The closest Washington’s vaunted $80-billion-per-year intelligence octopus has come to identifying a tangible ISIS threat is chatter on Twitter. Indeed, even the recent horrific incidents of ISIS-“inspired” attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando involved no organizational link to the Islamic State at all.
Likewise, it is breathtaking in the extreme that in the blood-soaked wreckage of the non-nation of Syria, which was scribbled on a map by dandies in the British and French foreign offices in 1916, Washington is now attempting to eliminate two regimes at the same time.
Never mind that the Assad-Alawites in the Southwest and West and the ISIS-Sunni caliphate in the North and East between them control 90 percent of Syrian territory. At least Donald Trump has been sensible enough to see that playing monkey in the middle borders on insanity.
He also seems to recognize that American boots on the ground to secure the dusty villages, bleak desert expanses and other pointless redoubts controlled by the Islamic State is pointless.
Hopefully, he will not succumb instead to the Pentagon fallacy, as did Barack Obama, that the Islamic State can be bombed back into the Stone Age by a purely aerial campaign—and that the “moderate” opposition can be recruited, organized, trained, equipped and provisioned to do the job of killing off the stragglers.
That’s right. The silly, naïve man in the Oval Office signed up to a bombing campaign that simply enraged the hordes of medieval butchers encamped in the Islamic State, while destroying much of what was left of civil society and killing innocent men, women and children in their thousands as “collateral” damage.
Worse still, he spent upward of $500 million training a rag-tag bunch of 60 buccaneers who lasted not even a week on the actual Syrian battlefield. As we previously described, within days of deployment, their commander and his deputy were captured by the jihadists, a dozen or more were killed and the rest fled—either leaving their U.S.-supplied weapons behind or selling them to the highest bidder.
IN A SANE WORLD, OBAMA’S ISIS STRATEGY WOULD BE IMPEACHABLE MADNESS
In a sane world, this would be considered an impeachable madness. In today’s Washington, however, Barack Obama’s ludicrous “no boots, all air” strategy passes for mainstream wisdom. And so does the preposterous idea that Washington is once again enabling the Iraqi government and its so-called army to liberate their own homeland.
But that is worse than a pipe dream. The reason that there will be no Iraqi government and war-capable Iraqi army, of course, is that there is no Iraqi nation—just the Sykes-Picot borders.
Yet the latter were long ago irreparably shattered by the Bush war of shock and awe against the last dictator who had been able to corral the Sunni, Shiite and Kurds into a temporary polity at the end of a sword.
As we have seen, the truth is that the brief and vanished nation of Iraq is already partitioned. The Kurds have already created a de facto Kurdistan in the Northeast, while the Shiite South is already a de facto province of Iran.
So be it. The greater Shiite polity on the North and East of the Persian Gulf is a more certain barrier to Islamic State expansion than any imaginary coalition of the unwilling that Washington might concoct.
But here’s the giant flaw in Obama’s Iraq War 2.0 strategy. The Peshmerga can be counted upon to ferociously defend Kurdistan against ISIS encroachment, and the Shiite militias will doubtless accomplish the same in their own territories.
But no one with a modicum of historical knowledge would think it sane to send the Shiite militias up into the Sunni lands of the Euphrates valley to mop up after the American bombs, missiles and drones; they would commit genocide if given half the chance.
In short, if Washington were to double down on Obama’s evident failure in a full bombs-away mode there would be no force of moderate rebels nor any reconstituted Iraqi army to finish the job. And the idea of meaningful Sunni boots on the ground from a regional coalition among the enmity-ridden nations of Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE is too preposterous to even merit discussion.
So what Obama actually launched two years ago was Operation Blowback—Washington’s stupidest military campaign yet from among a long list that stretches back through two previous wars in Iraq, countless Cold War coups and interventions and grand disasters like Vietnam.
Needless to say, there is a better way. The best safeguard and only real protection against the theoretical threat of the Islamic State is vigilance and enhanced public security at home. And coupled with it, an end to pointless bombing campaigns in Muslim lands that mainly succeed in destroying American tanks, artillery pieces and other equipment left behind in earlier delusional campaigns.
So, yes, let the Islamic State try to govern 5 million people in the dusty villages and impoverished desert expanse of the Euphrates valley by means of the sword and medieval precepts of Sharia law.
The eventual flight, sabotage and revolt of the long-suffering peoples of the ISIS-occupied lands will do more for the safety and security of the American people than all the drones and bombers that Washington could send to forge still more puppet nations within the Syrian and Iraqi “borders”—nations that have already been deposited in the dustbin of history.
The peace candidate of 2008 might have seen the sensibility of that course of action.
But after nearly eight years at the throne of power in the Imperial City it might be well and truly said by the world’s war-weary everywhere that Barack, we hardly knew ye.
CHAPTER 25
The Aspen Strategy Group—Hillary’s War Cabinet in Waiting
THIS FAIR SUMMER CAMP FOR THE (VERY) FORTUNATE GOT DOUBLE whammyed by the War Party during a weekend of “big think” last August.
First there was a “debate” about whether ISIS should be “contained” or “defeated.” That was followed by a glowing progress report from General John Allen. He was President Obama’s special envoy for the Global Coalition of the Unwilling and Unable (to fight ISIS), and the gist of his speech was that 6,000 airstrikes since the previous August had been winning droves of hearts and minds in the Upper Euphrates valley.
Well, that number is up to 11,000 now, and there is scant sign of hearts and minds being won.
Still, General Allen’s speech was all for the edification of the pooh-bahs of the foreign policy establishment who had been in town for the annual Aspen Strategy Group conclave. The latter bills itself as “a bipartisan foreign policy group that includes legislators, experts, journalists, policy practitioners, members of academia, and business leaders.”
No, it’s not. It’s an off-campus exercise in mendacity, vapid groupthink and narcissistic self-glorification by the perpetrators of Washington’s endless foreign policy catastrophes. Once a year they come to admire each other and split hairs about pointless tactical differences.
DEBATING A BIPARTISAN FOLLY
The debate about “containing” versus “defeating” ISIS proved that in spades. In fact, the “exterminate ISIS” team embodied an exact caricature of the bipartisan folly that has congealed in the Washington War Party.
Not surprisingly the #2 chair in the duo was occupied by an out-and-out neocon warmonger, Professor Philip Zelikow. He was an architect of the Bush wars on WMD and head of the 9/11 Whitewash Commission. His case boiled down to shouting vehemently that the Islamic hordes are heading for Times Square.
So America needs to obliterate the 200,000 citizens of Raqqa, Syria, before they get us. Never mind that there is not one iota of evidence that the self-appointed enforcers of Islamic purity who occupy a few dusty desert towns in the Upper Euphrates have any real capacity to mount a military attack on the fleshpots of Broadway and 42nd.
But the neocons are taking no chances. To nearly every last armchair warrior, led by Robert Kagan, they are lining up behind Hillary.
Apparently, they fear Donald Trump might make a deal with Putin to unleash President Assad and his Shiite Crescent allies. In short order that would put the Islamic State out of business and c
lose the Syrian theatre of the neocon war game, too.
But what was dispositive about last summer’s confab was that the #1 chair on the perpetual-war team was occupied by Michèle Flournoy.
That’s right. She was Obama’s #2 at the DOD and was ostensibly a legatee of what was once the Democratic Party’s left-leaning peace wing.
No more. Ms. Flournoy has climbed Washington’s slippery pole of power by growing a heavy plume of hawkish feathers.
Accordingly, she presented not a single coherent argument about how ISIS is a military threat to the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE or Springfield MA. Her case amounted to nothing more than a glib recitation of ISIS’ murderous brutalities, beheadings and benighted barbarisms.
But as John Quincy Adams so profoundly observed, America’s security does not require that it search the world for monsters to destroy.
HILLARY’S WAR HAWKS—WHY TRUMP DESERVES A CHANCE
Apparently, Hillary Clinton thinks otherwise.
Her secretary of defense designate is none other than Michèle Flournoy. Both share an obliviousness to Adams’ profound truth because they are credentialed members of the Washington War Party.
And as a team, they are as good a reason as any to give Donald Trump a shot at the commander–in-chief job.
After all, he has not spent a lifetime in the Imperial City looking for monsters to destroy abroad. He has even had the good sense to suggest that the vast network of U.S. bases used for this purpose should be sharply curtailed.
Defend America at home, first, he says. And why not? The Washington Imperium has failed virtually everywhere, and its bombs, drones and occupations have hatched far more terrorists than they have killed.
Nor is Trump a paid-off supplicant of the military-industrial-congressional complex that Eisenhower warned about, and which since the demise of the Soviet Union has done exactly as he predicted.
To wit, it has never stopped inventing enemies, provocations and threats designed to justify a massive, costly and obsolete Cold War military machine.
As we indicated in Chapter 20, the whole military-industrial complex, NATO and the international-security apparatus should have been disbanded when the Cold War ended for lack of a genuine industrial-state enemy.
Instead, searching for monsters to destroy has been the very raison d’être of American foreign policy. And it has surely been the source of the endless catastrophes that have ensued.
As we previously demonstrated, in the great wash of history it didn’t really matter to America which tyranny—that of the brutish Saddam Hussein or the repressive Sharia-law-based regime of Sheikh al-Sabah—controlled the oil fields on the Kuwait/Iraq border.
As we have insisted, the answer to oil shortages everywhere and always is high prices, not the 5th Fleet. This truth has been demonstrated over and over in the last half century—not the least in the current cycle.
High oil prices at $150 per barrel lasted a few months in 2008 and tottered above $100 a few years thereafter, but have now been buried as far as the eye can see by an outpouring of shale, tar sands and other lower-grade or costly-to-extract hydrocarbon supplies from provinces all over the planet. And that’s to say nothing of the vast upwelling of alternative energy and conservation responses to higher prices.
In fact, OPEC is no more. One day—perhaps soon—the opulent princes of the Persian Gulf will even be scrambling to fuel up their 747s for a final bon voyage.
Stated differently, economics will out, and whatever sovereign controls the bounty of Mother Nature buried beneath the desert sands of the Persian Gulf and North Africa will produce all of it they can.
Every dictator of the last half century proved that—from Muammar Gaddafi, to Saddam Hussein, to the mullahs of the Iranian Republic.
Indeed, the politically induced shortages have all been the work of the War Party’s perennial sanctions and embargoes. So the slight “shortages” that did occur from time to time were actually cooked up by the denizens of the Aspen Strategy Group, not bloodthirsty men in black turbans.
STILL WRONG AFTER 25 YEARS
Needless to say, as the Aspen Strategy Group carried on its simulacrum of debate and analysis, the original grey-haired perpetrators of the Persian Gulf oil-security myth were all there to cheer them on, including Brent Scowcroft, who had advised Bush the Elder to draw a pointless line in the Kuwaiti sand.
Yet, as we now know, what actually got implanted in the sand were the boots of the American army in Saudi Arabia. It was Washington’s spurious meddling in the $40 billion dispute between Saddam and the greedy princes of Riyadh over who owed what from their joint war on Iran during the 1980s that resurrected a Wahhabi fanatic named Osama bin Laden.
As we have seen, the latter had been left in obscurity and unemployment after his CIA-funded mujahideen work in Afghanistan ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
That senseless revival, in turn, ultimately enabled the fluke calamity of 9/11.
As bin Laden ranted in his famous “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,”
The latest and the greatest of these aggressions, incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet (ALLAH’S BLESSING AND SALUTATIONS ON HIM) is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places [Mecca and Medina] -the foundation of the house of Islam, the place of the revelation, the source of the message and the place of the noble Ka’ba, the Qiblah of all Muslims- by the armies of the American Crusaders and their allies. (We bemoan this and can only say: “No power and power acquiring except through Allah”)
But once bin Laden’s tiny cohort of fanatical jihadists—never numbering more than a few thousands according to the CIA itself—was unleashed, the War Party proceeded to add insult to injury. It mistook the U.S. military’s easy time of shooting Saddam’s ducks in a barrel on the Kuwaiti desert as evidence of Washington’s war-winning prowess, and the popularity of CNN’s first-ever live-action war games as an endorsement of the American people’s appetite for foreign adventurism.
So under the clueless authority of Bush the Younger, the denizens of the Aspen Strategy Group added lies and dissimulation to the sin of false pride. That is, they carried out an unprovoked shock-and-awe invasion of a country that had never, ever threatened America, had no capacity to harm the American people, and had no connection whatsoever to the fanatical sect that pulled off 9/11 against all odds.
Stated differently, 9/11-style terrorism was a domestic public-safety and policing challenge back then, and it remains so today. The remote threat of an ISIS terrorist attack or even an ISIS-inspired copycat attack in any given American city or town has not been reduced by an iota owing to the random bombing and droning campaigns being carried out in the Upper Euphrates valley by the Washington War Party.
So Imperial Washington had it wrong from the beginning. Fighting terrorism was never an appropriate mission for the Pentagon’s conventional war machine—a lethal armada of tanks, planes and ships that had been mistakenly built by Ronald Reagan to fight an industrialized enemy like the Soviet Union, which was no more.
OPENING THE GATES OF HELL
Yet once the American war machine was unleashed on the fragile polity that Saddam had stapled together with machine guns and canisters of deadly gases, the furies of historical grudges and sectarian grievances were inexorably unleashed
The truth is, Washington midwifed ISIS by hanging Saddam and destroying a brutal but serviceable regime that had at least been based on the secularist tenets of Baathist nationalism. Saddam had a penchant for brandishing rifles and liquidating dissidents, but he did not cotton to beheading infidels.
That was the modus operandi of the Shiite militias who got a free hand once Saddam was gone. And it was these vengeance seekers who ran riot over the land between the two rivers after the American people properly elected a peace candidate pledged to extricate Washington from its grizzly mayhem in Iraq.
Likewise, the reason more than anything
else that the Sunni lands of western Iraq fell to the butchers of ISIS during the summer of 2014 was that they offered a shield of protection against the vengeance of the Shiite vigilantes and the monumental corruption and theft of the Shiite government in Baghdad.
Even then, however, their lightning conquest was made in Washington. As we have seen, ISIS conquered its territories not by the “sword” of Sunni fundamentalism at all, but owing to the massive arsenal of tanks, Humvees, field artillery, lethal weaponry and ammunition and advanced paraphernalia of 21st-century warfare that had been deposited there by the departing American military.
Indeed, during the debate about “containment” versus “rollback” that Sunday afternoon there occurred a moment of clarity that explains why the War Party’s abominations go unchecked.
David Petraeus, the disgraced general whose misbegotten “surge” campaigns caused the pointless deaths of more than 1,000 American servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan and whose egomaniacal strutting led him to drop the CIA’s black book of secrets on Paula Broadwell’s pillow, had the cheek to stand up and explain that it was Obama who blew his victory in Anbar province.
Yes, that’s exactly what the man said!
Did the audience give the ex-general the Bronx cheer he deserved, or did the moderator call foul ball?
No, they did not. The moderator invited him to star in the next debate, and the audience welcomed the blithering nonsense he offered in the guise of a question.
Well, here’s the real question. Whose infinitely dumb idea was it to spend $25 billion purportedly training and equipping an “Iraqi” army in what by 2007 was an utterly failed state, rent asunder by sectarian strife that was beyond recall?
Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin... And How to Bring It Back Page 44