December 2015
This is a dumb war
by Serge Halimi
A little-known US senator named Barack Obama said in 2002: I dont oppose
all wars. [...] What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is
a rash war. [...] A war based not on reason but on passion. Americans were
angry after 9/11 and President George Bush Jr chose to channel their anger
not against Saudi Arabia (most of the Al-Qaida terrorists involved came from
there), but against Iraq, which the US invaded six months later. The media
wanted the war and most Democratic senators, including Hillary Clinton,
favoured it too. But the invasion of Iraq created the chaos that produced
so-called Islamic State (ISIS).
The Paris killings of 13 November are about to help realise ISISs two main
objectives. The first is to create a coalition of apostates, infidels
and Shia renegades who will come to fight it in Iraq and Syria, then in
Libya. The second is to make the majority of westerners believe that their
Muslim compatriots could be a fifth column hiding in the shadows, a
domestic enemy in the service of the jihadists.
War and fear even an apocalyptic objective contains a grain of
rationality. The jihadists have calculated that the crusaders and
idolaters may launch airstrikes on Syrian cities or patrol Iraqi provinces
intensively but will never manage to occupy an Arab country for long. ISIS
also hopes that its attacks in Europe will stir up mistrust of western
Muslims, and lead to heavy policing of them. This will breed resentment, and
some will want to join the caliphate; only a very few, but then the
followers of Salafist jihad arent trying to win an election. In fact, an
anti-Muslim party win would advance their cause.
France is at war, François Hollande told the French congress on 16
November. He has been trying for a long time to intervene militarily in
Syria, and has been pushing for greater US involvement. What is peculiar is
that Hollande now wants to fight ISIS in Syria, yet two years ago, seized by
the same war fever, he was trying to convince the US to punish Bashar
al-Assads regime.
Will Obama persist in opposing Hollandes dumb war? The pressure on Obama
is all the stronger because ISIS wants the same thing as Hollande. As
Pierre-Jean Luizard, a researcher at Frances Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), says, it was at first as if ISIS had
consciously made a list of everything that would disgust popular opinion in
the West: infringing the rights of minorities and of women, particularly
through forced marriage, executing homosexuals, reinstating slavery, [...]
beheadings and mass executions (1). When this macabre catalogue was not
enough, ISIS cut the throat of an American hostage, posting a video of it,
then carried out deadly shootings in Paris. At this point, ISIS expected the
crusaders to respond.
A head of state is almost duty bound to react to such spectacular acts. He
is under political pressure to announce some kind, almost any kind, of
response the destruction of a warehouse or a munitions depot, airstrikes
on a city. He is expected to show determination, to promise new, even
tougher, legislation and condemn those in favour of appeasement. He must use
martial language, talk of blood and assert that retaliation will be
ruthless. Thus, he will seek standing ovations, and his approval rating will
go up ten points. Eventually, all of this will prove dumb but not until
a few months later. And the temptation to escalate grows ever stronger,
especially with frenetic 24/7 news coverage making it seem that every act,
every statement, requires an immediate answer.
During the Gulf war in 1991, US hawks criticised George Bush Sr for not
ordering the troops that had just freed Kuwait to go on to Baghdad. Four
years later, chief of staff General Colin Powell justified their relative
restraint: From the geopolitical standpoint, the coalition, particularly
the Arab states, never wanted Iraq invaded and dismembered. [...] It would
not contribute to the stability we want in the Middle East to have Iraq
fragmented into separate Sunni, Shia, and Kurd political entities. The only
way to have avoided this outcome was to have undertaken a largely US
conquest and occupation off a remote nation of twenty million people. [...]
It is naïve however, to think that if Saddam had fallen, he would
necessarily have been replaced by a Jeffersonian in some sort of desert
democracy where people read the Federalist Papers along with the Koran.
Quite possibly, we would have wound up with a Saddam by another name (2).
In 2003 George Bush Jr completed his fathers military project. The neocons
hailed in him a new Churchill, courage, even democracy. But Powell had
forgotten to read his own book, as the fears he had once expressed came true
under the president he was serving as secretary of state.
Bush Jr was criticised for the childish, almost criminal naivety of his war
on terror. He seems to have found his true heirs in Paris. Lets put it
simply, Frances foreign minister Laurent Fabius said, talking down to us
like a teacher to a class of small children. ISIS are monsters, but there
are only 30,000 of them. If all the countries in the world are unable to
eliminate 30,000 people who are monsters, then nothing makes sense any more
(3).
Lets try to explain it to him: the 30,000 monsters have widespread support
in the Sunni regions of Iraq and Syria, where the armies they face are often
seen as instruments of Shia dictatorships, themselves responsible for many
massacres. That is why ISIS was able to capture some cities without any
fighting, when the soldiers holding them fled, abandoning their weapons and
uniforms. The US has tried funding the training and equipment of more than
4,000 moderate Syrian fighters but, according to the Americans, only four
or five are operational and the unit cost has been several million
dollars. At Mosul, 30,000 Iraqi troops were defeated by 1,000 ISIS fighters,
who captured more than 2,000 armoured vehicles and hundreds of millions of
dollars from the vaults of local banks. At Ramadi, the jihadists defeated 25
times their number of Iraqi troops. Syrias armed forces are exhausted by
four years of war. And the Kurds are not prepared to die for territory they
do not claim. In reality, Luizard observed, ISIS is only strong because
its opponents are weak, and is flourishing on the ruins of institutions that
are in the process of collapsing (4).
Its the same in Libya. Under the influence of strong emotions and led by
the shock team of Nicolas Sarkozy and Bernard-Henri Lévy, France made an
important contribution to the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. It imagined that
getting a dictator lynched would be enough to bring about a western-style
liberal democracy. But Libya has fallen apart and ISIS controls several
cities from which it attacks neighbouring Tunisia. Frances defence minister
has admitted: I am very concerned about Libya. Daesh [ISIS] has moved in,
taking advantage of internal clashes between Libyans, but if Tobruk and
Tripoli were to work together, Daesh would no longer exist (5). That
problem had presumably been solved, three years ago, when Lévy explained:
Contrary to what the Cassandras predicted, Libya has not split into three
confederate entities. [...] Tribal law has not prevailed over the sense of
national unity. [...] Compared to Tunisia and Egypt, Libya appears to have
achieved a successful [Arab] Spring and those who helped it can be proud
of themselves (6). Proud indeed: apart from Bernard Guetta, who broadcasts
the French foreign ministrys viewpoint (7), nobody is better at tall
stories.
Hollande now wants a grand and unique coalition against ISIS. This would
include Assad. But Assad has already replied: You cannot fight Daesh and
still be allied with Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are arming the
terrorists (8). President Vladimir Putin feels that Turkey, another
presumed member of the coalition, has stabbed Russia in the back by shooting
down one of its planes on 24 November. As soon as the motley coalition that
France is trying to cobble together had won the war, it would face the
question of what next, under even more difficult conditions than in
Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. US neocons have already forgotten all these
failures (as has Hollande), and are demanding that 50,000 troops be sent
into the ISIS-occupied zone (9).
In Foreign Affairs, Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson, experts on the
Middle East, list the conditions for a sustainable western military success
on territory currently controlled by ISIS: the support of the American
public; a large cadre of deployable civilian experts in reconstruction and
stabilisation; deep knowledge of the society for whose fate a victorious
United States would take responsibility; [...] a sustained military force to
provide security for populations and infrastructure [...] local constituents
or clients, or indeed allies, to assist. They point out that if this
sounds familiar, it is because it is the same list of things that Washington
wasnt able to put together the last two times it launched major military
interventions in the Middle East [Iraq and Libya]. [...] The United States
would likely lose another war in the Middle East for all the same reasons it
lost the last two (10).
France, already heavily engaged in Africa, cannot win a war in the Middle
East. The fact that ISIS is trying to draw it into this trap should not lead
Hollande to rush into it, taking with him a coalition of countries that are
often more cautious. Terrorism kills civilians, but so does war. The
intensification of western airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, which will create
as many jihadist fighters as they kill, will not restore the territorial
integrity of those countries, nor the legitimacy of their governments in the
eyes of their peoples. A lasting solution will depend on the peoples of the
region, on a diplomatic solution, not on former colonial powers or the US,
which are disqualified both by their support for the worst policies of
Israel and by the disastrous results of their military adventurism
disastrous from their own viewpoint too, since by invading Iraq in 2003,
after supporting Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran (which killed more
than a million) for eight years, they turned Iraq into an ally of Iran. And
states that sell arms to the oil dictatorships of the Gulf, propagators of
Salafist jihad, are not qualified to talk of peace, or to teach Arabs the
virtues of pluralist democracy.
Historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that when they operate in stable states with
stable regimes and do not have significant support from a section of the
population, small groups of terrorists are a police problem, rather than a
military one. He added that it is understandable that such groups make the
population very nervous, especially in major western cities, and especially
when government and media are working together to create a climate of fear
(11).
This creation of a climate of fear, and repeated denigration of those who
refuse to face up to reality, make it possible to stifle the voices of those
who reject the accumulation of repressive measures that are not only
ineffective but threaten civil rights. Xenophobic measures (as demanded by
the National Front) have been added to the mix, such as revoking the French
nationality of some citizens with dual nationality. The declaration of a
state of emergency was approved almost unanimously by French
parliamentarians, and, as if this was not enough, the prime minister asked
them not to refer to the constitutional council the legally shaky measures
he wanted them to approve.
Obama told Bush in 2002: You want a fight, President Bush? Lets fight to
make sure that [...] the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the
countless wars that rage across the globe. [...] Lets fight to make sure
our so-called allies in the Middle East [...] stop oppressing their own
people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality
[...] so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects,
without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells. Obama has not taken
his own advice, and neither have other heads of state. Hence, the situation
we are in today. ISIS attacks and Frances disastrous foreign policy have
led to a new war, solely military and therefore already lost.
http://mondediplo.com/2015/12/01dumbwar
