The Republican Foreign-Policy Meltdown
The Sunni power incubated under Gen. Petraeus’ watch now sees in the Syrian civil war an opportunity to redraw national boundaries in the region. Again, from Al-Monitor:
The Syrian unrest in 2011 was enough to stimulate new ideas including changing the border. For the first time, religious calls emerged in support of redrawing the border to unify Sunni regions on both sides. In the meantime, fears increased among the Shiite authorities in Baghdad and southern Iraq, who were worried that Sunni areas in Iraq would transform into a stronghold for Syrian revolutionaries, or that Syria would transform into a stronghold for Iraqi Sunnis who oppose the Baghdad regime.
A trillion dollars and tens of thousands of casualties have turned Iraq into a sectarian powder-keg, with an Iran-allied central government supported by its Shi’ite majority confronting a well-organized and well-armed Sunni minority. No-one expected the spark to come from Syria. The Republican leadership, meanwhile, has nothing to say about that conflict. We do not want to let the heinous Assad regime continue to murder its own citizens, nor do we want to put advanced weapons in the hands of Sunni extremists who dominate the Syrian opposition, despite the best efforts of the West to foster a moderate government in exile.
Petraeus allowed the Republicans to claim a certain degree of success for the unpopular Iraq war. American conservatives idolized him. In 2010 he was speaker at the annual dinners of the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, and Commentary magazine. Petraeus is gone, but the bill for his brilliance is just coming due.
Turkey has turned into a regional trouble-maker. As Halil Karaveli of Johns Hopkins SAIS warned in the New York Times on February 27th:
President Obama has relied heavily on Turkey in seeking to oust Mr. Assad and Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to visit the Turkish capital, Ankara, later this week. But Turkey is part of the problem. It is exacerbating Syria’s sectarian strife, rather than contributing to a peaceful and pluralistic solution….Turkey has provided a crucial sanctuary for the Sunni rebels fighting Mr. Assad and has helped to arm and train them. Even more ominously, Turkey is turning a blind eye to the presence of jihadists on its territory, and has even used them to suppress the aspirations of Kurds in Syria.
Washington’s embrace of Erdogan, though, began in the Bush administration. It was Bush who first invited Turkey’s Islamist leader Recep Tayyip Erodogan to the White House, undermining Turkey’s secular parties. As Omer Taspinar of the Brookings Institution wrote at the time:
America’s advocacy of “moderate Islam” against the “radical Islam” in the Middle East worries Turkey the most. Turkey being portrayed as a model within the moderate Islam project has been conceived as a support for the moderate Islam in Turkey, thereby led to a clash between America’s approach and Turkey’s laic and Kemalist identity. Already alarmed over the landslide victory of Justice and Development Party (AKP), the Republic’s laic reflexes have become overwhelmingly concerned with the “model” expression of the US, which allegedly promoted Turkey’s moderate Muslim identity. In the aftermath of his victory, Washington’s [December 2002] invitation to the AKP Chairman Tayyip Erdogan, who was not confirmed as a prime minister then, was perceived [by the Turkish intellectuals] as the weakening of the secular foundations of Ataturk’s republic by the United States.
The Bush administration and the mainstream Republican leadership went all in on the gamble that moderate Islam would bring democracy and stability to the Middle East, and turned the devious, erratic Turkish leader into its poster boy, with disastrous consequences. But the Republicans’ ideological commitment is so rigid that they have difficulty freeing themselves from the grip of what Charles Krauthammer inappropriately dubbed “democratic realism.” (In opposition to this, I proposed an Augustinian realism as the basis for U.S. foreign policy).
And your evidence of that is? Other than who Rand's father is? Yeah, I thought so. Nice of you to throw in a completely unsupported slur, though. That's becoming a PJM tradition.
Right now, a muscular brand of isolationism is looking pretty damn good compared to the Bush/McCain strategy of intervening anywhere anytime for almost any reason with no plan for finishing what you start. Enough of that crap, even if we could still afford to do it, and we can't.
This column, full of Monday-morning quarterbacking, uses the exact same playbook and proceeds to tell us to get further involved in the region, while convincing the American people that limited strikes in Iran won't get us involved in a land war.
Good luck.
It is unlikely that there will be western style reforms or redistribution of wealth to quell the masses. In the west "Bread and Circus" is a bribe to keep the peace. It took the Roman occupation of Egypt and the subsequent implementation of "Bread and Circus" to quell the unrest of the impoverished peasants of Egypt. The descendants of Ishmael, predicted in the Bible to be "wild as asses" have very little history of economic or social reform.
Arabs have been ruled by monarchs and dictators for time eternal.
The meddling by foreign powers, mostly for petroleum and other strategic
reasons has only exacerbated the problems. Foreign powers have invariably
backed the dictators and monarchs.
At present, the Mideast is a game of stratego, being played by the west against Iran, the Chicoms, and Russia. Once again the Arab tribes will be pitted in alliances with the foreign powers and against each other.
Can Armageddon be around the bend? All the players listed in the Bible, are in place. Good article David.
It was Oswald Spengler who came up with "optimism is cowardice."
I think you enjoy blaming Bush too much. My take is that Iraq was at least balanced between Shia and Sunni by the end of 2008. The major shooting and bombing had stopped and a quasi-democratic and legitimate government was in place. Our protective garrisons were in place to act as both a trip wire for Iranian adventures and to allow social and political evolution amongst the Iraqis. AQ lost many, many fighters too.
Obama changed all that with his pullout in 2009. This action destabilized the region and lead to the current mess.
Afghanistan was "ice boxed" by Bush. It continued its backward ways but we maintained a forward base to block backsliding and maintain a position along the Silk Road between Russia and India and China and Pakistan/Iran. Again, Obama wasted our military to no good end and still plans on a complete pullout.
I judge the Bush results as of 2008 as a major success. The problem, of course, is democracy - in the US - that brought Obama to power to reverse our hard-won foreign gains.
Intervention of any kind in Syria needs to pass the "national interest" test. What American national interest does it serve to intervene in that place? What compelling reason do we have to meddle in their affairs? So far as can be told, Jennifer Rubin and company have a big fat nothing on that one. By contrast, the intervention in Iraq had a number of selling points; and we all know how well that turned out. I'm not fond of the proxy war in Syria being funded by the Saudis and Emirates (not Turkey, who appears to only be looking after their own interests viz the Kurdish question), but it doesn't seem real useful getting involved in that tribal mess. It goes without saying that blowing up Iran isn't a real helpful idea either.
He is right that stopping Iran's nuke program can be done without dragging the U.S. into a land war. Israel stopped both Syrian (2007) and Iraqi (1981) programs - at least setting back the latter ten years - without any kind of land war. And, what we did in 1991 to finish off Iraq's program was also done from the air; the land war we fought then was to liberate Kuwait, not stop Iraq's nuke program. All hype aside, even the 2003 war was not about nukes; it was about other WMDs (mostly chemical), and even more than that, penalizing Saddam for flouting the terms of the 1991 ceasefire agreement and thus restoring U.S. regional credibility. One can argue whether this latter effort was worth the trouble; my point here is that even this war was not really about stopping anybody's nuke program.
Stopping Iran's at this point would require more resources than past efforts of this type, but we have these. Even Israel can do this, though with much greater exertion than was required in the two actions of this type she took previously (and Israel is in fact stronger now in many ways than years ago). None of this will lead to a land war.
Remember, one of the most important reasons Iran wants nukes - even apart from their nutcase religion-based doomsday scenario that their action is supposed to initiate - is that their conventional military has very little credibility. Their air force is a joke, and their navy is no better. They have a large army, but they don't have the logistica/economic wherewithal to project it anywhere; it is only good for defensive purposes. If we don't invade, we don't have to fight them, and we certailnly don't have to invade them to cripple their nuke program. The only instrument of power projection Iran has is terrorism, and they are using that pretty much to the extent they can even now. I doubt that they will hate the "Great Satan" any more than they already do, or try any harder than they already are (they can't), to undermine U.S. interests via regional subversion, terrorism, etc. And don't even start about Iran's threats to "close the Strait of Hormuz"; we can clear them out of there inside of a week, and make them pay very dearly besides at very little cost to ourselves.
Now, where Mr. Goldman is wrong:
It is useless at this point in time to discuss how the GOP is supposed to persuade America that Iran should be stopped from having nukes, that this is feasible, and that we should do it (or help/let Israel do it). They lost the last election. In effect, they no longer have a say. This discussion would be relevant if Romney had won, and if Romney still seemed to be wavering on this issue and seemed to need some "help" from his party on this.
But Obama won. He holds pretty much all the cards as to what the U.S. is going to do or not do concerning Iran. And I don't care what reassurances he is giving Israel; that is worth bopkess. His actions speak louder than his words. He appointed the likes of Kerry, Hagel, and Brennan to the top foreign policy/national defense relevant posts. He is now removing naval assets from the Persian Gulf for "budgetary" reasons.
Anyone who really believes that Obama has any intention of stopping Iran from having nukes by military means is truly living in la la land.
By the time the GOP is at the foreign policy controls again, circa January 2017 (MAYBE), it will be a moot point. Either Israel will have stopped them (in SPITE OF Obama), the regime will have collapsed and the new regime will give up the program (a nice daydream), or Iran will have the bomb.
Progressive Republicans don't seem to care how many casualties our patriotic troops incur. Progressive ideology trumps all. They, like Stalin, think that patriotic youth are like insignificant eggs that need to be broken in order to make a delicious communist omelette.
I warned people back in the day that we could never make a go of Iraq because the hatreds there go back centuries, back to Old Testament times if you count past Islam. There is no way invading a country and fighting in its streets for a decade while giving them a vote without a true understanding of Democracy is going to erase all of that. We just took out a somewhat stable strongman and left an open powderkeg.
All of this half ass crap since korea has passified the population to any outside incursions because we know our government will do it half assed.
Iraq was an exerciase in taking a big christian (for lack of a better adjective) DUMP in the middle of mesopetamia - and Bush blew it.
Iraq should not be islamic right now, just as Japan is no longer Shinto. Both extreme ideologies. We should have reconfigured the entire country wether they liked it or not. We should have a massive air base with 30,000 troops for the duration.
Yeah! Bush and Cheney blew it! The rest of us republicans did not - and we have nothing to apologize for.
problem. China isn't going to do squat. Nice try, though.
Let's be honest, this is about spreading the globalist view of economics and not an altuistic venture for democracy or peace.
Bad mouthing Rand Paul when your own efforts have increased our long term dangers is ripe.
Limited wars feed the military-industrial complex. Let's do this. Somebody dirty bombs us, we vaporize Asia from the Med to Malaysia. Leave no bone unturned. I doubt it will happen twice.