The US’ Never Ending
Wars
By Anne Turnbull
I just re-watched ‘Body of Lies’, 2008, based on the book by David Ignatius. This
story is horrifying because of the ridiculous levels and methods of involvement
of the US government in the Middle East. The only good thing about the
character played by Russell Crowe, Ed Hoffman of the CIA, is this speech:
[Regarding the war/s in the Middle East.] “Do we belong
there, do we not? Doesn’t even matter how we answer that question because we
are there. We’re tired, and we can’t see the end. We can’t even console
ourselves that our enemy is just as tired as we are. Because they’re not. It is
a fallacy that a prolonged war will weaken an occupied enemy. It does not. It
will most likely make your enemy stronger. They get used to the deprivation,
and they adapt and respond accordingly. While here at home, with every death
reported, we have to deal with a public opinion trajectory that slides rapidly
from support, to negative, to downright hostile. People just get sick and tired
of a moment’s silence at a ball game. They just wanna be told that it’s over. Despite
the fact we have markedly increased our operational intensity we’re not seeing
any progress. What we’re dealing with here is potentially a global conflagration
that requires constant diligence in order to suppress. Now you see, because our
enemy has realized that they are fighting guys from the future. Now, it is
brilliant as it is infuriating. If you live like it’s the past, and you behave
like it’s the past then guys from the future find it very hard to see you. If
you throw away your cell phone, shut down your email, pass all your
instructions face to face, hand to hand, turn your back on technology and just
disappear into the crowd. Now flags. No uniforms. You got your basic grunts on
the ground down there. They’re looking around going, “Who is it we’re fight?”
In a situation like this, your friends dress just like your enemies and your
enemies dress like your friends. What I need you to fully understand is that
these people, they do not wanna negotiate. Not at all. They want the universal
caliphate established across the face of the Earth and they want every infidel
converted or dead. So what’s changed is that our allegedly unsophisticated enemy
has cottoned on to the factually unsophisticated truth, we’re an easy target.
We are an easy target and our world as we know it is a lot simpler to put to an
end than you might think. We take our foot off the throat of this enemy for one
minute and our world changes completely.”
The last sentence of that speech may be true, now. I don’t
think that it would have been if we had “just” removed Osama bin Laden, as
president Clinton attempted to do before 9-11. Or if we had finished helping,
as we promised vs. backing out on helping southern Iraqis to march into Baghdad
during the first Gulf War. We didn’t have to lead, just help as promised. But
attacking Iraq for “weapons of mass destruction” by G.W. Bush was a completely
false and knowingly constructed farce to attack Iraq and has resulted in
trillions of dollars of debt that we cannot afford. “Occupying” Afghanistan,
instead of just rebuilding it after we promised (and reneged upon after the
USSR retreated from there), may have well prevented the whole Taliban and Al Qaeda
emergence. Our country’s leaders have been arrogant, greedy, irresponsible,
violent and have acted as war criminals. Their actions have created millions of
fundamentalists that wish nothing more than to kill Americans and destroy
America. And after what we have done to their countries and peoples, I cannot
say that I blame them. How do we remove ourselves from this? I have no idea. We
could try to help to rebuild infrastructure, roads, schools, power plants, as
we pull our military slowly out of their countries. I do not think that it will
be enough. But the only other possible choice is to cut and run. Which is what
we have done the 2 previous times with disastrous results.
If we stay in Afghanistan as we are now, as an occupying
military that makes a few weak motions toward building a school here and there,
we’ll continue to go broke, create more hostility and create another power vacuum
as we pull out (which bin Laden filled last time around). At no time in the
past 1000 years has ANY country successfully occupied or conquered Afghanistan.
In the more recent history, ask the Russians and British. We are failing
at it now. I suggest that UN peacekeepers go in to protect sincere, brave, volunteer
NGOs that want to build schools, roads, social infrastructure. I think that it
is the only way to re-establish a stable society and government without costing
us our future and without creating more Jihadists. Afghanistan needs the help
and we need a healthy and stable Afghanistan. (The Afghanistan before the USSR
invasion was secular and modern very much like Europe.) But they, for good
reason, do not trust us any longer, and they know that we are just going to
leave them when we tire of the fruitlessness of our efforts, leaving them to
deal with their warlords and jihadists. Why would they support us knowing that
this marks them for future elimination from the powers that are already
re-emerging?
In Syria, we should have helped the revolution from the
beginning. It would be over by now, and they would not have been supported by,
and now trusting and obligated to, Hamas and Al Qaeda. At the beginning, we had
the opportunity to be a supportive force that guides them to a secular
democracy, instead of a slaughtered and angry people turning to those few who
supported them during their greatest time of need. (Again, not leading,
supporting.)
We keep repeating these stupid mistakes over and over. “Super
powers” have no place as police in the world anymore. Allies do. We need to get
off of our high horse and quit dropping drones on small villages in an attempt
to kill 3 insurgents while creating enough anger within the populations to
create 60 more. What a horrible Return On Investment that is! Not to mention
that we have now opened Pandora’s Box so that other countries are developing
drones. This is just like nuclear escalation. This is going to get VERY ugly.
This is just a tip of the iceberg. But we seriously need to
think about the end results of the actions that we take today. Not just that we’re
the big bad bear in the woods and can punish and control those as we see fit.
We were supposed to learn this lesson in Viet Nam. Are we really that stupid to
keep making these asinine mistakes? It’s really not that difficult to email or
phone your congress man/woman as well as the president, and let them know that
these continued actions need to stop. We need to speak up, loudly and often.
