Friday, September 12, 2014
September 12, 2014
It’s 9/11 the 13th, and these United States have never been closer to losing
the last vestiges of their foundational identity.
Long ago, our first president, George Washington, prophetically warned
against “attachments and entanglements in foreign affairs.” In the last
century, such sentiments, tragically (as I increasingly believe), fell into
disrepute. In our time, Washington’s 21st-century successors, George W. Bush
and Barack Hussein Obama, have no such compunction. On the contrary, their
response to the Islamic assault of 9/11 and the aftermath of continuing jihad
have been to link the fortunes of this great nation with those of warring
tribes and factions in the Islamic world. That’s about as attached and
entangled in foreign affairs as it is possible to get.
For the past 13 years, it has been the flawed crux of U.S. foreign policy to
micromanage “moderates” in the Islamic world by waging “counterinsurgencies” as
a means of defusing the “extremism” of Islam. This failed effort has had the
disastrous effect of calibrating America’s fate – as well as exhausting our
military and emptying our treasury – according to the rise and fall of Islamic
strongmen and blocs.
It gets worse. Now, President Obama plans to fight against ISIS in Iraq and
to support ISIS-allied forces in Syria. This makes no American sense. Repel
ISIS (or al-Qaida, or Hezbollah, etc.) at our borders, but don’t pretend there
is an American “side” in Iraq or Syria. The United States’ fate is not Iraq’s
fate, not Syria’s fate, not Afghanistan’s fate. Entangled, however, we have
grown used to thinking in such terms. Maliki is causing gridlock in Iraq? An
American problem. Abdullah is threatening to bug out of elections in
Afghanistan? An American problem.
Why? Who cares? Cut the apron strings and the funding streams and learn from
our leaders’ mistakes. Acknowledge publicly that “moderates” in the Islamic
world are as common and/or as reliable as unicorns, and “extremism” is the
basis of Islam, and formulate new policy.
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