Why has the US invaded occupied or bombed 14 Muslim
countries in 30 years?
TO
PLACATE their pique at his effort to get a non-proliferation agreement with
Iran, Barack Obama met last Thursday at Camp David with Saudi royals and
leaders of the other five feudal dictatorships of the Persian Gulf.
He reaffirmed the United States “ironclad” commitment
to their security and promised even more military aid and cooperation. After
the personal dust-up between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu settles, we can expect the Administration and Congress to add even
more steel to our commitment to protect and subsidize Israel by adding more to
its already vast store of sophisticated weapons.
Thus, we take another step deeper into the
tragedy of US intervention in the Middle East that has become a noxious farce.
Consider just one of the head-spinning
subplots: We are allied with our declared enemy, Iran, against the bloody
Islamic State, which was spawned from the chaos created by our own earlier
decisions to invade Iraq and to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, which has
us fighting side-by-side with jihadist crazies financed by Saudi Arabia, whom
we are supporting against the Houthis in Yemen, the bitter rivals of Al Qaeda —
the perpetrators of 9/11!
Since 1980, we have invaded, occupied and/or
bombed at least 14 different Muslim countries. After the sacrifice of thousands
of American lives and trillions of dollars, the region is now a cauldron of
death and destruction. Yet, we persist, with no end in sight. As a former Air
Force General Charles F. Wald remarked told the Washington Post, “We’re
not going to see an end to this in our lifetime.”
Democrats and Republicans snipe over tactics,
but neither wants to discuss the question of whether we should be there in the
first place. Even liberals counseling caution, like the New York Times editorial
board, hasten to agrees that the US must play a “leading role” in solving the
Middle East’s many problems. In other worlds, stay the course.
The ordinary citizen trying to make sense of
all this might reasonably ask: why? The president’s answer is that the war is
in our “national interest.” Congress says, Amen. The phrase causes politicians
and pundits on talk shows to synchronize the nodding of their heads, signaling
that the national interest should not have to be explained — and certainly not
debated.
When pressed for more specifics, our
governing class offers four rationales for this endless war:
1.
Fighting terrorism
2. Containing Iran
3.
Securing oil
4.
Defending Israel.
But when the citizen in whose vital interest
the war is supposedly being fought takes a close look, he/she will find that
none of these arguments — or all of them together — justifies the terrible
cost, or even makes much sense.
Terrorism
The claim is that we will prevent another
9/11 by killing terrorists and keeping them offshore. But by now it is obvious
that our interventions are counter-productive, i.e., they have vastly enlarged
the pool of American-hating fanatics, willing to kill themselves in order to
hurt us.
Americans are appalled when shown ISIS’s
public beheadings on TV. What they are not shown is the beheadings routinely
performed by the Saudi Arabian government and our “moderate” allies. Nor are
they told that militias allied to the US-backed government in Iraq have killed
prisoners by boring holes in their skulls with electric drills.
This is the way bad people behave in that
part of the world. ISIS is a symptom, not a cause, of Middle East fanaticism —
a problem rooted in corruption, tyranny and ignorance, which the United States
cannot solve. Meanwhile, Arab governments themselves have enough firepower to
defeat ISIS if they can put aside their own differences to do it. If they
can’t, it is not our job to save them from their own folly.
The rationale here is embarrassingly circular
— we must remain in the Middle East to protect against terrorists who hate
America because we are in the Middle East. George W Bush’s often echoed claim
that “They hate us for our freedoms” is nonsense. They hate us because we are
foreign invaders. The longer we stay, the most likely it is that we will see
another 9/11. And as the Boston Marathon bombing demonstrates, the people who
carry out the next attack are more likely to live here, than there.
Iran
Iran is not a threat to US security and will
not be as far as one can see into the future. Its hostility to the US is a
product of over 50 years of our active interference in its politics, beginning
in 1953 when the CIA overthrew the democratically elected prime minister and
replaced him with a king.
Barack Obama is right that stopping the spread
of nuclear weapons should be one of our highest international priorities. But
taking sides in the Middle East’s political and religious civil wars has
undercut our credibility, making it look like we are more interested in
checking Iran’s influence than nuclear proliferation. Why, the inquiring
American citizen might ask, is it OK for Israel and Pakistan to refuse to sign
international treaties and allow inspection of their nuclear facilities, but
not Iran?
In any event, the leverage that brought Iran
to the negotiating table was not the US military’s presence or saber rattling
in Washington. It was the economic sanctions.
Oil
Oil is an international commodity. When it
comes out of the ground it is sold on world markets. Producing countries need
consumers. US consumers buy oil at world prices, and it is available to them as
it is to everyone else who can pay for it. They get no special discount for
having military bases in the area.
The economic motivation for the invasion of
Iraq was not to assure that we Americans would have gas for our cars and oil
for our furnaces, but to assure that American-based oil companies would be the ones
to bring it here.
Today, we get less than 10 percent of our oil
from the Persian Gulf. The US is now projected to pass both Saudi Arabia and
Russia as the world’s largest oil producer in the next two years. By 2020 North
America, and likely the US alone, will be self-sufficient in oil and gas.
The claim that Americans need to be in the
Middle East for the oil has gone from dubious to implausible.
Israel
The United States does not need Israel to
protect its security. Nor does Israel need the US
Israel has by far the most powerful
sophisticated military in the entire region. Its arsenal includes nuclear and
chemical weapons that, because Israel has refused to ratify international
nonproliferation treaties banning, it can continue to develop with no outside
interference. The surrounding Arab states are dysfunctional, disorganized and
caught in the brutal quasi-religious war between Sunnis led by Saudi Arabia and
Shiites led by Iran that is likely to drag on for decades. Hezbollah, which
arose in Lebanon as a result of Israel’s 1982 invasion, can harass, but is
certainly no threat to Israel’s existence.
Even if Iran eventually builds a bomb, Israel
would still have the capacity to blow that country back to the Stone Age, and
there is no evidence that Iran’s political establishment is suicidal.
The security problem for Israel comes from
within the territory it controls: the status of the conquered, embittered
Palestinians, who in 1948 and 1967 were driven out of their homes and herded
into the ghettos of the West Bank and Gaza in order make room for the Jewish
state.
The Palestinians are militarily powerless.
They can throw stones and occasionally talk some lost soul into becoming a
suicide bomber. From Gaza they can lob wobbly mortars over the Israel border.
But always at the cost of harsh retaliation. Two thousand Gazans were killed in
the Israeli punitive attacks of August 2014. It will take them ten years to
rebuild their homes and infrastructure.
Yet the Palestinians will not give up their
own dream of an independent homeland — at least on the territory occupied by
the Israel army since 1967. So for almost a half century, our governments have
pushed both sides to negotiate a permanent solution, pouring billions in aid to
Israel, and lesser, but substantial amounts to placate the Palestinians and to
bribe Egypt and Jordan into recognizing Israel. We have paid a huge political
price; our role as collaborator in the Palestinian oppression is a major source
of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.
The US effort has failed. Neither the
Palestinians nor the Israelis — both driven by anger, mutual distrust and
historical grievances — have behaved well. But, Israel is the one in control of
the West Bank. So any credible solution requires that it end the apartheid system
they have imposed, either by giving Israeli citizenship to the Palestinians
(One-State) or by permitting the establishment of an independent Palestine
(Two-States).
The Israelis will never accept a one state
solution with the Palestinians. Among other reasons is a widely shared fear of
the faster Palestinian birthrate. The re-election of Benjamin Netanyahu in
March after he promised Israeli voters he would never accept two states, has
buried that idea as well. The real Israel solution is already in motion on the
ground — pushing Jewish settlements further and further into the Palestinians’
territory until there is no space left for a Palestinian state.
There are now about 600,000 people in the
Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and their number is growing. No Israeli
government in the foreseeable future will be capable of evicting a substantial
share of them in order to give the Palestinians room to form an independent
country. The only pressure on Israel is the fear that it might become an
international pariah state — as South Africa did before it ended its apartheid.
But so long as Israel is under the political protection of the US, it can, and
will, ignore world opinion.
Our choice therefore is either to remain as
enabler of Israel’s “settler” solution, or, as part of a general withdrawal
from the region, to let the Israelis and Palestinians deal with the
consequences of their own behavior. Indeed, US disengagement might be the
political jolt needed to force a change.
Thus, the real answer to the question of why
our country is stuck in the Middle East will not be found in the phrase,
“national interest.” Rather it will be found among a much narrower group of
special interests — military contractors, oil sheikdoms, the Israel lobby, and
a media that hypnotizes the electorate into equating patriotism and war.
These interests are formidable. Their
fallback argument is that we are in too far even to contemplate pulling out.
Much too complicated. And America’s “credibility” is at stake.
Maybe. But our credibility as a democracy is
also at stake. To maintain it, responsible citizens should at least demand
clarity about why we are slogging deeper and deeper into this quagmire, putting
lives at risk, wasting enormous resources and diverting the attention of the US
government from the deterioration of our national economy — the fundamental
source of national security.
America’s bi-partisan governing class has no
intention of opening up their Middle East misadventure to such scrutiny. So
it’s up to the citizenry.
The 2016 president election campaign will
force candidates into forums, town meetings and question-and-answer sessions.
It may be the last chance for citizens to pierce the veils of glib rhetoric
that hide the reasons our rulers have pushed us into a part of the world where
we have no real business and where our presence has only made things worse.
The views expressed in this article belong to
the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Stop the War
Coalition
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