmed that Ri had been executed.

By December 2012, North Korea had carried out another, successful, rocket test.

In 2013, Kim outlined a new policy: The "byungjin line," or parallel development, to combine the nuclear buildup and economic growth.

A nuclear deterrent is essential to that, says Thae Yong-ho, North Korea's former deputy ambassador to London, who staged a high-profile defection to South Korea in 2016. The threat of absolute destruction makes a nuclear bomb a "poor man's weapon" with which to tighten control of the country and ensure long-term rule, Thae said.

"Once he has assumed control of usable nuclear weapons, he has more room to allocate resources more flexibly, and allocate the military forces for civilian construction," said Thae.

"Foolish dream"

North Korea spends about a quarter of its GDP on defence: Russia's President Vladimir Putin has said Kim Jong Un would have his people "eat grass" rather than give up its nuclear programme.

But with a legacy of famine, Kim also says he wants to boost people's prosperity.

The former chef, Fujimoto, said that on one summer break from school in Switzerland in 2000, the young Kim was preoccupied with a visit to Beijing his father had made.

"Let's talk," Fujimoto recalled the future leader saying over drinks on his father's private train. "I hear from higher up that China seems to be succeeding on many fronts – engineering, commerce, hotels, agriculture - everything," Kim said. "In many ways, don't we need to take them as a model example for us?"

In 2012, shortly after taking power, Kim went a small way to mimic reforms China made in the 1980s. Farmers were allowed to keep most of the harvest. State enterprises were given the right to buy and sell at market prices and to hire and fire workers. Private entrepreneurs and traders were encouraged to invest in state projects or with party and military entities. Kim also began to turn a blind eye to informal markets – a force his father tried in vain to contain.

That April, Kim addressed the nation - the first time in 17 years North Koreans had heard the voice of their leader. "It is the party's steadfast determination to ensure that the people will never have to tighten their belt again," he said.

Outsiders hoped the reform signaled a new political openness as Kim drove to promote the North in the world: In 2012 Antonio Razzi, an Italian senator for Forza Italia who calls himself the only Italian to have met the leader, said Kim had asked him to find training facilities for soccer players in Italy.

"I have talked with many (North Korean) local leaders," Razzi said. "They have no plan to attack anybody. North Korea is interested in nuclear only as a form of defence."

Kim worked to ensure the economic freedom would not unseat him.

Also escorting his father's funeral car in 2011 was Jang Song Thaek, an administrator at the vanguard of the reforms. He was married to Kim Jong Il's sister, was a special envoy to China and had overseen a host of new Special Economic Zones all over the country.

In December 2013, Jang was hauled out of the Politburo in front of the cameras and accused of plotting a coup. "Jang dreamed such a foolish dream," state media said, adding Jang hoped his reformist plans would help him "get 'recognised' by foreign countries."

Jang was shot "dozens of times" by an anti-aircraft gun and his remains removed with a flamethrower, according to South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) – an account no one has confirmed.

"Development dictator"

From that point on, Kim honed his personality cult. On the day Jang's purge was announced, North Korea's official daily the Rodong Sinmun unveiled a song dedicated to Kim Jong Un, titled "We Know Nothing But You." More were to follow.

The next year, Kim also ordered school textbooks be revised to focus on idolisation of himself and include images of nuclear weapons and missiles, according to the NIS-affiliated Institute for National Security Strategy.

The idolisation campaign kicked into high gear in 2016, focused on pop culture and youth: Kim's chosen female singers, the Moranbong Band, staged a series of musical performances and plays calling for loyalty to the leader, while the Shock Brigade, a crew of young North Koreans in charge of major economic construction, produced about 1,200 poems and other literary works, the Institute said.

"He has linked his own legitimacy to improving the economic situation in the country," said John Delury of Seoul's Yonsei University. "Kim Jong Un wants to become a development dictator."

At home, he casts himself as a bringer of plenty. In 2015, almost half the times he was photographed were at economic events, data from Seoul's Unification Ministry shows. Only this year, as his weapons tests multiplied and met an angry response in the United States, have military appearances come back into prominence.

Standing tearfully behind Kim Jong Un at their father's funeral was his younger sister, 28-year-oldKim Yo Jong. On the same October day that Kim dropped the last two of his father's aides, he included her in his Politburo. Kim Jong Chol, their elder brother, leads a quiet life in Pyongyang where he plays guitar in a band, according to former ambassador Thae.

"I think Kim Jong Un has been making good use of the existing system, while strengthening his power base and dictator regime in a very shrewd manner," said Lee Su-seok, a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Strategy.

]]>

0 notes

newstfionline · 7 years

Text

Who’s Afraid of a Balance of Power?

By Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy, December 8, 2017

If you took an introduction to international relations course in college and the instructor never mentioned the “balance of power,” please contact your alma mater for a refund. You can find this idea in Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and the ancient Indian writer Kautilya’s Arthashastra (“Science of Politics”), and it is central to the work of modern realists like E.H. Carr, Hans J. Morgenthau, Robert Gilpin, and Kenneth Waltz.

Yet despite its long and distinguished history, this simple idea is often forgotten by America’s foreign-policy elites. Instead of asking why Russia and China are collaborating, or pondering what has brought Iran together with its various Middle East partners, they assume it is the result of shared authoritarianism, reflexive anti-Americanism, or some other form of ideological solidarity. This act of collective amnesia encourages U.S. leaders to act in ways that unwittingly push foes closer together, and to miss promising opportunities to drive them apart.

The basic logic behind balance of power theory (or, if you prefer, balance of threat theory) is straightforward. Because there is no “world government” to protect states from each other, each has to rely on its own resources and strategies to avoid being conquered, coerced, or otherwise endangered. When facing a powerful or threatening state, a worried country can mobilize more of its own resources or seek an alliance with other states that face the same danger, in order to shift the balance more in its favor.

In extreme cases, forming a balancing coalition might require a state to fight alongside another country it previously regarded as an enemy or even one it understood would be a rival in the future. Thus, the United States and Great Britain allied with the Soviet Union during World War II, because defeating Nazi Germany took precedence over their long-term concerns about communism. Winston Churchill captured this logic perfectly when he quipped “if Hitler invaded hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt expressed a similar sentiment when he said he “would hold hands with the devil” if it would help beat the Third Reich. When you really need allies, you can’t be too choosy.

Needless to say, “balance of power” logic played an important role in U.S. foreign policy, and especially when security concerns were unmistakable. America’s Cold War alliances (i.e., NATO and the hub-and-spoke system of bilateral alliances in Asia) were formed to balance and contain the Soviet Union, and the same motive led the United States to back an array of authoritarian regimes in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Similarly, Richard Nixon’s opening to China in 1972 was inspired by fears of rising Soviet power and the recognition that closer ties with Beijing would put Moscow at a disadvantage.

Yet despite its long pedigree and enduring relevance, policymakers and pundits often fail to recognize how balance of power logic drives the behavior of both allies and adversaries. Part of the problem stems from the common U.S. tendency to assume that a state’s foreign policy is mostly shaped by its internal characteristics (i.e., its leaders’ personalities, its political and economic system, or its ruling ideology, etc.) rather than by its external circumstances (i.e., the array of threats it faces).

From this perspective, America’s “natural” allies are states that share our values. When people speak of the United States as “leader of the free world,” or when they describe NATO as a “transatlantic community” of liberal democracies, they are suggesting that these countries are supporting each other because they share a common vision for how the world should be ordered.

Shared political values are not irrelevant, of course, and some empirical studies suggesting democratic alliances are somewhat more stable than alliances between autocracies or between democracies and nondemocracies. Nonetheless, assuming that a state’s internal composition determines its identification of friends and enemies can lead us astray in several ways.

First, if we believe shared values are a powerful unifying force, we are likely to overstate the cohesion and durability of some of our existing alliances. NATO is an obvious case in point: The breakup of the Soviet Union removed its principal rationale, and herculean efforts to give the alliance a new set of missions have not prevented repeated and growing signs of strain. Matters might be different if NATO’s campaigns in Afghanistan or Libya had gone well--but they didn’t.

To be sure, the Ukraine crisis arrested NATO’s slow decline temporarily, but this modest reversal merely underscores the central role external threats (i.e., fear of Russia) play in holding NATO together. “Shared values” are simply insufficient to sustain a meaningful coalition of nearly 30 nations located on both sides of the Atlantic, and all the more so as Turkey, Hungary, and Poland abandon the liberal values on which NATO supposedly rests.

Second, if you forget about balance of power politics, you’re likely to be surprised when other states (or in some cases, nonstate actors) join forces against you. The George W. Bush administration was taken aback when France, Germany, and Russia joined forces to block its efforts to get Security Council approval for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a step these states took because they understood that toppling Saddam Hussein might backfire in ways that would threaten them (as it eventually did). Yet U.S. leaders couldn’t grasp why these states weren’t leaping at the opportunity to remove Saddam and transform the region along democratic lines. As Bush’s national security advisor Condoleezza Rice later admitted, “I’ll just put it very bluntly. We simply didn’t understand it.”

U.S. officials were equally surprised when Iran and Syria joined forces to help the Iraqi insurgency following the U.S. invasion, even though it made perfect sense for them to make sure the Bush administration’s effort at “regional transformation” failed. Iran and Syria would have been next on Bush’s hit list if the occupation had succeeded, and they were just acting as any threatened state would (and as balance of power theory predicts). Americans have no reason to welcome such behavior, of course, but they should not have been surprised by it.

Third, focusing on political or ideological affinities and ignoring the role of shared threats encourages us to see adversaries as more unified than they really are. Instead of recognizing that opponents are cooperating with each other largely for instrumental or tactical reasons, U.S. officials and commentators are quick to assume that enemies are bound together by a deep commitment to a set of common goals. In an earlier era, Americans saw the communist world as a tightly unified monolith and mistakenly believed all communists everywhere were reliable agents of the Kremlin. Not only did this error lead them to miss (or deny) the rancorous Sino-Soviet split, but U.S. leaders also mistakenly assumed that non-communist leftists were likely to be sympathetic to Moscow as well. Soviet leaders made the same error in reverse, by the way, only to be disappointed when their efforts to court non-communist Third World socialists frequently backfired.

This misguided instinct lives on today, alas, in phrases like the “axis of evil” (which implied Iran, Iraq, and North Korea were part of the same unified movement), or in misleading terms like “Islamofascism.” Instead of seeing extremist movements as competing organizations with a variety of worldviews and objectives, U.S. officials and pundits routinely speak and act as if our foes were all operating from an identical playbook. Far from being powerfully united by a common doctrine, these groups often suffer from deep ideological schisms and personal rivalries, and they join forces more from necessity than conviction. They can still cause trouble, of course, but assuming all terrorists are loyal foot soldiers in a single global movement makes them look scarier than they really are.

Even worse, instead of looking for ways to encourage splits and schisms among extremists, the United States often acts and speaks in ways that drive them closer together. To take an obvious example, although there may be some modest ideological common ground between Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, and the Sadr movement in Iraq, each of these groups has its own interests and agendas, and their collaboration is best understood as a strategic alliance rather than as a cohesive or unified ideological front. Launching a full-court press against them--as Saudi Arabia and Israel would like us to do--will merely give all of our adversaries even more reason to help each other.

Lastly, ignoring balance of power dynamics squanders one of America’s chief geopolitical advantages. As the only great power in the Western hemisphere, the United States has enormous latitude when choosing allies and thus enormous potential leverage over them. Given the “free security” that America’s geographic isolation provides, it can play hard-to-get, take advantage of regional rivalries when they occur, encourage states and nonstate actors in distant regions to compete for our regard and support, and remain watchful for opportunities to drive wedges between our current adversaries. This approach requires flexibility, a sophisticated understanding of regional affairs, an aversion to “special relationships” with other states, and a refusal to demonize countries with which we have differences.

Unfortunately, the United States has done the exact opposite for the past few decades, especially in the Middle East. Instead of exhibiting flexibility, we’ve rigidly stuck to the same partners and worried more about reassuring them than about getting them to act as we think best. We’ve deepened our “special relationships” with Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia even as the justification for such intimate support has grown weaker. And with occasional exceptions, we’ve treated adversaries like Iran or North Korea as pariahs to threaten and sanction but not to talk with. The results, alas, speak for themselves.

#balance of power #international relations

0 notes

clubofinfo · 7 years

Text

Expert: Kim Jong-un is not mad. Quite the contrary. He has pulled off a wholly rational feat. By producing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles capable of delivering them to U.S. territory, Pyongyang has obtained near-assurance that the U.S. will not attack it, in (yet another) attempt at regime change. Wait, you’ll say. He already had that insurance. Every talking head on cable news says a U.S. strike would inevitably mean an attack on Seoul, which would kill tens of thousands immediately. South Koreans would blame the invasion on the U.S. So it’s just not tenable. Even if limited to conventional forces, the threat of invasion already constituted adequate deterrence. There’s no way the U.S. would trigger an attack on a city of 10 million people who are supposed to view the U.S. as their benevolent protector. So the North Koreans didn’t need to upset the world by acquiring nukes. But think about it from Jong-un’s point of view. Born in 1984, Jong-un was 7 when the U.S. first bombed Iraq, supposedly to force its troops out of Kuwait (although Saddam Hussein had already agreed to withdraw). Then the U.S. imposed sanctions on the country that killed half a million children. He was 11 when the U.S. intervened in Yugoslavia, bombing Serbs to create the dysfunctional client state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He was 15 (probably in school in Switzerland) when the U.S. bombed Serbia and created the dysfunctional client state of Kosovo. He was 17 when the U.S. bombed and brought regime change to Afghanistan. Seventeen years later, Afghanistan remains in a state of civil war, still hosting U.S. troops to quell opposition. He was 19 when the U.S. brought down Saddam and destroyed Iraq, producing all the subsequent misery and chaos. He was 27 when the U.S. brought down Gaddafi, destroyed Libya, forced the Yemeni president from power causing chaos, and began supporting armed opposition forces in Syria. He was 30 when the U.S. State Department spent $5 billion to topple the Ukrainian government through a violent coup. He knows his country’s history, and how the U.S. invasion from September 1950 leveled it and killed one-third of its people, while Douglas MacArthur considered using nuclear weapons on the peninsula. He knows how U.S. puppet Synghman Rhee, president of the U.S.-proclaimed “Republic of Korea,” having repeatedly threatened to invade the North, executed 100,000 South Koreans after the outbreak of war on the grounds that they were communist sympathizers who would aid the enemy. He loves Elizabeth Taylor movies but hates U.S. imperialism. There’s nothing crazy about that. Jong-un was 10 years old when the U.S. and North Korea signed the Agreed Framework, by which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its nuclear power plants, replacing them with (more nuclear proliferation resistant) light water reactors financed by the U.S. and South Korea, and the gradual normalization of U.S.-Pyongyang relations. He was 16 when U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Pyongyang and met with his father Kim Jong Il. (In that same year, South Korean President Kim Dae-jung met with Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang during the period of “Sunshine Diplomacy” eventually sabotaged by the Bush/Cheney administration.) He was 20 when the agreement broke down (undermined by Dick Cheney and his neocons in 2004). He was 17 when his older half-brother Jong-nam was busted at Narita Airport, for stupidly trying to enter Japan with his family on forged Dominican passports, to visit Tokyo’s Disneyland. That stunt ruled Jong-nam (murdered as you know in Malaysia in February 2017) out for the succession, whereas the next son, Jong-chul, was deemed “effeminate.” (At a Clapton concert in Singapore in 2006 he was seen with pierced ears.) Jong-un probably didn’t expect to be the next monarch until he was in his mid-20s. He was 24 when the New York Philharmonic Orchestra visited Pyongyang to a warm welcome. (Washington refused a North Korean offer for a reciprocal visit.) Selected as successor, he became the new absolute leader of North Korea at age 27, a young, vigorous, well-educated man (Physics degree from Kim Il-song University) groomed for the post and with a strong sense of dynastic responsibility. That means returning the DPRK to the relative economic prosperity of the 1970s and 80s, when average per capita energy consumption in the north exceeded that of the south. Analysts suggest that Kim has make economic development primary, and the long-standing “military first” (Songun) policy is giving way to a policy more empowering civilian Korean Workers Party leaders. The DPRK economy, according to The Economist, “is probably growing at between 1% and 5% a year” A new class of traders and businessmen (donju) has emerged. The complex social status system (Songbun) that divides society into 51 sub-categories of “loyal,” “wavering,” and “hostile” (and distributing privileges accordingly) has been falling apart with the rise of market forces. Fourteen months into his tenure, Jong-un invited Dennis Rodman, a member of the U.S. Basketball Hall of Fame, to Pyongyang for the first of what have now been five visits. He is a huge basketball fan, an aficionado of U.S. popular culture, a child of rock ‘n roll. He is also rationally aware of the threat the U.S. poses to his country (among many countries). So his strategy has been to sprint towards nukes while he can. Perhaps he thought that since the Trump administration was (and is) in such disarray, no violent response (such as an attack on the Yongbyon nuclear complex) was likely. But it was risky; the U.S. president is, after all, unstable and ignorant. He has asked his advisors repeatedly, why can’t we use nukes since we have them? The fact is, Mattis, Tillerson and McMaster have been presented with a nuclear fait accompli to which they must respond, in a period of diminishing U.S. influence and relative economic decline. They cannot do it by dropping a MOAB bomb (like they did in Afghanistan in April) or a missile strike on a base (like they did in Iraq the same month, to display their manhood). Jong-un has insured that. If Jong-un plays his cards right, he will get international recognition for the DPRK as a nuclear power—the same degree of recognition afforded other non-NPT signatories like India, Pakistan and Israel. The U.S. will have to defer to Chinese and Russian sobriety and abandon hollow threatening rhetoric. It will have to back down, as it did in the Korean War, when it realized it could not conquer the North and reunify Korea on Washington’s terms and had to accept the continued existence of the DPRK. In return for tension-reducing measures by the U.S. and the South, and the establishment of diplomatic and trade ties, Pyongyang will suspend its nuclear weapons program, content with and proud of what it has accomplished. It is the only way. The other way is suggested by John McCain, crazy warmonger to the end. The Senate Armed Services chairman told CNN’s “State of the Union” that if the North Korean leader “acts in an aggressive fashion”—whatever that means to McCain who will never realize that his bombing of Vietnam constituted aggression—“the price will be extinction.” Shades of Gen. Curtis LeMay and his casual comments about killing every man, woman and child in Tokyo during the terror bombing of that city in 1945. Sen. Lindsey Graham, McCain’s good buddy, has said that Trump told him: “If there’s going to be a war to stop [Kim Jong-un], it will be over there. If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die here… And that may be provocative, but not really. When you’re president of the United States, where does your allegiance lie? To the people of the United States.” Just knowing that the enemy is capable of contemplating one’s people’s extinction surely motivates some leaders to seek the ultimate weapon. The dear young Marshall pulled it off. He replicated what Mao did in China between 1964 and 1967. He got the bomb, which had been introduced to the world over Hiroshima on August. 6, 1945, and used again three days later over Nagasaki. And never used anywhere since in the years since, in which the U.S. has been joined by the USSR, UK, France, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan as members of the nuclear club. He has no reason to use it, unless the U.S. gives him one. Negotiations on the basis of mutual respect and historical consciousness are the only solution. http://clubof.info/

0 notes

therightnewsnetwork · 8 years

Text

How We Got Here

The United States has already lost—its war for the Middle East, that is. Having taken my own crack at combat soldiering in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that couldn’t be clearer to me. Unfortunately, it’s evidently still not clear in Washington. Bush’s neo-imperial triumphalism failed. Obama’s quiet shift to drones, Special Forces, and clandestine executive actions didn’t turn the tide either. For all President Trump’s bluster, boasting, and threats, rest assured that, at best, he’ll barely move the needle and, at worst… but why even go there?

Lead from the front. Lead from behind. Surge yet again… The list goes on—and on and on.

And by now all of it, including Donald Trump’s recent tough talk, represents such a familiar set of tunes. But what if the problem is far deeper and more fundamental than any of that?

1979 Revisited

Through the first half of the Cold War, the Middle East remained a sideshow. In 1979, however, all that changed radically. First, rising protests against the brutal police state of the American-backed Shah of Iran led to regime collapse, the return of dissident ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the declaration of an Islamic Republic. Then Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding 52 hostages for more than 400 days. Of course, by then few Americans remembered the CIA-instigated coup of 1953 that had toppled a democratically elected Iranian prime minister, preserved Western oil interests in that country, and started both lands on this path (though Iranians clearly hadn’t forgotten). The shock and duration of the hostage crisis undoubtedly ensured that Jimmy Carter would be a one-term president and—to make matters worse—Soviet troops intervened in Afghanistan to shore up a communist government there. It was quite a year.

That was a major turning point for the U.S. military. Before 1979, few of its troops had served in the region. In the ensuing decades, America bombed, invaded, raided, sent its drones to kill in, or attacked Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq again (and again), Somalia (again and again), Libya again, Iraq once more, and now Syria as well. Before 1979, few—if any—American military personnel died in the Greater Middle East. Few have died anywhere else since.

2003 and After: Fantasies and Reality

It’s a riveting tale, of course, even if it is misguided in nearly every way imaginable. At each turn, Washington learned the wrong lessons and drew perilous conclusions. At least the first Gulf War—to George H.W. Bush’s credit—involved a large multinational coalition and checked actual Iraqi aggression. Instead of cheering Bush the Elder’s limited, prudent strategy, however, surging neoconservatives demanded to know why he had stopped short of taking the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. In these years (and for this we can certainly thank Bush, among others), Americans—Republicans andDemocrats alike—became enamored with military force and came to believe that it could solve just about any problem in that region, if not the world.

This would prove a grotesque misunderstanding of what had happened. The Gulf War had been an anomaly. Triumphalist conclusions about it rested on the shakiest of foundations. Only if an enemy fought exactly as the U.S. military preferred it to do, as indeed Saddam’s forces did in 1991—conventionally, in open desert, with outdated Soviet equipment—could the U.S. expect such success. Americans drew another conclusion entirely: that their military was unstoppable.

Then things turned ugly fast. This time around, Saddam’s army simply melted away, state institutions broke down, looting was rampant, and the three major communities of Iraq—Sunni, Shia, and Kurd—began to battle for power. The invaders never received the jubilant welcome predicted for them by Bush administration officials and supportive neocons. What began as a Sunni-based insurgency to regain power morphed into a nationalist rebellion and then into an Islamist struggle against Westerners.

Nearly a century earlier, Britain had formed Iraq from three separate Ottoman imperial provinces—Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. The 2003 invasion blew up that synthetic state, held together first by British overlords and then by Saddam’s brutal dictatorship. American policymakers seemed genuinely surprised by all this.

Those in Washington never adequately understood the essential conundrum of forced regime change in Iraq. “Democracy” there would inevitably result in Shia majority dominance of an artificial state. Empowering the Shia drove the Sunni minority—long accustomed to power—into the embrace of armed, motivated Islamists. When societies fracture as Iraq’s did, often enough the worst among us rise to the occasion. As the poet William Butler Yeats so famously put it, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed… The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Mission (Un)Accomplished!

It couldn’t be more obvious that Washington’s officialdom regularly and repeatedly drew erroneous lessons from the recent past and ignored a hard truth staring them in the face: U.S. military action in the Middle East has solved nothing. At all. Only the government cannot seem to accept this. Meanwhile, an American fixation on one unsuitable term—“isolationism”—masks a more apt description of American dogma in this period: hyper-interventionism.

As for military leaders, they struggle to admit failure when they—and their troops—have sacrificed so much sweat and blood in the region. Senior officers display the soldier’s tendency to confuse performance with effectiveness, staying busy with being successful. Prudent strategy requires differentiating between doing a lot and doing the right things. As Einstein reputedly opined, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Consider the last few decades in Iraq and Syria. In the 1990s, Washington employed economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein and his regime. The result: tragedy to the tune of half a million dead children. Then it tried invasion and democracy promotion. The result: tragedy—including 4,500-plus dead American soldiers, a few trillion dollars down the drain, more than 200,000 dead Iraqis, and millions more displaced in their own country or in flight as refugees.

In response, in Syria the U.S. tried only limited intervention. Result: tragedy—upwards of 300,000 dead and close to seven million more turned into refugees.

A real course correction is undoubtedly impossible without at least a willingness to reconsider and reframe our recent historical experiences. If the 2016 election is any indication, however, a Trump administration with the present line-up of national security chiefs (who fought in these very wars) won’t meaningfully alter either the outlook or the policies that led us to this moment. Candidate Trump offered a hollow promise—to “Make America Great Again”—conjuring up a mythical era that never was. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton offered only remarkably dated and stale rhetoric about America as the “indispensable nation.”

from http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/how-we-got-here/

0 notes

politicoscope · 6 years

Text

Saddam Hussein Biography and Profile

New Post has been published on https://www.politicoscope.com/saddam-hussein-biography-and-profile/

Saddam Hussein Biography and Profile

Saddam Hussein Biography and Profile (Biography)

#Biography and Profile #Iraq #Saddam Hussein

0 notes

patriotnewsblogger-blog · 8 years

Text

How We Got Here

New Post has been published on http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/how-we-got-here/

How We Got Here

The United States has already lost—its war for the Middle East, that is. Having taken my own crack at combat soldiering in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that couldn’t be clearer to me. Unfortunately, it’s evidently still not clear in Washington. Bush’s neo-imperial triumphalism failed. Obama’s quiet shift to drones, Special Forces, and clandestine executive actions didn’t turn the tide either. For all President Trump’s bluster, boasting, and threats, rest assured that, at best, he’ll barely move the needle and, at worst… but why even go there?

Lead from the front. Lead from behind. Surge yet again… The list goes on—and on and on.

And by now all of it, including Donald Trump’s recent tough talk, represents such a familiar set of tunes. But what if the problem is far deeper and more fundamental than any of that?

1979 Revisited

Through the first half of the Cold War, the Middle East remained a sideshow. In 1979, however, all that changed radically. First, rising protests against the brutal police state of the American-backed Shah of Iran led to regime collapse, the return of dissident ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the declaration of an Islamic Republic. Then Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding 52 hostages for more than 400 days. Of course, by then few Americans remembered the CIA-instigated coup of 1953 that had toppled a democratically elected Iranian prime minister, preserved Western oil interests in that country, and started both lands on this path (though Iranians clearly hadn’t forgotten). The shock and duration of the hostage crisis undoubtedly ensured that Jimmy Carter would be a one-term president and—to make matters worse—Soviet troops intervened in Afghanistan to shore up a communist government there. It was quite a year.

That was a major turning point for the U.S. military. Before 1979, few of its troops had served in the region. In the ensuing decades, America bombed, invaded, raided, sent its drones to kill in, or attacked Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq again (and again), Somalia (again and again), Libya again, Iraq once more, and now Syria as well. Before 1979, few—if any—American military personnel died in the Greater Middle East. Few have died anywhere else since.

2003 and After: Fantasies and Reality

It’s a riveting tale, of course, even if it is misguided in nearly every way imaginable. At each turn, Washington learned the wrong lessons and drew perilous conclusions. At least the first Gulf War—to George H.W. Bush’s credit—involved a large multinational coalition and checked actual Iraqi aggression. Instead of cheering Bush the Elder’s limited, prudent strategy, however, surging neoconservatives demanded to know why he had stopped short of taking the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. In these years (and for this we can certainly thank Bush, among others), Americans—Republicans andDemocrats alike—became enamored with military force and came to believe that it could solve just about any problem in that region, if not the world.

This would prove a grotesque misunderstanding of what had happened. The Gulf War had been an anomaly. Triumphalist conclusions about it rested on the shakiest of foundations. Only if an enemy fought exactly as the U.S. military preferred it to do, as indeed Saddam’s forces did in 1991—conventionally, in open desert, with outdated Soviet equipment—could the U.S. expect such success. Americans drew another conclusion entirely: that their military was unstoppable.

Then things turned ugly fast. This time around, Saddam’s army simply melted away, state institutions broke down, looting was rampant, and the three major communities of Iraq—Sunni, Shia, and Kurd—began to battle for power. The invaders never received the jubilant welcome predicted for them by Bush administration officials and supportive neocons. What began as a Sunni-based insurgency to regain power morphed into a nationalist rebellion and then into an Islamist struggle against Westerners.

Nearly a century earlier, Britain had formed Iraq from three separate Ottoman imperial provinces—Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. The 2003 invasion blew up that synthetic state, held together first by British overlords and then by Saddam’s brutal dictatorship. American policymakers seemed genuinely surprised by all this.

Those in Washington never adequately understood the essential conundrum of forced regime change in Iraq. “Democracy” there would inevitably result in Shia majority dominance of an artificial state. Empowering the Shia drove the Sunni minority—long accustomed to power—into the embrace of armed, motivated Islamists. When societies fracture as Iraq’s did, often enough the worst among us rise to the occasion. As the poet William Butler Yeats so famously put it, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed… The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Mission (Un)Accomplished!

It couldn’t be more obvious that Washington’s officialdom regularly and repeatedly drew erroneous lessons from the recent past and ignored a hard truth staring them in the face: U.S. military action in the Middle East has solved nothing. At all. Only the government cannot seem to accept this. Meanwhile, an American fixation on one unsuitable term—“isolationism”—masks a more apt description of American dogma in this period: hyper-interventionism.

As for military leaders, they struggle to admit failure when they—and their troops—have sacrificed so much sweat and blood in the region. Senior officers display the soldier’s tendency to confuse performance with effectiveness, staying busy with being successful. Prudent strategy requires differentiating between doing a lot and doing the right things. As Einstein reputedly opined, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Consider the last few decades in Iraq and Syria. In the 1990s, Washington employed economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein and his regime. The result: tragedy to the tune of half a million dead children. Then it tried invasion and democracy promotion. The result: tragedy—including 4,500-plus dead American soldiers, a few trillion dollars down the drain, more than 200,000 dead Iraqis, and millions more displaced in their own country or in flight as refugees.

In response, in Syria the U.S. tried only limited intervention. Result: tragedy—upwards of 300,000 dead and close to seven million more turned into refugees.

A real course correction is undoubtedly impossible without at least a willingness to reconsider and reframe our recent historical experiences. If the 2016 election is any indication, however, a Trump administration with the present line-up of national security chiefs (who fought in these very wars) won’t meaningfully alter either the outlook or the policies that led us to this moment. Candidate Trump offered a hollow promise—to “Make America Great Again”—conjuring up a mythical era that never was. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton offered only remarkably dated and stale rhetoric about America as the “indispensable nation.”

http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/how-we-got-here/ %cats%

#conservative #republican

0 notes