The friends of my enemies are my enemies…
It’s Saturday, December 31, 2011, and Mr. Obama has just given a New Year’s gift to terrorists. Barack, the Avenger, just became Barack, the Santa Claus, with respect to Mr. Karzai and his entire corrupt government. And Mrs. Clinton, his head elf, just goes along with it. The Afghan leader, who knows he sits on a powder keg, is trying to make peace with the Taliban—our foreign policy gurus just helped him along the way.
Come on, Barack! The friends of my enemies are my enemies—the Taliban showed their true nature many years ago. They gave safe haven to al Qaeda members and terrorized and killed their own people. They have killed our soldiers and civilian contractors whose only crime in that God-forsaken land was to work for the betterment of the Afghan people. They have falsely accused men under their strict Sharia law and beheaded them. They have stoned women who have been raped after accusing them of adultery. They have killed girls whose only sin was wanting to study. In brief, the Taliban are a blight on humanity, a pestilence that Pandora could have never imagined.
I really don’t care, Mr. Obama, if you gave the orders to kill bin Laden and al-Awlaki. If you embrace the Taliban, you embrace al Qaeda and the whole jihadist movement, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe the former is more consistent with the bulk of American foreign policy. We sell arms to the Saudis when their duplicitous tactics are responsible for many deaths. We turn a blind eye to massacres from the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, Somalia, and Kenya. We deal with the Pakistanis and Israelis when both have exhibited animosity and duplicity towards the U.S. The adage that “diplomacy makes strange bedfellows” has become “let’s see how much these whores put out if we give them enough money.”
American foreign policy has been on the wrong track for a long time. After WWII, that most noble of wars against the two worst tyrannies the world has known, we allowed the Europeans to steamroller us, financing their defense long beyond the time when they should have taken up their fair share of the burden. NATO was and is a defense welfare system for Europe and the Europeans, laughing all the way to the bank, knew how to take advantage of our largesse.
Of course, we took advantage of anti-communist sentiment in order to topple democratically elected governments in Iran and Chile, installing brutal dictatorships in their place. We manipulated that same sentiment to support the “Afghan freedom fighters” against the Soviet Union and empowered both the Taliban and al Qaeda in the process, providing them with sophisticated weapons that are still used against us. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” became the defining mantra for the sages in Foggy Bottom.
Consistent foreign policy is an oxymoron with respect to the U.S. government. How can it be consistent to hunt down al Qaeda members and yet negotiate peace with the Taliban? The only difference between al Qaeda members and the Taliban is that the first speak Arabic and the second some rude and rough Pashtun dialect. They are both ignorant and fanatic savages whose mission in life is to kill Americans and any other non-Muslim persons.
Does this mean that I’m an anti-Arab bigot? Far from it! Does it mean that I don’t want our government to pander to murderous fanatics and the people who support them, especially when they pretend to be our friends? You bet! Most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, graduates suma cum laude from the very madrasas the Saudi regime supports.
Can’t we wake up now and see that Afghan democracy is a dream, that Karzai and his family and friends are becoming wealthy off the opium trade, and that the Taliban are just as fanatical and ruthless as al Qaeda? Where did we find bin Laden? Comfortably ensconced in Pakistan, enjoying the hospitality of the Taliban, who control vast regions of that country. Yes, he was in hiding, but not hiding from the people who were hiding him—Navy SEALs and Predator UAVs are much more lethal and less duplicitous than either the Pakistanis or their Taliban brethren.
What makes American foreign policy at least morally ambiguous, if not morally reprehensible, is that it is driven by American business interests—sometimes even business interests beyond our frontiers. We are not the first country in world history to succumb to this temptation. Every empire has expanded and fallen due to business interests of one form or another. Some sage (comment if you know the person who said it) declared that war is always about economics. This has to be expanded: the foreign policy of empires is always about economics.
Economical interests exert tremendous pressures on even the noblest governments, are always self-serving, and succeed at morphing foreign policies into inhumane actions against weaker sociopolitical groups. Power and wealth (they are the same thing for business interests) rule the day—men and women with conscience do not usually control the wealth, so no brakes are applied to run-away foreign policies.
The British honed the double-edged sword of business and foreign policy into a terrible weapon during its colonial period. Many of present-day world problems can be traced to their swinging that bloody blade, carving up the Middle East and Southeast Asia into arbitrary regions that ignored different ethnicities and their preparation for governing. From Ireland, especially Northern Ireland, to the Middle East, to India and Pakistan, to Siam, and so forth, their stumble-bum policies for God and King left whole tracts of the world in a shambles. The sun never sat on the British Empire because it was obscured by the smoke of battles.
The French and Dutch didn’t lag far behind. After the French couldn’t hack it in Vietnam, they turned over the problem to us. The precursor to British Petroleum did the same in Iran, action which led to the Shah. Our foreign policy gurus stepped in to save the day and they learned their lessons well. From annexing Hawaii to invading Iraq, we rarely made a move in foreign policy not defined by business interests. Similarly, when we ignore other hot spots in the world, it’s because we have no business interests there. Ethnic cleansing? Holocaust? Starvation? Tough luck, if there’s nothing in it for us to intercede.
The “best places” for us are those countries or regions where there are multiple business interests. We “like” the Saudis because (a) they have lots of oil and (b) they buy a lot of military hardware. The latter is the worst sin of all, of course—selling arms to sociopathic despots. American foreign policy is run by business interests and the most powerful of these is called the military-industrial complex.
So, finally we come to the real reason why we’re in Afghanistan. Except for opium, that impoverished country has little to offer American business. Yeah, maybe an eventual oil pipeline or future markets if it ever becomes stable. But the latter won’t happen and, while American politicians are the scum of the Earth, they can’t dare to stoop so low as to promote the illegal drug trade, can they? No, I think Mr. Obama, in his move to the center to try to please everyone, has decided that Afghanistan is good for the military-industrial complex. It’s a war, and wars make money for arms dealers—Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, GE, and other megacorporations that make money off death and destruction.
Have I arrived at a contradiction? Yes indeed, but it’s not mine! On one hand, given the Afghan war we’re fighting, why should our foreign policy support one of the combatants, the Taliban? On the other, why should we support a corrupt military-industrial complex by fighting a war where we have no real interest and where the Afghan population considers us invaders? We’re seeing how well that worked in Iraq. The contradiction is in our foreign policy. Since Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton are in charge of that foreign policy, I lay the blame squarely on their shoulders.
It’s time for logic and consistency in American foreign policy because now it’s a matter of life and death for the U.S. The sun did set on the British Empire. It’s probably our turn next, and maybe that’s a good thing.
And so it goes…
