Much U.S. foreign policy follows this dogma.  Now Obama wants $500 million—that’s point five billion, in American’s crazy accounting—to help out the Syrian rebels.  Not only is this a 180-degree turn in policy with respect to the civil war there, it’s a bad mistake.  Clearly, Obama is trying to appease hawks in Congress who accuse him of dropping the ball in Iraq—oh yes, the old neocon contingent is piping up there too—and maybe trying to do something in a situation where there is no easy solution.  And Kerry, the ketchup lover of Foggy Bottom, is telling Maliki to hold the country together or else.  Or else, what?

First, the $500 million is too little, too late.  The Syrian civil war has led to radicalization of many rebels so bloodthirsty and murderous that even old al Qaeda wise men denounce them.  Shi’ites are slaughtered.  Civilians—men, women, and children—are slaughtered.  If you want a glimpse of want a Sunni-Muslim caliphate would be like, just look to ISIS.  It would be a bloody theocracy that makes Iran’s Islamic Revolution seem tame.  Throwing a few dollars at the “tame rebels” in Syria will accomplish nothing.

Besides being too late, one must remember that the ISIS members are rebels too.  How do you ensure that the funds only go to rebels who are “appropriately vetted”?  This has always been the problem in the Syrian civil war.  There are so many different factions that only God or the Devil knows which ones are which.  They’re all focused on toppling the Syrian dictator, but, beyond that, it’s difficult to determine who are the “good guys.”  The Syrian rebels’ motives and goals are varied and might even change from day to day.

But one thing is clear, right?  ISIS is our enemy.  Well, no, the murderous members of ISIS, steeped in their jihadist ideology and striving for a Sunni-Muslim caliphate, are the Shi’ites’ enemies right now.  Probably the Kurds too.  Both these groups will keep ISIS busy for a while.  They might get to us eventually, of course.  In the Middle East, knowing your friends and enemies is difficult.  Even Israel speaks out and spies against the U.S.  We can’t even say our enemy is Islam, because extreme Sunni and Shi’ite positions were created after the Prophet—both, in some sense, are aberrations of all the good you can find in the Koran.  Of course, religious fanaticism is always an aberration, even in the U.S.!  So, who’s the enemy?

When you can’t even determine who the enemy is, it’s time to revamp your foreign policy.  Maybe the geniuses in Foggy Bottom should realize that changing centuries-old ethnic hatreds is (1) not a policy with a high probability of success, and (2) something best left to the parties involved to work out themselves.  Yugoslavia comes to mind.  We only stepped in to stop “ethnic cleansing.”  That’s what the ISIS Sunni murderers want to do with the Shi’ites in Iraq, but there are already Shi’ites there to stand in their way.  You can bet the Shi’ites will practice a bit of ethnic cleansing themselves.  If the Kurds join the skirmish, it could really get interesting.  In any case, I wouldn’t support Maliki and his corrupt, non-inclusive government, no matter how much Bush, Cheney, McCain, and other hawks rant in Congress and to the media.

I’d put that $500 million in a trust fund, in fact.  Either we or a U.N. peace force will need that much to step in afterwards to bury the bodies, take care of the wounded, and feed the refugees.  Other than that, we should stay away from both Syria and Iraq.  We shouldn’t hop on the Shi’ite band wagon with Iran either.  They’re definitely not our friends.  We don’t have friends in the Middle East.  We might have people that want American dollars to further their own interests.  We might even have business interests because, even the most backward, fanatical jihadist likes American military weapons and modern technologies.  Talk about technological savages—more like technological murderers.  We shouldn’t worry about oil and natural gas—that’s Europe’s problem and it will be gone soon enough!

Another error in American foreign policy, a corollary of the enemy-of-my-enemy psychosis, is that problems in the Middle East come down to U.S.+Israel against everyone else.  Israel doesn’t have a great track record in being our friend (I know I’ll get pounded for saying that), especially considering their thwarting of the Palestine-Israeli peace process over the decades.  Ignoring their spying on the U.S., which some people justify by the statement “everyone does it” (that doesn’t justify it, of course), Israel often makes policy choices that make our coming to their defense embarrassing, to say the least—the Muslims’ indignation seems justified all too often.

But we are linked to Israel, historically and culturally.  It’s hard to call them a democracy—maybe “Western-looking socialist-leaning regime with theocratic predilections” is a better description.  (The link with them is clear when you realize that everything in that lengthy description applies to the U.S., except that “socialist-leaning” has to be changed to “capitalist-dominated.”)  Many Israelis, European refugees from anti-Semitic persecution, still identify with Western ideals.  Many want peace in the region, but their government can’t seem to get its head around the concept.  I don’t think the Israelis hate us, but I wouldn’t necessarily call them friends—maybe incompetent indifferents.

Same for the Egyptians.  A recent judicial circus where three al-Jazeera reporters were tried and sentenced to years in jail makes that country into a paper democracy, a country that champions democratic values only when convenient and throws them into the flames of tyranny at a moment’s notice.  Like so many countries in the region, they don’t have a long democratic tradition.  But they did sign and continue to honor a peace treaty with Israel, something that others in the region don’t like, to say the least.  Yet they aren’t our friends either, primarily because—and this seems to be a recurring theme—there are too many radical factions in the country, including the military.

But the Egyptians, Israelis, and a few others in the region also look upon the murderous fanatics that seem to knock at their door at times and want our help to combat that.  So, maybe it’s not about friendships or even business interests.  It’s about stopping murderous fanaticism on all fronts.  They need help in that.  So do we.  It’s time that the E.U., Russia, Israel, peaceful Arab countries, and others in the world step forward to contribute to stopping murderous fanaticism in the Middle East and the rest of the world.  That’s a simple foreign policy to state, a difficult one to put in practice.  But it’s ethically superior to the lazy alternative now in practice.

And so it goes….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2014 at 4:01 am and is filed under Fundamentalism, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.