D.C.'s
War Madness
By Damon
Linker
April
17, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Week"-
The past week
has been an immensely clarifying — and
profoundly demoralizing — one in American
politics. It has demonstrated beyond a shadow of
a doubt that the country's foreign policy
establishment,
along with its leading center-right and
center-left politicians and
pundits, are
hopelessly, perhaps irredeemably, deluded about
the role of the United States in the world.
From the start of the 2016 Republican primaries
on down through Donald Trump's surprise
electoral college victory, the transition, and
the opening months of his administration,
members of this foreign policy establishment and
these leading politicians and pundits have been
united in expressing dismay and alarm about
Trump's lack of temperamental and intellectual
fitness to serve as commander-in-chief. Yet the
moment Trump gave the order to launch 59
Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase used in a
chemical weapons attack a few days earlier, all
was forgotten and forgiven. Finally Trump
became president!
Finally he put Syrian President Bashar al-Assad
in his place!
Finally the U.S. showed it had moved beyond
former President Barack Obama's
reluctance to
use military force!
It's
hard to know where to begin in formulating a
response to this outpouring of delight at the
thought of Trump giving the order to launch a
barrage of deadly weapons at a sovereign nation
over 5,000 miles from American shores. But let's
start with absolute basics: Launching even one
missile at another country is not, as we
euphemistically like to presume, a "military
action," a "military operation," or even a
"humanitarian intervention." It is an act of
war. Full stop. That many countries in the
world, including Syria, are far too weak to
consider launching a retaliatory counter-attack
against the United States for such a bombardment
is utterly irrelevant. How would a more powerful
country — China, for example — respond if we
fired even one cruise missile at its territory?
How, for that matter, would we respond
if China fired just one at us?
The
answer is patently obvious: We would respond
furiously, and with complete justification,
because it would be an act of war. How people
who spend their lives thinking about
international affairs can write about America's
actions in the world without placing this fact
at the center of their analysis is nothing short
of astonishing — and a confession that their
thinking is really a form of ideological
propaganda that places the United States in a
different category from every other country in
the world. (American exceptionalism might be a
relatively salutary civic myth, but it is a myth
all the same. It has no business playing a role
in the policy recommendations of informed
analysts.)
Unconvinced? Then consider another basic fact:
The aforementioned foreign policy and centrist
establishments were united in considering Obama
averse to using American military might. Yet
during the eight years of his presidency, Obama
bombed at least nine countries: Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya,
the Central African Republic, and the
Philippines.
If
that's what "reluctance"
to use force looks like, I wonder what it would
take for these critics to call someone a
warmonger.
What these
critics really mean is that Obama didn't embrace
a policy of overthrowing governments around the
world ("regime change"), and that he didn't
think it was a good idea (either for the U.S.
domestically or for our relations with the rest
of the world) to brag in moralistic terms about
our motives in seeking to advance our interests
militarily (which Obama mainly did with targeted
drone strikes and the selective deployment of
special operations forces).
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The exception, of
course, was in Libya, where three senior members
of the foreign policy establishment and the
Obama administration (Hillary Clinton,
Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Susan Rice) persuaded
the president to help rebels topple the
government of Moammar Gadhafi. When events ended
up unfolding like a rerun of the Iraq War's
disastrous aftermath in miniature (with its own
unique horrors),
Obama's instinctual aversion to regime change
and moral grandstanding reasserted itself,
leading him to resist repeated calls to cripple
or overthrow Assad's government in Syria. The
president would bomb areas of the country that
were controlled by ISIS, but he would not act to
remove Assad for fear that the result would lead
to even worse consequences than the Syrian civil
war itself.
The
establishment's reaction has been uniformly
negative about that decision, which is a major
reason why there was such an outpouring of joy
and relief when President Trump reversed course
and did what Obama had steadfastly refused to do
for over five years: target assets of the Assad
government. If there was a criticism to be
heard, it was that Trump's missile strike was
too limited in scope. Never mind that neither
the Trump administration nor any prominent
analyst presented a convincing strategy for
using American bombs to bring the civil war to a
sustainably peaceful conclusion. All that
mattered was that the U.S. finally did
something, and that this something would
continue and expand. "More, please!" — that's
what most of the commentary has amounted to.
I'm
sorry, but this is madness.
To see
why, imagine an alternative history of the
American Civil War. In 1861 the southern part of
the United States launches an insurrection
against the central government and declares its
independence. The leader of the central
government decides to put it down. The result is
several years of bloody conflict that eventually
leaves approximately 600,000 people, or 2
percent of the total population, dead (that's
about six million people in contemporary terms).
Now imagine there was a country on the other
side of the globe in the 1860s that took a keen
interest in the conflict and was powerful enough
to intervene in the war. The citizens in this
country half a world away debate furiously
whether to try and "stop the killing" by joining
the battle. They have no plan to resolve the
underlying issues feeding the violence, but some
think it would be desirable to
punish the evil deeds
committed by one side or the other, or perhaps
to punish those who use
one kind of weapon or another
in prosecuting the war. Some even insist that
the case for intervention in the distant
conflict is so obvious that the
burden of proof
should fall on those who oppose it.
In the
end, this super-powerful country decides that it
makes most sense to pursue "regime change." So
it launches an attack that adds to the death
toll and eventually leads to the overthrow of
the central government, allowing the southern
region to prevail.
The
point isn't to equate Assad to Abraham Lincoln.
Go ahead and imagine the opposite scenario if
you wish: Perhaps the moral busybodies on the
other side of the planet are less moved by the
claim to self-determination asserted by the
American South than they are by Lincoln's noble
speech at Gettysburg, so instead of pummeling
Washington they bombard Richmond and contribute
to an easy victory for the North.
The
point is that regardless of which side the
outside power favors, it has anointed itself the
moral arbiter of the world, a position that
grants it the authority to mete out justice and
punishment to individuals and nations as it sees
fit — and this despite the fact that no one
elected this power to that ruling position, or
even asked the world if it wished to offer its
consent.
Every
country in the world thinks well of itself. But
we're the only country in the world that expects
every other country to defer to our self-evident
wonderfulness — apparently even when Trump is
launching the missiles.
Not every problem in the world has a solution,
just as not every injustice in the world is our
problem. This has always been the case. But with
a reckless, incompetent president prosecuting a
foreign policy
of "impulse
and whim," it
has perhaps never been more important to remind
ourselves of these truths, and of the pressing
need to tame our boundless national self-regard.
More than eight years after
Obama's first inaugural address,
we still haven't set aside our childish things.
Damon Linker is a senior
correspondent at TheWeek.com.
He is also a consulting editor at the University
of Pennsylvania Press, a former contributing
editor at The New Republic, and
the author of
The Theocons
and
The Religious Test.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
