Posted by Danny Sjursen at
7:22am, April 18, 2017.
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Now, we know. According
to Todd Harrison, an expert with the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, the replacement cost for the 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles recently
dumped on an air base in Syria: $89 million. That not-exactly-decisive strike in
Washington’s 15 years of war in the ever more chaotic Greater Middle East
against... well, you tell me what or whom... was but a drop in the bucket.
After all, the cost of those never-ending wars has already reached into the trillions of dollars. And keep in mind that these are wars
in which, as U.S. Army major and TomDispatch regular
Danny Sjursen suggests today, the most all-American military word around may be
“more” -- as in more troops for Syria, more troops for Iraq, more troops for Afghanistan, and of course more missiles, planes, ships,
advanced arms, you name it.
In that context, $89 million
is a laughably small sum. Still, just for the hell of it, let’s think about
what a figure like that might mean if spent domestically rather than on a strike
of more or less no significance in Syria. That sum is, for instance, well
more than half of the $149 million budget for the National Endowment for the Arts
and also of the $149 million budget for the National Endowment for the
Humanities, both of which the Trump administration would like to wipe out. It represents one-fifth of the $445 million the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, also
on Trump’s chopping block, gets from the federal government.
That single strike also represents about a thirtieth of the $2.6 billion his administration wants to cut from the
Environmental Protection Agency’s budget and about a sixtieth of the $5.8 billion that it plans to excise from the budget of the
National Institutes of Health.
So each time those Tomahawks
are launched, or American planes or drones take off on their latest missions
over Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, or Somalia, or the next batch of U.S.
troops heads for Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia,
or elsewhere in the Greater Middle East and those millions of dollars start to
add up to billions and finally trillions, just think to yourself: that’s the
arts, the sciences, public health, and environmental safety that we’re knocking
off. Think of that as part of the “collateral damage” produced by our
never-ending wars, or take a moment with Major Sjursen and imagine just how
Washington might continue to lose those wars in the future with even greater
flare and at even greater cost. Tom
How to Lose the Next War in
the Middle East
The Short Answer: Fight it!
Make no mistake: after 15
years of losing wars, spreading terror movements, and multiplying failed states
across the Greater Middle East, America will fight the next versions of our
ongoing wars. Not that we ever really stopped. Sure, Washington traded in
George W. Bush’s expansive, almost messianic
attitude toward his Global War on Terror for Barack Obama’s more precise,
deliberate, even cautious approach to an unnamed version of the same war for
hegemony in the Greater Middle East. Sure, in the process kitted-up 19
year-olds from Iowa became less ubiquitous features on Baghdad’s and Kabul’s
busy boulevards, even if that distinction was lost on the real-life targets of
America’s wars -- and the bystanders (call them “collateral damage”) scurrying
across digital drone display screens.
It’s hardly a brilliant observation
to point out that, more than 15 years later, the entire region is a remarkable
mess. So much worse off than Washington found it, even if all of that
mess can’t simply be blamed on the United States -- at least not
directly. It’s too late now, as the Trump administration is discovering,
to retreat behind two oceans and cover our collective eyes. And yet, acts
that might still do some modest amount of good (resettling refugees, sending
aid, brokering truces, anything within reason to limit suffering) don’t seem to
be on any American agenda.
So, after 16 years of
inconclusive or catastrophic regional campaigns, maybe it’s time to stop
dreaming about how to make things better in the Greater Middle East and try
instead to imagine how to make things worse (since that’s the path we often
seem to take anyway). Here, then, is a little thought experiment for you: what
if Washington actually wanted to lose? How might the U.S. government go about
accomplishing that? Let me offer a quick (and inevitably incomplete) to-do list
on the subject:
As a start, you would drop an enlarged, conventional army into Iraq and/or Syria.
This would offer a giant red, white, and blue target for all those angry, young
radicalized men just dying (pardon the pun) to extinguish some new “crusader”
force. It would serve as an effective religious-nationalist rallying cry
(and target) throughout the region.
Then you would create a
news-magnet of a ban (or at least the appearance of one) on immigrants and visitors of every sort
from predominantly Muslim countries coming to the United States. It’s
hardly an accident that ISIS has taken to calling the president’s proposed
executive order to do just that “the blessed ban” and praising Donald Trump as the “best
caller to Islam.” Such actions only confirm the extremist narrative: that
Muslims are unwelcome in and incompatible with the West, that liberal plurality
is a neo-imperial scam.
Finally, you would feed the
common perception in the region that Washington’s support for Israel and
assorted Arab autocrats is unconditional. To do so, you would go out of
your way to hold fawning public meetings with military strongmen like Egyptian President
Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and suggest that, when it came to Israel, you were considering
changing American policy when it comes to a two-state solution and the illegal
Israeli settlements in Palestine. Such policies would feed another ISIS
narrative: U.S. support for illiberal despots and the failure of the Arab
Spring is proof that practicing Muslims and peaceful Islamists will never successfully gain power
through the democratic process.
Key to such a losing strategy
would be doing anything you could to reinforce ISIS’s twisted narrative of an
end-of-days battle between Islam and Christendom, a virtuous East versus a
depraved West, an authentic Caliphate against hypocritical democracies.
In what amounts to a war of ideas, pursuing such policies would all but hand
victory to ISIS and other jihadi extremist groups. And so you would have
successfully created a strategy for losing eternally in the Greater Middle
East. And if that was the desired outcome in Washington, well,
congratulations all around, but of course we all know that it wasn’t.
Let’s take these three points
in such a losing strategy one by one. (Of course "losing" is itself a
contested term, but for our purposes, consider the U.S. to have lost as long as
its military spins its wheels in a never-ending quagmire, while gradually
empowering various local "adversaries.")
Just a Few Thousand More
Troops Will Get It Done...
There are already thousands of American soldiers and Marines in Iraq
and Syria, to say nothing of the even more numerous troops and sailors
stationed on bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Turkey, and other states ringing America’s
Middle Eastern battlefields. Still, if you want to mainline into the
fastest way to lose the next phase of the war on terror, just blindly acquiesce
in the inevitable requests of your commanders for yet more troops
and planes needed to finish the job in Syria ( and Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Yemen, and so on).
Let’s play this out.
First, the worst (and most plausible) case: U.S. ground forces get sucked into
an ever more complex, multi-faceted civil war -- deeper and deeper still, until
one day they wake up in a world that looks like Baghdad, 2007, all over again.
Or, lest we be accused of
defeatism, consider the best case: those endlessly fortified and reinforced
American forces wipe the floor with ISIS and just maybe manage to engineer the
toppling of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime as well. It’s V-Day in the
Middle East! And then what? What happens the day after? When and to
whom do American troops turn over power?
* The Kurds? That’s a nonstarter for Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, all countries with
significant Kurdish minorities.
* The Saudis? Don’t count on
it. They’re busy bombing Houthi Shias in Yemen (with U.S.-supplied ordnance)
and grappling with the diversification of their oil-based economy in a world in
which fossil fuels are struggling.
* Russia? Fat chance. Bombing
“terrorists”? Yes. Propping up an autocratic client to secure basing rights?
Sure. Temporary transactional alliances of convenience in the region?
Absolutely. But long-term nation-building in the heart of the Middle East? It’s
just not the style of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, a country with its own shaky
petro-economy.
* So maybe leave Assad in
power and turn the country back over to what’s left of his minority,
Alawite-dominated regime? That, undoubtedly, is the road to hell. After
all, it was his murderous, barrel-bombing, child-gassing acts that all but
caused the civil war in the first place. You can be sure that, sooner or
later, Syria’s majority Sunni population and its separatist Kurds would simply
rebel again, while (as the last 15 years should have taught us) an even uglier
set of extremists rose to the surface.
Keep in mind as well that, when it comes to the U.S.
military, the Iraqi
and Afghan “surges” of 2007 and 2009 offered proof positive that more ground
troops aren’t a cure-all in such situations. They are a formula for
expending prodigious amounts of money and significant amounts of blood, while
only further alienating local populations. Meanwhile, unleashing manned
and drone aircraft strikes, which occasionally kill large numbers of civilians,
only add to the ISIS narrative.
Every mass casualty civilian
bombing or drone strike incident just detracts further from American regional
credibility. While both air strikes and artillery barrages may hasten the
offensive progress of America’s Kurdish, Iraqi, and Syrian allies, that benefit
needs to be weighed against the moral and propaganda costs of those dead women
and children. For proof, see the errant bombing strike on an apartment building in Mosul
last month. After all, those hundred-plus civilians are just as dead as
Assad’s recent victims and just as many angry, grieving family members and
friends have been left behind.
In other words, any of the
familiar U.S. strategies, including focusing all efforts on ISIS or toppling
Assad, or a bit of both, won’t add up to a real policy for the region. No
matter how the Syrian civil war shakes out, Washington will need a genuine
“what next” plan. Unfortunately, if the chosen course predictably relies
heavily on the military lever to shape Syria’s shattered society, America’s
presence and actions will only (as in the past) aggravate the crisis and help
rejuvenate its many adversaries.
“The Blessed Ban”
The Trump administration’s
proposed “travel ban” quickly became fodder for left-versus-right vitriol in
the U.S. Here’s a rundown on what it’s likely to mean when it comes to
foreign policy and the “next” war. First, soaring domestic fears over
jihadi terror attacks in this country and the possible role of migrants and
refugees in stoking them represent a potentially catastrophic over-reaction to
a modest threat. Annually, from 2005 to 2015, terrorists killed an average of just seven Americans on U.S.
soil. You are approximately 18,000 times more likely to die in some sort of accident
than from such an attack. In addition, according to a study by the conservative Cato Institute, from 1975 to 2015
citizens of the countries included in Trump’s first ban (including Iraq and
Syria) killed precisely zero people in the United States. Nor has any
refugee conducted a fatal domestic attack here. Finally,
despite candidate and President Trump’s calls for “extreme vetting” of Muslim
refugees, the government already has a complex, two-year vetting process for such refugees which is remarkably
“extreme.”
Those are the facts.
What truly matters, however, is the effect of such a ban on the war of ideas in
the Middle East. In short, it’s manna from heaven for ISIS’s storyline in
which Americans are alleged to hate all Muslims. It tells you everything you
need to know that, within days of the administration’s announcement of its
first ban, ISIS had taken to labeling it “blessed,” just as al-Qaeda once extolled George W. Bush’s 2003 “blessed invasion” of
Iraq. Even Senator John McCain, a well-known hawk, worried that Trump’s executive order would “probably give
ISIS some more propaganda.”
Remember, while ISIS loves to
claim responsibility for every attack in the West perpetrated by lost,
disenfranchised, identity-seeking extremist youths, that doesn’t mean the
organization actually directs them. The vast majority of these killers are
self-radicalized citizens, not refugees or immigrants. One of the most
effective -- and tragic -- ways to lose this war is to prove the jihadis right.
The Hypocrisy Trap
Another way to feed the ISIS
narrative is to bolster perceptions of diplomatic insincerity. Americans tend
to be some of the least self-aware citizens on the planet. (Is it a coincidence
that ours is about the only population left still questioning the existence
of climate change?) Among the rare things that Democrats and Republicans agree
on, however, is that America is a perennial force for good, in fact the force
for good on Earth. As it happens, the rest of the world begs to differ. In
Gallup global polls, the United States has, in fact, been identified as
the number one threat to world peace! However uncomfortable that may be,
it matters.
One reason many Middle
Easterners, in particular, believe this to be so stems from Washington’s
longstanding support for regional autocrats. In fiscal year 2017, Egypt’s
military dictator and Jordan’s king will receive
$1.46 and $1 billion respectively in U.S. foreign aid -- nearly 7% of its total
assistance budget. After leading a coup to overturn Egypt’s elected
government, General Sisi was officially persona non grata in the White House
(though President Obama reinstated $1.3 billion in military aid in 2015).
Sisi’s recent visit to the Trump White House changed all that as, in a joint press conference, the president swore that he was “very
much behind” Egypt and that Sisi himself had “done a fantastic job.” In
another indicator of future policy, the State Department dropped existing human rights conditions for the
multibillion-dollar sale of F-16s to Bahrain's monarchy. All of this
might be of mild interest, if it weren’t for the way it bolstered ISIS claims
that democracy is just an “idol,” and the democratic process a fraud that American
presidents simply ignore.
Then there’s Israel, already
the object of deep hatred in the region, and now clearly about to receive a
blank check of support from the Trump administration. The role that
Israeli leaders already play in American domestic politics is certainly
striking to Arab audiences. Consider how unprecedented it was in 2015 to see
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticize a sitting president before a joint session of
Congress in an Israeli election year and receive multiple, bipartisan standing
ovations. Even so, none of this prevented the Obama administration,
domestically labeled “weak on Israel,” from negotiating a record $38 billion military aid deal with that
country.
While violent Palestinian
fighters are far from blameless, for 40 years Israel has increasingly created
facts on the ground meant to preclude a viable Palestinian state.
Netanyahu and his predecessors increased illegal settlements in the Palestinian
territories, built an exclusion wall, and further divided the West Bank by
constructing a network of roads meant only for the Israeli military and Jewish
settlers.
Although most world leaders,
publics, and the United Nations see the Jewish settlements on the West Bank
as a major impediment to peace, the current U.S. ambassador to Israel was once
the president of a fundraising group supporting just such an
Israeli settlement. The notion that he could be an honest broker in peace
talks borders on the farcical.
All of this, of course,
matters when it comes to Washington’s unending wars in the region. Even
Secretary of Defense James Mattis, soon after leaving the helm of U.S. Central
Command (CENTCOM), recognized that he “paid a military security price every
day as a commander of CENTCOM because the Americans were seen as biased in
support of Israel.” So, you want to lose? Keep feeding the ISIS
narrative on democracy and Israel just as the Trump administration is doing,
even as it sends more troops into the region and heightens bombing and drone raids from Syria to Yemen.
Send in the Cavalry...
If the next phase of the
generational struggle for the Middle East is once again to be essentially a
military one, while the Trump administration feeds every negative American
stereotype in the region, then it’s hard to see a future of anything but
defeat. A combination of widespread American ignorance and the intellectual
solace of simplistic models lead many here to ascribe jihadist terrorism to
some grand, ethereal hatred of “Christendom.”
The reality is far more
discomfiting. Consider, for instance, a document from “ancient” history: Osama
bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa against the United States. At that time, he described three tangible motives for jihad: U.S. occupation
of Islam’s holiest lands in the Middle East, U.S. attacks on and sanctions
against Iraq, and American support for Israel’s “occupation” of
Jerusalem. If ISIS and al-Qaeda’s center of gravity is not their fighting
force but their ideology (as I believe it is), then the last thing Washington
should want to do is substantiate any of these three visions of American
motivation -- unless, of course, the goal is to lose the war on terror across
the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa.
In that case, the solution is
obvious: Washington should indeed insert more troops and set up yet more bases
in the region, maintain unqualified support for right-wing Israeli governments
and assorted Arab autocrats, and do its best to ban Muslim refugees from
America. That, after all, represents the royal road to affirming
al-Qaeda’s, and now ISIS’s, overarching narratives. It’s a formula -- already
well used in the last 15 years -- for playing directly into the enemy’s hands
and adhering to its playbook, for creating yet more failed states and terror groups throughout the region.
When it comes to Syria in
particular, there are some shockingly unexamined contradictions at the heart of
Washington’s reactions to its war there. President Trump, for instance,
recently spoke emotionally about the “beautiful babies cruelly
murdered” in Idlib, Syria. Yet, the administration’s executive order on
travel bans any Syrian refugees -- including beautiful babies -- from entering
this country. If few Americans recognize the incongruity or hypocrisy of
this, you can bet that isn’t true in the Arab world.
For ISIS, today’s struggle in
Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere is part of an unremitting, apocalyptic holy war
between Islam and the West. That narrative is demonstrably false.
The current generation of jihadis sprang from tangible grievances and
perceived humiliations perpetrated by recent Western policies. There was
nothing “eternal” about it. The first recorded suicide bombings in the Middle East didn’t erupt
until the early 1980s. So forget the thousand-year struggle or even, in
Western terms, the “clash of civilizations.” It took America’s
military-first policies in the region to generate what has now become perpetual
war with spreading terror insurgencies.
Want a formula for forever
war? Send in the cavalry... again.
Major Danny Sjursen, a TomDispatch
regular, is a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West
Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has
written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of
the Surge. He lives with his wife and four sons near Fort Leavenworth,
Kansas.
