The phrase “easier said than done” could have been invented for theories about how to fix that catastrophe called the Middle East.
There will soon be 50 American military Special Forces personnel at work in northern Syria to help Kurdish fighters and others (a so-called Syrian Arab Coalition) weaken, if not destroy, ISIS.
The Monday-morning generals are crying foul: too little too late, advisors really mean boots on the ground; it’s too many troops; not enough troops; Obama is just buying time until the next administration inherits the mess.
After Syrian dictator Assad used poison gas against civilians a few years ago, Obama wanted to intervene in a limited military way. The Republican-led Congress screamed foul. How dare he try to use force in Syria without congressional consent? Even though congressional consent for anything, anything Obama proposed, was not to be forthcoming. And, since then, so many times Obama has been slammed for not using military force, after they wouldn’t let him use force to begin with. Should we laugh or cry?
Obama has been attacked from right-left-and-center for being incompetent when it comes to foreign policy. All of his critics, most notably Sen. John McCain, have their own ideas of how to weaken and defeat ISIS. It’s worth noting the obvious – that none of these experts is President of the United States. None has the grave responsibility of dealing with the Hydra-headed monster in the Middle East. If they were in charge, you can bet they wouldn’t be so know-it-all, because this convoluted cauldron of Hell is not a football game; it’s not a board game; it’s not a video game. There are no established rules to go by; it’s a frightening brand-new “game,” a simmering catastrophe.
I’m the first to admit some Obama critics might have some merit in their criticisms. As a sideline distant observer to these horrors, I myself have no clue how to do anything about them. I, too, have sometimes wondered if Obama is out of his league, if he is too tentative, too passive, too unwilling to use force against such butchery. Did his promise to withdraw troops from Iraq precipitate the rise of the sadism of ISIS and other extremists? Perhaps it did. But that, after all, is what was demanded by most Americans: withdrawal from those countries and no more boots on the ground. Pressures from every direction placed Obama between a rock and hard place. It’s time all these Monday-morning generals should stop nipping at his heels; they and all Americans should rally ‘round any effort to degrade and destroy ISIS, but only with participation of other nations. Going it alone, as we and other nations have learned in too many wars, is bound to fail.
As a history buff, I know the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s was a brutal folly, leading to the upsurge of the radical Taliban and the harboring and training of terrorists in that country, including Osama bin Laden. I know America’s intervention in Vietnam in the late 1950s (with just a few advisors) led to hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground and a long and divisive war. I also know the border lines of so many Middle East countries were imposed by colonial and post-colonial European powers and the United States in the 20th Century, mainly because of King Oil.
Blaming President George Bush II or President Barack Obama for the mess is maybe partly true. One did too much, one did too little? However, let’s quit blaming our presidents and ourselves. It’s ISIS who are the guilty ones, using “religious” precepts as their demented excuses for beheadings and crucifixions, torture of every description; the rape of women and children; the vicious persecution and painful deaths of Christians rivaling what the ancient Romans did to them in the Colosseum; the slaughter of Muslims who do not fit their notions of theological “purity;” the mindless destruction of priceless antiquities at “idolatrous” historical sites. It’s one of the most ruthless rampages in the history of the world.
The millions of refugees from Syria are a heart-breaking testament to the unspeakable cruelties of both Assad and of ISIS.
Vicious mass killers always get the axe, eventually. They kill themselves. They cannot last because their baseless mindset is morally and politically bankrupt from Day One. But what a crying shame they cause such widespread misery before their overdue demise!
Meantime, let us fervently hope the 50 Special Forces will at least help weaken them, put them on the run. And more than that, we had better hope other Middle East countries, like our “pal” Saudi Arabia, gear up for battle because those countries, in such lethal proximity, have most to fear in this neo-barbarian assault against civilization. The biggest hope and efforts of all should be for ongoing multilateral diplomatic agreements to end the horrors, but it’s so hard these days to keep such hopes for peace alive.
