Here we go again. No sooner did we stop Obama from making a fatal mistake in going to war against Bashar al-Assad almost a year ago today, than we have to put our bodies in the path of another war train rolling down the tracks. This time the bogeyman is called ISIS.
I bet you thought we’d retired that awful phrase, the war on terror. That by-product of the Bush-Cheney years. Wasn’t it Barack Obama who told us we were no longer at war? That we were replacing that spooky Cold War-like phrase with something more positive, constructive. What happened to that guy? Where was he tonight? I missed him.
Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign was so beautiful, so uplifting. He was going to finally embody all those values so many millions of us thought we’d never get a chance to see in the White House. He was going to turn his back on George Bush and restore constitutional government. He was going to restore faith in American democracy, end Mideast wars. Take us back to what we should be: a nation of laws with respect for human rights.
All that is now a shambles. Obama has achieved almost nothing of his original promise. Instead of the bold innovator who was going to remind us of Abraham Lincoln he’s become a Democratic version of Bush-lite. He shambles from crisis to crisis motivated more by fear of being outflanked on the right by his GOP enemies than by any impulse toward original thinking or bold policy initiatives. He reacts. He husbands his resources (for what purpose isn’t clear). He proceeds cautiously.
The only areas in which he’s moved boldly have been those in which he was fully confident his Republican enemies would join him. In other words, Obama’s strongest and most consistent policies have been his counter-terror program, which mirrors the Bush-Cheney doctrine: lots of drone strikes, special forces, targeted assassinations. Domestically, he’s prosecuted federal whistleblowers and invaded the prerogatives of journalists with a gusto not even seen under George Bush.
I say all this by way of talking about tonight’s speech. Obama during his speech seemed to be a robot. He spoke in that decisive manly way of his which we’d grown so used to and comfortable with during the 2008 campaign when he was declaiming meaningful slogans like “Yes, we can.” But the words coming out of his mouth were nothing like those heady time of yesteryear. It reminded me of poor Isaac being tricked by Jacob into giving him the portion rightfully belonging to the first-born, Esau. The blind, befuddled Isaac says:
The hands are those of Esau, but the voice is that of Jacob.
Tonight, the president looked like Barack Obama, but sounded like Dick Cheney. How can I say this any more forcefully: we do not need another Mideast war! We do not need another Muslim enemy. We have enough.
Charles Blow said it all in his column today:
He [Pres. Obama] made clear that “while we have not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland,” he still “will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq.”
He called it “a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy” and not a war. Yet, for all practical purposes, a war seems to be what it will be.
Pundits and journalists are regaling us with the poll numbers documenting the high level of support among Americans for taking on ISIS. The message appears to be that all of us are ready to roll up our sleeves and join the president as he orders those F-16s and F-35s and Green Berets into harm’s way. It’ll be another Osama bin Laden moment when SEAL Team 6 storms the bedroom in a hail of fire and takes out the Bad Guy.
Wipe out ISIS, the senators are saying. Send them to an early grave. No one beheads an American and gets away with it. It insults our national pride to see a fellow-American defiled like that. So we’ll send the Marines in like in the song, From the Halls of Montezuma. Oh wait. Not so fast. We’re not sending the Marines. No ground forces, the president promised tonight. Only air power. Those 1,000 soldiers either in Iraq now or soon to be arriving will only train Iraqi soldiers to do the jobs we were supposed to be training them to do over the past nine years. Yet somehow the lessons evaporated when they were faced with a determined foe like ISIS. Then they tore off their uniforms and disappeared into the smoke like wraiths.
“We have all been here before” to quote Crosby Still & Nash. Remember Iraq I? Where did that $2-trillion go that we spent there over the past nine years? Down the drain. What about those hundreds of millions in sophisticated equipment we left for the Iraqi military? The same ones who turned and ran at the first hint of Islamist trouble? Does anyone remember the 145,000 Iraqi civilians we killed to bring democracy to the Mideast? And the 5,000 U.S. soliders who died?
Here is what a Reuters reporter had to say on the subject:
“…Islamic State’s captured an enormous amount of U.S. weaponry, originally intended for the rebuilt Iraqi Army. You know — the one that collapsed in terror in front of the Islamic State, back when they were just ISIL? The ones who dropped their uniforms, and rifles and ran away? They left behind the bigger equipment, too, including M1 Abrams tanks (about $6 million each), 52 M198 howitzer cannons ($527,337), and MRAPs (about $1 million) similar to the ones in use in Ferguson…”
“Now, U.S. warplanes are flying sorties, at a cost somewhere between $22,000 to $30,000 per hour for the F-16s, to drop bombs that cost at least $20,000 each, to destroy this captured equipment. That means if an F-16 were to take off from Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey and fly two hours to Erbil, Iraq, and successfully drop both of its bombs on one target each, it costs the United States somewhere between $84,000 to $104,000 for the sortie and destroys a minimum of $1 million and a maximum of $12 million in U.S.-made equipment.”
Imagine if we’d fought harder against Bush’s Iraq war mirage in 2003 and prevented the very nightmare we face tonight. Imagine if we hadn’t invaded Iraq and turned the place into a seething cauldron of inter-ethnic and religious hate spiced with a heavy does of anti-Americanism? But the damage has been done. The question now is whether we’ll compound our earlier error and get bogged down once again in a war against the Arab Mideast.
My fear is that Barack Obama is being dragged into a war that the 2008 Obama would never have been suckered into. The problem is that the 2014 Obama listens to GOP dog whistles. And when he hears them his ears perk up and he assumes the position: attack dog. Break out the guns, fuel up the planes. That seems to be the answer to every problem in the Mideast.
There must be (and are) ways to confront ISIS short of getting ourselves into another war. Here are some examples offered by Phyllis Bennis.
Stand down, Mr. President.
Peace and of course a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is a desire that all of us share. The two-state solution, unfortunately, is undergoing a rather prolonged rigor mortis. The occupation of Palestinian lands because of the Six Day War of June 1967 is an unfortunate outcome of aggression of Egypt and its allies in those days. Today it is is morally unacceptable. Unfortunately, Mahmoud Abbas is very weak and has no ground root support from his people according to the latest Palestinian Polls. His so-called power and control is artificial totally dependent on the US and carrot and stick policies of Israel. I foresee another Hamas ruled scenario in a future Palestinian state on the West Bank with cooperation from ISIS and the dangers that this imposes on Israel is obvious to all. In a Catch 22 situation that exists with terrorism committed by ISIS, what would you suggest could be an alternative to neutralize radical Islamist terror which is a threat to the Middle Eastern countries, including Israel?
Shimon, After you have started with a “motherhood” statement about the universal desire for peace and a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict you attempt to smuggle in some pure hasbaras. Here is part of it:
“The occupation of Palestinian lands because of the Six Day War of June 1967 is an unfortunate outcome of aggression of Egypt and its allies in those days.”
Who are you trying to kid? You don’t have to go further than Wikipedia to find authoritative Israeli voices disagreeing with you:
“Major General Mattityahu Peled, the Chief of Logistics for the Armed Forces during the war, said the survival argument was “a bluff which was born and developed only after the war … When we spoke of the war in the General Staff, we talked of the political ramifications if we didn’t go to war — what would happen to Israel in the next 25 years. Never of survival today.”[175] Peled also stated that “To pretend that the Egyptian forces massed on our frontiers were in a position to threaten the existence of Israel constitutes an insult not only to the intelligence of anyone capable of analyzing this sort of situation, but above all an insult to Zahal (Israeli military).”[176]
In a 30 March 1968 Ma’ariv interview Defense Minister Moshe Dayan explained: “What do you mean, [the war was]unavoidable? It was, of course, possible to avoid the war if the Straits [of Tiran] had stayed closed to Israeli shipping.[177]
Menachem Begin also stated that “The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”[178]
…:
Yitzhak Rabin, who served as the Chief of the General Staff for Israel during the war stated: “I do not bet Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban wrote in his autobiography that he found “Nasser’s assurance that he did not plan an armed attack” convincing, adding that “Nasser did not want war; he wanted victory without war”.[183][184] As Abba Eban put it, Nasser wanted victory without a war.[185]
Thus far Wikipedia
The occupation of the West Bank after the war was based on a decision by a divided Israeli cabinet. Premier Levy Eshkol had declared, publicly, at the beginning of the war that it was not Israel’s intention to retain any territory that might be occupied by it in the course of the war. When Dean Rusk, American Secretary of State at the time, reminded Abba Eban of this after the war, the latter merely shrugged his shoulders and said “we changed our mind” (see Rusk’s memoirs “As I Saw It”).
The West Bank was occupied, against the advice of Ben-Gurion, on the basis of overhasty and sanguine settlement plans by Dayan and Allon. The assertion that Israel had no other option because of the notorious “three no’s of Khartoum” is a blatant lie. These settlement plans were drawn up before that Khartoum meeting.(see my series “The olive branch and Khartoum” at the end of this thread:
http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/805&page=3
Before the war most of the provocations that led to it cam from Israel. There is the famous incident at the Jordanian village of Samu (see the Wiki) but there was a general pattern here. The historian Dr.Ami Gluska wrote in Haaretz (June 3 2011):
“During the six month before the Six-Day War, Ben-Gurion severely criticized his successor as premier, Levi Eshkol, for actions by the air force and the ground forces, which in his opinion had contributed to a dangerous escalation of tensions.”
See also the two part video by the Dutch UN-observer at the time, Jan Mühren : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLVoSdg_AE8
The war could have been avoided. The blockade of the Straits of Tiran was not of vital importance to Israel. Moreover, President Johnson was in the process of forming an international naval squadron to relieve the blockade for which the Netherlands and Australia (according to his memoirs) volunteered. Israel jumped the gun.
Shimon, you also wrote:”I foresee another Hamas ruled scenario in a future Palestinian state on the West Bank with cooperation from ISIS and the dangers that this imposes on Israel is obvious to all”
No. it isn’t. That “cooperation with Isis” is a product of your phantasy.
Thanks Arie for the effort and time you put into those two excelent posts.
” There must be (and are) ways to confront ISIS short of getting ourselves into another war”.
Name one.
@Black Canary: Go back and read the link I just added to Phyllis Bennis’ article.
Thank you! Excellent and insightful …
ISIS created during the Bush invasion of Iraq in March 2003, however sustained by Maliki’s failure to encompass the Sunnis in a unity government. The neo-colonial western powers shipped tons of arms from Libya to Syria via Turkey and have trained fighters in Jordan and on NATO bases in Kosovo and Turkey. The funds from the GCC states did the rest.
Excellent explanation of this mess in interview with George Mitchell and in his long op-ed in the Boston Globe .
If Obama can’t fix the Israelis to move forward on a two-state solution with the Palestinians, he won’t succeed in any other campaign to remove ISIS or Assad. Saudi Arabia has been Israel’s ally in warfare against the ayatollahs of Iran, but the national interest of the Saudis forces them to back the U.S. against ISIS that was created between them. The Saudis are no partner for peace in the region, they should be our nr. one foe to stop their funding of extremists, preaching hate and propagate Wahhabism throughout the world.
Excellent article. Of course, Obama is doing exactly what his script says. The classic Hegelian Dialectic works again in the service of the false left/right paradigm. The corporate owned media complained ad nauseam about Obama’s “inaction” in dealing with the manufactured ISIS threat (thesis) in order to elicit a response (antithesis), a call to action, from those on the “right” and voila you magically get exactly what was ordered from Obama (synthesis). It is amazing that so few people remain deluded by these classic tactics of the ruling elites.
“He husbands his resources (for what purpose isn’t clear). He proceeds cautiously.”
Very true Richard. What is he saving political capital for? I think that pro-Palestinian state Rabbi, Arnold Jacob Wolf, who knew him well at an earlier stage, got him right. He liked Obama, says Peter Beinart, but he considered him timid. He believed that on Israel he would do nothing that would shake the American Jewish community.
Well recently he has done a few things that displeased Netanyahu at least. He continued negotiations with Iran. He didn’t resist outright the proposed union between the PLO and Hamas. But for the rest it has all been “lemonade with a straw”.
And that he seems more alert to the GOP’s dog whistles, as you put it, than to the wishes of the people who voted for him seems obvious even to this outsider.
Barack Obama is not a leader, he’s a politician. He has no vision and no strategy, only survival tactics (and poor ones at that). He hates the GOP, but recognizes that they are stronger than he is, and is more than willing to put the adage of “if you can’t beat ’em, join em” to practice.
I’ve often wondered what 2008 Barack Obama would think of 2014 Obama. He would probably be as disgusted as the rest of us.
Barack Obama taught courses in constitutional law …
Obama as presiding judge on the Court of International Law?
A misunderstanding? No, the executive branch of government and Office of the President of the United States of America is not the source of International Law. See also the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Well, it’s not all bad. The NDAA allowed the Executive to imprison Americans for indefinite periods and to execute such, under certain conditions, without due process. NDAA also rendered all people and all organizations potentially linked to Al Queda and hence covered by the act.
But, now the good part: Obama assured us that he would not use these obnoxious provisions! At that point, I wanted to hug my kids and show them that there is good in the world but, alas, there was only my dog. “Zoom” now appreciates the President’s leadership and strong moral compass. I will take Obama at his word. Of course, NDAA is silent on dogs.
A declaration by President Obama, Muammar Gaddafi is illegitimate and can be taken out is not based on Internatonal Law.
A declaration by President Obama, Bashar Assad is an illegitimate head of Syria and the United States recognizes the NSC as the legitimate representative of the state of Syria is not based on International Law and is just bat crazy.
A declaration by President Obama, General Sisi is the illegitimate head of state of Egypt and regime change was in fact a coup d’état does hold water. The elected president Morsi was overthrown by a popular uprising in July 2013, nevertheless Obama and Secretary Kerry announced Egypt and president Sisi will be part of the coalition against ISIS. Peculiar, former president Morsi was member of the Muslim Brotherhood in a strong alliance with Erdogan in Turkey, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the emir of Qatar. General Sisi declared the MB a terrorist organization, cut ties with Hamas and stopped Egyptians to join the jihad by traveling to Syria to overthrow Assad.
○ MB Axis Egypt – Turkey – Qatar Faces Defeat
The United States supports the minority regime in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia send troops in support of the Sunni elites. Nearly three quarters of the population is Shia and have little or no say in the government. The presence of a base of the US Naval Fleet seems to be an argument not to support democracy.
From Central America to the Middle East …
○ US Violations of International Law by Rick Sterling
Like I said:
-Israel,Hamas and PA will be talking without US/GB interference.
-next stop will be ISIS/Syria.
I’m not gonna bother giving you my view but I would advice you to read (and follow) syrianperspective.com by Ziad Fadel,a pro Assad US based attorney.
Remember that this man is writing as a Syrian ,and Syria is at war,so he might be exaggerating for political reasons,but his historical background info is spot on
I know of no better source to help you understand what this is all about,because you’re far off again.
Start with article: “The trip to fancyful;Obama’s farcical speech”.
We’re entering a crucial phase ,and even you are still as blind as bat.
Some critics of President Obama’s speech on ISIL wail that Congress will not discuss and vote on a declaration of war. Actually action or inaction of Congress on such issues is the least of President Obama’s problems with regards to “bomb or not to bomb in Syria”.
Syria is still a member of the United Nations. Its government has stated today that it will consider any US bombing within its territory without Syrian consent an act of aggression, which of course it is. The last thing President Obama should want is an involvement of the UN Security Council, not because any resolution against the US will ever pass but because our ambassador will have to present justification for the unauthorized (by Syria) bombing.
it seems that there is no one in power who is a true believer in the day of judgement.the religious books they read only weaken their faith in God.come study Quran.you will get peace and the world will peacefull